Seven Lamps of Architecture
Lamp of Sacrifice - Illusion
Lamp of Truth - Wrapping
Lamp of Power - Mounting
Lamp of Beauty - Bundling
Lamp of Life - Meandering
Lamp of Memory - Containing
Thesis
Completing a major cathedral like Beauvais is not a similar task to completing Notre Dame of Paris or Reims as if they were left incomplete in the middle of a major metropolis of France. The city has a population of 60.000 and it is not likely to increase in the near future. Cars are dominant at the city center, population is not young. One important aspect of the city is presence of the Beauvais Tille Airport. The airport is used increasingly by the travellers of Paris and Disneyland. Shuttle and train services are supporting the airport. As a city, the expectation of Beauvais become Bilbao by the power of one building is unnecessary and unrealistic. However such a beautiful building the left alone, incomplete in the middle of this village like city is tragic too. It should be recognised there is a reason the most ambitious gothic cathedral ever built is incomplete and it is mainly related to the financial and cultural weakness of the city Beauvais.
Turning the Beauvais Cathedral politely into a sparkling diamond having no dramatic impact on the city life would be an elegant restoration work. What should happen with such a great interior space is, it should expand, break the ground and conquer only to become part of the city again without any banal statements against the religion. Preserving itself as a Cathedral, a new world can be built around it to prove the power of the building again.
Urban Thesis
Our world today is not about the city, it is about buildings, it is either about the free standing - object like buildings or ugly and mega buildings providing infrastructure themselves. If this is the rule of the game, we can only manipulate and shock, to prove a building can do more than being a pretty sterile background image, a wallpaper.
Like Mont Saint Michel, like Laon Cathedral of France, Beauvais has to expand has its own city around it engaging 24/7 with itself instead of being alone. The completion is not a physical addition, completion is the bridging of Beauvais with it's people. It’s a soft transitional frame providing great spaces between the spectacular interior of the cathedral and the slow city of Beauvais.
This transitional space must be heavy looking like a mountain however when it is experienced as a space should be very light looking as a structure. The observer must be surprised in the city seeing at certain angles building becomes almost transparent similar to the experience of Reims Cathedral’s facade.
Mont Saint Michel of France is a city built around a church located at the highest of a rock. Since Beauvais has the most ambitions of height among other Gothic cathedrals, the idea is to treat the incomplete cathedral as an origin for a mountain city opening into the great interior.
Technique
Nave is the incomplete part of the cathedral, therefore the proposal starts with the line completing half of the roof for the nave. Then this nave reaches the ground level descending while rotating around the cathedral taking the transept as the origin. The lines, like a spider web are connected to each other forming spaces independent from the interior of the cathedral,
