 Now I'm very happy to introduce Carrie Norman, one half of the architectural firm Norman Kelly, as I mentioned before, Thomas Kelly couldn't join us today. But it's been a real pleasure to work with both of them on this project and it's been truly a collaboration. So I would just like to say that they were really instrumental in helping us develop some of the curatorial ideas for the show. So it was kind of a perfect match. So I'm really pleased that Carrie will be able to talk a little bit about their own practice, but also specifically about the ideas and developing the architectural design. Well, first off, obviously, thank you so much to Irene Sun Woo and Tiffany Lambert for inviting us here today. We're so honored and humbled to be participating in this event. We are by far the least experienced and familiar with Arakawa and Ginz of the participants here. So we thought we'd discuss how that neutrality sort of tempered our approach to the collaboration on this project and how that sort of neutrality tempers collaborations with other artists that we've designed or collaborated on exhibitions for. And it's incredibly exciting to be a part of this event and this exhibition, which really marks an important occasion in which this work and these artists can reach an architectural community and an architectural audience. I think that's wonderful. So to begin, we thought we'd start off by sharing a little about our approach to collaborations on projects like Eternal Gradient that aim to operate in the background, that are accessory to something larger. So if architecture were a double act, Norman Kelly strives to be the straight man. Take, for example, a comedy duo in which two differing personalities and sets of behaviors perform a comedy routine together but from contradictory angles. One performer, the straight man or stooge, may have no comedic purpose but to act in a manner that makes the actual comic look good. Usually the straight man's form of comedy is serious, nearly skeptical, so allowing the audience's perception of the actual comic's act to appear more ridiculous or shocking for heightened affect. Examples include Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Abedin Costello, architectural equivalents might include Lily Reich and Mies or Boss Princeton in Office, or Joseph Michael Gandhi and Sir John Sohn. So in the examples that follow, Norman Kelly is the straight man and woman. Our aim is to make the comic, I mean artists here, we're working with, to look good. We accept our role like an architect is often required to do, which is listen and interpret, and it's a role we're very fond of, replaying when the comics work is so good. So in January of this year we were invited to collaborate with the performance artist Brendan Fernandez, the Chicago-based Canadian artist of Kenyan and Indian descent, for an exhibition titled Master and Form, currently on view at the Graham Foundation through April 5th, which will be the last performance, so if anybody finds themselves in Chicago this week, I highly recommend seeing it. Installations and performances such as Master and Form and Eternal Gradient are incredible opportunities to expand our disciplinary discourse and work within the physical spaces of found rooms. In this case, the installation gives audience members an intimate vantage point of ballet dancers from the Joffrey Academy of Dance as they move through training objects and room-scale interventions. The show explores themes of mastery, masochism and ideal form within the culture of ballet through the use of designed objects that enable dancers to perform and extend iconic ballet positions. And here you can see a little bit of our working method with Brendan. On the left his initial sketch, in the middle our sort of digital translation, on the right a photograph of dancer Andrea de Leon holding encamber on the ground pose. If you look closely, where each object contacts the body is wrapped in leather, the collaboration involved research with Brendan that took us to the Leather Archives and Museum in Rogers Park, Chicago, a place dedicated to the preservation of leather, kink and fetish lifestyles. At the opening you could find Leather Daddies and ballet enthusiasts mingling. Occupying the first and second floor galleries of the Madliner House, the installation must work with dancers absent. At these times frames activate the space by drawing out existing architectural elements that relate closely to the body, such as windows and thresholds. In addition to being honored and thanking Brendan for his vision, we'd also like to take an opportunity here to thank Ellen Alderman, Ava Barrett, and Sarah Herda for allowing us to experiment yet again on their house. And around the same time we were also approached by Irene to collaborate on eternal gradients exhibition design. So thank you Irene for thinking of us. And thank you to Betsy Clifton, with whom we closely collaborated on this design. This was the first time our collaboration with the curator included being present during the selection of the work. So here we are at the giant art storage facility. I think you can see Moaco and Stephen in the background. And here you see Irene and Tiffany inspecting a bridge drawing. And performing what we imagine is the most challenging task of a curator, which is making the selections. In the end, nearly 40 drawings were selected, including these, which stood out in our mind as they introduced human figures wrestling sort of these spatial and material impossibilities. And in many of their spatial experiments of the work within this particular kind of era, like this sketch for their bridge project, and to which I should add our design is sort of heavily indebted. And I hope you'll see soon why. Is this idea of the container, again, that has been mentioned as illustrated here with this sort of gridded mesh structure used as a physical device sort of for, I suppose, measuring and navigating perception. And in our research, we also came across this photo of an exhibition that Arakawa actually designed. And to engage the work on the wall, one needed to climb ramps at different steepness. So here perception is both a visual and physical exercise, and it required work. You can see in the distance there are ropes. Those are to help you climb the ramp. And our hope in the design is to extend this affinity for active viewing. So what we've come up with is a sort of false envelope plan of centralized display structures. In this case, views are passed through the center rather than circulation, which recalls a bit of some of the themes we've seen so far in which maybe only a child could walk through the center. And upon entering the gallery and arriving to the center axis, one can see through the entire length of the exhibition. So all artworks are placed on the east and west walls of the display structures to really maintain that visibility. In three dimensions, the mesh structures recall some of their drawn counterparts while adding vertical and horizontal display surfaces. And this is what we're calling the sort of 41st drawing that we've smuggled into the show. It's an anamorphic drawing installed with dark gray vinyl below the mesh structures, which reenacts the sort of impossible spatial conditions present in their work and also reconstructs one of the sketches shown earlier. As one shifts to either side of the gallery or as if you are looking at it from eye height, the two-dimensional deceit is easily revealed. And the plan of the drawing that measures approximately 15.5 feet long by 8 feet wide. Perhaps the closest our design approaches the physical demands thematic to Arakawa and Ginza's spatial experiments actually occurred in the labor to produce the exhibition. For the vinyl, a team of 12 people patiently weeded the surface over the course of several days prior to install. For those unfamiliar with the term, weeding is the term for the process of removing unwanted material, and it's a manual process performed by hand. The labor of the install also included some heavy lifting, and we are very thankful to our fabricators, Navilas out of Chicago, and to Josh Jordan, to Yun Kang, to Karen Choi, to Ben Gillis, and to Alex Prince Wright for their assistance in the process. We invite you to crouch and to find the hidden drawing. Like the work of Arakawa Ginza, it resists passive viewing, so it does not reveal itself immediately. If you are patient, we recommend, if you are impatient, I should say, we recommend letting your camera be the viewfinder. Here a shot of the vinyl floor drawing installed. At the same time, there are other moments that require far less work, like this window that was intentionally designed to frame a very specific drawing in the near distance. Or to, say, put two other projects in dialogue with each other. And so the talk began with the term accessory. Hopefully it's clear that we prefer a self-effacing set of architectural services. In short, we relied on smart people to circumscribe smart contexts. And then, really, our job was easy. We just listened closely and tried to play it straight. I have exhibitions to join me at the table with Carrie for a short chit chat about our experiences. I think we have some questions for each other, probably even though we've been trapped inside the gallery for about two weeks together, focusing on things other than the concepts behind the design. Thank you. I think we have some slides, too, to go on behind us. Maybe I'll start just by asking Carrie, because you, like me, came to the work without prior knowledge, right? So I was just wondering, as an architect and also as an educator, just what your initial response was to seeing the breadth of work. Because you clearly did your research in preparation, looking at the paintings, the sculptures, and even the later works. Sure. It's, I think, as has been mentioned incredibly, a lot of the work is opaque and a lot of the range is a bit overwhelming. So at a certain point, you kind of had to cut off references anymore. You kind of had to just, like, kind of isolate a couple instances to really look a lot closer at. And that's where you guys became incredibly invaluable in the process. I'm continually keeping us updated on the kind of current checklist and the selection of the work. And I'm just incredibly impressed with, in a short time period, how such a tight selection of work happens. Throughout the process, certain sort of tendencies seem to kind of keep creeping up. As an architect, we kept looking at opportunities to frame it on terms of architecture. So we sort of started with thinking through the plan. How could the plan be an organizing device? And maybe not as obvious in the show. That was a sort of recurring theme played out in our colleagues, Spatial Experiments. So we sort of identified a strategy that then could hopefully absorb changes in scale, changes in scope, changes in size as the work sort of continually evolved to be more of, the selection process could be more refined and so forth. In Arkhow and Ginn's work from this period in particular, they're kind of searching for a visual representation for their ideas. And I was curious how, if you could talk a little bit more about how you as the architect kind of approached that idea of finding your own visual and physical representation of somebody else's work. That's a great question. I mean, maybe a shared affinity between our practice and the tendencies in their representation, particularly within this era that is represented in the show, is the idea of the grid. And so that was a sort of, I don't want to say easy selection, but it lent itself to ways in which we work rigorously with kind of alignments and are sort of obsessive about measurements and precision and tolerance and so forth. It was funny last night when a particular visitor was looking at some of the screen valves opposite the entry and regarded them as sort of geometric experiments. And what's kind of most fascinating about them is that they're actually, they're pretty literal spatial drawings. And so while they present themselves abstractly, they are meant to be looked at very literally. And maybe our approach to this design is a bit literal in its sort of mimicking of that process. So if you have questions for us, they don't need to grill you. I love to, I love to pick your guys' brains on how you go about making selections. That really must be the hardest part of this. And there's probably no easy response. Time, a timeframe, a deadline definitely helps. But I mean, as I kind of tried to explain a little bit at the beginning, there was this whittling down. So at a certain point there was a realization that the digital material was kind of a world of its own. And in order to do it justice, I think it would have needed much more time. Also technological resources really sifting through files and identifying which printout preceded another one. So I could see that that was quite an overwhelming project in and of itself. So landing on the hand drawings was kind of a beautiful moment of serendipity. But even within those, I mean, I should say that the research it was happening really simultaneously. There were some things I didn't realize about some of the projects until after we had selected them. So there were just a lot of happy accidents as well. But being able to identify certain clear projects like the Venice container for mind blank body. Also the bridge is a clear project and things like the screen valves are clear projects. But there were ways to find connections between these things. And it's because we're dealing with a quite contained period of time that you can tease out those things. Because you have the visual material, you know, sometimes I would just see two drawings across the room and I just look back and forth. It's like, now I get it. So it's that kind of beauty of having images to actually look at and really unpack very, very slowly. And then with the archival material as well, like these polaroids, you know, had been found, I guess, sometime in December or November and I couldn't always make out what the projects were. But after revisiting some of the drawings over and over again, I began to see like, this is that and this is what they meant by this container. And even just realizing that this term container was a really strong aspect of their vocabulary. So it's not like a neat answer for you. But having some of those limits certainly helped and being enthusiastic about the visual strength of a lot of the material. That was a real driving force. This emphasis on drawing, which also has to do with, you know, contemporary discussions right now. You know, for anybody in the field, we know that there's been a lot of drawing exhibitions recently and kind of interest in the period just up until the digital, let's say, thinking back to the 90s. But also, you know, focusing on the 80s, it was also an opportunity to introduce names into that historical discourse that have thus far been, I would say, pretty completely overlooked in terms of that decade. Let's say in the 2000s, Arakawa and Madeline were quite vocal. They were out there campaigning for themselves, but somehow this material kind of fell behind. Yeah, just to add to that, for me, I had heard a little bit about their work when Madeline passed away, actually. But it was their architectural bill work, so I was fascinated by this past history of artworks for Arakawa in poetry, which I had no idea existed from Madeline, and just kind of thinking, like, how did they go from there to there? And that sort of experience of uncovering that narrative of their biography was super fascinating to me in particular. Yeah, because in the research process, what I found was that I could find people that knew about the later work, the digital drawings that worked in the offices, and then other people who were quite familiar with the paintings and even the literature, but there was this zone in between that was a little bit of a mystery. And I think it's still a little bit of a mystery even though we've done a whole show focused particularly on this period. But my hope is that this is a point of departure for other people, scholars, architects, whoever, to kind of jump in and maybe for someone interested in painting, some of this material informs something of their intelligence about the 60s, or says something different about Mitaka Lofts or any of these other later built works. For drawings that are to be considered by or received by an architectural audience, they're incredibly open, right? And we could maybe hard to imagine but possibly possible imagine that maybe in 20 or 30 years that an architecture exhibition would not contain drawings because of the softwares that we're using makes drawings all equivalent. They're all looking the same, right? And so there is no openness to them anymore. So I find this to be like incredibly exciting to focus on the openness that still remains, that's still potential, it's still latent within that tool, that medium for architects. I was actually going to ask you something about that. I don't know how much time we have left, but what's that? It can make it quick. The end point of the show and just to sort of riff on one of their philosophies is like how the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning. So it's also the first thing you see in the show is their latest works which are the three lobby reproductions that you'll see in the gallery, which are the digital that Irene mentioned earlier, these digital computer software aided drawings that they made. And so I was just curious which represent the sort of turn to the digital that Arakawa and Madeleine did in the early 90s. These are from 1991. And I was wondering as an architect what you would say or an architect knowing about their work, what you would envision their interpretation to be with new digital tools today. Like VR for example seems like it has potential for some of their theoretical ideas. I just wondered working on the show if you had considered that or what you thought they would, how they would interpret that I guess. I think that that question would need to resolve whether or not they desire their work to be understood and that they want, right? Because the VR and that like mode of representation is not open. I mean that's very closed in a way, right? And the digital reproductions do present themselves in a way to be read quite clearly, right? It doesn't leave a lot to like question, to mediate on, meditate on. And so it would be hard to like try to put thoughts, you know, try to understand what their position would be. From the works that are in the show, I would, they're particularly like effective to me as an architect reading them because of that openness. And I would say like, I would hate to see their work in VR, even though they might desire that, I don't know. Can you talk about the, how you responded to the constraints and opportunities of the space of the gallery a little? Because I feel like, well, I have some thoughts about that, but maybe you could talk about that a bit. Some of their projects, at least some of the plans of projects that we were able to locate, though maybe at first glance appeared very complex, really did reduce to like the four cardinal directions and I think Moaco might have mentioned that. Or at any rate, like there is a kind of understanding between a relationship between the center and the periphery that we tried to maintain. So when you're in the gallery, you sort of always have a clear reference, an understanding sort of your position in space relative to the center, relative to the edge, and we're excited by moments in which you can afford a kind of farther, more distance from the work. And then there are moments that you are like uncomfortably close to the work. So playing with that kind of friction really excited us. Yeah. There was just one comment that slipped my mind, but now I just wanted to bring it up that it was quite interesting. In the research process, and this kind of has to do with a more big picture comment about where we situate the work today, because these projects have been kind of squarely outside of historiography, but perhaps there will be more scholarship coming. But it was interesting to find in the research process that there were not explicit ties to other contemporary practices or even historical practices. So when I was having a conversation with a journalist a few weeks ago, I was saying to him, you know, I was kind of hoping there would be a magical folder that said architectural precedence and there would be a bibliography and I could cross reference to their library because that's been inventoried. And there was no such thing and maybe there is one because I couldn't go through every single box. But in a way, I think it was telling in that it seems to me that they really came to architecture in their own terms. So without historical baggage, not having to reference Palladio or Peter Eisenman or whoever, even though they were very much part of the New York scene at that time. It's been really remarkable to mention the project to someone and they say, oh yeah, I worked in their office. I worked on that model and I was part of that project. I invited Madeline to a review at GSAP, which apparently she did a few times. I think Ed Keller was the one of a few that maybe invited her. So it's been really kind of strange but also refreshing to see that someone could so robustly engage with the discipline totally freely. And that had its benefits and also its drawbacks. But yeah, I'm just curious, Carrie, for you. You're very, very interested in architectural history. So when you kind of first encountered the work, what are the things that came to mind for you? Because I immediately thought of Keesler and a handful of other names. But I could never make those connections but at a certain point just kind of let it go. Right. I mean, maybe this is extreme but I think Thomas and I consider ourselves a bit like right wing architectural disciplinarians. Of which Arakawa and Ginz are squarely not. And yeah, when you mentioned this show and I looked up their work, the first return on the search is the built work. And what's striking is how much contrast there is between the built work and then the kind of drawings or the spatial experiments through drawing that preceded the built work. And I would love to know more about that kind of scale jump that happened in the work and why there is such a disconnect formally that happens. And I think that if you asked five architects, it would probably be a split response of whether they consider these artists architects or were they just approaching sort of architectural work. Right. It's hard to say. I mean, I think that we would fall along the lines that they're not architects but the scale of space, the spatial experiments, the physical experiment was just among the kind of scale that they took on. And at a certain point the darling could not surface their kind of aspiration. And so they had to build. But it's outside of architecture for me. Tiffany, what do you think? I have the same problem looking through. I kept trying to make associations with especially their interpretation of space and the body in the space. So I kept thinking of like psychogeography and like this idea of drifting and situation is international and Constance Babylon. I think I was talking to Andres a little bit about it the other day. But we had a whole list of what was in their library. So I was like, oh yes, that's where I'm going to find it. And none of them were there at all. So I found it really confounding and also really interesting that they were working amongst people in architecture dealing with some similar sort of issues. Obviously working for our show within a postmodernist idiom modernist to postmodernist except theirs is very different. And so I feel like they arrived at some similar but very different ideas. Yeah, I think maybe with Carrie at one point a few weeks ago, or I might have, I can't remember. A day ago. There are so many people who were talking to you. But it's interesting that they kind of approach architecture as a medium purely and then it's the theoretical that they're able to kind of articulate through that medium itself. Yeah, I find their work to be, I mean, of course, like I'm just, this is an opinion. Like to be just like practical theory, practical philosophy or something, right? Like the built work is not to be, in my mind, read architecturally. It's kind of a residue of the ideas in a way. But I feel like you embrace that with the design in a way. This like expanding of the mind into the space and especially with that nice moment that you talked about in the show. Smuggling in the 41st drawing. This nice moment where the two dimensional graphics become multi dimensional with the mesh structures in a 3D space. When you get at a certain actually kind of awkward and uncomfortable crouch position. But you'll have to do it for a second to realize it. So it's worth doing if you haven't already. Anyway, I think it's really interesting where you sort of embrace this idea of changing perception and coercing the body into a certain set of challenging positions in the actual display of the exhibition itself. So I kind of saw that connection too. I think to define the line between that separates architecture from something that's architectural is incredibly hard. And I think a lot of our work is architectural and we're still kind of defining what is architecture to us. And I think, you know, that's maybe a long pursuit. And so I obviously didn't mean any value, you know, any judgment when I when I called them architectural and not architects, because I would call myself architectural, maybe not architect. Right. So I think it's a tricky distinction that maybe only architects find interest in even kind of unpacking also. Well, I think that's a great way to close. Thanks so much. It was great to hear you walk through the project, even though I've been literally walking through it and also to acknowledge all the physical labor that you went through. I don't know if you guys noticed, but that was Carrie weeding the vinyl in that slide. I pitched in. I didn't do all of it. Okay, great. Thank you guys.