Barrault Pressacco

This project expresses the immanent tragedy of any human oeuvre: on the one side the moral, beneficent and ideal representation, on the other, the product of incontrollable impulses, desire and creativity.
Within the Bicentenario Tower, this inescapable bipolarity finds a balance between forces that were hitherto contradictory. The perfection of the beauty ideal and the internal freedom together produce a sensitive aesthetic, an attempt at representing the contemporary world.
The Bicentenario Tower is a 44 metres-wide and 420 metres-high cylinder. The exterior, clad with mirror, transmits a perfect and spiritual image. The interior is the free expression of the natural and inevitable complexity of any large-scale system. The tower’s structure is ensured by a peripheral crown of 2,50 metres width, built on trapezoidal columns of 1,6 metres and 0,50 metres width. This peripheral structure allows the freeing of all the interior surfaces, and the elimination of any dependency on the external representation. Each level works as an independent structural element, a four-metres beam lying between the 39 metres bearings, also the cylinder’s diameter.