Reef, an installation by Los Angeles Designers Rob Ley (Urbana) and Joshua G. Stein (Radical Craft) is currently on view at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York City. This kinetic sculptural installation takes advantage of new Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) technology to create a responsive environment.

Reef investigates the role emerging material technology can play in the sensitive reprogramming of architectural and public space. Shape Memory Alloys (SMAs), a category of metals that change shape according to temperature, offer the possibility of efficient, fluid movement without the mechanized motion of earlier technologies. Operating at a molecular level, this motion parallels that of plants and lower level organisms that are considered responsive but not conscious. A field of sunflowers as they track the sun across the sky or a reef covered with sea anemones, offer images of the type of responsive motion this technology affords. Its use in practical applications has been limited to the medical and aerospace fields as well as novelty toys - the super exclusive vs. the trite. Despite the potential of this technology, there have been few serious attempts to test its possibilities at the scale of architectural environments. Reef's unique exploration of technology shifts from the biomimetic to the biokinetic while liberating and extending architecture’s capacity to produce a sense of willfulness. This installation investigates the potential for emerging material technology to shape the perception of the built environment through the activation of membrane and partition surfaces. In this installation at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the public engages in the new social nuances revealed as exhibition is redefined by exploding the perceived 'wall' separating private and public space. The responsive membrane creates a diverse range of porous and dynamic enclosures capable of producing sophisticated, flexible responses to an existing program. Reef creates an interior condition which reacts according to an exterior street scape, and reasserts an active, willful role in shaping that public space. Reef furthers the experimental agenda of Storefront through the investigation of a sophisticated and flexible negotiation of the public street and the typical 1st floor retail space. The original façade installation by Acconci and Holl engaged public space in a novel way by locating the art and architecture experiment at interface between gallery and street rather than sealing it off from the public life of the street. Reef extends this experiment through the introduction of a more precise and fluid secondary interface; one charged with the purpose of fostering refined social interactions through a variable, and fluid porosity.. Unlike the typical activities that one associates with ground floor spaces of the city -- retail, office, or gallery - here the motion and sway of nature, like trees in the wind, is enfolded within interior space, drawing in the sensibility of the outdoors. In tandem with the Acconci/Hall façade, Reef questions the negotiation between the public realms of urban space and the intimacy of the interior.

Open through August 1, 2009

Photos courtesy Alan Tansey