Gray Matter
Speculative Project
St Louis. 2010
Gray Matter is a proposal for the deployment of mobile architectural “straw-men” into the urban expanse of St Louis. Like iron filings thrown into a magnetic field, it is the forces of the city into which they are strewn that make these “dumb” objects speak, if they speak at all. The project takes seriously the claim that “chance cannot be left to chance” introducing elements that raise the stakes for urban contingency and dynamism rather than attempt to bridle them. As an alternative gesture to Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, the project suggests a provisional monumentality that embraces the mutability of the Mississippi over the stability of the iconic image. Privileging distribution over composition, instigation over insistence, the objects instantiate an urbanism of hermeneutics rather than optimization, or even, for that matter, communication.
