'T' Space Rhinebeck

LECTURES

WATCH — Erik Kiviat: “Urban Biodiversity: What a Damaged Landscape Teaches”
WATCH — Torkwase Dyson
WATCH — Leah Kelly: “Organism – Environment”
WATCH — Ann Hamilton
WATCH — Hamed Khosravi: “The Ecstasy of the Image: The Work of Zoe Zenghelis”
WATCH — Marina Tabassum
WATCH — Diana Agrest: “Expanding Boundaries: Architecture as a Transdiscursive Field”

WATCH — Final Review

NOTES ON “COSMIC DUST: SPACE & TIME” RESIDENT WORKS

Despite the JW Space Telescope’s recent revelations with hi-res crisp imagery, we can not fathom outer space and the universe, similarly to how we can not possibly imagine our birthplace at the time we were born, or a tree–now a forest–that was planted before we existed.

To grasp this impossibility through spatial thought experiments, and contemplative acts that generate design, is the aspiration for the 2022 intensive architecture residency program at ‘T’ Space: “Cosmic Dust: Space & Time”.

1. Between the earthly and the cosmic

Jingwen Gu draws from asteroids, and designs acentric levitating ‘generators’ with a light touch on the ground (img.1). On the contrary, Lafina Eptaminitaki’s design is earthbound, fallen and broken into dust (img. 2).

2. space> Ancient Greek “σπάω” = “to break”

Or, let’s take the collapsing of the geological and the molecular, with Teresa Mark’s explorations of ‘dead ice’, i.e. the aging and retreating of melting ice in situ – over billions of years – to form a kettle lake. Her material experimentations reveal cavities into the earth where salt is the only trace of melted ice (img. 3).

3. Material study with ice and soil

‘Recursive Curve’ is inspired by the collapse of a dying star, which resists the inward folding by ejecting outward in its attempt to escape the endpoint. For Isabella Tangherlini, to cut-open a plane affords the opportunity for a surface to pull-in and form into place (img. 4). Using a bending and folding vocabulary, Steven Lemke’s design collapses and rises, exploring bound and unbound geographies–the give and take of spatial negotiation (img. 5).

4. A single entity, self-contained yet expanding

5. Folding the parcel geometry

Lastly, Yahya Abdullah’s inhabitable egg ovalloid is intersected by harsh rectangles and defined edges within a free floating embryonic space (img. 6).

6. Study of Egg, fractures, light, fragment

These works do not domesticate, but embrace the awe and terror of the infinite, the unreachable, and the ‘empty’ space. Neuroscientist Leah Kelly explains that when in empty spaces, when not connected to anything, we are unclear as to who we are, and therefore experience feelings of disconnection and fear. 

We rarely question the place we are in. As Georges Perec observes in his Species of Spaces and Other Pieces we think we know: we are at home, at our office, in the subway, in the street. Yet, how do we learn or dare to embrace and imagine our existence in space, beyond a selfish need for reassurance?

To explore the vast universe through design is not to be disconnected, but embodied within nature’s continuum. Not abandoned or alone, but bursting with potential.

Eirini Tsachrelia, Rhinebeck, NY
Aug. 5, 2022

WATCH – Nat Oppenheimer: “Poetry [and Engineering], the Ecology of the Soul”
WATCH – Paul Warchol: “Parallel Pantheons”
WATCH – Gökhan Kodalak: “Cosmodalities”
WATCH – Ellen K. Levy: “New Habits and New Habitats”
WATCH – William Stout: “The Influences of Books”
WATCH – Elia Zenghelis: “The Image as Emblem and Narrative”
WATCH – Catty Dan Zhang: “Diffusion: Towards Alternative Forms of Togetherness in Architecture”
WATCH – Arlene Shechet: “Betweenness, Making Sculpture”

WATCH – Final Review

Thank you to Elizabeth Diller and Leah Kelly for their lectures.

WATCH – Kostis Kourelis – July 7
WATCH – Iwan Baan – July 8
WATCH – Yolande Daniels – July 13
WATCH – Martin Stigsgaard – July 14
WATCH – Alberto Campo Baeza – July 16
WATCH – Kyna Leski – July 19
WATCH – Thom Mayne – July 20
WATCH – Lead Pencil Studio – July 22

WATCH – Final Presentations – July 26 at 2 pm

‘T’ Space Summer Architecture Residents: Alexander Kern, Brian Hartman, Meghan Pisarcik, Yolande Wen, Jack Wathieu, Reginald Mace

WATCH – July 8 | Richard Armstrong
WATCH – July 9 | Daniel Belasco
WATCH – July 14 | Chris Perry and Cathryn Dwyre, pneumastudio
WATCH – July 15 | Ashley Simone
WATCH – July 16 | Anthony Titus
WATCH – July 17 | David Leven and Stella Betts
WATCH – July 20 | Stan Allen
WATCH – July 24 | Yasmin Vobis
WATCH – July 27 | Final Review: ‘T’ Space Summer Architecture Residency
WATCH – July 28 | Nina Stritzler

Instructors:
Steven Holl
Eirini Tsachrelia

Schedule of 2019 public lectures, workshops, lectures, pin-ups and critiques:

July 5 | Yehuda Safran

July 6 | Christian Wassmann

July 12 | Christoph Kumpusch

July 18 | Ilona Lovas*

July 18 | Tamás Nagy*

July 22 | Ashley Simone

July 23 | Eirini Tsachrelia

July 24 | Marin Stigsgaard

With additional instruction by Anthony Titus.

2019 FINAL CRITIQUE

July 27 | Hosted by the Al Held Foundation

*Presented with support by the Institute of Architecture of the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design.

All Photos by Susan Wides

“But who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest? […] We should have to know how the forest experiences its great age; why, in the reign of the imagination, there are no young forests.”

– Gaston Bachelard, ‘The Poetics of Space’

We do not have to wander long in the woods to be struck with the impression of a limitless forest extending deeper and deeper. The forest’s hidden grandeur and depth is immediately sensed. In Gaston Bachelard’s words, what becomes present, is the ‘Immediate Immensity’ of the forest’s depth.

The forest and the universe alike, expand in the mind. The ‘Fellow’s cabin’, where five fellows reside, and the studio ‘Space-T2’ are situated within the forested site of TSpace Reserve, in the Hudson valley, in the Northwest Dutchess county, near the Hudson river which was glacially formed over twenty thousand years ago.

During their stay, throughout the month of July, the residents divide most of their time between the cabin -a lightly renovated structure from the ‘40s- and the studio, -a hunting shack from the ‘60s reappropriated by Steven Holl. It is a short walk between the two, downhill to the studio and back uphill to the cabin. Yet, the experience is intensified under sunlight and moonlight, and the unknown sounds of nature bewilder the imagination.

Img 1, Jen Chenyu Zhang, Binary Stars

On a clear night onsite, the starry sky vibrates to our naked eyes. When considering the universe, or observing the stars through the telescope, in an almost motionless state, we are overpowered with Spaciousness, what Bachelard calls ‘Inner Immensity’.

During the course of the residency, the Ecospace, or you may say the ‘outer’ space, or the negative space, is experienced as an extension of the indoors, like an outdoor ‘room’. The immensity is paradoxically compressed, and Intimacy is externalized.

Encapsulating this complexity, the hypothesis for the summer studio experimentation is the design of a small-sized residence and sky observatory on the grounds of TSpace Reserve. Space making is explored and communicated with white bristol paper models and with animated visuals; rudimentary materials paired with advanced means of representation.

Img 2, Jingyuan Candice Wu, Cosmic Collision, overlapping video stills

One project considers our galaxy as a perfect orbit in equilibrium, where most stars are in fact not single, like our Sun, but binaries or triplets in gravitational balance (img 1). Yet another project focuses on those gravitational forces that result in hostile and violent star collisions, massive explosions and bursts of enormous amounts of energy (img 2).

Such forces of energy and counter-energy become a spring point for the exploration of design language. How can complex geometries of our universe and other advanced mathematical models that describe it be understood or translated through architectural thought?

Τhe challenge that the fellows face is to translate Immense to Intimate and vice versa, in pursuit of ‘inhabiting’ the universe, and for the universe to ‘inhabit’ their architecture.

Eirini Tsachrelia
New York, February 2019

Img 3 Xiucong Han,3+1 Spacetime

Img 4 Mariano Cuofano, Intangible Convergence

Img 5, Haoran Wang, Implacable Order

Img 6, Jen Chenyu Zhang, Binary Stars