This month at Chamber Gallery in Chelsea, photographer Andrew Zuckerman presents the first capsule of his curated series called “Human Nature.” Framed around works by Steven Holl Architects, Levenbetts and Leong Leong, the show is an introspection on the cube as form, element and inspiration. Leong Leong’s contribution to the show, A Toolkit for a Newer Age,is a series of nine eight-by-eight-by-eight-inch objects carved in Himalayan salt, which gives the sculptures a translucent pink complexion.
The objects derive the shape of the cube into nine functional objects, tools for human activities like eating, sleeping and meditating. Architizer talked with principals Dominic and Christopher Leong of Leong Leong to understand their views on the relationships between the social and aesthetic potentials of architecture, a theme that grounds their installation at Chamber.
Installation view of A Toolkit for a Newer Age at Chamber Gallery; photo credits: Guang Xu
Architizer: Do you at all consider the properties of the cube within your design approach beyond the realms of the exhibition at Chamber?
Leong Leong: The cube is an unavoidable measurement of space which is so ubiquitous that our engagement with it is almost unconscious at this point. The suggestion of “unpacking the cube” was an opportunity to consciously embrace the form of the cube and manipulate it relative to the material properties of the salt. The combination of the platonic form of the cube rendered out of the imperfect and fragile nature of the salt was compelling to us.
Above: inside Leong Leong’s studio; below: detail of A Toolkit for a Newer Age
What interested you about the materiality of the Himalayan salt blocks, particularly as it could be applied to the exhibition’s context of encouraging communal interaction?
We were fascinated by the varying qualities of the salt. Each of the raw blocks are completely different from each other, differing in the patterns of veining and the density of iron oxide. These variations create an unpredictable quality of translucency and texture. This inherent unpredictability limited the precision with which the salt could be be shaped by the CNC machine, creating a wabi-sabi or rigorously imperfect quality. The imperfections of the material humanize the ideal form of the cube and give each one a unique character.
While each object is designed for a specific human activity (sleeping, eating, meditating, etc.), their shapes remain ambiguous and suggest their potential to exist at many scales, from the intimate to the monumental. Their “functionality” expands beyond their pragmatic use as domestic tools to their status as quasi-spiritual totems.
Inside Leong Leong’s studio
What kinds of methods do you utilize to facilitate social interactions within your broader practice? How are they expanded across the many different scales of your work?
Our design for the Anita May Rosenstein Center is a large and ambitious project for the Los Angeles LGBT community. It will incorporate housing, social services, education, culture and work space into a single campus in the heart of Hollywood. The design is really about embracing inclusivity within the LGBT community as well as interfacing with the city and a larger public. We designed the project from the inside out, focusing on the needs and desires within the community and connecting outward to the city through courtyards and domestic-scale public spaces.
Model view of the Anita May Rosenstein Center
What is the importance of experimentation with smaller scales, whether it be exploration through model-making, furniture or installation, in relation to your built-work?
We experiment with ideas at many scales in order to understand their potentials and limitations. Some ideas translate and take on new possibilities at different scales. Other ideas are specific to a certain scale. It’s important to recognize the relationship between ideas and scale and not make the modernist mistake that ideas are scaleless. And we build models because, as William Carlos Williams once said, “no ideas but in things.” We take that to mean that ideas can only really be experienced or tested if they are manifested in the world somehow and oftentimes a model is the most immediate way to do this.
Models to think buildings through by Leong Leong
Your practice demonstrates an interest in pursuing the depths and limits of materials and how they can enhance or alter our perception of space. Where did this interest in utilizing materials in such a flexible way originate?
Materiality is one aspect of our practice that we have explored obsessively in many projects. We’re interested in how architecture can subtly shift the experience or perception of the familiar everyday life to open up new ways of being. Materiality is one means of creating new aesthetic experiences which take people out of their normal, habitual ways of perceiving or behaving in a space.
Test and final models for Separation Addition
Now that you are working in the same space as two graphic-design firms, have you begun thinking about ways to reshape or enhance the role of visual communication in your architecture?
Yes, of course. We are lucky to collaborate on projects withProject Projects and MTWTF, two great design firms, and learn from their expertise. Architecture is very much about communication, and we need to continually invent new ways of connecting to people and showing them the value of ideas.
All photos courtesy of Leong Leong unless otherwise noted