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SciSKEW Collaborative
For Building Asia Brick by Brick Photo by Masahiro Shoda
STATEMENT
The Red Brick We have designed and fabricated a viewing device for a gallery or museum setting. The function of viewing becomes the process and program for this sculptural piece: the audience is invited to view the viewing process. The periscope form connects the height of an adult to that of a child, both heightening and questioning the act of viewing and the consumption of art. LEGO connotes play. The child's view of play can simply be in the purity of the brick itself and what it can become, but may also use the brick to make things that conform to our figural surroundings. This conforming process is perhaps the baggage of becoming an adult. An adult may never see the brick for what it was. The red brick in the child's viewing portal stands in as an object for such a hypothetical shared interest. There will only be a hint of redness emanating from the adult's viewing portal. The periscope serves as a conceptual hinge between childhood and adulthood, through a viewing of the same LEGO object. The dialogue is between the abstract and the figural, and perhaps between the scale-less and the scaled.
ABOUT sciSKEW COLLABORATIVE
sciSKEW Collaborative is an architectural and design practice based in New York, Shanghai and Singapore. Evolving out of a need to reconcile the triangulated geographies, the initial disparity between the three cities became raw material that feeds the work. sciSKEW seeks to create architecture that can bridge, critique and translate between systems and societies. Since 1999, the practice has projects in New York, Shanghai, Banda Aceh, Tamil Nadu and Singapore. Their work ranges from art and media installations, residential and commercial developments, to master-planning and consulting. After the 2004 Tsunami, they founded the 7+1 consulting initiative for non-profit design work. Principals at sciSKEW have lectured and taught in the US, Denmark, Turkey, China and Singapore, and are currently teaching at Columbia and NYIT.