Project Information
Name of the project: Being
Architects: The Bittertang Farm
Location: Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York New York
Year (project/construction): 2013
Client: Storefront for Art and Architecture
Photography: Anna Ritsch
‘Being’ was an installation for the 30th anniversary of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s existence. Storefront for Art and Architecture has been a forum for the discussion, display and creation of architecture for the past 30 years in New York. It occupies a narrow triangular building in Lower Manhattan.
The curator’s labeled the exhibition ‘Being’ because they wanted the project to represent the organization’s constant action, recreation and enabling of architectural thought and production. They felt the organization had taken on its own sort of ‘life’ and wanted the 30th Anniversary Exhibition to exemplify this by creating a new architectural being. Initially conceived of as 9 rooms to represent 9 different actions all housed within a super tight floor plan, we began to challenge what it means to be a room especially in relationship to the ways in which organs construct a ‘Being’. We therefore rethought architectural space as a series of organs defined by skins, wall protrusions, water sacs and other bodily like elements. The compaction of the space and its saturation with color, textures and layers made visitor’s feel as though they were squeezing through the innards of some large architectural organism.
Continuing this theme we explored materials that were tactile and dissolvable. An entire wall is coated in Vietnamese spring roll paper (yes it was edible) that gave the interior the appearance of tissue and when backlight, glowed eerily. A large circular and transparent waterbed, illuminated from below (and built for us, as have been all our inflatable work thus far; Blo-Puff and Burble Bup, by Bainbridge local Deano Perlatti) sits like a giant undulating cell in the corner of one room. Custom designed fortune cookie holders dangle from the ceiling awaiting people to pluck their fortunes. A mirrored infinity room occupies the tightest space in the gallery but expands infinitely visually.
The gallery was designed by Steven Holl with numerous pivoting doors that rotate both horizontally and vertically to open the gallery to the street. We took advantage of some of these openings to encrust furniture into the doors to toy with the tautness that we usually associate with walls, to turn what is normally a plane into a figure and to explore references to sub-tissue growths.
From the street when the doors are opened, peekaboo views of glowing saturated colors, strange forms, sounds and smells, entice passerby’s into the space and exposing them to the history of Storefront for Art and Architecture’s 30 years.
