Building Architecture, Landscapes & Poems – Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci will be teaching a ten-week long Tuesday evening workshop, beginning October 6, 2009. The class will meet in the Parish Hall from 7-9pm.

Poetry from another direction: poetry ‘caused by’ architecture & design…

Architectural materials & words as matter (‘concrete’ words, not abstractions – William Carlos Williams’ ‘No idea but in things’); the structure – the engineering – of a building & sentence-structure (diagramming a sentence & plans/section in architecture); scripts (narrative scripts, film scripts) & computer-scripting in architecture); punctuation – like Emily Dickinson’s dashes — & the time taken to walk through a building, through a city, through landscape); Roget’s Thesaurus as a geography, a terrain, of words (the dictionary is from the mechanical age, while Roget’s Thesaurus presages the internet)…

We might read Michel Butor’s Mobile (traveling through the United States in words, cities & rivers & mountains scrawled across the page); but we’ll also see the beginning of Alain Robbe-Grillet/Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad (the camera traversing corridor after corridor as the narrator’s voice performs a travelogue & a hypnotism); & we’ll listen to Vladislav Delay & Alva Noto (music & architecture are the same: each makes a surrounding, a context, an ambience – you can do other things while listening to music, you do other things while in the middle of architecture, both architecture & music engender multi-attention, the keynote of the 21^st century)…

From a background of poetry & then art, Vito Acconci became a designer/architect & formed Acconci Studio in 1988.  They’ve recently built a person-made island that twists from bowl to dome in Graz & a clothing store as soft as clothing in Tokyo; they’re working on a strip-mall makeover in the U.S. & a floating park over a railroad in Vienna.  He still begins projects with words.