Artist Taryn Simon in collaboration with OMA/Shohei Shigematsu has designed An Occupation of Loss, a major new performance work choreographed around an OMA-designed monumental sculptural setting consisting of 11 concrete wells. Located at Park Avenue Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall, and co-commissioned by the Armory and Artangel, London, the performance piece focuses on “the anatomy of grief and the intricate systems that we devise to contend with the irrationality of the universe.”
Designed by OMA’s New York office, the 11 concrete wells, each measuring 45 feet in height, will be activated by the presence of 30 professional mourners from around the world each evening. The wells are constructed of eight stacked, industrial concrete rings, which distribute their structural load onto a continuous platform. Integrated lift holds allow for easy disassembly to facilitate their transportation to new venues.
“Like Zoroastrian “towers of silence,” the installation makes explicit the never-ending human need to give structure to death in order to understand it,” explain the architects in a press release.
“The design was sonically-motivated, focusing on the performative act of loss rather than its physical manifestation, which has been historically marked by multiple scales – from tombstones to the World Trade Center Memorial,” says Shohei Shigematsu. “The industrial wells were configured into a readymade ruin that responds to both personal and monumental dimensions.”
Each towering structure provides the setting for the orchestrated ritual of mourning, emphasized by the “collective presence, absence, and movement of the audience within the installation.” The wells have been designed to amplify and reverberate sound waves, functioning as a discordant instrument.
The performances will be inevitably unrepeatable, as the interaction between the mourners and the audience and set will create unique reactions and movements. The mourners’ recital will feature texts from a variety of sources, including: Albanian laments, excavating “uncried words”; Venezuelan laments, safeguarding the soul’s passage to the Milky Way; Greek laments, binding the story of life with afterlife in polyphonic poetics; and Yezidi laments, mapping a topography of exile.
“The professional status of these mourners—performing away and apart from their usual contexts—underscores the tension between authentic and staged emotion, spontaneity and script,” the architects add. “During the daytime, visitors are invited to activate the sculpture with their own sounds, as a subtle drone created from recordings of the mourners’ rituals provides echoes of the evening performances.”
An Occupation of Loss will be on view at the Armory from September 13 – 25, 2016, after which it will be packed up and transported to be presented by Artangel in London next year.
A review of the work can be found at the New York Times, here.
News via OMA.
The jury may be out on the usefulness and ease-of-use of BIG’s website, but you could never accuse the Danish firm of not having fun.
In line with their playful spirit, BIG has teamed up with programmers Ruby Studio to release an alternate version of their icon-filled homepage that allows visitors to play a version of the classic arcade game Arkanoid.
Just like the original game, BIG’s site challenges players to destroy bricks using a ball and a sliding platform – but in the place of standard colored bricks, the objective is to eliminate the square icons representing different BIG projects.
As you progress through the game, the tiles will rearrange to create different patterns, and the ball will speed up to increase the difficulty.
Check the game out for yourself, here.
From the architect. The challenge was to convert a typical multi-tenant office space into a space capable of creating awe. To do this, the architects had to bring life to the existing beige box by breaking it open and allowing the diffuse Northwest light filter in. Historically, light has played a significant role in marking a transcendent space, and this design captures the richness of indirect, cast light reflected off natural surfaces. For the new Bellevue First Congregational Church, the new soaring sanctuary is filled with this indirect light, which subtly changes throughout the day and seasons.
Within the strict grid of the two-story building, the new form of the sanctuary is inserted, pushing out existing walls and roof, creating a new definitive form within the existing matrix. Delineation between the northern interior wall and ceiling is collapsed by using CLT, or cross-laminated-timber panels, as structure and finish material. The 17 CLT panels, each averaging 40’ x 8’, are inserted as an irregular, folded plate structure insuring both greater structural stability as well as a rich interplay of light, shadow and the warm texture of the Canadian White Pine of the white-washed CLT panels. Shafts of skylights are inserted into this composite skin dissolving the edges of the 40’ high space through high northern light. The use of cross-laminated timber highlights the Pacific Northwest’s regional relationship to timber, reduces the project’s overall carbon footprint, and humanizes the cold sterility of the existing two-story ribbon-window stucco building.
When renovating this tiny apartment in Sydney, Australian interior designer Dominic Kuneman adopted a minimal style to make the most of the small space (+ slideshow). (more…)
Hunkubakkar Gorge, near Kirkjubæjarklaustur by RoystonVasey http://flic.kr/p/oJHfji
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