Courtesy Zwirner Gallery

Last weekend I dropped into David Zwirner Gallery. As architects, we talk about space often. It comes up in conversation daily. Often we talk about "shaping" space. In many ways, as architects, we spatialize intent through the sculpting of nothing: making void from solid, separating figure from ground looking and how objects relate to one another. Architectural theorists and writers have developed a language of ideas looking as far back as palladio's use of space and relating those drawings to Le Corbusier. Even adopting didactic illustrative diagrams for projects such as Eisenman's House V. This kind of thinking is influenced by work's like The Orange by Gordon Matta-Clark and the many constructions of Sol Lewitt. In some ways those artists realize the purists form of the discussion without the pedestrian demands of the architect.

Flavin today may offer a new approach. The work at Zwirner created rooms and layers of space in way that I have yet to experience in other places. Young Practices like Faulders Studio's Mute Room seem to grow from this tradition. Where a person's shadow becomes a kind of absence of space in Flavins work, a person's weight describes their physical absence in Faulder's mute room.But enough of the pedantic critic.

It's amazing to see space created cheaply (fluorescent tube and colored gel's are readily available) and use color to define small spaces so clearly.