Color Block No. 2
Outpost Office, an architectural practice founded and led by Ashley Bigham and Erik Herrmann, have created Color Block No. 2, a temporary public agora that activates various in-between spaces both inside and outside the Wexner Center for the Arts.
Color Block No. 2 consists of four large-scale, modular furniture units composed of exaggerated, clunky, and colorful proto-architectural elements like columns, plinths and walls. Both incremental and mobile, this colorful installation forms an intense graphic landscape that conceptually and physically challenges institutional boundaries, while offering practical space for gathering and repose.
Museum architecture often imposes divisions between gallery spaces and public areas, but this division is already uniquely blurred at the Peter-Eisenman-designed Wexner Center, where exhibition spaces and architectural features converge. The four units of Color Block No. 2 further extend these characteristics by carving out new spaces at four distinct sites on the campus: outdoors at the main entry, indoors in the upper and lower lobbies, and outdoors slightly askew to the “whispering wall”, a curved amphitheater wall. Their placement allows visitors to experience them across the space and time of a visit; and their nature as both sculpture and seating allows for interaction with the pieces, encouraging rest, collaboration, socializing, and informal learning.
Each brightly-colored unit is constructed primarily from Duraply (a sustainably-produced plywood from fast-growing European poplar) and finished with acrylic latex paint and vinyl accents. The wood elements are connected internally and externally with powder-coated steel plates and angles, and feature screens that are fabricated from powder-coated steel rectangular bar grating typically used in industrial or heavy commercial applications. In this case, the material is elevated to a comfortable seating surface with some minor finishing and powder-coating.
In addition to offering a critique of how we traditionally interact with the museum, the project also addresses the qualities of color in architecture, which work in tandem with the formal qualities of each unit to respond directly to its specific site. The exterior units contain orange, vermillion and pink tones that play off the Wexner’s brick facade. The upper lobby unit, situated in a visually busy and geometrically complex location, itself compressed into a small niche, features the highest level of chromatic dissonance, with its pink base color and bright chartreuse, vermillion, and electric violet accents. The lower lobby unit is larger, containing the most seating, but is slightly more muted in two shades of mauve with chartreuse accents.
Says Erik Herrmann about the diminishment of color when compared to form in architectural discourse: “A perplexing scaffold of myths, tropes, cliches, and conventions have historically dictated the use of color in architecture, including the early modernist prejudice against color and insistence on whiteness that continues to influence the field. Color Block No. 2 instead explores color as an integral and increasingly mutable quality in architecture, and considers what it means to use color as structure in the composition and activation of public space.”
The other dimension of experimentation for this project is time. Color Block is an experiment in incremental architecture: designs that evolve over time. This project will enliven the performance of space-making, superimposing notions of process and product, action, and artifact. Furthermore, from a physical perspective, the units were also designed to be modular and transportable. Says Ashley Bigham , “Modular elements allowed us to design large-scale interventions that can be easily disassembled and moved to another location after the exhibition closes. We wanted zero waste produced by the exhibition.”
Color Block No. 2 represents the second phase of Outpost Office’s year-long intervention at the Wexner. The first phase consisted of the large-scale project Drawing Fields No. 7, in which a GPS-controlled robot has painted yellow and lavender curvilinear patterns on the tree-lined lawn of the Wexner plaza.
CREDITS
Design Team: Erik Herrmann, Ashley Bigham Design Support: Zach Schumacher, Chris Wall Fabricator: Edgework Creative, Columbus, OH Consulting Engineer: Bernie Kooi
