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.
Catie Newell: Second Story
Amplifying, transporting, and distorting the volumes surrounding and within a contested existing domestic environment, Second Story reconfigures spaces that were once familiar into an “other” occupation and visual register. Used to imprint the space and excite the atmosphere, this inhabitable texture is driven by the manipulation of standard factory produced acrylic rods designed to capture, manipulate, and distort the existing volumes of the second story of an abandoned house slated for demolition: Spencer’s Funeral Home in Flint, Michigan. Inherently transparent, the rods capture and permit the light to pass through, but distort its path through refraction and reflection altering the view beyond, the perception of its physical boundaries, and heightening the role of the building in the context of the neighborhood. This work agitates, relocates, and makes new volumes accessible that are otherwise unused, nonexistent, or unoccupiable: the exterior zone, the wall depth, and the depth of a windowsill. As a further technique of distortion and interplay of tectonic connection and assembly, the acrylic rods are systematically manipulated through the use of heat. One technique allows for the bending and forming of components to create a pattern that resonates with its context, but also distorts the existing relationships within the house to construct depth and volume. Another alteration is the tapering and pulling of the rods to develop extensions and strands that flee in a near weightless in pursuit of space, altering both the depth they occupy and how they are perceived. The “otherness” of Second Story is further heightened by suspending the piece above the ground by tethering it to the building’s roof trusses so that it hovers to promote an ephemeral sense of space, an attuned acknowledgement of its surrounding, and an implied stretched atmosphere.
Catie Newell is a founding partner of Alibi Studio, a firm committed to design through research and making on scales ranging from furniture and installations to residential, and site developments. Her work manipulates existing spaces and materials, focusing on the development of new atmospheres through the exploration of textures, volumes, and the effects of light, or lack thereof. Newell is a faculty member at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning where she was the 2009-2010 Oberdick Fellow. She received her Masters of Architecture from Rice University and a Bachelor of Science in architecture from Georgia Tech. In 2006 she was awarded the SOM Prize for Architecture, Design and Urban Design with her project proposal entitled Weather Permitting. Prior to starting Alibi Studio Newell worked as a project designer and coordinator at Office dA in Boston. She was recently awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers.
Thursday, June 23rd 2011, 6 – 9 pm Exhibition Opening, 7 pm Lecture
Second Story is sponsored by Extension Gallery, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, and University of Michigan Center for Research on Learning and Teaching.
Extension Gallery is sponsored by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, Archeworks, Skidmore, Owings and Merrill LLP and Gensler.
Second Story by Catie Newell of Alibi Studio at Extension Gallery. A walkabout. from Catie Newell on Vimeo.
