SCI-Arc is pleased to present Aqueotrope, a site specific installation designed by Marcelyn Gow and Ulrika Karlsson of servo Los Angeles/Stockholm. Aqueotrope opens Friday, January 18, followed by a discussion with Marcelyn Gow and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss on Friday, February 1, 7pm.

Using conventional ceramic roof tiles in an unconventional way, Aqueotrope explores the roofscape as a site for the development of synthetic architectural systems that are informed by and integrate systems of organic matter. The installation features an archipelago of gray ceramic tiles situated on the gallery floor, illuminated by a series of orbicular glass light fixtures. A cable sargassum confounds the simple diagram of a closed electrical circuit with the entropic tendencies of accumulation, excess and disorder, and in doing so, creates a third spatial layer—a drawing manifested in space, a canopy which is suspended above an unnatural gray ceramic landscape.

servo’s project proposes an architecture that has the capacity to embrace entropic tendencies and exploit the latent potential of energetic exchanges—in this case the transfer of moisture through an architectural medium and its effects on more extensive ecologies. Aqueotrope reconsiders the extensive green-roof typology as an immersive roofscape and focuses on amplifying its hydrodynamic potential. The emergence of cusp and contour in the roof tile is activated for its role as a water shedding or channeling device. The material properties of ceramics with varying degrees of porosity and surface articulation are coupled with a morphology of protuberant forms in order to perform as hydrophilic and hydrophobic constituents of a roofscape designed to subtly tamper with atmospheric effects in its specific environment and conjure the potentials of an architecture that embraces the fluxion of matter.

Visit the Aqueotrope exhibition page >>

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