Visual excess? Exploring the space between social promiscuity and solipsistic trance? Sounds like our kind of night. Architect Barbara Bestor considers social and communal experiences by staging a temporary disco at SCI-Arc. The six-week installation kicks off with a party Friday night and continues on view at the downtown architecture school where she often teaches.
"The design of the structure is an over-scaled, unfolded demi-dodecahedron model that contains a strong graphic interface," says Barbara, a pal who helped create a similarly strong graphic code to the A+R interior (and we love her for it!) "The title ‘Silent Disco’ refers to both the less populated hours of the gallery and to the space itself, when it is unplugged but still dancing.”
For Barbara, this exercise wasn't about erecting something static. From the homes she builds inside out to the pop-up installations for Paper magazine, pleasure—communal, corporeal and visual—is right there in the quirky charm and simple beauty of our every day surroundings and experiences.
This Friday's dance party is dubbed ¡Disco Silencio! A second follows on April 22 as ¡Disco Callado! Both feature live deejay sets via that modern and prosaic of music lover tools, the iPad. Barbara's take on what it's all about follows:
¡Disco Silencio!
Disco Architecture encourages visual excess and explores the space between social promiscuity and solipsistic trance. Silent Disco employs technologies of superficial deception inspired by Razzle Dazzle camouflage. This WW1 military technique used bold graphic and anamorphic surfaces to mislead enemy bombers about the size, speed and direction of a warship. Within our constructed space, this deflective graphic strategy is conjoined with the reflective effect of embedded mirror ball fragments whose strategy is to distort the visual space by refracting light - a hybrid military and disco architectures of surface.
¡Disco Refugio!
This disco is a refuge, providing respite from the institutional production of architecture with a program that stimulates communal exchange. When unfolded, the shape of this over-scale three-dimensional form reveals a dance floor that invites the social and engages the physical - a polyhedron of hedonism. The plywood panels appear to advance and recede within the space, obscuring the parameters of the disco and offering up multiple spatial possibilities based on the visual perception of form. Silent Disco is a stealthy architecture, imbued with disinformation of literal form.
¡Disco Callado!
In real time, Silent Disco has a day and nightlife of its own. By day, the reflective surfaces capture and refract rays, populating the space with a silent volume of light, both tranquil and kinetic. By night, the disco has many programs - including a downloadable soundtrack and dance parties with DJs, lasers, projections and fog. Like any other club, the Silent Disco's geometry naturally offers back rooms and dark corridors, an alternative refuge to the visual din of the dance floor.
Barbara Bestor Architecture: Silent Disco at SCI-Arc, 960 East 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013. Opening reception: Friday, April 1, 7 to 9 p.m. Installation runs through May 15.
Renderings Courtesy of Bestor Architecture
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Posted by: Cummerbund | Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 11:26 PM