IT’S ABOUT TIME

SO – IL’s open-ended architecture

Made by Corinne van der Borch and Tom Piper, It’s About Time explores a series of SO – IL’s temporary projects through moving footage, models and renderings plus interviews with people who worked with the Brooklyn-based architects on the installations.

It’s About Time includes interviews with Anne Surak (Artistic Director, Exhibit Columbus), Barry Bergdoll (Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology and Director of Undergraduate Studies at Columbia University and Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, MoMA, 2007–2013), Eva Franch i Gilabert (Director of Storefront for Art & Architecture, 2010–2018), David van der Leer (Principal, DVDL Design Decisions and Director of the Architecture and Urban Studies programme, Guggenheim Museum, 2008–2013), Mark Lee (Chair of the Department of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design and curator of Chicago Architecture Biennale, 2017) and Matthew Slotover (co-founder of Frieze Art Fairs). 

The video was specifically produced for the exhibition Currents. Temporary Architectures by SO – IL (maat, 10/06/2020 – 11/01/2021), a timely reflection on discreet but poignant gestures that interrogate the very nature of architecture as a cultural practice, both as agency and artefact. Twelve of the temporary projects the studio has formulated over the past decade are organised in six thematic pairs, or “currents”, bringing to the fore subjects the studio explores in its work.

exhibition

CURRENTS.
TEMPORARY ARCHITECTURES BY SO – IL 
maat, 10/06/2020 – 11/01/2021 

Exhibition design: SO – IL 
Exhibition graphic design: Geoff Han 
Text: Beatrice Galilee 
Video: Corinne van der Borch and Tom Piper

The idea of time, obviously, is really important. And designing time into the project is really important as well, because it doesn't mean a project is done at the day it opens. There's no beginning or end, necessarily. All architecture is temporary. It should remain, and it will always remain open-ended. That is something we always try to remind ourselves in the design process. 

Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, SO – IL