Afterword
Notes on the plates
Unbuilt is a museum with no building. Its three plates were drawn for sites that do not exist, in a stone that has never been quarried, under a sun that rises wherever you ask it to. Nothing here has been built, and nothing here could be.
The Stair That Outlived Its Tower
Every staircase is a promise that there is somewhere to arrive. This one was set inside its tower to lead to the top, and it did; then, finding nothing there to keep it, it carried on. The drum is laid as a real drum would be, in courses of running bond, with one slit left open so you can watch the treads wind up inside. Above the last course the treads grow lighter and further apart, turning slightly out of true, as if the stone were forgetting what it was for.
Try: raise Ascend fully, then set the sun to a winter morning and follow the shadows of the loose treads across the page.
Arcade of the Turning Day
An arcade is a sentence spoken by repetition: arch, arch, arch, until the rhythm itself becomes a place. Here each arch has been cut free of its neighbours and stood on edge like a coin, so nothing keeps it from rolling but its own weight. Turned, the doorways fall out of step one by one, morning, noon and evening, and the last of them opens toward the ground: a door for someone arriving from above.
Try: bring Turn back to nothing, choose the equinox and move the hour toward sunset, when the light runs along the axis.
House on a Needle
The right way up it is a ziggurat, the oldest idea in monumental building: every storey resting on a larger one. Inverted, every storey rests on a smaller one, all the way down to a single slender column. Nothing about the rooms has changed. The windows still frame the horizon and the stairs still join the terraces, only now they run across the ceilings. Turn it back and it becomes a building that could stand, which is to say, one that has already been built.
Try: open the Section halfway to see the rooms around the light-well, then pull it apart.
How to visit
- Drag the plate, or focus it and use the arrow keys, to walk around the model. Plus and minus bring you closer; the graphic scale keeps count.
- Hour and season move the sun along its true path at latitude 41.9° north. The dial is a sun-path diagram, turned to match your view; drag the sun along its arc.
- Section cuts the model through its heart and draws the cut in ink. Keep going and it comes apart into an exploded view.
- Each plate has its own verb: Ascend, Turn, Invert. Keys 1, 2 and 3 open the plates.
- Motion follows your system setting until you change it here. Sound is off until you turn it on.