The Insufferable Heaviness of the Gentle Body opened October 27 at Pratt Institute’s Siegel Gallery. Curated by Andrew Holder, James Wooden, and Alex Tahinos, the exhibition asks how light-frame timber development is being reinvented in modern structure.
Or, per a curatorial assertion: “How is the sunshine body being put to such heavy ends?”
The exhibition facilities how light-frame timber development is getting used to mitigate social, environmental, and theoretical issues throughout the self-discipline.
“Prop” turns into an integral verb for curators. Because the exhibition textual content describes, a body can prop up rocks or rolls of metal. It could actually function props for a rally of crowds or it may prop up the load of concept.
The exhibition opened with a roundtable dialogue with friends Laura Salazar-Altobelli of salazarsequeromedina, Leyuan Li of Workplace for Roundtable, and Nick Roseboro and Alessandro Orsini of Architensions in dialog with GA/LA/UD Chair Andrew Holder.
The conceptual framework for the exhibition appears again on the forged iron skeletons of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the balloon body, and the structural utopian fantasies of Fixed or Yona Friedman—situations the place light-frame development was understood as low cost, materially frugal, high-tech, and low-labor.
These architects, the present argues, created buildings that had been didactic or “somatic.” They stem from a interval characterised by a “lightness of substance” each materially and intellectually.
The Insufferable Heaviness of the Gentle Body catalogs totally different mechanisms and methods throughout practices: pinned or inflexible connections; members which can be crafted, purchased, or reused; and elements working in inflexible multiples or in singularity.
Fashions made by college students from the Pratt GA/LA/UD program signify an array of methods. Drawings made by over 30 collaborating architects accompany the work. Under is the complete listing of contributors:
Architensions
Andrés Jaque
Arrhov Frick Arkitektkontor
Fabian A. Wagner
COMMON ACCOUNTS
Dogma Architects
Besler & Sons
FAIL
Fernando Garrido Carreras
Ben Pennell
Pablo Castillo Luna
Grillo Vasiu
Johansen Skovsted Arkitekter
Jon Lott
Leopold Banchini Architects
Workplace for Roundtable
MAIO
Manuel Bouzas
EXTENTS
JaJa Co
American Framing
PRODUCTORA
Salazarsequeromedina
Studio Sotnas
Lourenço Soares
Studio Tom Emerson
Thom Moran
Tudor Vlăsceanu
New Associates
Takk
TEN
Assemble
Reese Greenlee
Andy Kim
The exhibition is open to the general public by November 21.














