The Museum of Vanishing Commodities (MOVC) is a critique on the museum; one that proposes a response against an architectural space that houses dead objects. The museum develops programmatic opportunities generated by worldwide events. This exposure inquires local ecologies framed through the interventions of complex political and social arrangements, organic systems, and emergent network structures.
Located on Wilshire Boulevard at South Fairfax Avenue, the MOVC will embrace and exploit biological processes of petroleum as a formal and tectonic system. Using the projective sociological, metamorphic, and metaphysical properties of oil on a micro and macro scale, this project results in a collection of local conditions that expose the vanishing commodities and enables a social interaction with the museum. Exposing the underlying political injustices of past, present, and future commodity trade and interaction, the new program exists as a platform to broadcast these events in real time.
By recognizing the geologically significant site and urban conditions that are created by the Miracle Mile, the MOVC generates a single educational organism within the park; which is stitched together by the interaction of people to the museum. The MOVC catalogs and displays the biological spectrum of planet earth, and combines it with the market forces that covet and exploit the world’s natural resources. Developing a stance on the co-existence of art as cultural significance, and commodity as a physical representation of a large social, political, and organic system has now generated a necessity for architecture.