CHICAGO ARCHITECTURE BIENNIAL

Mélange* emerges from a new reading of the performance of a kiosk within the urban landscape and the lake front. The final outcome is an iterative negotiation between the perspectival forces and the surface minimization process. At once emblematic of its computational origin and perfomative because of its algorithmic growth properties, Mélange* was designed to enable a blurring of the landscape’s relationship to the waterscape. Its material quality will allow it to exhibit a playfully shimmer with the lake experiences during the day and at night is will sparkle with the lights of the city.

Mélange* creates a profound new look into the potential to see architecture as a dynamic space that elicits action and emergent growth. It creates a condition, that allows for the landscape to infiltrate and merge with the structure. Mélange also investigates the boundaries of an interior picturesque, one that would attract a visitor through highly calculated framed of perspectives. Its informal and bizarre form is in a state of growth, part jungle and part architecture as it emerges from the landscape of the park. The lakefront kiosk becomes an apparatus for viewing the lake and the city and through numerous dynamic perspectives that re‑frames our perception of the urban condition.

Mélange* embodies a contradictory nature: it is always complete, yet it is always unfinished. It metabolizes and it always seems to suggest further expansion and growth. It’s an organism whose creators and users are just a part of it, helping it move along. At every moment, the kiosk is a mere projection, an index of a larger negotiation of antithetical forces, an encompassing scale in‑formation.