Breaking Ground: Architecture, Art, and Performance as a Tool of Engaged Design

Breaking Ground, a temporary installation situated on an urban campus, brought together a museum, an architectural installation, and a dance performance to initiate are examination of the relationships between space, place, and activity. The modest sculpture garden at Marquette University’s Haggerty Museum of Art served as the site for the installation. Commissioned for a group show titled ‘Current Tendencies IV: Topography Transformed,’ the architects created a temporary installation that traced the pathways through the garden then elevated the users above the ground plane to reconsider an existing context while testing the phenomenological qualities of building materials and tectonics. Changes in elevation and layers of intimacy enhanced by the changing transparency of the polycarbonate provided a dynamic stage for an improvisational dance piece. Blurring their respective roles, dancers, musicians, and audience members interacted with one another and with Breaking Ground by engaging the pathways and landscape of the sculpture garden. The purposeful siting of the installation disrupted a number of existing experiences for the museum, patrons/audience, and the performers; eliciting a conversation regarding the roles of the arts, institutions and experience within the public realm.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.106.54

Volume Editors
Amir Ameri & Rebecca O'Neal Dagg

ISBN
978-1-944214-15-9