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| Salazar Davis Architects created luminous living quarters for Laurie Stone. Click here for more images. | |
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| Artist Ian Montgomery designed an organic structure for Grant Bailie. Click here for more images. |
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| Tricky ink's espionage-inspired structure was designed and built for Ranbir Sidhu. Click here for more images. |
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All images on this page courtesy Flux Factory |
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This past May, the Flux Factory, an art collective based in Long Island City, New York, was transformed into a writing laboratory. In the 2,500-square-foot gallery space, three novelists settled into small live/work units custom designed and built by artists and architects chosen through a competition. The installation, aptly titled “Novel,” paired the designers with the writers to develop and refine their concepts for the space they would inhabit for the duration of the month. Like the writers, individually occupied with their respective narratives, each structure was self-contained; although they provided visual screens, they were still permeable to noise.
In this installation, writing became performance. Initially greeted by three apparently closed structures, visitors to the installation had varied types of visual access to observe the writers at work. The habitat of archaeologist-turned-novelist Ranbir Sidhu was constructed of stacks of wooden shipping crates; small gaps between them permitted views into his workspace. Its designers, Mitch McEwan and Kwi-Hae Kim—together called Tricky ink.—were inspired by the theme of espionage, composing one undulating wall of many storage cubicles, reminiscent of the dead-letter boxes once used by spies to transmit information.
For the writer Laurie Stone, New York–based Salazar Davis Architects built a shelter that demonstrated efficient use of space. A white cube with semitranslucent walls, offset diagonally from the corner of the gallery, glowed from within; interior light elegantly revealed both the cube’s structure and the shadows of its contents. A long orange ramp pierced the cube on the diagonal, directing the desk and bed to be placed along adjacent sides of the box so that the workspace was barely visible from the sleeping space and vice versa.
Meanwhile, Grant Bailie, a writer and artist, inhabited an organic, earthy structure with sod roof panels planted with different grasses. Designed by artist Ian Montgomery, the walls of painted stretched canvas allowed visual access only through the slivers between points of contact with the wooden structure.
The Flux Factory experiment incubated and shielded the authors from distractions, while translucent walls or intentional gaps encouraged voyeurism into the writer’s solitary process of composition. But ultimately, the habitats acted as subtle cocoons, meeting the writers’ functional needs while allowing them to devote their full attention to their craft.
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