August 29-Ocotber 13, 2016

“Textural” by Nick Gelpi

Opening reception: Thursday, September 1, 2016

6:30 pm

Join Nick Gelpi as he celebrates the opening of his first solo exhibition at the Miami Beach Urban Studios. (Photo credit: Catalina Ayubi.)

‘The characteristic physical structure given to a material object, by the size, shape, arrangement, and proportions of its parts…’

In the field of Geology, “Texture” is one physical characteristic useful in the identification of unknown minerals. This is a type of arbitrary categorization imposed on naturally occurring elements. In architecture, textures may be graphic or physical, but often are not considered intentional in their generative capacities. While textures may sometimes be considered shallow, or arbitrary, on rare occasion some can become more thematic, impacting the interactions of space around them.

TEXTURAL is a presentation of projects sampled from recent works of interdisciplinary design practice GELPI Projects. Various works are presented in large format somewhere between full scale detail and extra-large representations. An arrangement of typical media will be presented against a backdrop of large scale installations sampling the varieties of physical attributes such as size shape and arrangement of parts forming the various textures from six recent works. Projects are featured as an immersive set of details, obscuring the familiar scale of conventional representations, inviting the observer to explore the works physically, blurring two- and three-dimensional media.

GELPI Projects is a design firm whose work is categorized by a devotion to material details, and innovative experiments of scale. This requires a design approach dedicated to examining the relationships between materiality and building concepts, by focusing on the material consequences of form. Counterintuitive combinations of form and material properties seek to provoke unexpected consequences in the design process. Details distort materials and engage construction to find new opportunities through investigation, not by abandoning the material for the virtual, rather by collapsing them into a laminated reality. Projects produce new depth by emphasizing material experience and detail, over graphic superficiality, in which architecture remains a place of new discovery and embodied experience.

GELPI Projects

Nick Gelpi

Dean McMurry

Alvaro Membreno

Jorge Rodriguez

For more information on FIU Professor Gelpi and his practice, GELPI Projects, click here.