Fanyu Lin, young architect from China, recent graduate from Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in the city of New York, is helping design Fluxcity, an unrealized architectural project of George Maciunas, founder of Fluxus art movement, and is co-curating the exhibition FLUXUS AS ARCHITECTURE, Universal StructureTM, at Fluxus Foundation, 454 W 19th St. New York, NY, 10011.
Fluxus is an interdisciplinary art movement that gained prominence in the 1960s. John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, George Brecht and Henry Flynt are among the artists who shared George Maciunas’ vision.
George Maciunas was educated in architecture and art history at Cooper Union, Carnegie Institute of Technology, and New York University. While studying the European and Siberian art of migrations in NYU, he published the groundbreaking academic paper Atlas of Prehistoric Chinese art in 1958.
As an architect, he was credited with the invention of a structural framework and received a patent for the prefabricated building system in 1961. His design of Fluxhouse, as an example of the system was completed and copyrighted in 1965. The patented and copyrighted materials serve as critical foundations for further exploration of Fluxcity.
In designing the Fluxcity, an urban application of Maciunas Prefabricated Building System, Fanyu Lin takes George Maciunas’ master plan of Ginger Island as a conceptual testing ground, where Mr. Maciunas attempted to build artist community in the late 1960s. Having access to all the original materials, Fanyu Lin is able to research the building system. Through faithful reading and systematic analysis of the original design of Fluxhouse, she interprets the house beyond a mere prefabricated prototype by extracting its spatial syntax, which allows for reconfiguration and expansion of a single module to form clusters, communities and urban development.
The Fluxity proposal will be presented in upcoming exhibition FLUXUS AS ARCHITECTURE, Universal StructureTM at Fluxus Foundation. The Universal Structure, rather than a style of architecture, is more akin to a design strategy that critically develops Fluxhouse as an urban system of standardization, modularization and mass-production, where Maciunas combines his architectural expertise and vision with interdisciplinary intelligence in a humble yet ambitious way, that values the rational reflections on architectural design, manufacturing process and urban development as a whole. The exhibition intends to reposition the revolutionary relevance of Maciunas System in the context of today’s urban setting, arguing for an alternative of human habitat, where urban efficiency and social welfare play the leading role.
FLUXUS AS ARCHITECTURE, Universal StructureTM is curated by Harry Stendhal, Chairman of Fluxus Foundation, New York, and Fanyu Lin, Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation in Columbia University, awarded with Bachelor Degree of Architecture by China Central Academy of Fine Arts.