By now, it’s a relatively familiar narrative: over the course of the last few decades, there's been a mass return to urban centers from their outskirts, resulting in a field of abandoned strip malls and big box stores. What to do with these contemporary “ruins,” however, remains an open question.
In their installation for this year’s Chicago Architecture Biennial, the Ann Arbor-based studio T+E+A+M has imagined a strategy of “redistribution,” in which the physical elements of one such big box store are “taken apart, moved around, piled up, and mixed with new construction to create alternative uses.” It’s the type of bricolage, informal building logic one often finds internationally but rarely within the United States. Brought here, it’s a refreshing change from the type of totalizing, imposed visions often associated with architectural proposals for abandoned suburban sites.
A mise en scène model, replete with faux vegetation and miniature benches, Ghostbox plays off the legacy of 19th century picturesque ruin imagery, deftly retooled for the contemporary moment. Printed textures cover the surfaces of walls that divide the expansive space, serving also as structures for cubicle-like spaces—tiny dwellings interspersed throughout the space. On one edge of the building model, which features “T+E+A+M” prominently, a section of the parking lot has been excavated, resulting in a small island that wouldn’t be entirely out of place in the Bois de Boulogne.
According to the accompanying text, the studio focused on the way in which ruins “were always mediated through technologies of image production.” Indeed, their elegantly-rendered project invites a romantic gaze—but one that is immediately disturbed by the raw intimacy of the economic conditions and crises that has produced this context. In this, the viewer finds their familiarity with such landscapes troubled, inviting new ways of looking at these sites beyond normative narratives of decay and rather towards their potential. Here, the architectural imaginary is unleashed but tempered, thankfully, by something like an architectural-economic realism: neither a fetishization of economic decline nor a utopian projection.
5 Comments
Could have at least mentioned James Wines and/or SITE somewhere, even if only for the looks of it.
re-inventing the wheel
totally derivative rip-off!!!!!!
Wines was lecturing in Chicago at the start of the biennial too. Such a shame.
Pretty embarrassing the curators put them in the show, even more embarrassing that they don't reference Wines.
Or at least brings to mind, seems an extension of their own Detroit Reassembly Plant. Particularly the exploration of the logics of recycling/redistribution...
Really interesting stuff. More than half of the world's population lives in urban centers and the actual percentage of the world's population that is moving there is skyrocketing right now
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