Design

The Upside Dome by Gijs Van Vaerenbergh

Laura Chan

21 October 2010

Designers Gijs Van Vaerenbergh have suspended a network of chains to create an upside-down dome inside this church in Leuven, Belgium.

The Upside Dome hovers in front of the pulpit inside St-Michiel Church, suspended from the roof where the building’s missing dome should be located.

The installation is open to the public until 31 October 2010.

Photos are by Jeroen Verrecht.

Here’s a note from the architects:

Gijs Van Vaerenbergh

When visiting the St-Michiel Church in Leuven one might overlook that the church has no dome. Pieterjan Gijs and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh build an in- stallation that takes this seemingly trivial fact as a starting point and generate the missing dome in a remarkable way.

The installation casts light on the architecture of one of the most prestigious baroque churches of the Low Countries from a contemporary perspective. Using the design technique of the catenary, a new structure emerges in the church. The Upside Dome is a real size scale model, comprised of hundreds of meters of chain, which is literally and figuratively the counterpart of the unfinished dome.

Pieterjan Gijs (1983) and Arnout Van Vaerenbergh (1983) both studied archi- tecture and work together under the name Gijs Van Vaerenbergh in a multidis- ciplinary practice with an important focus on public space.