Dining with the Wolf, Space p11

Dining with the Wolf

Space p11

Left, a scene from the project documentation film, “How to Bake 30 Bricks,” depicts the demolding process for a batch of bricks. We all know the story of The Three Little Pigs. Neither straw nor wood will keep out the wolf, only the house of bricks. What does the frustrated wolf do? In the popular 1922 retelling by Flora Annie Steel, he climbs down the chimney and into a pot where he’s boiled for the pigs’ supper.

When Western thought turns to nature, it tends to do so from the standpoint of Enlightenment ideas about human subjectification of nature through industrious labor so neatly captured in this tale. As humans increasingly find ourselves subject to nature despite or even because of our grandest interventions, the story becomes less convincing. Could it be we never really boiled the wolf, its breath just got hotter? As the house of bricks melts, our world begins to collapse.

Part slow-burn durational performance, part landscape diorama, Liz Galvez’s Im(Material) Space, Designing with Air, at Space p11 in the Chicago Pedway, updates the tale of the Three Little Pigs for a new era of mutual subjectivity. True to the industrious spirit of the Three Little Pigs, Galvez first toils at brick-making,

brick-moving, and brick-stacking; but unlike the story, a waft of hot air is enough to blow down this seemingly solid matrix. As an allegory for climate change, it demonstrates the falling-apart of enlightenment fairy tales at a very human scale. It is hard not to see little receding glaciers, tiny meltwater lakes, and delicate rocky moraines in this decomposition.

Set in a basement vitrine, Designing with Air models the closed system in which we find ourselves trapped. No longer able to access an exterior to our rapidly warming Earth-chamber, with nowhere to dispose of our waste or to mine anything new, we are left to watch it all melt away under the hot breath of the wolf as we contemplate a future casting about in our own mess.

When the house of bricks fails, where do the pigs go? What kind of house can they—can we—make next?

Designing with Air offers us a new perspective on old questions about our relationship to our environment and to our buildings, and to how to live among both. Like the story of The Three Little Pigs, it has its own morals. The first of these is not to see collapse as failure. Buildings and nature are subject to one another and their dynamic relationship only becomes destructive when resisted. Next? Invite the wolf in for dinner: share, maybe tell new stories, or very old ones. Admit that if

the wolf boils so do we. Only by recognizing and embracing our mutual dependence on our environment can we hope to live in it.

Right, a pallet holding approximately 445 soy-wax and aggregate bricks fabricated by the architects, and weighing over one ton.

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