HTC Experiments

Our project, The Mound of Vendôme was just featured as part of Abitare’s issue on re-enactment in architecture – shown above.*  I make visual projects so rarely (about one per year), and therefore – as you can imagine – such things rarely get published in the “official” architectural press, so this is an exciting moment. The Abitare section on re-enactment also contains brief but interesting writings by Jorge Otero Pailos and Giovanna Borasi, who is the chief editor of the magazine, as well as a provocative  project by Diener and Diener.

The installation version of the Mound (discussed in another post), which is part of the Temporary Structures exhibition at the San Francisco Art Institute (“SFAI”), was recently reviewed here, here and here. It is a very difficult project to photograph (something we are working on). So, if you’re in San Francisco, I hope you have a chance to see it at SFAI’s Walter and McBean Galleries.

Finally, I’m currently in the process of turning the project on the Mound into an hour-long lecture for several upcoming talks. This lecture will be part-history lecture (as if you’re in a survey course), part experimental history lecture, and part I-don’t-know-what. But I’m completely fascinated by the once-popular technique of presenting one, and only one, project as part of a formal lecture (Eisenman’s 1976 House X lectures were one of the more well-known of these single-project lectures, and the inspiration). I have no idea how to keep an audience’s attention for so long on one project; especially as this is so different from many of today’s lecture-series lectures:  painfully monographic, idea-free hurricanes of images of twenty or more projects. We will see how this more alternative format goes.

*incidentally, re-enactment in architecture also happens to be the subject of an upcoming exhibition on the history of New York which completely passed me by.