BOBBY FISCHER vs. BORIS SPASSKY: THE MATCH OF THE CENTURY
BECOMES A BUILDING!
The opening game in the spectacular chess match between the American prodigy Bobby Fischer and world champion Grand master Boris Spassky in 1972 has been transformed into a cyber-building. Chess House (the resultant structure) records and objectifies every move in the game, recreating it into a permanent spatial trace of the original cognitive battle.
The game of chess is a highly rigorous process which never-the-less allows for a considerable degree of imagination and intuition. The process actually has more to do with the intangible space of the intellect than the physical space of our world. The pieces and board are only markers for the mental processes which they map out. As the game is played these pieces viscerally carve through space over the Cartesian grid of the board. We generally think of ourselves as existing in Cartesian/Euclidian space, and so the question arose of how chess playing might be used as a means of creating three-dimensional form. This challenge was met by extending the mapping of the game from a simple alpha-numeric codification (B e3, K x d4, etc.) to one involving the placement of (virtual) tectonic elements.
Chess House relies on the mechanism of translating the game through a set of rules based on the colour, rank, sequence of play and interaction of the original pieces. This limited set of predetermined rules is then rigorously applied, resulting in a different three dimensional spatial record for each game. It follows that a particular style of play might even be recognized as a characteristic structural pattern over a series of games.
-This text Copyright 1997, Rodney F Cottrell Architect, MAIBC-
