The Charlottesville Community Design Center is hosting architects Robert Mantho and Michael Wenrich Friday for an art installation/architectural collaboration they call “Taking Place“. Michael Wenrich is a UVa grad who works with Formwork Design LLC, a firm that has given us the innovative layouts of Blue Light Grill, enoteca, and Ten.  The two architects have a side project they call LOCUS and they go around creating these architectural installations that they use to, “ pursue the making of architecture as an act of art in a specific place”.

They’ve already done two of these in Vermont called “Hurricane Ridge” and “Making Space” ( picture above) and one in Scotland: “Making Complex Space“. The architects say they “ want to encourage people to question and possibly reinvent their understanding of space, form, and basic relationship to earth and sky.”

In the picture at the top, they took a 26 square foot room and painted it bright colors and divided the space with “walls” of string weighted with translucent spheres.  They describe the object of this installation on their website:

“Through the use of color and minimal material edges the user was engaged in a spatial experience that was physical, visual and intellectual. The open volume of the gallery was simultaneously divided and unified by ten distinct but interconnect spaces of color with edges defined by the planes of various lengths and densities of suspended string. These planes of string alternately compressed space, while at other times expanded out to the exterior or slipped into an adjacent volume.”

Ok, yeah. I didn’t get half of that. But they did transform an ordinary white room into something really cool that invited human interaction and challenged ideas of perception of space. The hanging strings divide the room into smaller areas but if you squint they disappear and the room is undivided. The colors change your perception of the shape of the walls and make a normally rectangular room seem much more dimensional. Is this art? They transform a space and make you view/experience it differently. It’s not unlike the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artists who wrapped NYC’s Central Park in orange fabric, letting New Yorkers see it in a new way. Be sure to check it out this Friday at 6pm at 100 Fifth St. NE (second story of the Post Office building) on the Downtown Mall. 

[pic]

Popularity: 41% [?]