This past Saturday night, Silver Lake landscape and architecture research center Materials & Applications celebrated its latest outdoor installation (the Silver Lake Blvd center shows two outdoor installations a year) with a party. Called "Phalanstery Module," the piece was inspired by "a comic book which asserts commentaries regarding the Frank Lloyd Wright vision of a Utopian city." Judging from the scene on Sunday morning, shoes are optional in this gravity-free Utopia. Beer bottles: required. Complete description of the project after the jump.
Via the M & A site: "This installation grows from the hypothesizes that in zero-gravity, one can rotate (in) architecture and treat all elevations as plans - i.e., walls, ceilings and floors. Without gravity, all surfaces can be occupied. In essence, the distinctions between orthographic drawings become obsolete. To this end the installation will be a large constantly rotating structure which visitors will be able to approach and use differently every time.
The installation is inspired by a comic book [Jimenez] Lai created to assert commentaries regarding the Broadacre City-- a 1932 Frank Lloyd Wright vision of a Utopian city where each family own a one-acre agrarian plot and commutes by private automobile. Wright never really took into account that space and natural resources are limited. We are witnessing such an impact today. Wealthier citizens have fled cities for sprawling suburban sub-divisions. Downtown cores are left to the poor, and cities are becoming increasingly ineffective in controlling energy consumption. Lai takes Broadacre City to outer space. Flipping it on its side and making it an Ark are ways he signifies that resources are finite. It is a world where every man (gets) a dwelling unit and every man (gets) a pointlessly boring job... until the citizen dies.”"
· M & R [Official Site]
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