Casa observatorio

This observatory house is an almost 1:1 scale replica of one of the architectural components of the Jantar Mantar astronomical observatory built in Jaipur in the eighteenth century. The house was designed as an observation platform and studio for the artist himself. A relatively small construction (16×16 meters), it consists of three bedrooms and a kitchen separated by four terraces, two of which function as bathroom-patios and two others as living areas.
These spaces surround a central pool: a semicircle eight meters in diameter and four meters deep at its deepest point. Access to the pool is by way of the rooftop, from where a panoramic view looks 360 degrees over a landscape of coastline and wilderness.
From the outside, the construction strikes a discreet note, embedded among the rocks. The interiors seem to disappear behind the backs of the visitors, leaving an open landscape before them. Thus, the house all but vanishes into the landscape, evoking the corridors linked by an impossible logic of the constructions of M.C. Escher.
Orozco's dialogue with architecture has been manifest in previous works, from the renovation of his house in Tlalpan (1999) to his intervention into the Carlo Scarpa pavilion at the Venice Biennial of 2003. His interventions using found objects, with their striking socio-cultural connotations -such the Citroën DS car, cut up and reassembled, or the ping-pong table reconstructed for four with the pool in the center-, also bear an oblique relation to this house.
The gesture of relocating an architectural object from another culture and another age along the coast of present-day Oaxaca -in continuity with its original functions as an astronomical observatory, even as it serves as a lookout over the landscape-, makes this work a recipient of experiences: of what surrounds it and what prolongs it as a creative instrument for the artist. Barbara Hernandez

 
Gabriel Orozco (Xalapa, 1962) studied at the School of Visual Arts of the UNAM and completed his training in the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. En 1992 he moved to New York, where he gained recognition as one of the outstanding artists of his generation. He divides his time between New York, Paris, and Mexico City.