Client: University of Pennsylvania School of Design

Overview

Accumulation. Vibration. Color. Excess. The body engulfed by a flood of images. Fractures, fragments, particles sped up and slowed. An entrance, a passageway, an exit: transfer, movement. Delayed arrivals, departures… through a wall of color, reflections, deflections, sounds of the spectrum. Pulsing light penetrates the transparency of a once solid glass field broken apart by color, shards of imagery, an aerie, stars born and destroyed – explosions, new textures of light and space.

Goals

The goals for the project were to reimagine the entrance to the main University of Pennsylvania, School of Design entrance, to give it a facelift, a transformative moment of dynamic reconstruction and explosive fragmentary revitalization, enacting a contemporary pulse to the intersection of architecture and art. Through the utilization of photographs that the artist took at various locations across the globe, altered, remixed, and repurposed into this new transformed curtain wall, a stitching together of the past, present, and future.

Process

This was a project carried out over course of the summer of 2009, photographs and imagery was procured from mostly Barcelona, Spain while traveling there, and the installation was commissioned by the Dean of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania. Design work for the panels were worked on by myself and Nadine Kashlan. Assisting Hurcomb and Kashlan with this project were faculty liaisons Cathrine Veikos, Assistant Professor of Architecture, and David Comberg, Lecturer in Fine Arts; installation crew Minjoo Kweon, Matt Cianfrani, and Huiying Chan. Material and administrative support was provided by IT Project Leader Cathy DiBonaventura, Associate Dean Pat Woldar, and Fabrication Lab Manager Dennis Pierattini.