Thick by Maxi Spina, on view at the SCI-Arc from July 7, attempts to expand on the problems of material thickness through the topic of sections, ruins, fragments, constructions, figurations, simultaneity, and representation.
Thickness is an increasingly elusive condition in architectural design. Alluded to in section, camouflaged in the figure-ground, and presented as a foil in the developable surface drawing, material thickness is an understudied architectural condition.
As a term, thickness does not refer to the actual solidity of a material (as in the standardization of sheet material or thickness of marble), but a conceptual and material problem that sits (literally) at the edge of architectural thinking. The condition of thickness - the necessity of thickness - carries no central import in any era of architectural thinking, but manages to circulate through different modes of architectural production. Its condition is linked to (but is not central to) the history of stereotomy and stone construction; in the emergence of new forms of architectural drawing (developed surface drawing); and in the classic problem of the Doric order. Even in the Modernist obfuscation of solid form, it remains an unavoidable consideration in the Miesian corner and Kiesler's endless surfaces.
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