Quasicrystals Screen
Installation view, “Tlatelolco and the localized negotiation of future imaginaries,” February 27-May 6, 2008, Museum as Hub, New Museum, NY. Photo: Alison Brady
Quasicrystals Screen
Artist: Thomas Glassford
Quasicrystals Screen, 2008
Cut vinyl on glass
Courtesy the artist
Thomas Glassford’s project proposes giving a fresh “skin” to the former Foreign Affairs tower on the Plaza of the Three Cultures in Tlatelolco. This building, designed by the architect Ramírez Vázquez, has recently been taken over by Mexico’s national university to become an important new cultural center. The ambition of Glassford’s project involves giving this building a strikingly new visibility as it seeks to change its identity. The outer surface Glassford proposes is a geometric pattern constructed from colored neon tubing, hung on transparent wire netting. Taken from the structure of quasi-crystals, this non-repeating “atomic pattern of infinite change” was identified by the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose in 1974. Here this design is used symbolically, as a reference to the multiple, cyclical, and ever-changing attempts throughout the history of the site to generate new cultural movements at Tlatelolco.
Artist Statement
The idea of giving another skin to the site of Tlatelolco follows the tradition of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and clearly re-marks the institutional charge of the modernist building of the triad. This is not another concept of effacement but one of full respect of all structures and of the tower itself, a relatively transparent skin or net that would maintain the modernist edifice of the architect Ramírez Vázquez. At night this isolated tower would beam on the cityscape, marking its new use as the Centro Cultural Tlatelolco, a beacon to draw visitors and to re-invigorate the neighborhood of Tlaltelolco itself.
The concept of using the structure of quasicrystals as a conscious and cohesive pattern, one that represents a newness of intellectual study, an ancient presence and what is ultimately a natural crystalline framework in itself, places a prominence on the conglomeration of previous attempts to idealize a cultural movement on this site, be it conquest or utopian urbanization. This atomic pattern of infinite change celebrates this process and recognizes in its natural complicity of geometry, the endless nature of culture not only to this site but marks Tlatelolco’s complex historical continuum though humanity worldwide.
With an eye on UNAM’s invested presence in the arts and science, this project attempts to express the notable restructuring of this complex as a beacon for cultural movements with its newfound use.
