2022 06 20 Public Issue 5: America

A journey across contemporary America, 31 artists across multiple disciplines each interpret a state. Architensions contributed to this issue with our ongoing research on architecture and leisure. We have focused on projects in Connecticut, a state that is home to some of the largest suburban office parks and corporate estates in the United States, some unused or abandoned. Through the means of collages we focused on important examples of these typologies in Connecticut: The Union Carbide Building completed in 1982 and the Richardson-Vicks Headquarters in 1975 both by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates. We imagine them as leisure parks in a world that no longer needs labor and where humanity will focus on their well-being. The collages aim to deprive the buildings of their labor extraction function and purge their precursory obsolescence.