Jason Oddy
Sphere

After years of making work in response to architectures of control I began thinking about less prescriptive architectural forms. The result was Sphere, a meditative four-way video installation depicting a quartet of exemplary spherical structures. The géode cinema at Paris’s Parc de la Villette. Buckminster Fuller’s 1967 Montreal Expo geodesic dome. The decommissioned nuclear reactor at Dounreay on the north coast of Scotland. East Berlin’s Zeiss planetarium. Each of them a symbol of universality and wholeness. Each of them also encompassing a highly complex system of knowledge.

By projecting the films I made of these four places onto the vertical sides of a cube I brought together two traditionally irreconcilable forms. In doing so I wanted to ask how architecture might help sublimate our never-ending worldly entanglements and also whether it might itself be able to transcend its own mundane limits.

Alongside the video piece I also produced a series of still images as a further meditation on this iconic form.