An Organism in Richmond/ The Architect Has Gone Missing (2017-2018)
An Organism in Richmond (an idiosyncratic visitor’s guide)
The Architect Has Gone Missing (a novella)
2017-2018, commissioned publications
Institute for Contemporary Art [ICA]
Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia
The idiosyncratic visitor’s guide functions as a hand-held, fold-out walking map to the ICA, a new building designed by architect Steven Holl and his team. Holl took inspiration for the building from The Garden of Forking Paths, a short existential detective story by Jorge Luis Borges. The publication features speculative floor plans and captions narrated by an anonymous group of individuals who predict the shape of a mysterious building and imagine several scenarios as to what its interior might hold, floor by floor.
The novella functions as a non-linear mystery which includes several narrative forks-in-the-road for a reader to choose, inspired by Borges’ concept of forking time. Each combination of paths chosen will transport a reader through a different mix of imagined episodes relating to the ICA and its building site as well as Richmond’s past, present and future.
