Shuruq Tramontini
Creative Technical Artist


The Grinning Cat


2017 - 2018


Playable game environment where audience inhabits speculative world of architectural elements, designed with the software Platform Sandbox by Damjan Jovanovic


‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’. ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to’, said the Cat. ‘I don’t much care where -’ said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go’ said the Cat.


- Lewis Carroll: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland








The paradigm for this project is the Philharmonie in Berlin, 1960 by Hans Scharoun. Creating a small public building - a soundscape - in Frankfurt city, my interest focuses on the notion of the dissolved space and how this can formally be translated into architecture.

To do this i concentrate on the following: Maintaining the sketch derived from platform sandbox and dissolving Scharoun’s idea of the mountain by flipping the diagram; fragmentation and creating a soundscape in the interior through scattered subelements; layering and repetiton which is more conceptual, but repeating the same action over and over again, thus questioning and loosing precision and perfection, much like the piece ‘I am sitting in a Room’, 1969 by Alvin Lucier.

The continuous space in the interior of the Philharmonie and the merging and overlapping of forms and geometry create a path of connectivity with no clear boundaries or seperations, the space starts to dissolve, and at the same time layered densities start to emerge. The multiple trajectories, that lead on different routes into the main concert hall are offset. Using the main building elements of the Philharmonie I take them to platform sandbox, a software developed by my current instructor Damjan Jovanovic. The idea of chance and a composition based on super fast clicks and intuition in the frame of 20 minutes lead me to a series of diagrams. I define them, manouver through them, and finally categorize them into groups depending on spatial qualities and formal aspects.

In my final design proposal the exterior and interior do not correlate in a direct way: The interior consists of dispersed point elements, which are more or less floating, but are also needed for stuctural detailing, while the shifted collapsing planes create clusters of spaces which are partially interconnected and dissolve into one another, creating the effect of movement in terms of formal language but also spatial experience. Paths at different levels with gradual inclinations serve as circulation and ensure that the listener can hear sound from different points and different angles with different frequencies.





PRIZES // NOMINATIONS // FEATURES:
_GUENTER BOCK PRIZE 2017