Hypostyle Permutations

Group project for an independent workshop at The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) studying permutations on Henry Cobb's installation "Hypostyle" at the SCI-Arc Gallery, coordinators Marcelyn Gow and John Southern, 2015

with Andreina Pepe and Yves Lu

Henry Cobb's "Hypostyle" installation at the SCI-Arc gallery during the summer of 2015 proposed a fairly straightforward organization of space: a repeated field of ostensibly similar modules. Each piece was comprised of a construction of four standard doorway panels, arranged in a T-shaped logic. By rotating each module adjacent to the next, a fairly complex, yet poignantly monotonous, three dimensional experience gradually comes forth.

The field itself is highly contingent on the individual spectator's experience within it. At certain times utterly porous and at others brazenly opaque, the organization entices a kind of impetus for movement throughout its space on the part of the onlooker.

This naturally raises questions about the capacity of this organization to speak to a range of spatial experiences beyond the merely binary: open and closed. Can a hypostyle produce an endless array of spatial conditions? Can a physical object once pronouncedly solid speak to a deep transparency through space?

By studying the characteristics which tightly organize the hypostyle, our team began to interrogate the spatial qualities at play. This series of studies began to highlight the various compositions of space which speak both to tightness and relaxation, solidity and complete translucency.

An interesting dichotomy emerges between the organizational methods of the field (the planometric constructs which regulate it) and the experiential ends to which the inhabitant is subjected when within the installation.

Due to the level of reduction on the part of the modules’ geometry, the actual form of the “columns” is experienced literally as such. One encounters what one perceives to be planes, edges, lines and the like, rather than another more ambiguous type of form.

The viewer directly engages the geometry of the thing, rendered in its minimal aesthetic with a twofold quality that both intensifies (and somewhat paradoxically plays with) the reading of the geometry as pure form and rich materiality which is lathered over it.

Thus, it is with an unexpectedly small degree of difference that the planometric organization of the field and the perspectival engagement of the modules in space come together to entice an understanding of the thing as both human in its perception and abstract in its parameters of arrangement.

This further deepens when one considers the duplicity of the doors’ dimensions, as mentioned during the dialogue between Cobb and Moss during the gallery discussion. Although the doors are at their purest mere bars, their dimensions tie them intrinsically to the proportion and orientation of the human body.

Could the projective methods of the perspective and the regulating geometry innate within the field be leveraged to mitigate the differences between these two prerogatives (the constructive and the experiential)?