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detail:
Frank Lloyd Wright Robie House
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Landscape
1997
Constructed
paper kit houses, model turf, wooden tables
Included in "Bay Area Now," Yerba Buena Center for the
Arts, San Francisco
Consisting
of 117 paper houses constructed from prefab kits, then covered
in green turf, "Landscape" is a model city composed of "real"
structures and "ideal" structures--all date from different time
periods of American history, but while some houses are historically
specific (Thomas Edison's laboratory, etc.) others are fictional
structures which mimic ideals ("theater," "train station," etc.).
After researching each buildings' function, they were arranged
to create a "working city," complete with suburbs, a downtown,
farmlands, industrial zones, upscale areas, and working-class
areas. The green fuzz covering each house effectively masks architectural
details and obscures each's individuality, creating a sort of
lost or embalmed city. This city-that-never-was takes these discrete
building blocks of educational/hobbyist, prefab, "ideal" structures
and forces them to coexist with one another, imploding geographic
regions and distance, in an attempt to examine urban/suburban
spaces, and also to explore "America"--through the cloudy lens
of fact and fiction.
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