Field Note #14

Ambrosius Holbein's woodcut plan of the island of Utopia illustrates a 1518 edition of Utopia, a book by Thomas More.

Utopia from Greek ou “not” + topos “place”

“You shall not touch; the more you see the less you hold – a dispossession of the hand in favor of a greater trajectory of the eye.”
-Michel de Certeau The Art of Everyday Living

Negative space
What can occur in the spaces between objects, between surface, between directives? Windows, despite their structural role in architectural context, function ostensibly as negative space. We look through them out into the city or into the street. They forfeit their contents for our sake of a view. Yet at times, we use materials to obscure their transparency for privacy or decoration. A number of the Outside Design exhibitors use windows as the platform for their practice and projects.

Joyce Hwang founder of Ants of the Prairie, designed and installed a pavilion made of reclaimed window shutters and wood, that serves as a habitat for bats and birds. No Crash zone is dynamic vinyl pattern applied to a north facing window of the gallery.  The project is designed to make otherwise invisible window visible to birds, helping prevent the injury or death of hundreds of birds a year.

David Hayes’ Honey Window is an interactive and experimental gesture illustrating windows as a vessel as well as the luminescent qualities and viscosity of honey.

The Living’s Amphibious Envelope is an engineered ecology installing frogs between panes of plexi-glas that act as biosensors revealing oxygen levels within a building.

 

Eric Ellingsen has installed large panels covering the north facing bullnose windows of the gallery.  The one circular cut-out functions as a solar clock, and draws out attention to the absence of a significant architectural detail in the gallery.