In his book The Public Interior as Idea and Project, Mark Pimlott explores the poetic and speculative potential held by ruins since the Renaissance: they have served as a resource for architectural invention, composition, and imaginative projection. After World War II, in the context of reconstruction, the ruin gained a new meaning as a theme in architecture. Architects were challenged to develop new discourses and strategies to engage with the damaged urban fabric. This involved making visible both the scars of destruction and the ongoing process of healing, often through light or contrasting interventions. Such approaches gave rise to prosthetic architectures, where historical and contemporary layers coexist and mutually enrich one another. Ruins also represent a space of “vertiginous freedom.” They offer the possibility of endowing an existing structure with new meaning. Free from prescriptive uses or institutional codes, they allow for open-ended speculation and wandering.
The SG hall, like a ruin, provides shelter for extraordinary temporary events. While preserving this remarkable quality, the project proposes to transform the hall into a two-stage theater: a dense vertical plane for ordinary life, and a free horizontal plane for extraordinary life. To achieve this, a lightweight structure is built in contrast to the existing one, hosting a layering of domestic spaces for students. The SG’s giant screen acts as a curtain, concealing or revealing the life within.
This equipped wall also functions as a fly tower, housing the technical elements necessary for the theater’s operation. It contains everything needed to activate the walkways, which become balconies for observing the activities on the ground. The project unfolds in space in the form of carpets, emphasizing the scale of the cleared area.