Client: Private

Overview

Articulating haptic spatial experiences by accentuating the ‘place’

The redBARN installation is a rigorous analysis of place and a sensual experience. The project, located on a privately owned farm on the north side of Indianapolis, 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.’’2 Liberated from programmatic constraints, the experience of place was favored over rational thought as a point of departure for the project. Students were asked to look for and to ‘‘see’’ the potential in the existing space, ultimately grounding their observations in the genuine and very tangible demands of constructing the full-scale project.

Goals

-Create a sculpture that represents the experience of place
-Catalog the site's materials and showcase them in an elegant and meaningful way
-To provide a datum to calibrate the space within the barn.
-To heighten one’s appreciation of the qualities of the
existing space
-To contribute to the communities awareness of this and
other historic agrarian structures as objects of beauty and
value.
-To increase awareness of the continued relevance and
potential for revaluation of discarded materials (both the
barn and its contents).

Process

Collaboration between 2 groups of students from The Ohio State University and Ball State developed designs, fabrication methods, physical and digital models, and created presentations.

The completed installation consists of six discrete objects oriented on a north / south axis along the length
of the barn. A new steel track which recalls the linear
track of the old hay loft attaches delicately to the existing oak timbers of the barn, supporting and unifying
each of the six objects.
The “larva”, the first component of the installation, is
suspended overhead at the entrance to the barn. Composed of radiused steel straps and rods, the exuberant
geometry of the Larva contrasts with the utilitarian regularity of the barn and simultaneously recalls agrarian
structures such as corn cribs and grain silos. At the base
of the object, a skin of latex is stretched and lashed to
the framework; lit from within (fig 3, 4). A fan pulses
rhythmically causing the latex diaphragm at the center
of the tail to expand and contract like the breathing

Additional Information

The project culminated in a one night public opening for the work that drew over three hundred visitors to the barn. Participants at the entry to the barn were invited to “milk” the teats which (through a series of pulleys and spring dampers) set the boxes above in the loft in mo - tion, the glass vessels swinging relative to one another and to the boxes of steel (fig.15). At three different times in the evening the boxes were “over stimulated” and the glass vessals crashed into one another and came shattering down on the floor of the loft. There was a real sense of danger and lack of control as well as a tension accentuated by the material contrast between the steel and the glass, reinforcing qualities identified in the response essays written by the students at the outset of the project.