Concept: The Museum is by nature a cataloging, Enlightenment institution. Art museums do more than just collect and exhibit artwork - they proclaim objects as "art" through the very acts that make them a functioning museum. They are machines of exhibition and acquisition, processes that transform the objects they touch into art while often divorcing these same objects from their inceptive purposes and/or meanings.
The studio began this brief by looking at MoMA and analyzing one particular exhibit in depth. My examination - a cataloging of the metadata of the exhibition, a cataloging of the cataloging apparatus itself - led to the discovery of narratives hidden within the metadata. These narratives give me a reading of the metadata of collection & exhibition as a sort of database of the institution's own art history; as a snapshot of the institution's authority over time. This diagrammatic, data-driven reading of the museum's exhibitions and the subsequent re-organization of the exhibit based on its own metadtata is what I term "Metacuration".
What is the nature of a collection, and what historical curatorial proclivities make up its aggregation? How can one create a series of spaces that delineate the same kind of stories as an infographic of the exhibit can delineate? In the approaching era of near infinite access to cultural information, how does architecture compete with the database?
To achieve Metacuration in three-dimensional space, one needs:
Architectural Manifestation: My goal was to design an architctural system that anticipates all possible metadata reconfigurations of its collection.
In order to achieve such a system, my musuem combines the storage of its permanent collection with the display of the same collection. These two functions - storage (preservation) and display (communication) take place within the entire space of the building, and are organized around axes of metadata that change every month. Indeed, it is these reorganizations that are the engines of Metacuration: each new reorganization brings with it a new set of spatial relationships between each piece; a new set of neighbors that changes how each piece is viewed. The flexibility of the storage & display apparatus within the museum allow for custom denisities; for closed storage; and for the architctural benefits of the grid: pieces can be displayed at a consistent desntiy across the axis, or may be grouped according to a regular access.
Finally, the only spaces not used for storage and display - the only programs not able to be sacrifices to the machine of Metacuration - are the lavatories, which are placed in the center of this machine and become the only human presence in the building. Indeed, as the machine is organized around display on the scale of the human body, the lavatory intrusions are inevitably the most conspicuous foil for this machine, their banality serving as the only refuge from the omnipresent and overpowering regualrity of the organization of the collection.
During the Summer of 2009, Evan Sharp, founder of HeaderFooter, spent some time interning with Timo Lindman Architect, PLLC in New York.
One of the projects he was involved with was the renovation of an existing Brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Evan was lucky enough to follow this project through several stages, from the initial client consultations, through the measurement of the existing premises, through schematic design and then into the drafting of the construction documents, some of which are pictured here in low quality, out of respect for the Timo and the client.
The description of this project forthcoming.
This design for a Climatology Labratory Headquarters in New York City is grounded in a fascination with the Dome; with experiments in environmental isolation epitomized by the Biosphere II experiment and NASA's experiments in closed-environment living.
Concept: The Dome is a scientific and ecological ideal that no longer represents environmental realities understood to be true by science, but that continues to embody the dominant perspective of desirable environmental conditions as understood by media, educational, and legislative dialogues.
With contemporary threats of global warming, unprecedented environmental devastation, loss of species diversity, overfishing, and other ecological crises, the Utopian isolation of the Dome has become more than inaccurate, it has become harmful: it must be officially "unsealed". In place of isolation, this laboratory will study & communicate to the public why the idea that nature must exist in an idealized, inceptive, pre-human state is threatening to the long-term health of Biosphere I.
Architectural Manifestation: The climatology laboratory brief is altered to the design of a labratory of urban ecology, interested in the interaction between the "natural environment" and the "urban environment".
Whereas the dome is an isolated, closed-environment, the urban ecology laboratory contains three distinct areas of climatological and vegatative study: the Terrarium, a standard enclosed space for the study of strictly controlled environmental conditions; the Solarium, a space outside of the building that is entirely open to the city, for the study of urban conditions; and the Vivarium, a space sheltered within the mass of the laboratory yet open to the city's climate and its public pedestrians, for the study of the interaction of these two conditions.
Formally, the box carries the banal, monolithic state of the surrounding buildings (the adjacent Holland Tunnel Ventilation Tower and City Sanitation Garage) into the site, which the terrarium and vivarium then punctures and interrupts through a formal lanuage of curvilnear strips - a technique used to achieve partial control, partial openness, and partial enclosure simultaneously.
The intersections and openings of the box and the strips are placed at the intersection of these two system, and where the terrarium / vivarium and the box interact becomes the point where the Dome unseals, where the Utopia of the dome is unraveled by the language of the strips.
This is the crucial moment of urban ecology, where uncertainty (the raw material of science) is generated so that science may perform its certainty-producing function.
The description of this laboratory is forthcoming.
