Elisa Vaccaro

Leopold Park, Brussels - BA1 (2012).

The exercice of the observatory has as an objective to push the student in a first reflection about the link between architecture and the feeling of a place. It is about to find a place in Brussels where there's something we wish to show, then to implement an architecture that is the best way to show it, and to say through it, and through its communication with the environment, what we are looking at and why.
The place I choosed was the Leopold Park : as I walked around in the park, I felt the calm and the silence, I looked from a little terrace the immobility of the whole. Only one tree, lighter than the others, and the pond a little further, were moving with the breath of the wind, disturbing that absolut silence with the sound of foilage and water. With this few elements, I lived a moment of solitude and disquietude. With this observatory, I wanted to immerse the visitor in this particular experience.
The observatory is in metal, it is presented as a "promenade" who takes the visitor close to the light tree to listen to the foilage sound, while looking at the pond in front. The point of the walk over the observatory is to get altenatively close and far from these interest centers to listen to the sounds and to look at them from different highs and points of view, and to feel this solitude and disquietude.
These sensations are amplified for every single sense directly or indirectly (taste, smell), with the forms and the materials that can raise the disquietude feeling with a particular reverberation of the sound, the high that gets stronger at the same time that the platform it shrinks, the texture and the way you move over it, the sliding feeling, the smell of it when it rains, the cold sensation of the handrail, the disorientation that it can provocate by getting further or closer from the platform.