Kendall Buster : ‘New Growth’ (Architectural Structures)

An inventory of architectural models that operates in the territory where architecture and biology might meet; an imagined city where old forms generate new forms through processes that suggest germination, budding, merging, hybridization, or absorption. This model city is a single organism conceived of as a functioning system of interdependent parts. It is also a grouping of autonomous structures that operate like competitive independent organisms in a loose highly provisional community. Some are connected by passageways that suggest either umbilical cords or parasitic invasions. Contiguous membranes create distinct regions in the city and the transparency of these membranes allow inner layer to be visible through outer shell. These porous membranes also operate as a continuous plane where an exterior protective shell wall folds to become an interior vessel lining wall.

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‘New Growth’
Shadecloth, Steel
Boise Art Museum
2007
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I have long been fascinated by the way in which architectural structures embrace, contain, shelter, frame, and even control the individuals who inhabit them, and explore this notion by building sculptures that for me operate both as scale models for imaginary buildings and as sites of enclosure with accessible spaces. My initial study in microbiology and my interest in the history of architecture results in works informed by both details of buildings from various historical periods and by biological morphologies. My aim is to build a sculpture that appears to have been built with a precise blueprint, while at the same time contradict this notion with some demonstration of that structure (or grouping of structures) as a dynamic system.

Though my sculptures reside in a place between object and architecture, most have human-scale chambers and all are constructed with a play between interior and exterior space. Some works are autonomous and singular, and these lone forms are typically designed with radial symmetry to suggest an enormous vessel or an isolated building. Here my design seems driven by a need for an almost classical sense of order and a ‘true center’ in the interior space of the form. However, in New Growth, as in most of my more recent works I build with heterogeneous parts in fields or in asymmetrical groupings, and this is for me resonant not only with the notion of biological growth, but also with the manner in which architectural structures form and re-form the fabric of cities over time. This new work reflects an expanded vocabulary of architectural sources and an interest in a shift towards greater complexity in the combination and collision of components in my design. [Extract : ‘New Growth’ Project]

Kendall Buster : Website

Kendall Buster : Preparatory Work

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