OFFICE 268

To commemorate the 450th anniversary of the death of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the municipality of Dilbeek organised an open-air exhibition, Bruegel’s Eye: Reconstructing the Landscape. OFFICE’s contribution, developed in collaboration with Bas Princen, was a ‘Model for a Tower’ installed in the forest environment frequently depicted in the artist’s paintings. The circular aluminium pavilion forms a railing for curtains printed with Princen’s photographs of fragments of Bruegel’s Tower of Babel. The curtains move with the slightest breath of wind and the juxtaposition of the two – the images and the forest – takes the viewer into a space where painting blurs into reality. Just as Bruegel depicts the ambiguity of our notions of nature and artificiality, with tree leaves visually mutating into red bricks, the pavilion aims for the same, as a scale model of a painted tower.