A Dance for Architecture

When history looks back on the architects working today, it may remember them as the group of practitioners who dramatically expanded the boundaries of architecture into a cultural form. With this goal in mind, architect Steven Holl and choreographer Jessica Lang have teamed up and created what the duo bills as, “a dance for architecture,” entitled Tesseracts of Time. The architectural dance performance, which premiered last month as part of the ongoing Chicago Architecture Biennial, explores the four types of architecture as they correspond to the four seasons.

“Both architecture and dance share a passion for space and light in time, however they are on opposite ends of the spectrum with respect to time,” explains Holl, who also teaches a class called The Architectonics of Music at Columbia University and in 1989 exhibited works at the Museum of Modern Art. “Architecture is one of the arts of longest duration, while the realization of a dance piece can be a quick process and the work disappears as the performance of it unfolds. Here the two merge."

The hour-long performance uses Holl and Lang’s year-and-a-half-long joint research project, Explorations In, as a point of departure. Lang’s dancers bend and glide swiftly, under vivid projections of light, around the structures Holl crafted for Tesseracts of Time. The four sections of the performance—“under,” “in,” “on,” and “over”—evoke the architectural form of the body as the dancers “engage in deep spatial constructions in inspiring ways,” notes Holl, to show the ways in which architecture and dance can collide in time and space. The research has also led Lang and Holl, who has notably designed the Simmons Hall at MIT and the Kiasma contemporary art museum in Helsinki, to begin the process of building a 900 square foot house from the same ideas.

“We both wanted to push the edges of our arts,” says Holl of the project that differed greatly from his usual design process. “Jessica from the beginning said she was inspired by architecture as a creative catalyst for her choreography. Rather than historic examples from dance she would like to find new fields of inspiration,” Holl continues. “Our architecture likewise doesn’t originate in past examples, but is provoked by new experiments in space, materials, and light. Architecture can begin from many seeds—dance, music, science or poetry.”

For Tesseracts of Time tour dates and more information, click here.

Related:

Notes on the State of Architecture Today

Mind-Bending Architecture Photos from a World Inspired by Escher

These Architecture Pictures Are So Crisp It’s Unreal