Tim Girvin + Jonathan Girvin. The Met Roof | Cantor Garden (Photo by Dawn Clark)
Working in NYC | Four explorations in 24 hours.
In any trip, anywhere, the idea of a break — even packed-in on a tight agenda, can be meaningful — it’s an expansion on the effort to engage in that commerce that, somehow, each of us, do to survive on one plane of action. Being in a place, it’s best to dig into it, nestle in, explore and huddle into the context of the experience of what makes that environment special. As a designer, you’d presume that, given the nature of the commitment — designing an experience, you’d surely need to know how to truly “feel it.”
I make it a habit, to get out — even if it means adding a day, or a night, striding onwards to explore something unexpected and out of the loop. So this is one in four notes, that all relate to taking a day with my dear friend Dawn Clark, as well as, in this opening storytelling, my brother Jonathan Girvin, who lives in NYC.
The beginnings of this foray, as well, compensated for today, my day — my birthday, traveling fifty seven times around the sun. That beginning, then, was speaking to the conceptions of the layering of experiences — and what better place to start than a transformation that linked concatenation to bamboo. Two of my favorite words, combined. Bamboo. And concatenation — the knotted puzzlement. Stories linked. The Metropolitan Museum of Art defines it in this way, the plait-work created by the Starn twins, two brothers, born in 1961, accompanied by the choreographed team of mountain climbers / gerry-riggers, lacing up the bamboo like a troupe of Hong Kong scaffolders, erecting yet another structure in Kowloon Harbor. The love of bamboo and knotting, plaiting and the weaving of light, sound and the sheer energy of how bamboo grows makes is a study that ranges back in my life decade on decade.
I can recall, working in the sultry heat of one summer, having planted bamboo in protected rings, round my first house overlooking the Ballard Locks, and out to the Puget Sound — the sound of the bamboo growing, slowly sliding and creaking in the soil, the cells of the very fiber, cracking and expanding.
I can recall the nesting into the root masses of bamboo — during storms and rain, the clacking of the sounds, ruffling the leaves in a shearing, riffling sound.
I recall — the silence of bamboo in snow, falling — the perfected quietude of a forest in winter quiet, the momentary dripping, of flake — melting — as it drips off another leaf — falling to the snow protected soil and root culms, beauty, the meditation emerging.
FROM THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART WEBSITE.
CURRENT EXHIBITION
Big Bambu
April 27, 2010—October 31, 2010
American artists Mike and Doug Starn (born 1961) have been invited by The Metropolitan Museum of Art to create a site-specific installation for The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden, opening to the public on April 27. The identical twin brothers will present Big Bambú, a monumental bamboo structure ultimately measuring 100 feet long by 50 feet wide by 50 feet high in the form of a cresting wave that will bridge realms of sculpture, architecture, and performance. Visitors are meant to witness the creation and evolving incarnations of Big Bambú as it is constructed throughout the spring, summer, and fall by the artists and a team of rock climbers. Set against Central Park and its urban backdrop, Doug + Mike Starn on the Roof: Big Bambú will suggest the complexity and energy of an ever-changing living organism. It will comprise the 13th consecutive single-artist installation on the Cantor Roof Garden.
The first event, in 24 hours, what I saw:
p a t t e r n i n g
c a t h e d r a l
c r o w d a n d c e n t r a l p a r k b e y o n d
n e s t e d p a t h w a y s
o n e k n o t c o n c a t e n a t i o n s a n d l a s h i n g s
s n a k i n g l a s h i n g s a n d n e s t e d p a t t e r n i n g s
t h e w o v e n r o a d r o d e
s i m p l e l a s h i n g
o n e p o l e i n t o t h e k n o t o f t h e n e x t n e s t
s k y r i n g
t h e p a t h t o t h e s k y
To me, it’s always, all ways, about the patterning of place — there are rhythms that you find and experience — finding them, takes you someplace deeper into the context of expression, that you find yourself being in there.
Worth examining, as a designer, where you are. The signature of design is that it does, in deed, scribe place — signing, perhaps, the way…
home.
TSG | The roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
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