LIGA 23: S-AR (Mex). A Column is a System
Photography: Luis Gallardo
1.
We rarely stop to think about the basic utensils we use, the essential tools that fulfill a single function and are almost mechanical extensions of everyday actions and habits.
These basic things go unperceived while we are bound up in the larger problems of our tiny lives.
Nowadays, we live in a throwaway culture where objects lose their function or their purpose within a couple of years, seasons, months, weeks, or seconds of use.
Is this why basic utensils have a timeless, almost mystical quality?
2.
The sieve is a crude tool that was originally used to clean wheat and other grains or seeds, separating out the soil, dust, straw and husks, waste from the fields, residues and excess.
In the mining and construction industries the sieve has been refined with woven wire meshes of different thicknesses or bends, different openings and tensions, which allow the accurate sorting and classification of different materials.
In the daily building practice of S-AR stación arquitectura, the sieve mesh is a basic utensil, a filter for separating the gravel and sand to be incorporated into concrete mixes, the most common material used in their work, and together with steel and glass, the stamp of what is produced or built in Monterrey.
3.
Removed from its context and original function for the intervention by S-AR at LIGA, this simple mesh is transformed into an element of construction, a load-bearing structure that instead of separating materials functions as a filter for the immaterial: variations in distances and densities, in openness and closure; light, air, space.
Distributed in semi-circles defined by the corners of the gallery’s triangular layout, like the transversal waves that appear when we drop a stone into water, the mesh expands and distorts the boundaries of the room through the repetition and variation of frequencies.
With this nascent gesture, S-AR also expands and distorts its own architectural grammar.
Employing this type of resources is a recurrent feature of the firm’s built and theoretical work: “taking things out of a given context and switching them to a different one.” Playing with the same basic elements, twisting functions, shaking up and clearing out architecture in order to let through new forms, effects, and experiences.
A practical nucleus altered by amplified frequencies of its basic elements, which unfold and illuminate the fundamentals of architecture. S-AR’s projects do not just occupy spaces, they cause spaces to resonate.
4.
In paying attention to what seems insignificant, we encounter fundamental answers to key questions about material, function, habitability and perception.
In this work created by S-AR for a specific space and for a specific moment, a sense of being-there emerges through architecture: “We are questioning, here and now, for ourselves.” [1]
[1] Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” in Basic Writings, trans. David Farrell Krell, London, Harper Collins, 1993 (originally published 1929).
