Leftover Landscapes

I realize now that my project made a paradigm shift from being about the highway to leftover landscapes when I first began cutting the voided landscapes out of highway interchange plans, and used them as a scrim for the projection of light. Similarly to these leftover highway landscapes, the site is a leftover landscape; a residual slice from the surrounding corporate development.

The Return to Irwin...

“My art has never been about ideas… my interest in art has never been about abstraction; it has always been about EXPERIENCE… my pieces were never meant to be dealt with intellectually as ideas but to be considered EXPERIENCIALLY.”
-Robert Irwin, Reshaping the Shape of Things


phenomenological EXPERIENCES of an art museum:

interplay of light and shadow
path and movement throughout becomes spectacle, melodic
interaction/reaction of people, place, and artifact
temporality


Irwin on Site

Conditioned/Determined

“Here the sculptural response draws ALL of its cues (reasons for being) from its surroundings. This requires the process to begin with an intimate, hands-on reading of the site. This means sitting, watching, walking through the site, the surrounding areas (where you will enter from and exit to), the city at large, or the larger country side. Here are the numerous things to consider; what is the site’s relation to applied and implied schemes of organization and systems of order, relation, architecture, uses, sense of scale? … What kinds of natural events affect the site — snow, wind, sun angles, sunrise, water, etc.? What is the physical and people density? The sound and visual density (quiet, next to quiet, busy)? What are the qualities of surface, sound, movement, light etc.? What are the qualities of detail, levels of finish, craft? What are the histories of prior and current uses, present desires etc. A quiet distillation of all of this determines all the facets of the “sculptural response”… whether the response should be monumental or ephemeral, aggressive or gentle, useful or useless, sculptural, architectural, or simply the planting of a tree, or maybe even doing nothing at all.”
- Robert Irwin, Being in Circumstance


What does it all mean?

The gallery as a landscape, experimentation of viewer/artifact relationship
Exploration of the artifact as an object in space

The highway [primary circulation] as a surreal interaction with the city, impersonal, fluid, suspenseful Disconnected oblique views into the city

The urban street [secondary circulation] as a personal relationship with the city, submerged, vis-à-vis
Movement sporadic yet rhythmic

Unsuccessful Models - Can anything be learned?

Weaving evokes motion and fluidity of freeway movement
















Could the space of the weaving be inhabited?






The weave needs a loom.

Space truss introduced

Expressway ramps provide arterial circulation to the gallery spaces




Courtyard fenestration as a snapshot of expressway movement.

Suspended volumes in the wall animated both the courtyard and interior street




Double weave. Could this be structural on its own and also function as circulation?






Circulation weave.

Based upon movement of traffic on the expressway it is both experiential and arterial. provides longitudinal and vertical circulation to the gallery [landscapes]