Architecture is inhabited sculpture.
Constantin Brancusi
So here we are, in the courtyard of this 96,000-square-foot monument to interdisciplinary aspiration, and the dancers are turning Brancusi’s old line, “Architecture is inhabited sculpture”, into something that bleeds and sweats and refuses to be theoretical.
The McMurtry Building wants to be unified, wants its art practice and film studies and documentary programs to play nice under Diller Scofidio + Renfro‘s geometry. But the courtyard, this negative space between the Cantor Arts Center and a parking structure, that’s where the truth lives. Where bodies become the sculpture inhabiting the sculpture, where the rehearsal is the thing itself, not some prep for the real event.
The lens catches what the architects couldn’t plan for: the way a dancer’s spine contradicts a wall, how movement exposes what 96,000 square feet of “integration” really costs. Those screening rooms and the Experimental Media Art Lab humming inside, they’re watching through glass while we’re out here making the courtyard confess what it actually is.
This isn’t gallery bullshit where everyone nods politely. This is architecture getting inhabited by the one thing it can’t control: bodies that remember they’re mortal, that know October 2015’s dedication ceremony will be just the beginning of the building’s real education.