Two of my good friends are part of Holiday Home, a project by UN Studio opening at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Philadelphia on January 20th. Noah Olmsted of Imaginary Forces is the project leader for experiential design and Isa Wipfli is the architectural photographer.
Details from ICA below:
Holiday Home, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos (UN Studio, Amsterdam)
Visual Media: Imaginary Forces (New York/ Los Angeles)
January 21-March 26, 2006
Exhibition Walkthrough: Friday, January 20, 5-6pm, ICA Members Only, join on-site
Opening Reception: Friday, January 20, 6 - 8pm, free and open to the public
December 21, 2005
This winter, the Institute of Contemporary Art is pleased to present a site-specific commissioned installation by renowned architects Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos in ICA's second-floor galleries on view January 20-March 26, 2006. The technical realization of the visual media is a collaborative effort of UN Studio and Imaginary Forces.
The "Holiday Home" is an experiential installation exploring and quantifying areas in which the holiday home departs from modern design conventions. The orthogonal surfaces of the archetypal house are extruded and skewed creating the sculptural armature within which the dichotomies of home and holiday home are played out. The new architectural shape emulates escapism, the expectation of a holiday as removed from the everyday experiential routine. The interplay of what is real and what is virtual transpires on a number of levels touching on ideas of collective memory and phenomenological perceptions.
The unadorned construction allows attention to be directed towards the spatial configurations of the structure. Visitor movement through the installation activates unexpected views and the multidirectional shadows cast create unpredictable perspectives as they fall onto faceted surfaces. The perception of time is intrinsically interwoven into the project as light conditions subtly modulate referencing different atmospheric qualities; the sense of season and time of day become more abstract as you may find on holiday where time has a different rhythm as it is unbound by the frameworks of contemporary patterns of living and dwelling.
Based in Amsterdam, van Berkel and Bos have realized several internationally acclaimed projects, including the Erasmus Bridge (Rotterdam, 1990-96), the widely publicized Möbius House (Het Gooi, 1993-98), and most recently, the opening of the Mercedes-Benz Museum (Stuttgart,2006). Their work was also featured in the International Architecture Exhibition of the 2004 Venice Biennale. Van Berkel and Bos’s firm, UN Studio, is meant to act as a powerhouse in which architects, graphic designers, stylists, engineers, and other building and creative professionals can collaborate dynamically. Van Berkel, a self-described hyper-modernist, strives to design on the cutting edge while maintaining coherence with the surrounding landscape, and credits the computer for his designs’ noted fluidity. Bos, an art historian, serves as in-house critic, all-purpose debunker, and producer of conceptual and theoretical literature.