Over the last few decades, a rich and increasingly diverse practice has emerged in the art world that invites the public to touch, enter, and experience the work, whether it is in a gallery, on city streets, or in the landscape. Like architecture, many of these temporary artworks aspire to alter viewers’ experience of the environment. An installation is usually the end product for an artist, but for architects it can also be a preliminary step in an ongoing design process. Like paper projects designed in the absence of “real” architecture, installations offer architects another way to engage in issues critical to their practice. Direct experimentation with architecture’s material and social dimensions engages the public around issues in the built environment that concern them and expands the ways that architecture can participate in and impact people’s everyday lives.

Ronit Eisenbach is an associate professor of architecture and chair of the Kibel Gallery at the University of Maryland. She teaches design to majors, as well as a general education undergraduate course, Introduction to the Built Environment. An interest in thinking through making and refining perception has led her to teach a series of situation-based, design-build studios that frame elements of architecture such as light, color, space, and movement.

Eisenbach's installations and maps have been exhibited both in the US and abroad in venues such as the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Graham Foundation, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Art Gallery of Windsor, Princeton University and the streets of Tel Aviv. These temporary works explore how perception of subjective, invisible and ephemeral objects affects understanding and experience of place.

Her new book (with Sarah Bonnemaison), Installations by Architects: Experiments in Building and Design explores the rising importance of installations as professional and pedagogical tools of architecture that can serve as a vehicle to generate public dialogue about the built environment.

Sponsored by The Gensler Exhibition Endowment.

SOA student work on display | Contributions from
 
ARC 520  |  Michael Beaman
ARC 393  |  Danelle Briscoe
ARI 530K |  Igor Siddigui

Open Monday - Friday | 9am - 6pm

The exhibit showcases a selection of images that were donated to the VRC by Professor Christopher Long and have been cataloged and digitized in collaboration with ARTstor.