Jon Lott / Para Project, completes the Brugge Diptych --a temporary pavilion for the 2021 Brugge Triennale, TraumA, Brugge, Belgium. The Diptych served as an event space for the Triennale’s programming, addressing issues in urban trauma, and was one of several international commissions open within the city through late Fall.
Docked within Brugge’s peripheral and residential waterways, and roughly the same size as its neighbors, the wood-framed pavilion stood on 15 (sistered) pontoons, avoiding any direct contact with the protected UNESCO Heritage city. The visitor rested mid-block, through summer and fall, abutting an abandoned 15thc. canal house, thereby dividing the block in two.
Its brief proximity with the canal house is a study in formal estrangements. Still, through orientation, material, scale, and posture, the pavilion recognized something of itself in its new neighbor. It seems both have their trauma to work through. Afterall, architecture is felt before it is understood.
The project is the third in a serial study of urban “strangers,” including Lott’s Storefront for Storefront (2016) and the Roche/Dinkeloo Double, at the Fine Arts Centers, Amherst (2018). Each embrace the familiar construction technique of “common framing” in partnership with their respective institutional urban concerns
Jon Lott is an American architect, principal of PARA, cofounding member of CLOK, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design.
He is recipient of the Emerging Voices Award by the Architectural League of New York, the Design Vanguard award by Architectural Record, and the Architectural League Prize by the Architectural League of New York. In 2020, Domus selected Para Project among the 50 best Architecture Firms worldwide, for “having projects that are advancing architecture.”
