Recently, we’ve been examining the visitor response to the Idea Centers that are placed strategically throughout the museum.  An educational component of the exhibition, the centers are intended to provide our guests quick access to the Life on Mars website, artists’ catalogues, gallery guides, and other informational resources while exploring the exhibition.  The Centers also serve as a place for visitors to blog on-the-spot about the Life on Mars experience.

Earlier this year, during a live webcast conversation, Douglas Fogle mentioned the importance of hiring architects to design the 2008 Carnegie International's exhibition space.   Douglas chose the innovative and experimental Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena, founders of the esteemed architectural firm Escher GuneWardena, to partition and redesign the museum spaces encompassed in Life on Mars’ sprawl.

They derived a conceptual order from the Fibonacci sequence of numbers (1,1,2,3,5,8, etc. – You read the Da Vinci Code, right?) that are rendered in neon tubing in Mario Merz’s Fibonacci 1202. Looking at occurrences of the numerical pattern in nature, the architects arrived at clouds as an appropriate metaphor.

Frank Escher is a renowned expert on the heavily influential architecture of John Lautner. It’s not a stretch to see traces of Lautner’s futurist “Googie” aesthetic in the transparent cylindrical legs of the table and the cloud shaped surface reminiscent of the Mar Brisas house in Alcopolco.  If you don’t know Lautner’s work, imagine any diner in 1950’s America, and you’ll have in your mind the vision for American modernism that he inspired.

Seating, of course, was also an issue when conceiving the Idea Centers. What does it feel like to sit on a cloud?  A number of custom-made ideas surfaced but the challenge was to straddle the conceptual integrity of the environment but still be comfortable, durable, and stylish.  In the spirit of the International, the iconic Jasper Morrison Air-Chair was the obvious solution - a chair that embodies all three components with an extra splash of humor and levity.