18. September 2017
All photographs by John Hill/World-Architects
One of the few large-scale, physically accessible contributions to the Chicago Architecture Biennial is (Study for) Chapel for Scenes of Public Life by baukuh and Stefano Graziani.
Subtitled The Meeting of Enrico Mattei and the Queen of Sheba, the installation references Piero della Francesca’s fresco in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arrezzo, Italy, that depicts the meeting of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. But in place of King Solomon is Mattei, an Italian politician who also ran the state-owned oil company ENI. And instead of paintings, the chapel’s rectilinear frame would be filled with photographs depicting the fictional meeting of Mattei, who died in 1962, and the biblical Queen of Sheba. As erected in the Chicago Cultural Center, the study model is half-scale and thereby requires visitors to crouch down in order to enter the colorful interior where line drawings are situated in lieu of actual photos.
