Upside Dome

Over on BldgBlog, Geoff Manaugh has a post up about Gijs Van Vaerenbergh’s “Upside Dome” installation at St. Michiel’s in Leuven. It’s so beautiful I can’t help but post a picture of it here — I’m a sucker for the Belgian Baroque and modern interventions to it.

The piece, I suppose from the title, is a physical inversion of the church’s actual dome. But it looks just as much as if it might be some grid from William Gibson-land that is dripping into the elaborate old space and that it will soon spread out and cover the entire nave in its matrix. It’s amazing how solid the volume contained by the drooping net appears, when it’s really just air. An ethereal effect and in the right space for it.