Slought Foundation Conversations in Theory Series: From Word to Action to Architecture - Lecture by Vito Acconci :: February 29, 2008; 5:00-6:30 pm :: Meyerson Hall B1, University of Pennsylvania (210 South 34th Street) Philadelphia. Also see Vito Acconci: Public Nuisance Symposium, March 1, 2008; 10:30-4:30 pm.

Vito Acconci will address the role of process, drafts, and the question of the archive in his studio practice. This event has been organized in conjunction with the opening of Power Fields: Explorations in the Work of Vito Acconci (February 15-March 31, 2008); the opening reception will take place at 6:30-8:30 pm, immediately after the lecture.

“It is the best of architecture, it is the worst of architecture. It’s the age of lightness, of fluid architecture; it’s the age of architecture that’s constructed into forms of fluidity and lightness that themselves remain solid and heavy. It’s the epoch of architecture that emerges and grows as a living creature; it’s the epoch of architecture that looks as if it emerges and grows, that looks like a living creature. It’s the era of sensual architecture; it’s the era of a visual architecture of effects. It’s the season of virtual architecture, science-fiction architecture, video-game architecture; it’s the season of architecture that, when built, comes tumbling back down to earth. It’s the spring of computational architecture; it’s the winter of a generic architecture generated by and justified by numbers. We architects and designers practice operations now that will make architects ultimately unnecessary, we anticipate architecture that designs itself; in the meantime, we’re specialized into a chosen few starchitects. We architects and designers harness multiple complexities; all the while we refine complication into elegance, we revive aesthetics, we do something that smells like art, we fall back on taste, we hang onto an ‘upper class.’ We architects and designers build for people; but, as we write personally derived scripts, and mix and match a multitude of formal parameters, our design-process gets lost in translation – the building masquerades as a force of nature, and we’re asking people to only believe.” - Vito Acconci/Acconci Studio, A Tale of Two or More Architectures (An Architecture of Fairy-Tales), (Icon Magazine, Feb 2007)

Vito Acconci was born in Bronx, NY in 1940, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. His early work took the form of fiction and poetry, and his last poems reduced words to indices of the writer’s and reader’s travel across the page. In the late 1960s and the early 1970s, his first artworks used performance, photos, film and video as instruments of self-analysis and person-to-person relationships. His audio and video installations of the mid-1970s turned an exhibition-space into a community meeting-place. His architectural games of the early 80s made performative spaces for viewers, whose activity resulted in the construction and deconstruction of house prototypes. In the mid 1980s the work crossed over into architecture, landscape, and industrial design. In 1988 he started Acconci Studio, a theoretical-design and building workshop. Their method is, on the one hand, to make a new space by turning an old one inside-out and upside-down; and, on the other hand, to insert within a site a capsule that grows out of itself and morphs itself. Their tendency is toward leftover sites and outlands, where hypotheses might be buildable and testable as future cities. They treat architecture as an occasion for activity; they make spaces fluid, changeable, and portable.