Tabaimo: Dandan

Mika Tajima is a New York–based artist whose latest project, The Architect’s Garden, is on view until December 17 at the Visual Arts Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Tajima’s site-specific installation is accompanied by a program of events, including a conversation she had with Richard Linklater, director of the 1991 film Slacker. Her latest body of work continues to excavate the social implications of contemporary built environments, and the concomitant development of particular kinds of human performers, such as the flaneur, the slacker, and the good worker.
I DON’T GO TO HOME DEPOT A LOT, but I recently went to the paint section looking for two specific colors, a royal blue and a rusty brown. It’s an easy place for me to select industrialized mixed colors and coincidentally complements the idea behind The Architect’s Garden. The experience of picking colors is bound up in the brand’s dreamy affects—the Ralph Lauren Collection or the Martha Stewart Collection—and reading all the evocative, predetermined color names. One of my favorites was Soul Sister, which is a deep purple, and there’s one called Lion Heart, which is a soft yellow. The exhibition includes an ongoing series of spray-painted Perspex paintings linking visual abstractions to geographic locations—smoky gray and sunglow orange in Furniture Art (Malmo), or banana yellow and gold in Furniture Art (Belize City)—projections of those places, taking you there.
I’ve been thinking a lot about Richard Linklater’s Slacker, which was made in Austin twenty years ago. When I was growing up in Austin, the local resistant figure was, and maybe still is, the slacker. The slacker––not to be confused with involuntary underemployed––makes self-determined choices not to do something—to refuse or strike with little effort. For me, the psychogeography of the film is the polar opposite of an overtly structured environment, like Herman Miller’s Action Office, the first designed cubicle spaces in which work and social interaction were organized to control/produce life’s abstractions. The figure of the slacker is a critique of those systems that regulate bodies and space. It represents the potential possibilities around or at the edges of these regulated places and logics. Slacking is nonperformance in the face of post-Fordist total life.
In our discussion, Linklater talked about how slacking in the film was an aggressive response, a way to be a nonparticipant in a society you don’t see much point in. Perhaps we need the slacker now more than ever, as we hurtle toward an overbuilt negative utopia. The characters in Slacker are having this conversation in 1991, during a time when Austin was pretty removed from commercial development. There’s a character in the movie who says, “I have much more important things to do than work a day job, and when I have my true calling, I’ll know it.” Or the hitchhiker who says, “I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it.”
The characters’ conversations remain prescient. Big box stores, highways, overbearing condominiums and fancy hotels that, even if they are rapidly (and shoddily) built, remain half full or totally empty. There is a new luxury construction in Austin that opened last year. It’s been riddled with construction failures, including windows falling from balconies and crashing to the ground from above—and the building’s slogan? “Whatever/Whenever.”
By making space for nonprescribed functions in The Architect’s Garden, I’m trying to create a structure for slacking. Similarly, in my previous work a painting becomes a double-sided bulletin board, or another architectural element, skirting an object’s normal role or adding other purposes—productive or not. Slacking is a mode of refusal. Perhaps the best representation of the slacker painter is the monochrome.

— As told to Andy Campbell

Art Space Talk: Juilan Stanczak

Monday, July 23, 2007

Art Space Talk: Julian Stanczak

Julian Stanczak has been exploring art for over 60 years. He is considered by some to be the father of Op Art. However, that is a title that Mr. Stanczak is not very fond of. I found Mr. Stanczak to be extremely humble considering the mark he has made in the world of art. Julian is an artist who does not permit ego to overshadow his work.

Julian's art is an exploration of what it is to see- his work challenges the viewers perception through his mastery of color. His art can be viewed as a journey into the miracle of sight and an amplification of discoveries in that journey. This understanding of color is only matched by the seriousness in which he creates his art- a life long journey that he continues to explore. His ongoing contributions to the artworld are considered to be one of the most significant since the American Abstract Artists movement.

Mr.Stanczak's art can be observed in several major public and private collections throughout the world- including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC). Julian's art can also be found in the collections of several colleges and universities- Princeton University, Dartmouth College and the University of Illinois, just to name a few.

Brian Sherwin: The Op Art movement was named for your first exhibition in New York. Held at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1964, the exhibition was titled Julian Stanczak: Optical Paintings. Can you recall how you felt having had an art movement named after your work? How does it feel to be the father of Op Art?

Julian Stanczak: I don't consider myself the "Father of Op Art" and I hated the title of my first one-man-show in New York. I was shocked by the terminology "Optical Painting" because it diminishes the seriousness of the artist's search, the hard work and convictions - regardless of the visual form that it might take. Martha Jackson used the title as a means of provoking the media to respond,- and they did! So it was clever politics... I never did nor ever will consider myself "Father of Op Art"!

Optical Art existed through millennia as the visual investigation of human perception. With the years, I learned to accept the terminology and I adopted my philosophy: now the name attached to me is just a name.

BS: Mr. Stanczak, may we discuss your youth? Can you reflect on your past and explain how it shaped your future in art? At the beginning of World War II you were forced into a Siberian labor camp, where you permanently lost the use of your right arm (You happened to be right-handed.). In 1942, at the age of 13, you escaped Siberia to join the Polish army-in-exile in Persia. How did these early experiences of struggle and war influence your future work? Also, how did you make the transition of having lost the use of your right arm to painting with your left-hand?

JS: The transition from using my left hand as my right, main hand, was very difficult. My youthful experiences with the atrocities of the Second World War are with me,- but I wanted to forget them and live a "normal" life and adapt into society more fully. In the search for Art, you have to separate what is emotional and what is logical. I did not want to be bombarded daily by the past,- I looked for anonymity of actions through non-referential, abstract art.

In visual art, there are two important elements: 1. boundary formations and the tease of the familiar, and 2. the poetics of color. I am juggling both of these visual quests for the past 60 years and I am finding echoes through-out history of these same concerns.

BS: Many people would stop working after loosing the use of their main hand. I actually know a few artists who stopped working after enduring such a tragedy. They never got over it. Considering the experiences of your youth and the loss of the use of your right arm... all of the obstacles you had overcome... would you say that your work is about survival? Was that a key element to your growth as an artist?

JS: All human chosen preoccupations are about survival!

BS: Can you tell our readers about some of your other influences? For example, has music inspired you?

JS: All the arts feed on one another and help clarify the quest. The greatest influence I find in the parallel of art,- the creative richness of nature. I greatly admire Far Eastern Sumi painting, Egyptian figures, Monet's colors, and Van Gogh's abstractions....

BS: You received your Master of Fine Arts from Yale University School of Art and Architecture in 1956. Who were your mentors at that time? How did they influence or inspire the art you have become known for?

JS: Conrad Marca Relli and Josef Albers were my teachers at Yale. One would clabber me and the other would protect me from clabbering myself. They took away everything I thought I knew- and at the end,- through self-confrontation,- they offered much and I found myself whole. I learned to love my teachers.

BS: Mr. Stanczak, in the early 1960s you began to make the surface plane of your paintings vibrate through your use of wavy lines and contrasting colors in works such as Provocative Current (1965). These paintings gave way to more complex compositions constructed with geometric rigidity yet softened with varying degrees of color transparency such as Netted Green (1972). Can you recall the progression of your work? Was it an issue of trial and error... or did you map out the progression of your work?

JS: Anything one designs to follow in one's art, through working many pathways offer themselves as visual possibilities. This awareness of possibilities leads you: you weigh and analyze and project mentally the validity of those possibilities and with truthfulness you decide if these should be yours. You syphon out what fascinates you, which you modify and they in turn enrich the direction in which you should go.

BS: In addition to being an artist, you have also been a teacher, having worked at the Art Academy of Cincinnati from 1957 to 1964 and as a Professor of painting at the Cleveland Institute of Art from 1964 to 1995. How did you find balance between being an art instructor and a working artist? Also, were you inspired by your students?

JS: Teaching and having a regular income was a necessity for me. Teaching makes you crystallize your ethics and concepts. Having fragile young minds around you, full of anxieties, is challenging. To be of assistance and help and recognize surprises (each of us is so different) one has to tune into their state of mind. This unveiling of new creative life/energy is the reward.

BS: Mr. Stanczak, your most recent work has been creating a large-scale series, comprised of square panels on which you examine variations of hue and chroma in illusionistic color modulations. Are you working on anything at this time?

JS: Yes, and I still have lots of work to do... I am a colorist and I do not dwell any longer on the resolution of the unknown - which is color! Physical problems, acquired through age, make large paintings impossible - but I work on small panels and bring them together into a new totality. These are the constellations that I work on now.

BS: Finally, is there anything you would like to say to younger artists? Do you have any suggestions or advice for them?

JS: Don't look for art outside yourself,- you can only find it within yourself.- and most likely,- you are already stepping on it!

 

 

Stanczak's work is characterized by scientific precision and the illusion of pulsating motion. using repeated line patterns, his work studies the optical behavior of colors in close proxmity to each other. His work earned him the moniker "Father of Op art."

 

on lines, he writes: "I found line-repeated line with its potent timing-paralleling many aspects of daily life. From the point of action, line behavior is distinct from color; line activates the surface fo the canvas more than a single flat color. This activation of a surface through varous oppositions of values and wavelengths of line in different situations, offers not a stable but an endlessly active surface, which is controlled by the range of color-fusion and tempo."

 

The effect is not just visual, but also visceral, as the repetitious patters appear to emerge and change at the CAC in 1961, and has since exhibited all over Ohio and the world.

 

 

Katharina Grosse

By David Ebony 12/31/69

View Slideshow Images this article, unless otherwise noted, Katharina Grosse’s exhibition “One Floor Up More Highly,” 2010-11, soil, wood, acrylic, Styrofoam, clothing, acrylic on glass-fiber-reinforced plastic, and acrylic on canvas; at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass. Photos Arthur Evans. Grosse works courtesy Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.; Images this article, unless otherwise noted, Katharina Grosse’s exhibition “One Floor Up More Highly,” 2010-11, soil, wood, acrylic, Styrofoam, clothing, acrylic on glass-fiber-reinforced plastic, and acrylic on canvas; at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass. Photos Arthur Evans. Grosse works courtesy Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, Vienna, and Christopher Grimes Gallery, Santa Monica. © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.;

Mass MANY EUROPEANS THINK OF AMERICA in terms of vast landscapes and infinite sky, and urban centers packed with towering buildings and teeming masses, all in a rather precarious state of flux. The sprawling and spectacular site-specific exhibition by German artist Katharina Grosse at MASS MoCA, “One Floor Up More Highly,” seems to reflect this view. Organized by the museum’s curator Susan Cross, the show could be seen as an homage to an idealized if not wholly fictional place, such as the American frontier. But it soon proves to be a multifaceted installation, inviting myriad interpretations.
This project, like most of Grosse’s large-scale installations, incorporates massive sculptural features that
allude simultaneously to empirical space and an imaginative vista. Yet the artist’s primary means of expression is painting, and the thrust of the work is rigorously abstract. She employs painting’s illusionistic devices of light and shadow, and, with a subtle manipulation of other elements, suggests complex narratives. Over the past decade, she has developed a unique working method and a singular approach to painting that has taken the medium far beyond its traditional domain.
Grosse typically designs intricate but ramshackle constructions using mounds of dirt, found objects and fabricated abstract shapes in wood, Styrofoam or plastic. Once the tableau is in place, she dons protective gear that resembles a hazmat suit and wields an industrial spray gun. She moves through the environment—usually on foot, but sometimes on scaffolding or suspended from a crane—covering almost everything in her path with brilliant, saturated color. Occasionally, she coats the gallery’s furniture, walls, windows and ceiling, incorporating the architecture into the art.
Grosse’s rather novel practice has been compared to graffiti and street art. More convincingly, she commingles the diverse tactics of artists such as Robert Smithson (in his earthworks) and Jules Olitski (in his misty Color Field canvases) to create something startlingly new. A large part of her practice is performative, albeit without much of an audience. Since she uses a compressor to keep the paint moving, she must act quickly and deliberately to complete the work. Unlike the Action Painters or Expressionists, with their convulsive brushwork and gestures, Grosse never comes into direct contact with the surfaces. Her physical if not psychological detachment seems related to Conceptual art. However, her technique involves a machismo stance, with aggression modified by a kind of opulent sensuality.
BORN IN FREIBURG/BREISGAU in 1961, Grosse studied with Gotthard Graubner at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Works by Gerhard Richter and Nam June Paik were early influences. She currently teaches at the Kunstakademie, even though several years ago she relocated to Berlin. She now lives and works much of the time in a striking Bauhaus-style home and studio in Berlin’s old city center that she commissioned from architects Ute Frank and Georg Augustin.
Her early paintings, from the late 1980s and early ’90s, are spare gestural compositions that at times recall Mark Rothko’s work or, more closely, the Zenlike, brushy late abstractions of Hans Hartung. Attracted to shaped canvases and unconventional materials, Grosse experimented with unusual painting supports ranging from found objects to a lightweight resin material used for surfboards. In some sense her work is akin to postwar movements such as the French Supports/Surfaces, in its approach to abstract-painting-as-object, as well as Arte Povera, in its use of abject materials.
Grosse’s art blossomed and her career took off when, in 1998, she began adding passages of spray paint onto canvases and directly onto gallery walls. Growing increasingly bold and elaborate over the past decade, Grosse’s large-scale installations, which she has been invited to produce in many parts of the world, have brought her significant notice. Her first in the U.S., at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, in 2001, was widely praised in the art press, as were subsequent exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati (2006), and the Renaissance Society in Chicago (2007). Her untitled work for the 2008 New Orleans biennial, Prospect.1, garnered considerable attention and was reproduced in numerous art publications, including this one [A.i.A., Feb. ’09]. Amid post-Katrina devastation, she covered a derelict home in sweeping sprays of yellow and orange-red to suggest that it was on fire.
The most ambitious installation Grosse has produced in the U.S. to date, “One Floor Up More Highly”—whose title comes from a phrase scrawled on a building, directing patients to a dentist’s office near Grosse’s Berlin studio—is an interrelated, multipart work that fills three enormous galleries. The largest section is a rather theatrical panorama situated on the ground floor of the former textile mill. Stepping into the cavernous gallery of MASS MoCA’s Building 5—about the size of a football field—viewers encounter hills, valleys and mountains. Pathways allow easy passage and offer numerous vantage points to view this peculiar and richly varied terrain. Visitors are dwarfed by tall slabs of unpainted white Styrofoam rising some 30 feet. Sliced and shaped with a hot wire into pointy stalagmites or giant crystals, the pieces also evoke sections of collapsed skyscrapers, or even more closely, crumbling glaciers.
The jagged white slabs thrust skyward from waist-high mounds of dirt, studded with real twigs, gravel and rocks. These, plus huge resin boulders, are all spray-painted in great swathes of outlandish hues: hot pink, deep red-orange, Day-Glo green, yellow and blue. The piles of sprayed dirt have the rich density of tons of dried pigment, a feature that recalls certain Yves Klein works of the 1950s.
The overall image conveys the sense of awe that one feels in response to nature, like paintings by 19th-century German Romantics. Specifically, the work calls to mind Caspar David Friedrich’s majestic 1823-24 painting of a ship wreck in the arctic, The Sea of Ice, in the collection of the Hamburger Kunsthalle. This painting of a doomed expedition imparts a sense of tragic beauty not unlike the mood Grosse establishes. Her wildly colorful environment indicates an abstract, phantasmagoric mindscape that might offer a transcendent experience. At the very least, “One Floor Up More Highly” invites a sustained reverie. In order to arrive at that state, however, the viewer traversing the space is obliged to accept a visual, intellectual and physical engagement with the work. Grosse’s installation is most effective as it envelops viewers in a kaleidoscopic fusion of color, form, rhythm and texture.
In the middle of one long wall, sprays of red, blue and purple rise from the floor to cover rows of high windows. The translucent acrylic allows highlights of color to further enliven the space in the manner of stained glass. At first unnoticed, tangled wads of clothing appear throughout Grosse’s installation, including sweaters, pants and shirts wedged between rocks or partially buried under the dirt, all garishly painted over. Despite the high tones, the gnarled garments imply something sinister. Conjuring disappeared bodies and unknown human remains left behind after some calamity, the ragged clothing adds an abrupt note of discord to the lush environment, and a hint of despair.
Literally embedded in the landscape, the perplexing details provoke considerable consternation. What has happened here? Where are we? Are we confronting the past, present or future? The overall design suggests the scene of a momentous event, but whether apocalyptic or regenerative remains a matter of speculation. What is clear is the unexpected emotional impact these garments give to the entire installation. What initially appeared rather simply as Grosse’s witty and fanciful cosmic playground suddenly implies a narrative with darker connotations—the aftermath of war or an environmental catastrophe, as examples. It could be the site of a nuclear disaster, where everything still glows with a sort of radioactive aura. Providing no specific answers, the artist leaves the viewer to conjure his or her own scenario.
In a counterpoint, Grosse, with a sizable dose of humor, adds a passage of quiet respite. A long bench, in the form of a wooden plank traversing a large mound of bright red dirt, allows visitors to rest and contemplate the view, as one would in a nature preserve. Across from the bench, one of Grosse’s large, shaped abstract compositions lies on the floor. Painted with sprays and splashes of yellow, green and red on a thick white panel made of surfboard material (glass-fiber-reinforced plastic), the concave, elliptical object recalls a giant kite or stylized airplane wings.
MOVING FROM THE MAIN GALLERY into a smaller room with lower ceilings, visitors enter an entirely different realm of Grosse’s invention. This space appears enclosed like a large basement or a warehouse. Broad passages of paint in fluorescent pink, viridian green, purple, orange and lime seem more urban and graffitilike than those in the larger gallery. They cover the floor, walls and ceiling, suggesting the interior of a tacky nightclub after the crowd has gone home and the lights have been turned up.
Articles of clothing appear again—T-shirts, underwear and slacks—this time strewn about the floor and covered with paint. Once again these disembodied garments spark broad and unsettling speculation. Perhaps they belonged to hedonists who disrobed during a heated, drug-fueled rave. Or is this evidence found at a crime scene: murder at the disco, perhaps, or a shoot-out at the bar?
At the far end of the room, seven tall, white rectangular shapes on the wall stand out against a florid background of neon green, blue and bright red. Made with stencils that blocked the spray, the rectangles appear like doors or windows, an illusionistic device to suggest the source of light that fills the room. The painted doorways imply a world beyond the gallery, like portals to a fictive space. Near the last rectangle, in front of an actual doorway, narrow passages of white look like beams of light cast on the floor. They help guide visitors toward the door, out of the room and up a tall staircase, at the top of which one finds yet another imaginative environment.
This upper gallery, smaller than the others, is a kind of terrace overlooking the main space. From here, the view of the vast installation below is arresting. And, on this upper level, the scope of Grosse’s vision becomes apparent. The works here may be seen either as a summation or an introduction to her art. On view are finely wrought examples of the three principal types of works that have preoccupied her for the past decade: installations, three-dimensional paintings and more conventional wall-hung canvases.
A kind of abbreviated version of the ground floor installation, a mound of dirt and twigs at the center of the gallery is sprayed luminous shades of blue, orange and yellow. Bundles of clothing poke out from the mound. Placed horizontally on the floor, an enormous convex panel painted mostly red looks like a stylized surfboard 15 feet long. It partially covers the colorful pile of debris. The elliptical work corresponds to the concave panel piece integrated into the first-floor installation. It also relates to a series of huge shaped paintings that Grosse recently created as permanent public works in Germany.
One such piece, an approximately 30-foot-high convex oval composition in purple and green, was installed last year on the facade of the Johanneskirche, a 19th-century Baroque-style Protestant church in downtown Düsseldorf.
More traditional in format, if not in image and design, a single, untitled canvas from 2010, an approximately 8-by-6-foot rectangle, represents the third group of works. Using sprays, pours and stencils, Grosse suggests here an undulating, fractured field of purple, red and gold. Though abstract, the painting echoes the collagelike layering found in some of James Rosenquist’s deconstructed images. The only wall-hung work in the show, the painting appears as a solitary icon on the otherwise empty back wall. The canvas bears a contradictorily grand and elegiac demeanor as if emblematic of the evolution of abstract painting. It also serves as a key to the entire exhibition, since it brings Grosse’s endeavor full circle. She transmutes the abstract visual language that began with paintings by artists such as Malevich, Kandinsky and Kupka in the early years of the 20th century and makes it intelligible and practical in the 21st century.
CURRENTLY ON VIEW “Katharina Grosse: One Floor Up More Highly,” MASS MoCA, North Adams, Mass., through Oct. 31

ongoing competition

Deadline: Oct. 15, 2011
Title: "Simply the Best": Juried Digital-Arts Show
Sponser: Digital Arts: California, division of Art and Design Initiative
Jurors: Virginia Christensen, Glen Christensen, and guest juror
Eligibility: Professional, non-professional and student digital artists and photographers are eligible. All works whose creation or presentation involves a digital process are eligible. Works by entrants under age 18 myst be submitted by parent or guardian on behalf of entrant.
Fees: $25 (1 - 5 images)
Website: http://www.DigitalArtsCalifornia.com









Deadline: Oct. 26 2011
Title: A Show of Light
Sponsor: Flow Art Space
Awards: gallery show, promotion on website, artist reception
Jurors: Artist and Flow Art Space Founder Melissa Metzler
Eligibility: During the darkest time of year, the gallery will be lit up with art that uses light as its focus, including art that depicts light, art that uses actual light, and art that references light. Sculpture, drawing, painting, fiber, photography, glass, ceramics, wood, mixed media, etc. are all wecome. 18 years of age or older.
Fees: $40 for 4 images
Website: http:// www.flowartspace.com










Deadline: Nov. 4 2011
Title: Richeson 75 small works 2012 international art competition
Sponsor: Richeson School of Art & Gallery/ Jack richeson & Co.
Awards: $5000 cash best in show, 2 $1000 Richeson Art Materials Awards, 2 $500 Richeson Art Materials awards
Juror: to be announced
Eligibility: Artwork image must have an area of 144 square inches or less. Artist must be eage 18 or ove. Artwork to be entered must be 2-D and drawn/painted intirely "by hand." Acceptable media are oil, acrylic, oil pastel, soft pastel, water media, dray media or hand-pulled prints. No digitally enhanced or created artwork, no giclees and no photography will be accepted. Art work must be original in concept and execution
Fees: $30 first imege, $10 each additional image up to 6 images total
Website: http://www.richeson75.com

Op Art - Bridget Riley

Illusional Pattern

-Her works appears to flicker, pulsate and move, encouraging the viewers' visual tension.

-Gray is largely an illusion of overlapping circles.

-As your eyes explore the picture to the left, can you continue to see momentary after images that cause a slight flickering effect.



-Works meticulously, carefully mixing her colors to achieve the exact hue and intensity she desires.

-Explores color interaction first in small guache color studies. then moving to full-size paper-ad-guache designs. The large-scale canvases are then marked up and painted entirely by had-first in aryl and then in oil.

"The eye can travel over the surface in a way parallel to the way ti moves over nature. It should feel caressed and soothed, experience frictions and ruptures, glide and drift. One moment, there will be nothing to look at and the next second the canvas seems to refill, to be crowded with visual events."

Language of Architectural Illustration

Kevin Appel

-beautifully architecturalted compositions of horizontal and vertical planes, lusciously colored and made semitransparent by the use of liquid acrylic rather than paints.

-sequential

-achieving a transparency that allows a distinction between masses and void rivaling that of the traditional ink and vellum.

Khedoori

-compositions have the look of architectural illustration

-delineated horizon

A horizontal line was a delineator of illusionistic space for the lot masters, and it remained a firm spatial cue, moving between 2 and 3-D, until modern artists reinterpreted it as a trace of the movement of the artist's body

Julie Mehretu

- using the impersonality of architectural diagrams as a kind of code. She creates recognizable but unidentifiable cities, both hybrid and generic.

-multi-D in that Mehretu borrows still another architectural convention; the layering of drawings on translucent material, one atop the other. 

Installation Art

Installation arts are more about interpreting a space and giving it a new meaning or, in some cases, drawing out what that spec is in it self. 

Surreal Architectural Installation Art at Clark Shoes International Headquarters by Roso

 

Public installation art by Doris Salcedo

Raindrops Installation Art by Stacee Kalmanrosky

This rain art installation project goes against two basic associations we have with rain: that it falls only on the outside of buildings and that it is always in motion and difficult to see while moving. By contrast, people can walk through this controlled space and see, feel and push each individual drop of rain. 

Turning the place over by Richard Wilson

The building envelope is what defines the difference between interior and exterior, public and private. This moving building wall project contorts and distorts that strict boundary, literally spinning a section of wall visible to pedestrians passing by on the street below.