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EXHIBITION: "MOCKUPS"

Mockups is a collection of work from the past year of research focusing on the general condition of the relationship between materials and architectural scale.  Less about the way things look, and more about the concept of “Something which does something,” the projects in the gallery exhibit how a found characteristic in a material, in this case plywood, can be integrated into the various scales of architecture construction.  Preceded by curious material investigations, the discovery of plywood's ability to 'Feather,' becomes a constraint for productively getting architectural objects to behave a certain way as opposed to only looking a certain way. Inherent within the behavior of these material objects is the potential for "Failure" which defines a limit to the range of possible configurations. Many of the objects are broken or pushed past the point of the materials ability to accommodate what's drawn in the abstract. These instances become moments of ’failure,' and in so doing operate more as tests or 'mockups' than as pure representations.   

Artist Bio:
Nick Gelpi was born in 1979 in New Orleans, and holds a professional degree of architecture from Tulane University. In 2003 he graduated from Columbia University in New York with a Masters of Science in Advance Architecture Design.  He has worked in the New York offices of nArchitects, G-tects, and most recently Steven Holl Architects from 2004-2008.  Nick’s work focuses mainly on materials, their relationship to scalar specificity and the noise produced at their intersection.  He is concerned with scale’s relationship to architecture as a way of testing and engaging the world.  In 2007 Nick received  ARCHITECT Magazine’s first annual R&D award, he is the 2008/2009 recipient of the Howard E. LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University, and has previously taught graduate design studios at Columbia University.