Containers of light and space

 

This project proposes to produce a large significant work of architecture, from the excesses of our industrial landscape, capable of housing tools and providing workspace for artists in summer residence at the Franconia sculpture park.  Using shipping containers, pallets, recycled glass, used telephone wire, railroad connector plates, tracks, and radio towers, it is possible to construct an architecture that can use art and particularly the industrial art movement to inspire new freedom in contextual interventions; to suggest new material possibilities; to explore other understandings of space. 

 

This proposed installation project is designed to question certain accepted modes of architectural practice and the place of architecture both in the gallery and the city.  The pieces also work with and against normative notions of art versus architecture by placing architecture in the art space, and art and the artist in a constructed urban space.  The project accepts conventional arguments used to advocate design/build: they expose us to real materials and their performance, to sites, to construction methods and to collaborative practice.

 

The Boxes of space explore the interconnection and cross-fertilization between art and architecture as a strategy for redefining both disciplines.   In the case of Franconia sculpture park, it is a landscape filled with experimental ideas about exterior installations, land art and the relationships between object, site and viewer.   As constructions placed in the public realm, the sculptures in the park probe relative scale and subject/object relationships.  The Boxes of space, by contrast, is an architectural object installed in an art-space-- a placement permitting conceptual as well as spatial exploration and calling into question the traditional place of the architectural object vis-à-vis the observer.  Furthermore, the replacement of art with architecture in the art-space represents the ever changing functions of urban institutions in contemporary society. 

 

Once installed, the Containers read as either nomads in the landscape or singular architectural constructions.  It is difficult to judge whether they are object-like or spatial from a distance, a mysterious condition that invites the viewer to come closer and engage personally with the space.  Their juxtaposition across a site suggests a re-mapping of the site as a field without inner or outer horizons, a labyrinth or a memory of objects in a larger field.   

 

The use of the construction as a gallery setting offers the unique opportunity to view the installation both with and without scale, from inside and from without, as art and architectural artifact.