Think you've seen all of Neil Denari's work? Eleven inkjet drawings featuring unbuilt visions by Denari's studio NMDA will be showcased in his “Displaced Buildings in Aperiodic City” exhibition, opening May 27 at the Steven Holl-designed ‘T’ Space Gallery in Rhinebeck, New York. If you'll be in the area in the coming weeks, it could be worth checking out.
NMDA created the drawings over the past seven years. Ranging from port terminals to museums, each project was originally designed for specific contexts in various cities.
“A number of buildings designed over the last seven years have been displaced from their original context as a life-enhancing act, given that their material lives never began. Designed for specific contexts in various cities, they now occupy peculiar voids in Aperiodic City,” Neil Denari writes.
Aperiodic City is an urban accumulation organized around self-similar proto-blocks. It is at once like all cities in that it is made up of building forms that vary only slightly across an expansive field. But like no other city, it is also based on a system rather than a meta-plan. It is an idea that is neither emergent nor parametric but simply vaguely repetitious, incredibly persistent, and appearing in more than one form (proto-block). It is an idea city and a city of ideas.
A number of buildings designed over the last seven years have been displaced from their original context as a life-enhancing act, given that their material lives never began. Designed for specific contexts in various cities, they now occupy peculiar voids in Aperiodic City. In this new context, these buildings take on new meanings, yet they retain all the attributes of their original locations. But the location is not strictly limited to place, it also includes time, and in this, they are all imbued with ideas that are located on an endless curve that strangely oscillates through architecture and urban culture. –Neil Denari, 2017 (from the exhibition website)