Found Adjacencies: The Constructive Systems of the Vernacular and the Abstract Martin Puryear

Does it matter how objects of art and objects of architecture are made to change over time? To "make it new," as Modernist poet Ezra Pound put it, produces an individual work relying on the author’s singular, subjective response, seeking to use abstraction as a way of accessing an original condition and an unprecedented stance a new language of form.

This studio considers the work of Martin Puryear, focusing on his sculptures and drawings as departing points to consider both the abstract and the vernacular. We study the individual objects in their specific formal conditions, and the ways in which they bridge representational and functional language employing an array of constructive, compositional, and material systems. We are interested in finding formal and material systems in each object that can produce linguistic adjacencies between the two concepts in the parallel operations of architectural design.