Archinect - News

Christopher Hawthorne on when architecture and performance intersect

2017-06-30T12:06:00-04:00

This interest in performance among architects is less a style or a fledgling movement than a register, a way of working. It’s a means of sketching out a new set of priorities — and giving up older ones that are tarnished or compromised. It’s also open-ended, challenging the idea that a building can ever really qualify as finished. It makes room for perspectives that come from other fields.

According to Hawthorne, this new trend—seen in the work of architects from Andrés Jaque to Bryony Roberts—evidences the appeal of "impermanence and often...informality," putting the work in contrast to the ritzy architecture that seems to dominant these days.

Next Up Mini-Session #13: Bryony Roberts

2015-12-02T17:06:00-05:00

Architect and experimental preservationist Bryony Roberts joins us for our next Mini-Session, a continuation of our Next Up event staged at the Chicago Architecture Biennial. While Roberts' interview at the Chicago Cultural Center unfortunately didn't make it to tape, I called her up for a do-over interview in Rome, where she is currently residing as a winner of 2015-2016's Rome Prize.

Roberts' contribution to the Biennial – a drill team performance entitled "We Know How to Order," staged in downtown Chicago's Mies van der Rohe-designed federal center plaza – was performed for a limited run during the Biennial's opening weekend. Check out a video of the performance below.

Listen to Mini-Session #13 with Bryony Roberts:

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Cutting across the Chicago Architecture Biennial: Re-ordering Mies in "We Know How to Order"

2015-10-15T19:23:00-04:00

For a highly-limited run during the Chicago Architecture Biennial's opening weekend, Mies van der Rohe's federal plaza became the stage for a performance foreign to most central business districts: a drill team exercise. Conceived by Bryony Roberts (of the Oslo and Los Angeles-based Bryony Roberts Studio) and choreographed by Asher Waldron (of the South Shore Drill Team in Chicago), the drill team's performance is an extension of Roberts' practice in the emerging architecture discipline of experimental preservation.

Titled "We Know How to Order," the performance elaborates and re-contextualizes the idea of "ordered" space within the public realm, showing how the concept of rigid structures – including both the imposing facades of Mies' plaza buildings and the tight coordination of the drill team's movements – may become elastic within a given space. Scored by a mixture of Philip Glass and House music, and followed by the undeniable intoxication of watching impressive displays of pre...