DAY 7: The Pantheon 1

08.07.2014

I approached the Pantheon from the back. It felt like approaching a well-known person, a bit awkward and uncomfortable. I had to remain rational. The cinematic experience, which excluded a front view of the monumental entrance, initially broke all the visions of the space that I had somewhere in my conscious. I even lost the sense that the Pantheon is round. Approached from the back, the first thing one sees is a square extension and a deep excavated area around the building. The traces of marble cladding and the former exterior glory are visible only around the entrance.

The Pantheon has a rather humble urban presence. Its interior, on the other hand, is both an absolute presence and absolute absence in one. Apart from the engineering aspect of the Pantheon being a ground-breaking structure that introduced concrete as a delicate construction material, its shape and the opening at the top can be seen as an abstraction of the universe, a possible spatial scenario of how the world was created. The same breath-taking effect is experienced by a lost tourist and an expert with all the background knowledge.

With a strange sense of being inside a time measuring device, the ability to perceive the space is highly questioned. It seems that a lot of present-day admiration comes with the struggle to photograph the space using a phone or a regular camera. The acrobatics performed by tourists in an attempt to capture both the opening in the dome and the floor surface, give a layer of fantasy, an imaginary reading of the Pantheon as an interior of the circus tent.