Saturday, December 14th 2024
The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design is pleased to offer you this members and students only event.
Please choose one of two tour times offered.
Tim Durfee, exhibition designer of Crossing Over, with graphic designer Jennifer Rider
Crossing Over, Caltech’s sprawling contribution to the 2024 PST ART theme Art and Science Collide, is a network of installations across the Pasadena campus that puts the university’s historic archive in counterpoint with works by contemporary artists including Helen Pashgian, Shana Mabari, Lita Albuquerque, and Lia Halloran – all while guiding visitors through spaces usually inaccessible to the public.
Installing a complex exhibition within the functioning spaces of a university, and not in a flexible gallery, introduced significant challenges: existing walls could not be touched, existing lighting could not be used, and daily teaching and research activities could not be interrupted.
The response to these constraints was to view the staging as a temporary, alien occupation of the campus. Each structure is autonomous, self-supporting, and self-illuminated. Interior elements barely touch the ground, and skirt past existing walls. Form corresponds to highly specific delivery of curatorial narratives, rather than architectural context. Materials follow internal, pragmatic logics, with the same material shifting from structure to substrate to finish in the same object. Crossing Over’s foregrounding of the exhibitionary apparatus is part of an ongoing experiment in new ways of conceiving a future for architecture in the information and AI age, where content and the flow of “users” determines form. It is a consideration of the interface as a public and cultural phenomenon.
Independent curator: Claudia Bohn-Spector
University Archivist: Peter Sachs Collopy
Coordinator: Bailey Westerhoff
Exhibition Design: Tim Durfee Studio
Graphic Design: Jennifer Rider
Photography: Joshua White
Video: Jeremy Eichenbaum
Exhibition catalog available from Caltech Store and Getty Publications
Image Credits
- Linde Design Tim Durfee Studio Photo: Joshua_White
- Entrance_Design: Tim Durfee Studio Graphic Design: Jennifer Rider Photo: Tim Durfee Studio
- Gates Design: Tim Durfee Studio Photo: Joshua_White
- Dabney Design Tim Durfee Studio Photo: Tim Durfee Studio