Now to address the burning question on everyone’s lips: “What is Snarkitecture? And how can it teach me to make more money?” Would that all innovations in / explorations into the nature of art, architecture, and design would enrich us so, but unless you’re as intimately involved as principals Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen, you’ll have to be content with a more figurative brand of enrichment. And actually that’s no small potatoes, as Snarkitecture possesses the kind of conceptual moxie to make us re-think our constructed environment, perhaps even re-create it.

Dig. Designed by Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen.

Exploring the Bounds of Architecture and Expectation

Snarkitecture is not, in fact, a built environment for snakes, nor is it a fantastical Seussian apparition in the midst of the everyday, though it might certainly count the late Theodor Giesel among its influences. It is, rather, “a collaborative practice operating in territories between the disciplines of art and architecture… Snarkitecture aims to make architecture perform the unexpected.” Think of it as a sort-of non combative guerilla operation into the nature of constructed space. Arsham and Mustonen have staged several stateside acts of Snarkitecture—like creating the curious “Slab Table,” which looks like in inverted Matterhorn of creamy foam; or the enigmatic “Excavated Mirror,” appearing to have been unearthed during an archeological dig into our subliminal selves. They’ve also staged ambitious installations, like the towering column illumination at the Florida Marlins’ stadium, whose LED-powered oscillations alternately unveil “The scale of the columns… allowing this effect to be visible at great distances through the city, acting as a kind of beacon drawing people to the stadium and announcing events occurring within.”

Slab Table. Designed by Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen.

Slab Table. Designed by Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen.

Slab Mirror. Designed by Daniel Arsham and Alex Mustonen.

That kind of collaborative proposition is just what they have in mind with their latest project: “Dig,” sponsored by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and OHWOW, intends a literal and symbolic inundation and excavation. The burying, in this case, effected not by a malevolent mass of lava or a thunderous avalanche of snow but rather with the relatively innocuous whoosh of EPS Architectural Foam. The performance, slated to start on March 29 and conclude on April 23, begins with Arsham and Mustonen packing Storefront’s store space (on 97 Kenmare Street, NY, NY) with copious amounts of rigid foam, then proceeds for the duration with their subsequent efforts at excavation, “using simple tools—hammers, picks and chisels – to transform a stock industrial material into a strange, unexpected cavern for both work and play.”

The proceedings will be captured live and in real time on oh-wow’s website, as well as at Storefront itself, where the intrepid duo (visible to passersby through the glass like so many tunneling ants) will hand-mold their way into the unknown, hoping to happen upon some crucial bit of insight into the “intersection of primitivism and contemporary architecture”: “the complexity of the final surfaces and form suggests a Digital origin and conceals the simplicity of a space made entirely by hand.”