The photograph of the main living and contemplating room of Can Lis (Jorn Utzon´s own house at Mallorca, 1972) has formed part of the iconic images of the discipline of the last decades and a has become a statement about how to relate the interior of a building with its exterior perimeter and the landscape beyond.

It is a good example of how the domestic realm of an architects´ own house can be the ground for architectural experimentation that then permeates into the rest of the discipline with different intepretations and compromises, and thanks to the diffussion of its photographs.

Arguably, the reason why the photograph of this space has become so pregnant relies in the fact that the aspects that had made this space so relevant are very related to the discipline of Photography themselves.

A static and minimalistic interior room is activated by several deep windows that allow the exterior to be viewed and determine the way light enters the room.

Like in photography, several ways of framing a motif are used, and thus, the windows are a collection of different croppings of the exterior subject -as those provided by different cameras with different framing ratios and orientations.

The fact that the windows are almost smaller rooms (which depth is defined by the distance between the interior limits of the room and the exterior limits of the building), and that the observer is in a fixed point (defined by the built in furniture) clearly define the distance between the glass and the observer, and the walls of the viewing funnels literally frame the view thanks to their perspective perception.

In our  Biennial Room of Plinths piece,  this precise relationship that Utzon defined between the observer, the frame and the cropping of the landscape is the theme that is re-worked in order to adjust the scaled down model of the interior space with the new limits and rotation of the Plinth. As a consequence, each viewing funnel is precisely reshaped in order to keep the original framing proportions of each view.

In this way, the model respects the settings of Utzon´s room while it adapts to the new variables of the Plinth geometry and dimensions, creating as a result new spatial conditions for each viewing funnel. It deals with the precedent in a literal way, but only to create something new out the negotiation of its logics with the present conditions.