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119

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review / SAM KEBBELL

Penumbral Reflections
Sarosh Mulla and Aaron Paterson
Objectspace, Auckland 
May 12–June 23, 2018

There is something slightly disconcerting about walking into an unfa-
miliar dark room, especially when there is a weird thing in the middle of 
it, but it also ignites my curiosity. The room, in this case, is the main gal-
lery at Objectspace, and the weird thing was made by Aaron Paterson and 
Sarosh Mulla, both of PAC Studio and the University of Auckland School of 
Architecture and Planning. At first glance, it looks like a big black egg in an 
orthogonal nest, but it’s not.

What is it? The big black egg is in fact a dark-tinted reflective disc. From the 
side at which I arrived, it is totally black, which is why it looks like an egg, but 
when I move around it I can see it has a slightly convex curve that distorts 

Fig. 1 A big black egg in an 
orthogonal nest? [Photograph by 
David St George]



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120

Penumbral Reflections
Sarosh Mulla and Aaron Paterson
Objectspace, Auckland 
May 12–June 23, 2018 

F R O M  B E AU X- A R T S  T O  B I M

the reflections of the projectors aimed at it. I read in the project description 
on the wall that it is a Claude glass. Wikipedia tells me that in the eighteenth 
century, a Claude glass was a portable black-tinted convex mirror that tour-
ists and landscape painters used to turn expansive views of the landscape 
into an image, so I am looking at a Brobdingnagian version of that. The nest 
is not really what I thought either. As random as the framing appeared when 
I walked in, it is actually a finely made metal frame that forms a 3.6 x 3.6 x 
3.6-metre cube with vertical members spaced evenly down each side and em-
bedded within it is a slightly rotated framework of similar proportions. The 
shadows of the frame appear on the Claude glass and in the puddle of light in 
front of it. The rotated smaller framework sets up a diagonal geometry that 
also provides some lateral bracing. There are projections on the walls behind 
us too, which were produced in gaming engines as a digital simulation of cer-
tain visual qualities in the metal contraption.

How do I look at it? If I was an eighteenth-century painter using this Claude 
glass, these projections are where the landscape would be. I would be using the 
Claude glass to look at that landscape, but here I am inclined to use that land-
scape to look at the Claude glass. Partly because I prefer to look at the finely 
crafted object and the complex play of light and shadow across it rather than 
the projected pixels on a flat wall. I circle it a few times wondering if I might 
stand in the puddle of light and take a good hard look into the Claude glass as 

Fig. 2 Screenprint made as part of  
the design process. [Screenprint by 
PAC Studio]



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Penumbral Reflections
Sarosh Mulla and Aaron Paterson
Objectspace, Auckland 
May 12–June 23, 2018 

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if staring into a giant eyeball. The gallerist senses my timidity and invites me 
to climb on in, so I do. I get very close to the Claude glass, but I don’t touch it. I 
promise. It looks like polished metal, but the reflections make it hard to focus 
on the surface itself. It is more like peering into a strange phantasmagorical 
scene with my own eyeballs in the foreground. When I turn around though, 
I see my colleagues and a more prosaic reality takes over my mind. I start to 
think, if I had time, this might be quite a nice spot to pull up a few chairs and 
kick back with a drink. A sort of belvedere in a digital landscape. 

I can imagine looking out at this digital landscape and pondering one of the 
fundamentals of our trade: light, in its various forms and with its range of 
implications. The way light and dark produces apparent depth, even if the 
surface is in fact flat. The way a complete lack of tonal variation produces a 
totally different kind of depth, the kind of infinite depth James Turrell has so 
often produced, and that the Claude glass is capable of here. It is a relatively 

Figs. 3-6 The Claude glass, the frame 
that supports it, and the various 
projections. [Photographs by David 
St George]

 



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Penumbral Reflections
Sarosh Mulla and Aaron Paterson
Objectspace, Auckland 
May 12–June 23, 2018 

F R O M  B E AU X- A R T S  T O  B I M

dark room to ponder light, but maybe that in itself is something to ponder. 
Even though light and shadow are a phenomenological couple, light has 
been the dominant partner under modernist regimes. In this sense, it is re-
freshing to wallow in the dark thinking about light.

This contraption is also a good vantage point to ponder the tension between 
realities and digital simulation, given that screens, projected images, and pix-
els are very much part of our contemporary reality. On one hand, I ponder the 
exhibit as a string of simulations: projected images that simulate aspects of a 
contraption, and a contraption that simulates certain architectural qualities. 
On the other hand, I am conscious that all these simulations form the reality 
of the gallery space I am standing in. So I think of it all as both simulation and 
reality; I am both part of PAC’s architecture, and part of their thinking about 
it. All this serves to reflect on the creative processes PAC explore, and their rel-
ishing of the movement between different modes of architectural production. 

Along this line of thought, it is hard not to consider PAC’s built work and the 
frequent use of dark timbers, shadowy interiors, enclosed courtyards, and ex-
pressed framing. This room feels like an elaboration on those qualities but it 
pushes them to new extremes. It will be interesting to see if the built work also 
becomes more extreme as a result of this exercise. Pieces of this exhibit will be 
relocated to the Waikereru Ecosanctuary near Gisborne, and this might give us 
a clue to how this thinking will play out in larger buildings later.

PAC’s buildings matter to this exhibition because for all the play with simu-
lation, it remains committed to architectural experience. While the Claude 
glass does introduce certain narrative layers, the exhibition is not a rep-
resentation of an idea that belongs outside of architecture. It relies less on 
some external narrative than on the attention I pay to my experience in the 
room, and the histories and potentials that surround that. Yes, the Claude 
glass is a historical device for looking at the landscape, and that’s not what 
is happening here, but the mechanics of the device have been co-opted at an 
architectural scale to look at architectural surroundings. The Claude glass is 
not a metaphor here; it remains an instrument. 



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Sarosh Mulla and Aaron Paterson
Objectspace, Auckland 
May 12–June 23, 2018 

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In fact, the whole exhibition is an instrument, a kind of multi-tool running 
on the fuel of light and shadow. I think it has less representational value 
than operational value. It is a contraption to produce depth, illusion, and 
distortion. It flips between reality and simulation, and it exposes creative 
fascinations with light and shadow. It is never quite what I think it is, and 
simple interpretations of it never quite resolve. But however much I slip off 
one idea and into another, I always feel immersed in architectural thinking: 
in drawing, digital modelling, experimenting with light, framing, looking, 
and fashioning some future situation.

At this stage in the reflections, sitting in my real-imaginary belvedere, I have 
been utterly drawn into PAC’s web. The various modes that architecture must 
exist within cannot easily be pulled apart on a clear day, and this contrap-
tion tangles them up even more. It is full of rich ambiguities, and insights 
into their multi-modal practice. This weird thing in the middle of the room 
is a real thing, for sure, but it also operates between the realms of simulation, 
representation, and imagination. I have been invigorated by the exchange 
between them.