PYLON DESIGN COMPETITION

 
To design a pylon and is to seek for the relation between the object to its site.
It's an evidence for us that to study a pylon requires to take some distance to its environment, as essentially it has to face several countrysides and different landscapes. Unless the power lines aren't buried, a pylon in the landscape is a situation within the panorama, a position that catches one's mind. Because of its dimension you can't avoid to see it. What we see from distance is more of a «running fence» that prints the landscape, than an isolated object seated in a site. Our research therefore started with this observation: the idea of a fence running going through the countryside that you have to play with.
To accentuate this point of view we think the pylon can't be perpendicular to the power lines, as it usually is. Its orientation has to come along the axes of the lines, following the transported energy, which energy is not visually interrupted to each pylon, but rather escort to make a transport more fluid and limpid. The project is a simple parallelepiped rectangle, large enough to be present, indicating a direction.

Made out of dark high performance concrete (Ducal®), the monolith is covered gradually by thousand of little mirrors from the bottom to the top of the volume as it disappear into the sky.
This impressive construction like skyscrapers doesn't seek to merge to the perspective, but rather trace another landscape, a new horizon line redrawn by a mysterious alignment of totems coming from nowhere. As the pylons are being separate by 360 meters we are drawing a regular punctuation at the scale of the site.
At first sight, the presence of the pylon may be seen as a simple body dig into the ground. Ultimately the pylon will appear more to come out of the earth, being able to reach the same altimetry at its top, enhance the idea of a tension line within two points. Thus, they seem to have always been there, steadfast, immu- table, and enigmatic, whereas the natural landscape composes and decomposes all around.
This intent to shape the landscape is highlighted by the profile of the monolith, as the observer is captured by the line of totems. One side is straight rectilinear, like the bow of a boat, the other side is notched, cut up like an engine that help us to know in which direction the energy goes. This static object becomes a dynamic image, inviting us to see energy being transport along the line.
If the horizon line in the landscape is that uncertain line that separate the sky from the earth, here, a new horizon line create a dynamic way through the punctuation of the pylons and invite the observer to appreciate the intangible transport of energy.