Curatorial Question

Where do you find joy in the city?

Joseph Altshuler (left) and Zack Morrison (right) are both parents of young children who keep them on their toes when they’re not working on design projects -- and even when they are. Joseph has an 8-year-old named Rafi and a 4-year-old named Sonia, and Zack has a 4-year-old named Evelyn. Their kids are also their best design critics, often invading Zoom meetings and backseat driving during collaborative 3-D modeling sessions. As Sonia would say, “Make that architecture more fuchsia, please!”

The team takes pleasure in being generalists, working on various design projects ranging in scale from furniture to installations to interiors to buildings and even festival landscapes.

For their first commissioned client project, they designed new public restrooms inside an existing synagogue facility, noting that sitting on the toilet is the most intimate architectural experience a person can have.

While strolling around downtown Columbus in October 2022, they stumbled upon the Ovation Plaza space and were immediately smitten. The diagrid pavement! they said. The stepped, cascading parapets! The walls with rounded corners! The triangular soffit! The existing surfaces of pavement and walls were abounding with tasty shapes. And yet the whole space was washed in beige paint as if to disappear into the background. It was like this corner of the city was challenging them to celebrate its existing quirks, to animate its edifices in full color, and to awaken it to live its best life.

A Carousel for Columbus is a proof-of-concept for a broader design research project called “Supergraphic Landscapes.” They’re interested in building a body of work that playfully combines 2D graphics and 3D forms in dynamic and animated ways that might be considered graphic design at the scale of the city or architecture that flickers between flatness and deeper space. Whatever it is, they hope to make a lot more inhabitable public art in the future that doesn’t just decorate or beautify the city, but reorganizes the city’s operation and that expands the ways city-dwellers find companionship and love for their city and its architecture as much as each other.

One word that is conspicuously absent from most conversations about architecture in the profession and the academy, they said, is “love.” Exhibit Columbus is a profound exception to this tendency. From Paola Aguirre’s Love Letter to The Crump (2019) to Joyce Hwang's To Middle Species, With Love (2021), for example, they hope that A Carousel for Columbus, their locomotive love letter in-the-round, continues a multiyear collective conversation about the intersection of love and civic space and of affection and architecture.

This excerpt is from the 2023 Field Guide. Download it here.