Venice, Italy—Architects Hani Rashid and Lise Anne Couture of Asymptote have designed an installation for Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia. Asymptote’s installation will be exhibited at the Arsenale’s Corderie during the preview from September 11 – 13, 2008 and subsequently from September 14 – November 23, 2008. Entitled Prototyping the Future: Three Houses for the Subconscious, Asymptote’s large-scale, site-specific work will be showcased in an exhibition that explores the question of how one can be at home in the modern world.

Conceived and manufactured digitally, Prototyping the Future comprises three large fiberglass objects displayed in an illuminated light environment. Each artifact represents exquisite forms of elegance and sophistication found in objects subjected to, and resulting from, high velocity, acceleration and speed such as wind tunnel testing, fluid dynamics, ballistics and mathematically modeled form. The objects, separated by large panes of reflective, mirrored glass, reveal the intriguing and perplexing architectural possibilities that result when form is simultaneously subjected to optical flux, the interferences of perception and resultant ambiguity of meaning. They are precise agents of spatial interference, absorbing and retransmitting the space of their surroundings into textural and ambient constructs for potential occupancy.

“What we are showing at the Venice Biennale is a piece conceived of and thought about as a potential architecture and a potential place for architecture to reside. These works, caught somewhere between furniture and large-scale buildings, exist in a kind of luminous ether, flowing down the stage as if trapped in a frozen performance of architecture in the making,” explains Hani Rashid.

Asymptote’s work deliberately calls up the early days of architectural experimentation that occurred between the 1960s and the early 1980s when the boundaries between architecture, engineering and art were blurred far from the prescribed and delineated boundaries found in the discipline today. Such unraveled territories are a place in which one can attempt to understand the way in which “buildings” can work not just visually and pragmatically, but, more importantly, emotionally and viscerally: the way architecture can and does react to light, and architecture as a cultural vehicle affecting the atmospheric conditions in which it is situated and capable of impacting and altering.

The work of Asymptote has always tried to find a space that is out there, that is not necessarily within the norms and conventions of architectural form making and architectural theory, but rather something that exists on the periphery that finds its way to the center. Today there is a new threshold in technological innovation and architectural possibility manifest here using the robust digital tools available for devising and making new forms and spatial conditions as well as celebrating the innovative and enigmatic prospects for future architecture.

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