Client

Overview

The redBARN installation is both a rigorous analysis of place and a sensual experience. The project is site specific in the truest sense; what Robert Irwin might refer to as “site conditioned response”.… “where the sculptural response draws all of its cues (reasons for being) from its surroundings”. Liberated from programmatic constraints, experience of place was favored over rational thought as a point of departure for the project. …

Goals

Students come to understand "the site and the project…..as interwoven in the production of art.

Process

The project was a collaboration between students and faculty from two schools of architecture and was funded in part with a grant from the Indiana State Art Commission. Students began their design process by spending time on site, recording and writing as well as renovating and removing debris from the loft. Altering the barn was empowering and students came to understand the place through their immediate experience: cold damp sweat on a winter day, the thick smell of dust and time, the ever changing quality of the light pouring through the weathered siding. The textures, smells, sounds and rhythms of the place all began to guide the design, both consciously and subconsciously. The act of design (intention) became inextricably intertwined with the act of making and the experience of the place.

Additional Information

In the spirit of Scarpa’s intervention at Museo di Castelveccio, the final installation remains independent from the existing structure, attaching delicately to the barn and contrasting in material and scale. What was rubbish becomes precious, observers rooted in the moment and in the place, invited to touch, smell and move about the loft, participants in the finished work.