Entering the Metropolitan Exchange Building in Brooklyn feels a bit like walking into Kafka’s trial house. Multiple corridors snake their way through various parcels of debris and up an indeterminate number of floors. People hurriedly pass by before quickly disappearing into elevators, up stairways, and past walls. Roboticists, bio-technologists, and experimental architects busy themselves above, while on the first floor, amid the clutter of reclaimed furniture and decades-old dross, Marc Fornes of THEVERYMANY demonstrates to me one of the 29 nodes that will make up his newest project, a pop-up store for jewelry designer Irene Neuwirth.

As he explains the intricacies of the design’s fabrication–from the 40,000 + rivets that fasten the assemblage together to the hundreds of volunteer hours required to construct the piece–the building’s owner Al Attara shuffles into the vast room, casually interrupting the proceedings and pulling up a seat next to the object at hand, a single, tall multifaceted node of spiraling gold aluminum panels. Attara, a one-time ecological designer-now turned-”patron” of the arts who was profiled earlier in the year by The New York Times, is familiar with the work of his tenants, including THEVERYMANY, and begins fielding an array of questions to Fornes. Will you be finished on time? How are you guys going to make these things into actual architecture? How do you make these things usable?

If you’re familiar with Fornes’ projects, you may share some of Attara’s concerns. Under the label THEVERYMANY, Fornes has produced a body of work comprised of large-scale prototypes, each characterized by a spiraling organic form whose expression is determined by algorithmic processes. After several museum installations and exhibitions, THEVERYMANY are slowly expanding beyond the art gallery, having recently finished a permanent plastic pavilion in St. Louis and begun design work for an indoor pavilion for Miami-based restaurant chain Sushi Samba. Fornes’ most recent project, the second of BOFFO’s Building Fashion series of pop-up stores, represents a transition of sorts in the work of the self-proclaimed “experimental architect.”

[Image: THEVERYMANY team assembles the nodes]

by Samuel Medina

posted in Competition Identities New Projects Uncategorized

tagged Architecture, boffo, Building Fashion, Irene Neuwirth, Marc Fornes, pavilion, pop-up store, theverymany

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