Bloodline

A Self-Consuming Grill Pavilion, Stuttgart, Germany, 2008-11

Bloodline: Self-Consuming Barbecue Pavilion is a grill pavilion in the forest outside Stuttgart, Germany, in the grounds of the eighteenth century castle ‘Solitude’. Bloodline begins as a cube, clad with grillholz (local barbecue wood), which conceals a grilling and preparation space, enclosed in a more complex interior lining.The exterior grillholz cube is consumed as the grill is used, gradually revealing the asymmetric fire-space inside.

Its form derives from Castle Solitude, which appears to be a perfectly well-behaved piece of Baroque architecture, while hidden beneath an ordered facade, a sinister and degenerate architecture is concealed. These “fire-spaces” are mis-shapen spaces with windows through which the servant viewed the world of the aristocrats from behind the fire.

The facade portion was built in Ithaca, NY, in 2009 and exhibited in Tjaden Gallery, Cornell University. With support from Cornell Architecture, CCA and Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.