Beyond Environment | Call for Proposals

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The curators for the exhibition Beyond Environment, to be held in September through November, 2014, are hosting a competition to design and build three pavilions at the LACE gallery. Submission deadline is June 7, 2014.

Beyond Environment explores the potent interchange between architecture, Land Art, and Performance Art that emerged through Italian architect Gianni Pettena’s collaboration with American artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in the 1970s. Captivated by a journey to the USA in 1971, Pettena’s About Non Conscious Architecture series would converse with the American Midwest, a conversation culminating in his meeting with Robert Smithson in Salt Lake City. Earlier, while in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Pettena’s experiments in material transformations helped create some of architect’s most iconic works. Staged in Minneapolis in an abandoned school and in a non-descriptive suburban house, and titled Ice House I and II, Pettena would pour water into the mold works he created around the buildings’ perimeter walls. Curing during the winter night to a coat of ice, the houses resonated with their conceptual predecessor, Kaprow’s Fluids of 1967, as well as with a newer contemporary architectural sensibly concerned with the effects of variedly compounded, highly eidetic architectural surfaces.

Curated by Emanuele Piccardo and Amit Wolf, in collaboration with the Graham Foundation, Beyond Environment combines approximately thirty works by Pettena, Kaprow, Smithson, as well as from Pettena’s Florentine milieu, that of Superarchitecture and the Italian “Radical” groups UFO, Superstudio, and 9999. Competitors are asked to reconsider this architecture-art complex using contemporary technologies and materials. An exhibition of selected proposals will be hosted concurrently at the WUHO Gallery.

Program Requirements

Design three pavilions that will act as media rooms, each approximately 10’ x 10’ x 10’.

Important aspects of the design include the control of light/visual/sound elements and the further manipulation of the pavilions’ envelop to accommodate seating and display.

See competition packet for existing gallery layout and setting.
Dates for site visits will be sent to participants following registration.

The winning designer(s) will be presented with a budget of $4000. The Competition is open. There will be a preliminary round of judging, from which a short-list of three candidates will emerge. The final judging will be held on 31, May, 2014.

The winning proposal will collaborate with the curators, engaging in all aspects of the project’s realization, including design sessions, discussions of the projects’ amendments/adjustments, and technical investigations into the pavilions’ realization.

Schedule (dates may be adjusted)

07 June Proposals Due

08 June Jury selects winning proposal

09 June Winner Announced

July – August Construction of pavilions

4 September Exhibition opening

For information please contact Amit Wolf at wolfat@gmail.com

More info in the official call.