Project by Alexandra Zhao
Through Stanley Saitowitz’s Transvaal House, each component is dissected into its individual masque-like components. From the painted trusses to the glass to the front gate that pushes open and open and open into the back door, the Transvaal House is understood as a combination of masque-like objects assembled from recursively structured building materials. DNA and its double helix structure in combination with the front gate that never seems to close, new programs and new modes of living are stripped and processed through the agar gel of Earth’s atmosphere. It culminates in a strand-by-strand understanding of how gel electrophoresis breaks down the typology of a truss, the typical use of a pane of glass, and how contemporary livelihoods hang from platform to platform in cloudy pools of Earth’s atmospheric agar gel and the biochemical currents of Earth’s building blocks of life.
