Grotto (2009)

Following in his father’s footsteps, Callum Morton (Montreal, 1965, lives and works in Melbourne) first studied architecture and then moved on to the visual arts. Architecture plays a prominent role in Morton’s oeuvre, but is not the actual theme of his work. Morton first became known for his fabrication of two-dimensional plans of archetypical forms of modernist architecture, which he transforms into models, giving the buildings a completely new, banal function. For example, he changed the Casa Malaparte in Capri into a Spizzico fast-food restaurant and turned Farnsworth House in Illinois into a 7/11. For the 2005 Istanbul Biennale, he turned this process around, giving a ruined building the shop front of a Levi’s 501 store, with a display window that featured the rubble that was there when Morton found the site. The focus of these works is not on the architecture, but on the levelling effect of processes of globalisation. The appearance of cities worldwide is becoming increasingly similar, as formal criteria are derived from architectural world heritage, with design gradually descending into banal common property and becoming completely interchangeable and devoid of its original significance. Morton plays with this notion by mixing modernism with entertainment architecture.

In 2007 Fundament Foundation, then the name of the foundation, commissioned Morton to design a pavilion for De Oude Warande. If the Baroque design of the garden was to be respected, it had to be at the central point of the park, the only spot from where the star-shaped pattern of the paths can be seen. However, a pavilion in this position would destroy the view of the star design. This presented Morton with a dilemma, which he resolved in a way that was both simple and ingenious: he designed an invisible pavilion. The exterior is not immediately apparent, because it is a mirror. The exterior of the pavilion functions both as a façade, screening off the inside from the outside, and as a reflective screen, mirroring and continuing the outside world. However, this continuation is an illusion.

Anyone who steps inside the pavilion is confronted with another essential characteristic of Baroque garden designs. The interior is a grotto, a cave-like space, sunk 75 centimetres below ground level. Walls have holes through which the outside world can be seen, as the glass façade is made of two-way mirrors. In the evening, the interior is illuminated in such a way that the reflective function of the pavilion is cancelled out and the glass box makes place for a dark mound, reminiscent of solidified lava. This transformation takes place gradually as darkness falls, so that the pavilion not only has a constantly changing form but alternate meanings too. Grotto is a Baroque folly, a screen, a cave and a mound.

Callum Morton’s thinking was guided by Baroque notions, the principles of contemporary entertainment and the desire to produce an exciting tension between interior and exterior, between past and present. “In the first instance, I wanted to develop a design that would clash with De Oude Warande,” says Morton. “But now I think it clashes with itself. Grotto is a paradox.”