The Keller Gallery at the MIT serves as a new context for the work of C+S Architects.

As if lifted from the firm’s Treviso studio and planted directly within MIT, a working table of models and drawings composes the central space of the gallery, juxtaposed with the firm’s recent built works.

 

Feeling Contexts summarizes the philosophy and methodology of C+S Architects: the table is in fact a frame where pixels of works of the office, of suggestions, of models and sketches are appearing within a wood made structure of lumbers in the aim of  letting the visitor to customize a self opinion of the connections and threads which tie together the different aspects of C+S research.

On the walls a texture of painting by Oikos produces the effect of a thick texture where the projection of a quotation of Josè Saramago strengthen the idea of customization related to that of having a journey through C+S architecture research.

 

...Reader, take the following pages as a challenge and an invitation.

Make your own journey, paying the least attention

 to the easiest, most comfortable and frequented itineraries.

Agree to make a wrong turn and go back or, conversely,

persist to go ahead to invent unusual ways out into the world.

You won’t make a better journey.

And, if you feel impelled by your sensitivity, in turn register what you said and heard...

 

Josè Saramago

 

For C+S architects are the translators of contexts. 

As a translator, the architect chooses each context he wants to operate in, serving while preserving it and bridging it to another form and time.

Engaging and re-inventing the site itself, as a space rich of potentiality, reconfiguring the boundaries of the programs, re-writing the history of the place (materiality, topography, strata, culture, socio-political expectations) cross-sectioning through the different scales and disciplines disciplines involved, each time C+S manipulates and reinvents the boundaries of their intervention, dealing with the whole of the built environment.

C+S re-writes the contexts as a map of the potentialities, where to graft interferences which react with the physical, economic, social and political spheres.

These interferences are frames in search for the beauty of the ordinary, open to the flowing of time, energy, people. They are specific but prototypical.

Understanding the fragments of the ordinary and allowing them to interfere in any new design, requires a great deal of empathy.