snarkitecture.com

What's a piece of Snarkitecture? It's a structure, installation, or furniture that's inconceivable, improbable, and impossible. In the multidisciplinary practice of artist Daniel Arsham and architect Alex Mustonen, it's also inevitable.

What's your common ground as artist and architect?

Alex Mustonen: We came from similar backgrounds, in the sense that we went to the same school, and, in some ways, that set up a sort of interesting foundation. In terms of our practice, whether it's art or architecture, [our] one very basic common experience would be a focus on the viewer or visitor and how they experience the work, project, or moment that we're creating, as opposed to, for instance, an architecture that is interested in exploring formal properties or, you know, parametric geometries or something like that.

Daniel Arsham: I don't think we have any common ground, ha ha. We're completely different, which is somehow why it works in the studio. You know, we knew each other—when Alex and I started working—the reason I went to him and asked him to work on a project with me was because he had a number of skills that I didn't have. He was an architect; he was able to figure out more complex problems, problems related to real construction. Many of the things I was involved with were fictional or in the proposal state, where they need the reality that an architect can bring to a project. So, chaos and order.

Are your roles mutually exclusive? Do you explore each other's discipline?

Alex: When we're practicing Snarkitecture, Daniel described we're each bringing a different sort of game to the table. But in that collaborative, creative process, there's a sort of a blurring, often that results in the final product, which, at the same time, there's obviously ideas from Daniel's individual art practice that filter through and also, you know, either my ideas or ideas from previous work that I've done that are also somehow working their way in.

Daniel: The way we sort of work in the studio when we're beginning a project is often with a somewhat unbuildable or impossible proposal perhaps that I'll make. And, oftentimes, the reality of that project and the physical possibility of it is something that Alex brings.

You talk about the "misuse of architecture." For people that are not familiar with your work, can you explain?

Alex: A lot of times, what we're doing is operating within what we would define as existing architecture, which could be an existing space, like, literally, a building or within a room, or it could be within a design… Whether it's an existing site condition or existing material or existing architectural convention, we take that condition and start to reimagine it or misuse it so it could be transformed.

Daniel: Yeah, this kind of reinvention of known materials or objects. I mean, I have been playing with this idea for a number of years in my own practice, starting by manipulating the surface of architecture, often drywall—white drywall—and causing it to perform in unexpected ways, where the material quality of it is manipulated, so the wall can appear like its melting or rippling in the wind.

Alex: So, a lot of times, that misuse can be turned into a sort of creative or positive act.

There seems to be an absence of colour in your work and a fixation with white.

Daniel: There's been an absence of colour or very slight variations of colour in my work for a number of years. I don't know if it comes from something specific. I mean, I am colourblind, which sort of has come up in the past. Alex isn't. But, oftentimes, we're using found materials, or we're trying to manipulate materials that are known and, generally, those parts of architecture we are changing happen to be white already.

Alex: There's also something important about the simplicity of the white, in the sense that it's a way to reduce a gesture or the sort of feel of the project, particularly when there's additional element of intense complexity.

With your practice crossing into both art and architecture, what are the unique challenges that you face? And are the expectations of your clients different?

Daniel: I mean, we don't have traditional clients either, in a way.

Alex: This is true. We've been fortunate so far in our practice to have a lot of very good clients who understand; they oftentimes have some relationship to the arts, and they understand what this practice and this collaboration between an artist and an architect is about. And that makes our lives a lot easier.

Daniel: Even though we consider it more of an architectural practice than my studio, if you look at the projects on the site, you know, very few of them are what you would consider traditional architecture. There's a number of installation projects, public art, set design; it's just now that we're beginning. I mean, even my apartment—it's architecture, but it was this kind of experiment. And in that, we had the best client, ha ha. We've been fortunate to be working on projects that are also not so defined—or confined.