Enact a Preservation
The Resor House was designed by Mies van der Rohe as a summer home for the Resor family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Although the project brought Mies to the United States in 1937, and is represented by over 800 drawings, collages, and models, the home remains relatively unknown, in part because it was destroyed by a flood in 1943.
Enact a Preservation re-envisions the home’s three large picture windows of Mies’ original design. In it two grand mythologies meet for the first time, an iconic American landscape seen through the rectifying lens of high modernism. Little is known about Mies’ time on the ranch, but it was said that he would sit on the foundation pillars of the building site, contemplating the changes in light. The video is a three-channel 45 minute loop made from a single take: a view of the fields and mountains, revealing the slow changes in sunlight as clouds track across the sky. The installation is a hybrid of research and place, the speculative history of a structure, it’s narratives reimagined through an equally speculative archaeology. It is the recovery of an unmade ruin, and the preservation of a view that never existed.
Enact a Preservation re-envisions the home’s three large picture windows of Mies’ original design. In it two grand mythologies meet for the first time, an iconic American landscape seen through the rectifying lens of high modernism. Little is known about Mies’ time on the ranch, but it was said that he would sit on the foundation pillars of the building site, contemplating the changes in light. The video is a three-channel 45 minute loop made from a single take: a view of the fields and mountains, revealing the slow changes in sunlight as clouds track across the sky. The installation is a hybrid of research and place, the speculative history of a structure, it’s narratives reimagined through an equally speculative archaeology. It is the recovery of an unmade ruin, and the preservation of a view that never existed.
