Inspiration for Temporary Outdoor Gallery Space "Street Invaders"
The Concept for the TOGS Street Invaders emerged from a desire to capture the ephemeral performance of the street via a manipulation of light and screening. In addition, by wanting to be both a place that houses art as well as one that encourages the ad hoc creative nature of street culture, the TOGS Street Invaders needed to be versatile, had to encourage free-participation, and had to mediate between the uber-programming of the designer and the re-appropriation of space by the user.
TOGS Day Rendering
The street is a landscape of chance meetings, informal politics, and spontaneous appropriation within the illusion of organization and order. With so much of a city’s health dependent on and reflected in active street culture—legitimate and otherwise—the street’s role is more than simply an enabler of a trajectory or the backdrop for a path. It is the catalyst for the spectacle and performance that is the city.
TOGS Sections
In contrast the art gallery has been transformed in the latter part of the 20th century into the ultimate void, a non-space, a neutral white box that artwork can inhabit without competition or friction. The mutability of these white box spaces emerges from its lack of definition whereas the mutability of the street emerges from its aggregating quality. It is this tension between formal high-brow art and guerilla street culture that this project aims to harness through the interplay of rigidity and fluidity, programmed formal spaces and ad hoc improvised spaces, and transparency and opacity. The playful organic forms of the wood slats that act as an expression of a continuous interior surface push against the seemingly pristine outer fiberglass shell. Meanwhile these curving organic forms suggesting adaptability and flexibility are anything but as the creases and folds in the surface are (over-)programmed specifically for various functions—low wide folds for human seating, dips for free-standing sculpture, high narrow ledges for paintings and other flat media.
TOGS Invaders at Night
The translucent screens provide hints of activity within to entice passersby. Encouragement of graffiti and flyposting of the fiberglass panels as they weather will provide a historical index of activity when the units are dismantled. By using battery-powered energy efficient LEDs embedded in the wood slats, the TOGS transform into a nighttime parade of color. These TOGS lead double lives from day to night.
Final 24" x 36" presentation board
