Site: Waterman Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design

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City/State: Providence, RI

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Country: U.S.A

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Year: 2019

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Layering Centrality was conceived as an architectural temporary intervention to highlight the central axis on the enfilade of rooms and pay an homage to the architectural proportion of the geometries of the historical space of the Waterman Gallery.

(72) An exhibition is a form of Architecture, but almost an oxymoron: an architecture that is transient, temporary, built to disappear and live only in the memory of visitors. An ephemeral construction that still has to relate to the existing context (73) but which has the privilege of the impermanence. (74) Exhibitions are not designed to last and that implies that the intervention on a pre-existing space will not physically/visibly/permanently change the context on which it operates. The intervention expresses one of the infinite possibilities of relating and transforming the architectural, historical, political and socio-economical context. (75) An ephemeral transformation that does not take the responsibilities of an Architectural permanent intervention but instead plays with the fragmented complexity of the context trying to combine, overlap, intertwine or distinguish the existing narrative with the narrative of the displaied object/content. The exhibition narrative was imagined as a layered path as visitors follow the central axis of the historical building, a path that tells stories of students projects from theory to practice. (76) From the first room imagined as a private library of thesis books and prototypes (77) to the second space where theory becomes practice through digital drawings of complete design projects (78) to the last room where the design takes different forms through materiality (art installation, product design of a lamp, surfaces for interior design) (79) all represented as part of the same circle which tried to define the identity of the Department through the words and works of its students.

 

Team: Xiao Fang (Graphic Design and Fabrication Assistant)