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.

http://www.cathlynnewell.com/

Second Story by Catie Newell of Alibi Studio at Extension Gallery. A walkabout. from Catie Newell on Vimeo.

CHANGING ROOM is a mirage of the intimate in the realm of the public.
Situated in the context of the gallery, this installation proposes its oscillating redefinitions of the intimate and the public as an experimental architectural expression. The psychological conditions associated with transparency, reflectivity, illumination and lightness intersect with their material expression in a lightweight semitransparent dichroic polycarbonate surface. This surface is the temporary veil that creates the ambient conditions of CHANGING ROOM. At the same time the surface is organized by the textile and tectonic logic of a herringbone weave to perform as a structural skin shell and create faceted surface conditions that allow for maximum visual dichroic and transparent effects.

Friday, April 8th 2011, 6pm – Lecture and Exhibition Opening

April 8 – June 3, 2011

Changing Room is sponsored by Extension Gallery, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, National Endowment for the Arts, NY State Council on the Arts and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, NY.

Please visit the following link to review and support this installation:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/925393979/changing-room-an-experimental-environment

http://www.eastoncombs.com/

The Active Layer is an homage to the complex glaciated landscape of the Arctic.  The regional geology and climatic conditions give rise to a vast diversity of unique aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems found within the permafrost layer, glaciated rock, and the millions of melt water pools that form in sunken pockets of the land.  The Active Layer invites visitors to experience this condition, to be immersed in it, and observe its complex patterns and terrain.  Over 25,000 unique points fill the gallery in a tight array making different topographic heights and bathymetric depths.  The work can be read as both a scaled immersive  Arctic landscape and a hypnotic spatial moray of points and lines.

October 15, 2010, 6:00 pm – Opening Lecture & Exhibition

October 15 – December 3, 2010

This exhibition is sponsored by Extension Gallery, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Archeworks, Cambridge Galleries, Canada Council for the Arts, and Consulate General of Canada in Chicago.

http://www.lateralarch.com/master.html

“THEVERYMANY is looking for a bottom up protocol of creation – first, extracting a specific problem within the broad field of architecture (issues of constructability), experimenting at smaller scale models, finding geometrical possibilities (tending toward degrees of “efficiencies”), slowly growing back in scale through computation to building larger physical prototypes and eventually reaching back to a scale of inhabitable architecture in the near future….”

April 1st, 2010, 6 PM – Lecture and Exhibition Opening

April 1st  through September 10th 2010

http://www.theverymany.net/

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

The complexity of this project, composed within a nine-grid, lies within the intricacies of the joinery system: it is all soft / flexible. When one connection point is moved, the entire structure will deform. This allows the piece to become interactive with the visitors, as they will be able to actively change its form. The dimensions of the grid are highly suggestive of sitting, grabbing, or leaning. During the gallery off hours the installation will self-illuminate.

The exhibition was sponsored by Extension Gallery, Podmajersky, Inc., and The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.

January 9th through March 14th 2009

http://www.bureau-spectacular.net/

Unseen Current is an atmospheric nebula that saturates Extension Gallery. An immersive installation unknowable in its entirety when viewed from a single perspective, it invites visitors to navigate it like a dense rolling fog. Is it a body or is it a surface? Not exactly either, requiring over ten miles of brightly colored twine, 3000 sagging strings or “catenaries” will come together to form the project. Each catenary spans across the gallery and is unique in length. The designers used custom software developed for the project by Pylon Technical to explore the form and compute the position and length of the individual catenaries.

Philip Johnson’s ethereal hanging-chain window treatments at the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building served as inspiration for the design. Ball-Nogues “sample” what was essentially a two dimensional decorative motif for Johnson then reinterpret it for their three dimensional spatial modulations in the gallery.

The exhibition was sponsored by Extension Gallery, Podmajersky, Inc., The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the United Sates Artists.

March 14th through December 20th 2008

http://www.ball-nogues.com/unseen_current/

The Vivisys installation is an experimental double-curved lattice vault that plays host to an extraordinary cluster of rapidly prototyped aluminum and acrylic barnacles. Three-dimensional auroras of blue electron emitting cold cathode tubes respond to interactions from their environment. Vivisys synthesizes patterns of the organic and the manufactured into a new creative paradigm for energy, form and matter.

The exhibition was sponsored by Extension Gallery, Podmajersky, Inc., The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The University of Virginia School of Architecture, Tektonics Design and Fabrication Group (Richmond, Virginia), and 3Form.

November 29th 2007 through January 13th 2008

http://www.future-cities-lab.net

The Dresser Trunk Project curated by William Daryl Williams, is the recovery of lost stories, memories, and places of refuge for traveling black musicians playing in the Chitlin’Circuit during segregation.  Inspired by the Cornell boxes, eleven participants designed trunks that each tells the story of a place of refuge in an era of segregation.  The place include a hotel, a residence, a club, a section of a train station or even a Negro League baseball park.  The stories will include who passed through and how their experiences at that location may have influenced culture and music.  All places are located in a city served by the Southern Crescent Line.

Eleven cities have been identified from New York to New Orleans.  For each city, a dresser trunk was designed similar to those used by musicians on their travels.  The trunks contain stories, photographs, maps, hotel registers, and images of the way places looked during their travels and speculations on their future.  The trunks are planned to tour each of the eleven sites by train, and will be exhibited in an Amtrak train car.  Before the exhibition gets on its trail, it will be exhibited at Extension.

The Dresser Trunk Project is significant in its preservation of a unique cultural heritage that is being lost to the ravages of time and the pressures of development.  It strives to link isolated places together in a chain that gives each their rightful place in architectural, music and cultural history.

Participants: Felecia Davis, Yolande Daniels, William Daryl Williams, Lisa Henry-Benham, Mabel Wilson, Mario Gooden, David Brown, Craig Barton, Scott Ruff, Nat Belcher and Walter Hood.

The exhibition was sponsored by Extension Gallery and Podmajersky, Inc.

September 14th through October 14th 2007.

http://www.williamdarylwilliams.com/Site/DTP_Gallery.html#0

The Descent is an installation of three nested spaces that offer a voyage of vertiginous descent inside atmospheric parameters of space.  The envelopes introduce, in succession, a decline in temperature, illumination, and humidity.  The Descent sensitizes the visitor to the transformation of architecture in correlation to climatic global warming and the construction of atmospheres as a new tool of organization in architecture.  Philippe Rahm’s work challenges the architectural notion “form follows function” or “function follows form,” and instead suggests that architecture should follow climate.

The exhibition was sponsored by Extension Gallery and Podmajersky, Inc.

April 13th through Aug. 18th 2007

http://www.philipperahm.com/