January 28 – March 3, 2012
Unplanned Architectures
Opening Reception: Saturday, January 28th 8:00pm
Artists:
Andreas Buchwaldt
T + T (Tyler Brett and Tony Romano)
Within artistic production, architecture is a discussion about society and interactions, while within the discourses of capitalism, architecture is a commodity, whose production rises and falls according to periods of growth or recession. “Unplanned Architectures” looks at artists’ representation of the architectural plan in our current state of global instability and uncertainty. During the great depression, there was a dramatic rise in “paper architects” (architects who focused on plans for buildings and cities that were never meant to actually be built). Similarly the great recession offers us the unique opportunity to rethink our place in this world; it is a time for architectural experimentation, to examine the philosophical implications of our constructed environments and our relationships with them.
The “unplanned” here is multiple: it is the architectural cousin to capitalism or other unplanned economies (market architecture), it is the architecture of necessity that is borne from crises, it is the unforeseen forms that emerge from buildings as living systems (living architecture), it is the intuitive patching together of previous forms like the Frankensteinian advancement of Western civilization (automatic architecture). As the consequences of sprawl and deregulation become widely apparent, the architecture of our current system is readying to be uprooted, to be rebuilt—yet while this market architecture is being dismantled, what will replace it is unknown. The artists in this exhibit use new media, sculpture and installation to provide insight into our current state of limbo. While we demolish the foundation on which we stand, they illustrate our fascination with the collapse, they illuminate our feelings of dread and excitement, they examine failings in analogous architectural shifts, while all along appreciating the beauty of the uncertain and emergent structures that rise from the natural movement of cities, buildings and culture.
Curated by John G. Hampton
