As part of the MBIArch Master in Architecture program’s offerings from the History, Theory, and Criticism Department; art curator, critic, and member of the BIArch Board of Directors Gloria Moure is directing a seminar around the work of three crucial figures within contemporary art, design, and culture: Vito Acconci, John Knight and Rikrit Tiravanija. All three of these designer/artists deal with the production of space understood as a vital generator instead of a mere container, exploring the intimate connections between architecture and politics, criticism, and aesthetics.
Vito Acconci delivering the first BIArch Open Seminar of the Fall 2010 cycle. Photo by David Farrán
The first of these two-day seminars was delivered by renowned designer, landscape architect, performance and installation artist, Vito Acconci (The Bronx, New York, 1940). Acconci also inaugurated the Institute’s Fall 2010 BIArch Open Seminar series, Work in Progress: Contemporary Approaches to Architecture History, Theory, and Criticism, which provides a space for lecturers to share, test, and discuss their ideas, topics, or methodologies with an engaged audience.
Vito Acconci teaching a class at BIArch. Photo by Carlos Cabrera
In class, Acconci focused mainly on his early work, including his experiments with forms of writing and poetry, film, installation and performance art, as well as his first spatial concerns that grew from explorations of the relationship between public space and the body. The work of Vito Acconci is usually developed at the intersection of art and architecture: he seems most comfortable on the margins of both disciplines. Even though his work seems to constantly push and blur boundaries, Acconci insists on recognizing the distance between art and architecture:
There is a big difference between art and architecture: the scales of involvement of the user. Seeing is not enough. Seeing is mostly an active distance. Looking at art is different from being in architecture.
In his Open Seminar, titled “No Idea Without Things. No Space Without Time”, he presented an ample selection of projects that he has worked on since 1988, when founded Acconci Studio, an experimental architectural practice based in Brooklyn. Ranging from prêt-à-porter umbrellas and möbius-shaped benches to large-scale “parasitic” interventions for stadiums and a 24-hr underground skate park, Acconci presented recent projects such as the United Bamboo Store in Tokyo (2003), the artificial Mur Island (Graz, 2003), and a “mobile art laboratory” vehicle, Mr. Artsee (2006).
Vito Acconci BIArch Open Seminar. Photo by David Farran
The possibility of interaction, understood as the capacity for connecting people through public space, is one of the salient features of Acconci’s work. “The interesting thing about architecture,” he mentioned, “is not only that people can go through it, but that they can also change it”.
Acconci Studio, "Möbius Bench"
Acconci traced his personal shift from art to architecture to a 1976 installation: “Where we are now? (Who are we anyway?)”. In this work he intended to treat the museum as a communal meeting space, but the experience fell short of his expectations:
A gallery or museum will probably never be a public space. As long as there are ‘do not touch’ signs, there is an affirmation that the art is considered more valuable than people.
It was around this time that Acconci started to explore the idea of intervening in public space and approaching established disciplines such as architecture, landscape architecture, and industrial design. Acconci considered his more recent projects “operations”, not only in the sense of their smaller-scale, cluster-type approach or their focus on interaction, but also because they depart from and intervene on what is rather than start from scratch.
Acconci Studio, "A Skate Park that Glides over the Land & Drops into the Sea"
Acconci Studio, "Beaumont Village"
This mode of practicing architecture is a better fit for the collaborative nature of Acconci Studio. Acconci Studio’s operations also question the assumptions of what architecture does, should do, and can do. They challenge behaviors and break the rules by proposing new ways of using an relating to space. “The biggest responsibility of an artist or architect,” says Acconci, “is to try to make a kind of architecture that people can really control themselves. I don’t want people to be subordinate to architecture.”
Vito Acconci and Jorge García de la Cámara, director of the BIArch. Photo by David Farrán
The “fluid” character of the Studio’s work goes beyond formal concerns and metaphors: it is an architecture of “loose ends”. It resists the urge to control and define uses, programs, and behaviours, under the assumption that architecture should constantly challenge itself, or to put it in Acconci’s own words, that “architecture is worth it when it thickens the plot.”
