Acconci Studio

Acconci Studio's design & architecture comes from another direction, from Vito Acconci's backgrounds in writing & art. His poems in the late 60's treated language as matter (words to look at rather than through) & the page as a field to travel over; his performances in the early 70's helped shift art from object to interaction between art-doer & viewer; later in the 70's, his installations turned viewers into participants; in the early 80's, his architectural-units could be transformed by users. By the late 80's his work crossed over & he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm that mixes poetry & geometry, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology, chemistry & social-science. The Studio uses computers to give form to thinking; they use forms to find ideas. They make not nodes so much as circulation-routes, they design time as much as space. Their design starts with clothing & ends with vehicles - in-between, they design buildings that slip into landscape & vice versa; they make spaces fluid, changeable & portable; they make architecture subservient to people & not vice versa -- they anticipate cities on the move. Built in the last decade are, in Graz, a person-made island where a bowl (the theater) twists into a playground on its way to becoming a dome (the restaurant). Being built now, in Indianapolis, is an interactive tunnel through a building where pedestrians & cyclists set off lights that swarm around them like fireflies.