The Stone Spiral is
an architectural articulation of a particular place/locus of a sinkhole. I used two specifically architectural elements, a wall
and a tower. The wall enclosed the place and demarcated it from the
surroundings, while the role of the tower was to announce this narrower,
separated place.
The abandoned
sinkhole, resembling a kind of a bowl, was special because of the
content/sediment it stored inside itself. In the bottom there was a stone
jumble,
an enormous pile of rocks, which had been thrown there by farmers in the
process of cultivating the wider area of the sinkhole into a meadow.
Immediately above the sinkhole bottom on its east side there was a large
boulder, a sort of axis loci, the
axis and the centre of gravity of the place. In this wonderful stone stage set, I envisaged a stone
altar in this narrower intimate place of the sinkhole, and wanted to bring man to
it.
Using the local method of dry construction and the stone material at hand,
I materialized this idea by stacking the rocks into a spiral wall, guiding the
visitor to descend from the sinkhole edge past the altar into its bottom where
the spiral penetrates the earth and leads into unfathomable magnitudes of the underground
karst world.
The spiral ramp thus
ends with an opposition to the stone tower which announces it at the entrance,
at the top of the sinkhole.
