Design Team: Jaime Correa

A project for a puppet theater, contained within a Platonic cube, with a colossal lantern floating on a barge. It is also an exploration of issues of architectural phenomenology, theory, and symbolism in the visual language of comics (an homage to Chris Ware’s “Jimmy Corrigan: the smartest kid on earth”). In terms of phenomenology, ten complete dimetric views of the project provide a more-real-than-real aesthetic concretization and an overall understanding of the ontology of the architectural object; as a theory proposal, it challenges the mimetic Vitruvian myth of architectural creation by proposing a rational order where the human mind is capable of producing the real by “contrast” rather than by “imitation”; and finally, symbolically, the project is a political paradox between the primordial archetype of a Greek Senate and the informality of a puppet stage – the two archetypes are juxtaposed within a roofless colored space in order to suggest the invisible hand of hidden controllers as the effective leaders of the contemporary political discourse.