Vito Acconci, a pioneer of video art, started out at the famous New York school, which at the time worked in the genre of video performance. Then, according to the artist, no one had a computer or various electronic gadgets, but the most important thing was a portable video camera. It was through her, discarding the relatively familiar form of creativity - poetry, with which he began, that Acconci began to study his own body, the interaction of the viewer, the creator and the zone of public space.
The artist has always been interested in working in the border zone - in poetry he explored the movement on a sheet of paper, in the video - the zone of public and private space … For example, in the provocative performance Claim Excerpts, the artist says, standing in front of the camera with a stick chased away the spectators who appeared at the entrance to the gallery, and thus tried to explore the meeting of the viewer and the creator in the space created by him. Gradually, Acconci moved from performances to architectural installations, and then to real architecture, for which he came up with a whole set of rules.
The first thing that Acconci defined for himself was that public architecture cannot be done by one person and be individualized. Therefore, opening his own office in 1988, he decided that a group of people would always work on a project - namely, at least three people. In addition, the author admits, he did not have a clear idea of how architecture was made, and he needed professionals with whom he would eventually work out the ideas that came to his mind.
One of the first methods he discovered was the principle of "perforation", that is, creating a shape by making holes. Using this principle, he made a design for a competition at the WTC in New York - a building riddled with cone-shaped holes - which the author explained as follows: "If it is ever blown up again, let it be built blown up right away."
Another method - "camouflage" or "second skin", Acconci used to modernize a Milan house, covering it with a giant metal mesh - which vaguely resembles the project completely wrapped in silver Reichstag cloth by sculptor Hristo Yavachev. In a similar way, Acconchi designed a Japanese clothing store: the facade is covered with a metal mesh, in the middle, punctured by a hole in the entrance.
Another principle of his - "dividing into lanes" - he applies in the competitive project of a public space, where, according to the assignment, a large parking lot had to be hidden under the park area. This is how an interesting landscape turned out, literally cut into belts of underground roads, planted on top of dense lawns. Basically, these stripes echo the directions of the tracks, and from time to time they get out of the general structure of parallel straight lines and change direction, as if "at their own whim."
For the street bench project, Acconci proposed the "infinite space" method. The bench consists of two rings inserted into one another and inclined at small angles. It turns out an infinite curve, a kind of Mobius strip, on which, moreover, you can not only sit, but also lie.
In Austria, on a small river, the architect made an artificial island connected to the two banks by diagonal bridges; the island was to become one of the centers of the cultural life of the town in which it is located. It consists of two spheres passing one into the other, the metal surface of which is curved like the scales of a river fish, shimmering in the sun.
It must be admitted that Acconci is particularly good at designing small shapes - namely, their bending, splicing and deformation. But the architect Acconci also has projects for large buildings, made according to the principles of organic architecture and resembling bloated, diagonally elongated capsules - such are the projects of a library in Mexico and a community center in Seoul.
