VISITING ARTIST, UNIVERSITY OF WYOMING, 2014

The Resor House is a well-known residential project by Mies van der Rohe, despite never being built. The project’s only physical remnants on site in Wyoming are four concrete pilotis spanning a creek bed. van der Rohe generated a great quantity of proposal materials, most notably collages, for the commissioning Resor family.

The challenge of this movement intervention was how to relate the human body to a concept of architecture rather than a physical structure. More than one intervention was generated to address this challenge. These include a video work of a tight rope walker and live performance of vertical dancers with van der Rohe’s collages and building site photos.

The performance was in collaboration with Margaret Wilson, the head of the Dance Department at UWYO and was held at their Visual Arts Center. This intervention occurred in two spaces simultaneously, one conceptual and one physical.

These movement interventions ask whether perhaps the the purest manifestation of a modernist building project is the concept rather than the physical building. This notion may explain why some of the most recognisable Miesian imagery – the Resor House collages or his drawing of the glass skyscraper – represents projects never built.