DION CACAO

In a period in which industrial capitalism was beginning to recalculate its manpower requirements, the maintenance of health, cure, became a collective responsibility [1]. Crans Montana, a village in the swiss alps, opened two “cure” - hotels, serving as health resorts. The resort rose in popularity and developed into a holiday resort, with all its needed infrastructure. Hotel, shops and even a golf course were built. To advertise the village there were numerous events like worldwide skiing and golfing tournaments. A century later a new shift in society, that being less and less concerned with possessing things and more and more concerned with consuming information [2], such as the sight of extraordinary locations and nature, escalated the interest in the village. But the visitors were looking for a merely Arcadian nature, the nature of vacations and tourism. [3] The field trip spoiled the charms of the field; the tourism left a kind of scorched earth [4]. Crans Montana degenerated in an unorganised, generic mass of economically motivated buildings; hotels, luxury shops, holiday homes and rentable lodges. The village thus is imprisoned in its own noise of nothingness, a content free feedback loop. A camera pointed to the screen where it itself is linked to, as Hofstadter puts it. When, however, something is added into the blank screen, this non-blank patch gets sucked into the video loop and cycled around, populating the screen with many bits of colour forming a complex pattern. [5]

The shop of DION CACAO is inserted, as this non-blank patch, in the heart of of Crans Montana, the luxury shopping street, at a former site of a PRADA, which has been abandoned by the world leaving nothing but the ghost of a spent civilization. [6] By defining the locus in which the new store is placed; it reveals the place where the two branches of the alternative join; it localizes the divergence and the place where the two discourses are juxtaposed. [7] Inside the principle volumes of the abandoned store there is a new structure inserted which grows through the store into the street completely distorting its appearance. This moment—the point of change—becomes an architectural event. Architecture occurs at the meeting of interior and exterior forces of use and space. These interior and environmental forces are both general and particular, generic and circumstantial. Architecture as the wall between the inside and the outside becomes the spatial record of this resolution and its drama. And by recognizing the difference between the inside and the outside, architecture opens the door once again to an urbanistic point of view. [8] The space between the new structure and the existing store is filled with machines enabling an artificial growth of local plants. We therefore call it the plane of Nature, although nature has nothing to do with it, since on this plane there is no distinction between the natural and the artificial. However many dimensions it may have, it never has a supplementary dimension to that which transpires upon it. That alone makes it natural and immanent. [9] The visitor who came to Crans Montana is reminded of their initial search for Arcadian nature by the overwhelming novelty which is growing out of the inserted structure. Yet the machinery is not concealed but emphasised in certain areas of the wall, showing a connection to various bioreactors, where the DION cacao plants are being grown and fermented. The room is filled with a mixture of floral, mossy and oriental scents which are being produced by the plants. Walking through the room towards an electrified heating wall displaying turbulent black sky, amid the dark and moving lavas, the troubled murmur of things is raising its commotion. Hurricanes on the open sea, sandstorms in the desert, forest fires, waterspouts and lightning as almost simple components of this great random howling: here, the sum and product of all the world's noises, the great vortex. [10]. Imitating reality, reproducing experience in an artificial medium, architecture. The reality of the Virtual stands for the reality as such, for its real effects and consequences. [11] which draw the visitor to the staircase towards the next room.

Following the staircase there is an oval opening into a cylindric room framed by a wall with an irregular and intriguing surface, populated by plants from all over the world. The sensation created by the space is not the lightness of flowing air but the thickness of molten liquid. [12] Even though the walls structure is created by images of nature, it was translated through the machine and can no longer be recognised in the fantastical images of the counter-natural. An immediacy, in short, where nature is mediated by morality. [13] In the middle there is a Spira Mirabilis ramp leading up towards a cupola. There the structure frames a view of the mountains, the pre-socratic physis, giving the visitor what he originally was looking for when coming to Crans Montana. Yet the frame serves as a reminder of the instability of the impersonal world of physical meteorology: it is raining, it is thundering, it is hailing, it is snowing. [14] and the construction of the collective for a working set of rules and valuations. The global (matter, energy, information . . . law) comes to a locality (cell, body, town ... an element of the countryside) through its surroundings (membrane, skin, peripheral walls, borders . . . circumstances) where it negotiates its transit or passage through an exchanger. [15] In this moment of maximal dislocation while being centred in a sphere the customer can choose a piece of DION chocolate from one of the many shops all over the world.

Refined they leave the shop again, moving backwards through the machinery. Marvelling at the wondrous world DION has created.