Aerial.

Pie-shaped tent section wedges are inserted between six tent sections to relax and open up the standardized system, and offer amenities at each section as a moment of recess. The wedges bend the otherwise straight tent into a meandering, supple, shape. The winding form animates it on the unusual waterfront site, as well as establishing the temporary structure as an icon along the water.

The wedges divide the relentless length of the fair into manageable sections. Rather than exposing the end gable section at each end of the tent, we extended the tent roof fabric in stripes, dissolving the tent into the ground. The playful entrances introduce visitors to the experience within.

Photos: Iwan Baan

Selected Press

May 3, 2012
Scoping Art at a Four-day Island Getaway
Wall Street Journal PDF

May 3, 2012
Where “Just Looking” Is Just Fine
The New York Times PDF

April 28, 2012
Ahead of the curve
The Financial Time Link

east entrance.

site plan.

Considering the clear diagrammatic geometry of the white cube too rigid within the historic fabric the building is enveloped in a permanent “nebula”—a pliable chainmail veil. The stainless steel mesh produces a layer of diffusion in front of the actual building mass, through a combination of multidirectional reflection, openness, and the moiré pattern generated through interplay of its shadows. An additional quality of the material is that it can stretch, thus avoiding creasing. It is strong yet pliable, and can easily wrap around crude geometries. Together with Front Inc., SO — IL has developed, engineered and fabricated this one-off
façade.

ground floor plan.

 Photos: Iwan Baan

Our office, SO – IL, is across the ocean in what once was the New World. Founded in New York at the beginning of the decay, it has provided shelter for natives of countries in various states of anguish, be it looming bankruptcy, ideological hollowness, or rising extremism. Voluntarily exiled from our frustrated utopias or unattained Shangri-Las, designing today for us is a quest for new common meaning in an evolving socio-political and cultural environment. We search for ‘growth-within’ at a time when the notion of progress has become suspicious.

‘To be determined’ has been our impulsive battle cry and modus operandi. While modern states go awry in their inability to reconcile inconsistencies inherent in reality, we question whether architecture has to be deductive and exact, and to what extent it can be shaped by fleeting uncertainties — whether those be programmatic, social, meteorological, or cultural. We are determined to work on projects that frame types and degrees of indeterminacy, projects that invite external activation or subjective reading. We relinquish control to introduce deliberate ambiguity. We believe that through leaving things open and unfulfilled we can introduce an appropriable space for common exchange. Varying widely in scale and life expectancy, we create projects that through mediating layers define a multitude of charged voids. This issue introduces two projects in which this space-in-between materializes.

For Kukje Gallery in Seoul, Korea, we have ‘shrink-wrapped’ an explicit organizational diagram into an indefinable form. A carefully crafted veil of 500.000 hand-welded rings creates a permeable poché, a soft blur around the hard edges of the white gallery space. Producing this one-off stainless steel mesh involved a process of extensive computational and physical testing, and the development of a custom production infrastructure at a fabricator in Anping, a region of China specializing in the manufacture of wire mesh goods. Through stretching, coiling, scoring, patterned weaving, welding, bead blasting, electro polishing and cleaning, fourteen unique swaths of mesh were created. On-the-fly troubleshooting of problems and a rigorous quality control process in the form of sample reviews, factory visits, and custom specifications (with language on such issues as the use of the local car wash for mesh cleaning) controlled the production. Once on site, swaths were hung on the building separately and spliced together with loose rings to form a single sheet of seamless mesh. The space-in-between the mesh creates negotiates its insertion into a historic context and liberates the form of the building from any one encoded interpretation.

At Logan in New York, stretched fabric walls create diffuse borders between different workspaces and mediate between the virtual realm of Logan’s production and the SoHo loft building they inhabit. Extensive material research led us to a few possible fabricators who could supply the seamless stretches of nylon fabric that form the walls. A similar, yet more modest process of 1:1 mock-ups and an innovative installation procedures, overcame initial concerns about feasibility.

In both commissions, a group that includes the clients, architects, engineers, and fabricators, embrace the risks and uncertain outcome (in form and effect) of novel material and organizational explorations. We strongly believe that designing today is catalyzing such processes of invention. Progress and its uncertainties are immanent in design, not for capital gain, but for the advance into a new territory of growth. Rather than modernist top-down utopianism, we strive to achieve a series of local heroisms subtle interventions positioned in the murky space between modernism and the fear of its impotence. The uncharted grounds are fuzzy. Layer over layer we work towards a new kind of focus.

Editorial in Domus #958 May 2012

fabric wall.

The space is divided into two identical, symmetrical rectilinear spaces. Each long room has a 65 foot continuous custom work table. Accommodating working groups of any size, the shared desks consolidate almost every operation of the company in one place: design, production, and meetings. The end section of each continuous table is divided by glass walls, allowing for acoustically private offices and meeting rooms to share the same work surface. Seamless, floor-to-ceiling translucent fabric walls separate the central work areas, visually breaking down the scale of the space, while maintaining a shared environment, and allowing natural light to penetrate. A stretched PVC luminous ceiling provides totally even, shadowless lighting.

Looking through layers of fabric, people and objects perpetually appear as if out of focus. Fabric walls catch natural light and change colors as light changes throughout the day. Together, the seamless fabric, luminous ceiling, and continuous desks create an environment of abstraction and scalelessness, freeing those working in the space from typical expectations of use. This abstraction, combined with the symmetry of spaces, the spatial ambiguity of the fabric, creates the illusion of reflections when looking into adjacent spaces, creating a dream-like, surreal experience.

Photos:
1, 3, 4, 10, 11 Naho Kubota
5-9, Iwan Baan

Rather than reiterate well-documented reports on migration that stress economic or political motives for relocation, Transhistoria explores individual and cultural narratives, such as the flight from problematic family situations or escape from suffocating social structures. These types of everyday stories open up a different enquiry in the search for identity and home away from home. SO – IL offers visitors an opportunity to hear transformative personal histories through a series of accounts commissioned from many renowned Queens-affiliated narrators, including writer René Georg Vasicek, and rappers Himanshu Suri and Ashok Kondabolu of Das Racist.

Each will create a story about personal transition and finding familiarity and tranquility in Jackson Heights. During these four weekends in April and May, neighborhood residents will recount their stories around several local stillspots as varied as residential living rooms, performance venues, and private courtyards.