Kasper Ax

Ecovisual Morphologies - The new Ecumenical Council of Turin, 2009

The project proposes a museum for the Turin Shroud as well as a congregation hall to host the new Ecumenical Council of Turin, the latter being conceived as an open forum for contemporary religious debate.

With the intention of overcoming a still pervasive presence of pure form in architecture, the proposal utilises theories of visual perception in computer aided design and manufacturing methodologies, which interpret previous Gestalt and the more recent Ecological Visual Perception theories. Constructed viewpoints are created in the interior and exterior of the congregation hall, infusing the spatial configurations with distorted and exaggerated perspectives, along with figurative formations, such as the Cross of Jesus. These viewpoints, or ‘ecovisual morphologies’, interfere with the user’s cognition by creating associations and assumptions in the mind of the beholder through both frozen and dynamic moments. Essentially, this could be described as a ‘soft’ approach to architecture that places less emphasis on construction or enclosure and more emphasis on the conceptual reasoning of the space, reaching towards the Sublime.

Kasper Ax is a Danish architect. He initially studied at the University of Aarhus in Denmark and later at the Bartlett School of Architecture UCL where he graduated in 2008. He worked for Asymptote Architecture in New York and is currently working for LASSA Architecture in Belgium. He is also an assistant tutor at the Architectural Association and the University of Westminster.