Fixing the Gap (2019)
Collaboration with Maggie Chang, Yuqing Liu, and Gina Vestuti
Fixing the Gap is our attempt at resolving a questionable architectural choice that we felt was symbolic of the more troubling and obtuse aspects of RISD’s administrative decision-making process.
In 2018, RISD unveiled its renovation of the historic 20 Washington Place, an outrageously expensive and bafflingly flamboyant facility designed to centralize the Mailroom, Student Career Center, and RISD Registrar office. Just past the front doors, a literal barrier of entry divides the foyer and the lobby— a wall of screens that showcase images of RISD, before giving way to a vast, sterile, space-age lounge. Curiously, the wall does not extend to the floor, but instead hovers roughly 2 feet above the stairs.
The absurdity of this gap struck us as something beyond a blip of non-intuitive interior design: it was a literal lapse in judgement.
Following the humble guidance of YouTube’s ample collection of DIY-home-improvement videos, we decided the construction of a plaster wall in Prov Wash’s empty space would both reunite us with the material processes that ultimately comprise RISD as well as bring us peace of mind at night.
Plaster’s ubiquity makes it especially pertinent to RISD. The infamous “white cube” is built from plaster slabs; this “standard” has been exempt from cultural signifiers due to its supposedly default and non-descriptive qualities. Of course, like the institutions that utilize it, the notion of plaster as neutral is totally farcical, as it in fact does have descriptive and formal qualities: white, messy, homogenous, often toxic.
We built the infrastructure for this piece— a wooden frame with the precise measurements of the Prov Wash gap— in the middle of the floor, effectively transforming Prov Wash’s expansive lobby into a workspace for student.
After healing the Prov Wash gap and reclaiming the otherwise exorbitant facility, we were finally ready to relinquish ourselves into the institution and become subsumed by the monolith of RISD. For us, this meant literally building ourselves into the architecture, both as a surrender to the magnitude of our school, and as a way to immortalize ourselves into its walls— creating a new history from the ruins of 20 Washington Place.
