Vito Acconci

Vito Acconci’s design and architecture comes from backgrounds of writing and art. His poems in the late 60’s treated language as matter and the page as a field to travel over; his performances in the early 70’s helped shift art from object to interaction; in the early 80’s, his architectural-units were meant to be transformed by users. By the late 80’s his work crossed over and he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm that mixes poetry & geometry, computer-scripting & sentence-structure, narrative & biology, chemistry & social-science.

The Studio uses computers to give form to thinking; they use forms to find ideas. They make not nodes so much as circulation-routes, designing time as much as space. Built in the last decade are:

In Graz, a person-made island where the theater, a bowl, twists to become a playground on its way to becoming a dome. In Coney Island an elevated subway-station façade that waves & bulges to make views & seats. Being built now, in Indianapolis, is an interactive tunnel through a building where pedestrians & cyclists activate sensors that set off lights that swarm around them like fireflies