As an architect, I have always been interested in the subject of cult structures. The entire process of their emergence, the gathering of donations, volunteers, the construction process, and finally the feeling of peace within a chapel.
At the exhibition ‘Islands’ in St Petersburg, there was an opportunity to fulfill this idea, to reenact the creation of a chapel in miniature. When someone decides to donate clothing to the church, they put it aside in a plastic bag, and sometimes it remains in the closet, gathering dust for years. We collected these kinds of belongings using them to fill the glass jar walls of the chapel.
This created place of meditative human presence and refuge from the external world, which becomes surreal, obscured by the lens-like walls of the jars.
Image Of The Temple
Does architecture comment on itself? Yes, surely enough.
Sacral buildings give the best example of the fact. The sacral architecture has been inter-textual from the earliest times. For instance, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem has been imitated in the whole Christendom. Yet, those were not exact replicas, as we now understand them — with the same proportions, the same articulation and the exact exterior of the original. It was rather a conceptual reproduction repeating the exact number of columns and its circular plan. Hagia Sophia in Constantinople, in its turn, served as a model for quite a number of imposing Ottoman mosques. In this case the interchange of architectural quotations broke the confessional barrier. Yet, even the most humble chapel has its place in the chain of symbolical genealogy, referring to the sacral constructions that may well be situated at a several thousand kilometre distance.
The closed portal of any temple enshrines a very singular sacral space accentuating all of your senses and creating a multidimensional, complex aura of these sacral structures — they all bear the symbol of divine presence to be forever etched in your memory.
The Rags Chapel by Olga Treivas is a simple single-naved basilica. Its subtle and exquisite simplicity is intrinsic to the basic typology in question. However, it seems to be epitomised in the chape’s very precious body: dematerialising, transpar-ent, transfused with light and full of colour — it is like a total work of stained glass. Although the walls of this small chapel are made of ordinary glass jars, while the chromatic effect is reached through the use of short-life old clothes, once you are inside, you tend to lower your voice and behave yourself in a more dignified manner. After all, the Museum is also called a Temple…
Andrey Egorov, ‘Art Is Art Is Art’ Exhibition Catalogue