The Thickness of the Wall and The Urban Box were student-produced installation projects designed to question certain accepted modes of architectural practice and the place of architecture both in the gallery and the city. The pieces also worked with and against normative notions of art versus architecture by placing architecture in the art space, and art in the urban space. Both projects accepted conventional arguments used to advocate design/build: they expose students to real materials and their performance, to sites, to construction methods and to collaborative practice. The Thickness of the Wall combines 18 individually conceived parts in a collaborative whole, a process that accommodated personal invention while necessitating compromise. The Urban Boxes were 22 single units scattered in a larger field--garden or urban matrix. Collaboration here occurred when the pieces had to be transported and installed but was otherwise intentionally eschewed in order to provide a contrasting model from the Wall.
The Wall and the Boxes explore the interconnection and cross-fertilization between art and architecture as a strategy for redefining both disciplines. Architecture can use art to inspire new freedom in contextual interventions; to suggest new material possibilities; to explore other understandings of space. In the case of the Wall, students worked with methods developed by the sculptor Richard Serra; experimented with materials like plywood form board; and tested the possibilities of space defined by slide projections. While for the Boxes, students looked at land art and public art for ideas about exterior installation and potential relationships between object, site and viewer. As constructions placed in the public realm, the Boxes probed relative scale and subject/object relationships. The Wall, by contrast, was 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.
Lastly, the Wall and the Box simultaneously frame a critique of the artist as unique creative genius even as they explore the possibilities of individuality and the creative process. In addition, each project posits a different relationship between architecture and the urban condition. The Urban Boxes can be read both as miniature buildings or unique sculptural installations in the urban fabric. While The Thickness of the Wall is both a single wall exploded to enormous dimensions and a microcosm of the urban condition, a complex layered construction whose internal logic mirrors the happenstance of urban space.
The Thickness of the Wall is a group installation piece intended from the start for gallery exhibition. Its strategy is to explore the intangible dimensions of a wall initially defined as a linguistic structure. This structure could be seen as it relates to a construct by Foucault, a city described by Calvino or Borges, a mood suggested by Kafka, or a sculptural manifestation of the word by Richard Serra. By beginning the design process with an exploration of the Space of Memory, we encouraged students to become familiar with their individual experience and thought processes. Students were asked to develop a model that represented the in/excluded condition of memory--a space at once interior and exterior, a map of their remembered experience. The highly individual space of memory was then distilled into one word, an active verb, making the highly personal universal. These verbs became the programmatic elements of the wall as well as the individual’s architectural position.
The 18 students were then required to develop 18 projects for the wall and coordinate the projects into one larger piece. Some designed parts of the floor, others addressed the walls, still others worked on the roof. There was no organizing system or framework until the very end when each of the 18 parts was already fairly well designed. Thus, the students had to invent strategies for inclusion akin to the evolution of an urban morphology in which individual sections grow together, or bend to accommodate one another, or simply learn to coexist side-by-side. In this way, The Thickness of the Wall becomes a metaphor for the complex found in the urban condition.
The Thickness of the Wall was exhibited in the Tanya Grunert Gallery in Cologne, Germany--a highly regarded gallery for conceptual art. From there it traveled to the 1995 Architectural Biennial in Sao Paolo, Brazil and to the Architectural Biennial in Argentina. The 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.