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PARKOUR ARTIST
2012

Image source: Streets United and Canon Photography

The Past Futures, Present, Futures exhibition presents 101 unrealized proposals for New York City, dating from its formation to today with 101 reenactments by invited artists. Between Name is my reenactment of Buckminster Fuller’s “Manhattan Island Dome.”

Between Name perceives life as the movement of giving and dissolving shape; of risings and finitudes mediated by the body. It thinks of the intervals among shapes as part of what defines shape itself; suggesting an invisibly cohesive tension between actions and their environment. The project enacts an architecture that resists stability. It does so by performing links between hapticity and geometry. Links that address the interrelatedness of inhabitation, and question architecture and the city as embodiments of socio-political actions.

Fuller’s Dome contains a human habitat within an enclosed climate. In so doing, it sets it apart from a larger ecology. Gated Communities come to mind as ready-made living conditions designed from the top down. Stable and localized. The reenactment resists the localization of life into an apparatus, and seeks to dissolve the Dome into a series of actions. “Architecture is about Surprise” states Niemeyer.

Between name proposes an inverse geometry built form the bottom up. One that engages with a plurality of centers, where movements become constitutive of space, and space constitutive of an event. It proposes a re-organization of the urban syntax by resisting conventional boundaries between the built and the unbuilt— conceiving the city not as a site, but rather as a contingent and flexible medium.

The project embraces Fuller’s criticism of “Touch and Go” as a structural paradigm, and equates Yves Klein’s “Leap into the Void” with Parkour. As an art form, Parkour is concerned with overcoming obstacles. With dissolving architectural limits through the body. Its movements are reductive, focusing on essential gestures that touch- and-go. Practitioners are called Tracers. The project imagines tracers as living sensors let loose within an environment. Sensors that at each point of contact with a surface inscribe nodes, or vertices, within a larger system. The nodes are then joined and extruded into geometric atmospheres which—like Gaudi’s catenary models— are reversed to reveal dimensional forces at work. Forces that appear to dissolve into one another. Fluid and affected.