Xefirotarch - Hernan Diaz-Alonso, Principal
Joshua M. Taron, Project Designer
Submission 0183
Ripley
Epiphyte (ep·i·phyte) n.
def: A plant, such as a tropical orchid or a staghorn fern, that grows on
another plant upon which it depends for mechanical support but not for nutrients.
Architecture is never displayed innocently. Any encounter with the work is
framed by multiple determining contexts—political, sensual, spatial—
that productively contaminate the moment of reception.
This proposal presumes and consumes this critical insight in its proposition
for an architecture that will house (and will be housed by) the city and its
flows.
Instead of repeating the ultimately false presumption of normative architecture
to some neutral palette –a spatial black canvas on which works would
be encountered-- here the architecture acknowledges its own iconic status
within the city as a centripetal gatherer of works, and establishes an irreducibly
unique context for their presentation and representation.
Like epiphytic plants, this form is conjoined with the city and its site,
but self-sustaining in its capacity to focus public flow and creative intensities
within its purview. It extends, unexpectedly across the arbitrating urban
grid, allowing for multiple access points, perspectives and experiences. It
multiplies individual itineraries from interior to exterior, multiplying in
turn the individual visitors’ positions in the space and the exhibitions.
In this, the architecture’s own highly charged perspective on the affects-ambiences
–even especially site-specific works-- becomes an invitation to visitors
to trust their instincts, and to enjoy adventurously the works that they find.
The project presumes that the viewer or visitor’s reception is a critical
component to the work’s very completion. What it provides is the richest
possible frame for any art: a provocation of context.
