“Future Conversations of Architecture”

2010
wood, PA speakers, misc audio playback equipment, audio CDs
8.5′ x 26″ x 24″

Included in the group exhibition “4.01162010″ at MVSEVM in Chicago, IL. Curated by Bret Schneider.

This project is based on an LP from the 1950’s titled “Conversations on the Future of Modern Architecture”. The record features the following architects in conversation: Gordon Bunshaft, Walter Gropius, Ernest Kump, Eero Saarinen, Richard Neutra, Philip Johnson, and Mies van der Rohe. Each of the 7 architects’ voices were isolated and cut up into short phrases and words, then each put onto an audio CD. For the playback, each CD is randomly shuffled and looped and is emitted through a small dedicated PA horn. The 7 speakers are mounted on a wood structure resembling a column and is installed between the floor and ceiling of MVSEVM. The form of the wood structure with it’s diagonal cross braces refers to an image still from a Three Stooges episode titled “How High is Up?” from 1940. In the episode they were hired as iron workers and when left unattended, they built a diagonal structure on the top of a gridded skyscraper which functioned as the punch line of the episode.

I am interested in the promise and the ultimate failure of the Modernist project as well as the failure of language to represent. This ‘tower of babel’ performs as an endless and random poetry machine that is collapsing the significance of each architects’ intentions into an unintelligible cacophony of male hysteria. The poster includes the names of each architect as well as an image that is the result of superimposing 7 iconic buildings, one from each of the architects on the record. The exterior form of each building is rendered in 3D as a line drawing. The individual buildings were scaled and superimposed in order to generate a hybrid geometry of modernist space.