Jessie Marino & Leighton Beaman’ s Performance/Installation, “This House Is Made Up Of Talk” opens, February 21st as part of the Cinque Mostre Exhibition at the American Academy in Rome.
The relationship between score and performance / instruction and execution is one that is fundamental to both musical and architectural production. Each disciplines relies on the involvement and entanglement of others for creation. Any work produced within these two fields has already enfolded both modes of existence. The incompleteness, misalignments and incongruities inherent in this duality provide a space for exploration, a place to dissolve the hierarchy and linearity of this relationship into an event. this house is made up of talk is an experimental mini-drama that engages the spatial, rhythmic, and temporal disillusionment of notation and materialization within the event of their creation. Both occur simultaneously and anew with each iteration and as others are asked to navigate the auditory, visual, and environmental dimensions of the piece.
In Translation: Some Loss Is Inevitable, will be on display at the 2019 Cinque Mostre Exhibition at the American Academy in Rome. The collection of artifacts on display is a collaboration between Joannie Bottkol, Allison Emmerson, Karyn Olivier, and Zaneta Hong. Glass unguentaria (perfume bottles) were among the most popular Roman grave gifts. In some cases, mourners poured perfume over the body, then broke the bottles on the ground. In others, the bottles and their contents were deposited whole in the tomb. Perfume was valuable and luxurious, an excellent gift to honor the dead, but its strong scent also helped to mask the very human smells of death, while elevating ritual proceedings beyond the everyday. For this installation, five glass perfume bottles from the AAR Archaeological Study Collection were reinterpreted into six materials—beeswax, dirt, hair, plaster, paper pulp, and resin. These materials were selected for their corporeal ties to the human body and in their traditions of use in conservation, archaeology and construction.
meta-field, a speculative & applied design research group at the University of Virginia, launches on Nov 6th 2017. Meta-field, a collection faculty, researchers and students, from multiple disciplines examines the intersections between Materials, Environments, Technologies, and Assemblies. Meta-field is co-directed by Zaneta Hong, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia & Leighton Beaman, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia and Design and Technology Critic at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Lumina Pavilion opens October 6th at the University of Virginia. The Pavilion is a product of a design and fabrication course taught by UVA faculty Michael Leighton Beaman & Melissa Goldman and Andrew Kudless of Matsys and the California College of Arts.
Sub-aqueous Interventions for Non-Humans, an article about the Oyster Block Project is available in the Int|AR Journal Vol. 08
As more emphasis is placed on humanity’s impact on the Earth’s environments, and what might be called an acknowledgement and exploration of the ecological context of our activity, designers have become more involved in adaptive and interventional projects that are realized in larger, more interconnected ways. Increasingly, those projects are involving sub-aqueous environments and ecotones. These projects are expanding the notion of intervention and adaptation for designers to encompass water. The Oyster Blocks Project, which began as a collaboration between Beta-field and Allied Concrete, was born from this approach to design intervention. Our collaborative goal was to investigate how manufactured elements which play a role in these environments, might be reconsidered to be more specific in form, material, and construction; more responsive in relation to its intended intervention and more mindful of unintended effects.
Zaneta Hong was selected as the editor of the 4th volume of Catalyst which spans design education and research at the University of Virginia. This volume will examine the relationship between academic levels and how course are organized within and outside of research frameworks.
Catalyst IV will be published by ORO and is scheduled to be available in 2018.
ShopBox, a light assembly workshop & studio for an artist living and working in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains, was awarded a 2017 AIA Unbuilt Merit Award.
TEAME wins the Providence Preservation Society Headquarters Renovation Project. The Competition combines RISD students and faculty in a five day charette that examines renovation of the PPS's historic headquarters buildings. The project will be on display at the Providence Preservation Society's Symposium Why Preserve? in the Industrial Trust Building, 111 Westminster Street, November 3rd & 4th.
TEAME:
Students: Xunqi Shen, Madison Kim, Minhee Kim, Gloria Ramirez, Shuchen Peng, Peihan Wang, Mariah Bennett , Danning Niu
Xenvironments is a partnered research project between RISD Industrial Design, Interior Architecture and Digital + Media departments, and Textron Aviation, makers of Cessna, Hawker and Beechcraft jets and planes, and Bell helicopters. The purpose of this collaboration is to reimage the constructed, controlled and contained conditions of modern flight, in an effort to design potential interior spaces for a new Cessna transatlantic jet currently being developed. We are working closely with engineers, researcher, manufacturers, pilots, and designers at Cessna to develop these spaces. RISD's involvement has been divided between paid research project conducted during the 2016 winter session and a spring semester design studio.
The Landformation Catalogue Exhibition Publication is now available. The Landformation Catalogue is an ongoing research agenda that examines the generative methodologies of landform manipulation, revealing correlations between the histories, morphologies, assemblies, materials, and affordances of landscape practice. It analyzes the resulting spatial artifacts of humanity’s larger Earth transformation project.
The publication was made possible through a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.