If you're in an architectural frame of mind and you're looking for a good Halloween party night, check out the Critical Halloween party. This event is put together every year by Storefront for Art and Architecture, a non profit organisation founded in 1982 and committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art and design.
The organisation usually offers a wide variety of events including exhibitions, artists talks, film screenings and conferences to generate dialogue and collaboration across geographic, ideological and disciplinary boundaries.
The Critical Halloween Party and Costume Competition has been going since 2011, tackling all sorts of themes including Banality, Metaphor and Corporate-Avantgarde.
These topics unleashed the most bizarre and original sartorial choices that went from costumes inspired by the "Form Follows Function" statement or by literal interpretations of the Grasshopper software and the Rhino application (for parametric enthusiasts...) to amusing interpretations of King Kong and the Empire State Building, of Humans Scales, or of conceptual statements such as "Banality in the Eye of the Beholder" and Superstudio's Supersurface.
Taking place in Lower Manhattan, this year's theme is "I-Relevance" (with a poster inspired by the engravings in Masquerade à la Grecque by French architect Ennemond-Alexandre Petitot) and looks at the digital world and at the online culture that propels banality to stardom.
People going are therefore encouraged to address the relevance/irrelevance (and the Irrelevant/I Relevant) dichotomy within contemporary culture and contemporary digital platforms in their costumes.
The event will also include a competition for Best Group Costume, Best Individual Costume and Best Critical Costume. But, remember, if you can't go, you can still pick ideas for costumes from the previous editions (monstrous architecture and corporate vampires are after all more scary than traditional monsters and vampires...) on the Storefront site.
Surely Storefront for Art and Architecture have gone well beyond the 1931 edition of the annual costume ball given at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts with its group of prominent male architects dressed as buildings. Who said it wasn't possible to think critically about art and architecture during a costume party and enable critical thinking and public forms of expression at a Halloween event?
Critical Halloween, 80 Greenwich Street, Lower Manhattan, 31st October 2014.
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