Aotearoa and the Hive: The Urban Condition [excerpt]

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Auckland’s commercial spaces are also perpetually shedding old skins in favour of fashionable new ones by following the trends of international markets. Constructed out of various recycled and waste building materials, Mark Schroder’s work The New Modern Efficiency provides a seating area that replicates various design elements found in such buildings. His installation includes structures such as frugal cinder block walls, raw plywood construction site hoardings, steel framing, a heated towel rail, digital advertising displays of the type found in retail outlets, and planters mimicking those used as partitions in offices and plazas. This amalgam of distinct architectural features produces a sense of being in between the seductive consumer environment of a shopping mall and the prosaic infrastructure of a parking lot. By slipping between these spatial cues, Schroder turns the logic of profit-driven space inside out to lay bare its designed intentions and material qualities.

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by Bruce E. Phillips