INTERMEDIATE 7 2011 / 2012
EASTERN PROMISES: INCUBATOR GALLERIES
Prospectus Statement: Intermediate 7 is concerned with transfers between conflicted urban systems, relying on design infrastructures to align formal and programmatic strategies. Learning from Moscow’s sophisticated materialism, we will exploit clashes between culture and commerce to define new hybrid typologies. Diverging artistic and entrepreneurial resources have severely hindered the development of Moscow as a global cultural center, with paradoxical coexistence of cultural refinement and commercial excess at its core. However, tensions between public institutions and private networks, confined collections and dynamic outlets, as well as display spaces and creative products suggest latent possibilities. We will be rigorously opportunistic to convert such artificial ruptures into generative associations. By advancing experimental formats of pragmatic research and speculative design, we will reconcile the Russian extremes of grandiose museums and makeshift markets, imposing salons and underground dealerships, as well as gigantic expo-cities and miniature pop-ups. Unit interventions will activate a sequence of underperforming sites outside segregated social circuits by installing new mediators between creative hubs and shopping routes. We will amalgamate exhibition zones, retail areas, cultural institutes, studios, archives, etc., developing new types of ‘incubator galleries’ – able to attract, nurture and proliferate a range of commercial and cultural events. As both subject and product, ‘design’ will affect display media and filing structures on several scales. Relying on synthetic ‘infrastructures’, we will accommodate spatial and functional, static and dynamic, imposed and emergent components. Diagramming, mapping and graphic analysis will expose active ‘elements’ in juxtaposed urban sites and typologies. Contrasting elements will be combined in conceptual frameworks and physical prototypes. Formal prototypes will poach diagrams of production-displayconsumption, while concrete program structures shortcut to graphic shapes and intricate surfaces. We will pursue a ‘plastic fit’ between form and program inspired by case-studies from leading contemporary practices. The logic of loose control will inform how we curate and manage at the levels of city, building and content. Diagrammatic tools will allow discrete transpositions between urban and architectural concepts and forms. Alternating between social and spatial effects, we will assemble beautiful apparatuses and imageable condensers. Our ‘galleries’ will emerge from the mix of diagrammatic matrices and seductive renderings, composite drawings and intricate models. Theoretical and practical products will be collated in extensive ‘catalogues’ of urban scenarios, design models and final artifacts.