The Evening Line in the Corderie dell’Arsenale is the result of an intensive three year collaboration with New York based artist Matthew Ritchie, architects Aranda/Lasch and geometric/structural designers from Arup AGU and was produced by T-B A21.
Apart from being an autonomous structure conceived for the Biennial, The Evening Line is also a portion of a larger structure – potentially the size of the universe, through the application of fractal geometry –, entitled The Morning Line. This is the foundation’s second Art Pavilion commission, which will be inaugurated at Biacs, the Contemporary Art Biennial of Seville entitled YOUniverse on October 1st. Curated by Peter Weibel, the Seville Biennial is dedicated to the convergence of art and science.
The Morning Line is a highly complex “anti pavilion” (Matthew Ritchie) in which a great variety of interdisciplinary reflections converge. Among these, fractal geometry manifests this principle and is the bond linking The Evening Line in Venice and The Morning Line in Seville. Both are infinitely modular constructions, built from a single shape called “the bit”, that assembles with other similar bits to make occupiable spaces. This bit is conceived as a universal brick that can be mapped with Matthew Ritchie’s drawings to produce pictures in and of space.
The bit’s shape is derived from a truncated tetrahedron and was developed by the architectural duo Aranda/Lasch and specialists Arup AGU. It shrinks or grows and then attaches back onto itself to produce three-dimensional fractals. This fractal assembly is both structural and infinitely self-scaling. As these modular bits expand or contract in any direction, so too do the drawings that express the underlying geometry and carry the weight of the structure. In the project, each successive size of the bit is called a “generation”, with generation 1 being the largest. All five generations are built out of Aluminum alloy 5083 (H32) for lightweight shipping and on-site assembly and are finished in an impervious black epoxy with aggregate coating.
“The project is not only about geometry, it’s about expression. There is nothing else in the project besides Matthew Ritchie’s visual language. The lines themselves and the drawings they make are the structure and the space.” (Benjamin Aranda / Chris Lasch)
The Evening Line is closely linked with Matthew Ritchie’s own decade-long artistic project of constructing a personal cosmology that weaves his own histories within the languages of science, myth and religion to construct a single systemic or “semasio-graphic” visual language. The artist’s visual language maps onto the bits to make The Evening Line a true unification of expression and structure. In other words, the drawings are both structural and meaningful at once. This synthetic process is accomplished by applying certain geometric constraints to Matthew Ritchie’s drawings so that as they grow and change, every line connects to every other line to form a larger picture and a structural framework. Geometry and expression become one.
Matthew Ritchie talks about The Morning Line fron his studio in New York (courtesy ART21)
More information
11ma. Muestra Internacional de Arquitectura de Venecia
Biennale di Venezia
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