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Shawn Lutz

Shawn Lutz

Houston, TX, US

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Framed Conoids

This project, now a permanent installation, inhabits 2,600sf of the 213,000sf ground level that formerly functioned as a United States Postal Service (USPS) central distribution center in downtown Houston. The parameters were defined by a secured fenced area that originally served to protect important packages. 

In part of repurposing the building as a art and events center, the objective is to transform the undesirable state of the fenced area and its raw character by infilling the interior with an installation with little to no impact of the existing conditions.

This installation takes on the hierarchy of four informed geometries, as rooms within one contained area. Through the repetitive structural grids and the cage’s chain link fence work together as a framework for the four framed rectilinear views on one side with clusters of circular profiles on the other. 

The series of rooms and opposing profiles onto the bounding perimeter set the framework for synthetic yarn constructs of the installation. The two parallel sides of the fenced box link projections of two primitive shapes forming conoids geometry inspired by Le Corbusier’s roof of Ronchamp, Saint Pierre at Firminy-Vert, and Expo 58’ Philips Pavilion.

As multiple objects defined within this singular interior transcends compounding implications within and on its surroundings.

The experimentation and realities result in multiple readings of the space. Firstly, the interior framed geometries inform a set of secondary rooms within a singular embodied space. Second, layering of rooms by lines cast defamiliarizing spatial realities upon both oblique and profile views.

Framing views by means of different shapes on opposite sides are connected by the act of lofting indexical reference points to form four rooms within the abandoned structure to construct rooms by use of yarn, existing fence and recycled bicycle rims for an installation entitled Framed Conoids.

 
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Status: Built
Location: Houston, TX, US
Additional Credits: Photography by Paul Hester