


Shower Curtain Wall
Proposal: Installation / Performance
2020 - Ongoing
Shower Curtain Wall speculates on the cultural and disciplinary space between the shower
curtain and the curtain wall, and the oppositional spheres they
occupy: keeping
water in versus keeping it out, soft vs hard, private vs public, interior vs exterior, etc. This opposition between the surfaces has its parallel in the
domain of architecture discourse, i.e. the degree to which they attract
scholarly investigation. Additionally,
this pairing illuminates the
boundaries of the discipline, with the curtain wall firmly confined within its
limits, and the shower curtain - with its quotidian associations, “a fleeting
object of study”1 - at its fringes. In projecting
modernist virtues of bureaucratic transparency via the material transparency of
glass, the former attains the status of a disciplinary project,
invariably becoming a tad too disciplined. If the identification of a
medium is an act of institutional reification 2,
then the curtain wall presents as modernism’s medium par excellence.
The research culminates in an exhibition that stages a caress of opposites, of the shower curtain’s surface against that of the curtain wall.
In seeking moments of approximation within a spectrum of institutionally
assigned value, the project unpacks this messy notion of disciplinary proximity.
Surface Rituals
The project adapts performance to mediate oppositions: the requirement for maintenance and cleaning shared by both surfaces plays out as a cleansing ritual (performance). The ritual extends beyond the cleansing of inanimate surfaces and engages the subject surface (the corpus), an allusion to cleansing oneself (showering). Furthermore, this ritual cuts through the metaphysical realm of the discipline (its value assigning regimes) and the material space of the profession (with its maintenance policies). Intersecting the shower curtain and curtain wall, the ritual becomes refracted as a spectacle that coopts the curtain wall’s transparency in service of screening modes of occupancy that flicker between the strange and the routine.
1 Sylvia Lavin, “Critique passionnée or a folie à trois,” in Flash in the Pan (London: Architectural Association, 2014), 7.
2 Waled Beshty, “Aesthetics and Distribution Case (1): Preliminary Notes on Art’s Ability to Radicalize Academia,” in 33 Texts: 93,614 Words: 581,035 Characters (Zurich : JRP | Ringier, 2016), 213.
Images: Elevation and axonometric fabric print studies depicting the curtail wall of the Pepsi-Cola Corporation World Headquarters by Natalie de Blois & Gordon Bunshaft of SOM.