fbpx
We rely on advertising revenue to support the creative content on our site. Please consider whitelisting our site in your settings, or pausing your adblocker while stopping by.

Get the Magazine

An art gallery covered in a chain-link veil. A canopy made from perforated aluminum. Dividing walls constructed from stretched gauze. Almost every one of SO-IL’s architectural projects is defined by an element of semi-transparency. Principal Florian Idenburg says it’s his interest in breaking down the barrier between walls and the outdoors that informs most of what he and partner Jing Liu have built since they started their New York practice in 2008. “We’re always aware of that threshold between exterior and interior,” he says.

When Idenburg was invited to create something new for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, he naturally chose the leafy environs of Garfield Park Conservatory, where indoors and out already co-exist, as his site. He also teamed up with Serbian artist Ana Prvački to create a performance piece that would bring awareness to their shared concerns about air quality and how pollution will affect the way we live in the future.

The performers at Chicago’s Garfield Park Conservatory were cocooned in air-filtering fabric mesh commonly used in HVAC systems.

Titled L’air pour l’air, their intimate work featured a quartet of musicians (a trombonist, saxophonist, flautist and vocalist) performing a score by composer Veronika Krausas under personalized tents made of the air-filtering mesh used in HVAC systems. The enclosures allowed the performers to walk around freely; each was shaped to the ergonomics of the individual players and their instruments. For viewers, the performance translated as a poetic meditation on the air needed to play an instrument.

“In order to play and make poetry and culture,” the collaborators explain, “we need to be able to take deep and full breaths, without fear.”

This story was taken from the March/April 2018 issue of Azure. Buy a copy of the issue here, or subscribe here.

We rely on advertising revenue to support the creative content on our site. Please consider whitelisting our site in your settings, or pausing your adblocker while stopping by.