Extension Gallery is an experimental forum for testing new thought and practice in architecture. It is a platform for dialog between national and international practices and investigation of the relations between architecture and other disciplines. The gallery commissions architects that adopt a diverse set of architectural theories to design and construct site-specific installations that transform the gallery space with their work and allow visitors to explore and experience current architectural thought in practice.
Eric Ellingsen: SEA (Seeing Eye Architecture)
Like Seeing Eye dogs, miniature service horses, assisting chimps and parrots, Architecture Service Animals are structural organizations bred for the working apperception of space and matter. Chicago’s Architecture Service Animal is bred following nature as a model. Nature does not design a dog. Nature designs dogs. ASA’s are systems not single forms. Because every space and time is unique, the unique and continuous re-engagement of our bodies and minds is required. Architecture Service Animal’s are designed to assist that re-engagement, for the pragmatics of spatial stability and structural survival in the space of the gallery. But they are also designed for the luxury of looking, the space of wonder, the delight and pleasure in pattern and material organization, for the perceptual fitting that takes place between matter, organization, space, and mind.
Architecture Service Animals are not there for our emotional support or to look at as comfort animals.
They are working animals to look with for our spatial re-abilities, not pets.
Species of Space is an experiment in design studios founded by Eric Ellingsen in 2009. It is structured on the illogical leaps of open door experimental collaboration, cultivated difference, the responsibility of risk, and the joy of the embodied imagination playing in space and matter.
The exhibition was sponsored by Extension Gallery, The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the MLA program at IIT and the Driehaus Foundation and the Chicago Sister Cities program, Casablanca – Chicago.
May 7th through July 10th 2009
