Aries

Independent, Generous, Optimistic, Enthusiastic, Courageous, Sincere, Honest, Holds strong convictions, A leader, Passionate, Short-tempered, Self-involved, Impulsive, Impatient…

Aries, child of the zodiac, is perpetually overcompensating for its fragile sense of self with an extremely large ego. The infant sign of the celestial sphere, Aries as artist/architect possesses a vanity that stems from the child's desire for eternal youth, making birthdays rough. However, the Aries is good at transitions. As first house of the zodiac, Aries is a pioneer, an originator, continually redefining and reinventing its own creative conceptions. This was the case for Mies van der Rohe and Giuseppe Terragni. Driven by a desire not to repeat themselves, both architects were never beholden to style, but rather committed to a syntactical expression that emerged out of a variety of structural and spatial explorations.

The Aries is spontaneous and likes things that occur moment-to-moment, played out for both Mies and Terragni in a shared affinity towards light. This ephemeral phenomena provided the perfect means for satiating a desire for fleeting and transient sensations, expressed in Mies's ghostly Glass Sky Scraper projects and in Terragni's unbuilt glass structure Danteum.

Aries are romantics. Almost all of Mies's early work in Europe was sited in the landscape, reflecting a sympathetic alliance to German romanticism and moreover the influence of Schinkel. The Tugendhat house, a horizontal volume situated on top of a hill, refers to Schinkel's Orianda Palace. A conservatory is situated to the side of the living room—a sheet of glass separates the two spaces reflecting the domestic interior into the exteriority of the garden. The Tugendhat house can also be seen as a Palladian villa for a businessman. An alabaster wall divides the living room into two parts. The front of the room is a place to conduct business meetings. The circular conference table relates to the cylindrical floor-to-ceiling glass wall. This office-type situation is mirrored on the other side of the wall by the family living space—business and pleasure are mirrored onto one other.

Aries, driven by a sense of vanity, is fascinated by the phenomena of reflection. Lacan, also an Aries, explores this concept within his "Mirror Stage"—once the child recognizes its image within the mirror it undergoes a separation from the mother. In very different ways both Mies and Terragni use reflected surfaces to explore ideas of reflection, transparency and transference. Within the Barcelona Pavilion, a fleeting image of the self is projected into the materiality of the marble walls, a projected state of existence from the corporeal into the surface of material. A mirrored ceiling was originally hung in the entrance hall of Terragni's Casa del Fascio. However, the mirroring in Casa del Fascio also occurs beyond this psychological phenomenon. The lobby of Casa del Fascio was used as an emergency gathering place—as people look into the mirror above they see themselves reflected as a part of a larger social body. As an optimistic Aries, Terragni was highly attracted to the idealistic aspects of early Italian Fascism with its implementation of social programs and its resurrection of national pride.

Despite the unabashed Aries ego, in the work of both Mies and Terragni we find another classic Aires trait: a generosity of spirit along with a frailty that resides within the image of the self, transferred into the transparent materiality of the walls they build.

Dan Graham first emerged in the mid-1960s alongside the Minimalists. Graham's work crosses multiple mediums and arenas including performance, film and video to explore shifts in individual and group consciousness and the limits of private and public space. Over time these works have evolved into the installations and pavilions for which Graham is most internationally famous. All of Graham's projects are democratically rooted in everyday urban life and activity. Graham is one of the most influential Conceptual Artists of his time and has since become one of the more influential artists for a younger generation of international artists.

Jessica Russell studied and practiced art in Melbourne Australia, where she also worked in film and television before relocating to New York City in order to explore the possibilities of the grid and enjoy finer weather. She currently studies architecture at The Cooper Union. Of late she has been listening to a lot of Elvis.