Elastic Borders:
A Workshop by New York Prize Fellow Gabi Schillig

Thursday, February 26, 9:00am - 12:00pm
and Saturday, February 28, 2009, 10:00am - 5:00pm
at Van Alen Institute

Van Alen Institute is pleased to invite students who are members of the Institute to participate in a workshop with current New York Prize Fellow Gabi Schillig.

Starting from a reflection on the spatial and social distances that define New York City's public spaces, workshop participants will design and develop their own wearable devices to mediate between the human body and the built environment. Participants will work with a range of fabrics (surface formations) and linear flexible materials (line formations), and will experiment with various geometric principles and spatial techniques to allow different social spaces and interactions to emerge. The resulting body structures will move away from a static and autonomous architecture towards open systems and soft geometries.

Gabi Schillig is an architect and conceptual artist based in Berlin and has been recipient of an Akademie Schloss Solitude Fellowship. Her prior work engages art and architecture through the medium of the tactile, focusing the spatial quality of her architecture on the personal nature of the body and on physical interaction with space. Schillig teaches Spatial Design at the Institute for Transmedial Design at the Berlin University of the Arts, and has previously taught Advanced Architectural Design at the Städelschule and the University of Applied Sciences in Nuremburg and Coburg. For this workshop, Schillig will be joined by Asterios Agkathidis, founder of the architecture and research laboratory a3lab Frankfurt-Thessaloniki and instructor at the Technical University of Darmstadt, where he is currently working on his PhD.

JOIN NOW! If you are not a Van Alen Institute member and would like to participate in this workshop and other future programs like it, please JOIN ONLINE or contact us at 212-924-7000 x12 for more information.

Space in this workshop is limited to Van Alen Institute members who are currently enrolled as undergraduate or graduate students. Please RSVP to rsvp@vanalen.org by Monday, February 23.Those who respond will join a selected group of students from New York City and Berlin; participants must attend both full sessions of the workshop.