serial consign

[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.

Earlier this month, I was semi-inspired by a Dataisnature post on some recent work by Lia. In that post, Paul Prudence contextualized Lia's Isaidif project in relation to some of other great "drawing machines". To add to that list of projects:

First up is The Plotting Machine, a modified wide format printer that can be outfitted with a variety of "print-heads" to produce a variety of imperfect output. The project was developed by You Don't Matter, a design collective comprised of Martin Borst, Sebastian Cremers and Daniel Schludi. The device can be equipped with blades, a variety of styluses, and the trio of designers have even conducted some long exposure photographic experiments with the contraption. The statement for the project outlines some of the wonderful idiosyncrasies of the content output on this machine:

Most interesting and inspiring are all the little mistakes this machine produces, because of too much data, too much water, color, pressure etc. There are always gradients because the color gets less and less as the machine draws on. This expansion space describes the machine's actual identity. No Image looks like the other.

Take a look at the gorgeous output that this machine has generated - I'm particularly taken by the watercolor grid drawings.

Secondly, Rob Meek recently produced the above demo video for his Meek FM "typographic synthesizer" [see previous post]. While this device isn't a drawing machine in the conventional sense, the demo clearly illustrates the manner in which this system reads individual letterforms as reconfigurable vectors. The character of these "lines" can be modified and that shapes and modulates the sound travelling along these paths. This project is quite noteworthy in that it creates an interface through the intersection of two distinct disciplines.