serial consign

This weekend I've been exploring my archived del.icio.us bookmarks in hopes of inspiring a new research project. In my perusal, I came across Occupation Game, a very clever installation by STEALTH.unlimited, a Rotterdam and Belgrade-based design collective. Part of from_&_to, a 2007 group show, Occupation Game took the exhibition history of the kunst Meran Merano arte gallery space (in Italy) and mapped the entire "spatial history" of the venue as a colourful, composite floor plan. STEALTH.unlimited reviewed a range of video and photographic archival material to determine the various configurations of the gallery over the entire history of the venue. An excerpt from their statement:

The documentation from different mentioned sources has been used to detect positions of artworks in the gallery spaces during its six year existence, and 24 exhibitions. Their outlines are 'drawn' with tape on the floor, each year in a different colour and each exhibition within one year with another line thickness (2002 - white,... 2007 - red, line thicknesses 9 mm to 75 mm). These accumulated ‘shadows’, or horizontally layered projections, map the total ‘history’ of artistic occupation of this space.

Between the flooring and the colourful line-work, Occupation Game almost reads as some kind of demented basketball court, no doubt accompanied by an unintelligible rule book. The piece speaks to the process of mapping, interrogates the architectural plan as a drawing convention and highlights the manner in which we can occupy the same space in different ways.

Occupation Game does not only engage the floor as a surface of demarcation but supplements this graphical information with related annotation on the walls of the gallery. This text provides a legend with which to read the intervention as a comprehensive text which documents the history of the space.

STEALTH.unlimited is comprised of Ana Dzokic and Marc Neelen and the duo has been collaborating since 2000. Their portfolio contains a range of provocative work dealing with the representation of space in a variety of different contexts.

[frederick kiesler / study for an exhibition / 1947]

Exhibition design is a challenging arena in which to practice architecture. While the jury may still be out about the utility of the museum as spectacle, it is universally acknowledged to be in poor taste to overshadow the work being exhibited in smaller, thematic settings. The planning of "display space" put architects in the doubly dubious situation of acclimatizing themselves to the programme of the curator and the spirit of the work being exhibited. All of that said, nARCHITECTS has just completed what looks to be a promising exhibition on the drawings of Frederick Kiesler that opens this week at the Drawing Center in New York City.

Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965) was an important industrial designer and architect who dedicated much of his career exploring the notion of "flow" in space. This lifelong research project culminated in Kiesler's proposal for the Endless House, a band of bulbous volumes which serve as an organic counterpoint to the machine rhetoric associated with Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye. It might have taken three decades and parametric modeling for architecture to catch up with some of Kiesler's ideas, but his work has clearly influenced experimental architects like Greg Lynn and Asymptote and projects like UNStudio's Möbius House.

Given that Kiesler only realized two built projects, drawing was extremely important to his practice. He left behind a significant archive of drawings pertaining to the Endless House, idealized space, viewing devices and exhibition design. A selection of this material will be on display at Frederick Kiesler: Co-Realities on at the Drawing Center until July 24th. For this show, nARCHITECTS have developed a simple and elegant band of curvilinear vitrines in which to showcase Kiesler's drawings and related multimedia content. Always a sucker for an interesting set of drawings (and a complimentary environment to view them in), I'm most certainly adding this show to my summer hitlist. Really though, what could be better than architecture for drawing?

A special thanks and hello to my peer and former thesis neighbour Alice Wong for tipping me off about this exhibit. As an intern architect at nARCHITECTS I'm sure she contributed her fair share of blood sweat and tears to this project.