UNBOXED
| Vertical Design Studio | Spring 2010 & 2011 |
| Cornell University | Instructor: Dana Cupkova with Lise Anne Couture |
The UNBOXED studio attempts to reconsider the architecture of the Big Box art museum. The focus is to examine a tension between architectural spatial experience and architecture as generalized container for art. Despite the recent explosion of extravagant formal expressiveness in contemporary museum building design in the last decade, the myth of the white-box ideal remains. The notion that art needs complete contextual neutrality is still coded within the formal and organizational rules of institutional "modernity". Our focus is on re-negotiating a set of presumed binary conditions: the art container vs. its urban context; and the container vs. the contained objects. Through understanding of subtle formal variations built into architectural systems, we investigate more complex organizational strategies that would offer alternative networks of connectivity binding the light and circulation within the choreography of viewing art; that is also informed by the effects and organization of the proposed enclosure. The goal is a creation of a new charter for transitional public spaces fused with the site, while addressing specific curatorial philosophies and artistic practices that are current today, or have yet to be discovered. This studio was taught collaboratively as a two part series in the spring semesters of 2010 and 2011.
| STUDENTS: Carla Martinez, Johann Schweig, Chiayu Peng, Xiang Zhang, Pak Kiu Wong, Zheng Huang, Qiaolun Huang, Aurgho Jyoti |