From Above: An Instrument

Karoline Schaufler

Level 1 Experiences 

101) On the Wall  

Endearingly, many architectural terms are already reminiscent of the body: ribs, struts, veins, skin. Although, where normalcy says the human body post-fuse is made of 206 distinct pieces, even the most mundane structures come in any size. 

The story of Sky Church is that, with one hip on West Harrison and something cartilaginous reaching toward 5th, it wanted to know if it is possible for a structure to evoke the things inside. In order to ask, its skin swelled in twisting swaths of metal whose curves could be seen from within and without, distorting the ceiling or the skyline singularly from every angle. It dreamed that every time a person looked, they would see something unique— fractured and flexible like a girl who can lick her ankle from the front or the back. The way music sounds and residue crusts.  

102) Can’t Look Away 

Remnants of my time as a dancer include that I can stand on the tops of my toes with or without shoes, a fact which nearly sent my podiatrist to a cardiologist when the former surveyed my strangely located calluses. Also, that I know how to make someone feel excruciatingly inadequate for being unable to spin three times on one leg and land facing precisely the direction from which they took off. 

03) Sound Lab 

Additionally, a taste for loud music was cultivated in me. Its vice-ious deposits building up inside, clanging on inner walls of copper arteries, constricting tubes supposed to pump blood to the outer endoplasm of me.  

To paraphrase: Most beautiful things are reckless in some way.

104) Revolution  

There is a lot of sweat in Ballet.  

Like endlessly circulating water we can say was once sipped by dinosaurs, or the atoms of each of us that were once part of stars, can we say that the same sweat which has poured off construction workers for centuries, now permeates us?  

105) Gallery: The Quest for Volume  

If you weren’t there you probably wouldn’t know that tights are out of style for anything that isn’t classical, and leotards were only to gird tights.  

With the eve-tapering expectations, some of us simply sprayed outfits on, or stitched them straight into each other’s untaught skin. 

106) Infinite Worlds  

And— did you know that dancers have part time jobs? Greasy ones. I once knew a ballerina with the most beautiful passé you’ll ever encounter, and in the evenings he was a  landscape gardener. Always in trouble with his father for planting hedges in variegated circles.  

And— competitions are held in the ballrooms of casinos, or the ballrooms of hotels constructed to contain the people who go to casinos.  

And— no matter how vigorously you can put your leg behind your head or make an obtuse angle with yourself, someday you won’t be able to anymore.  

107) Taking Rock to the Masses 

If I had to finance the life I live with another, I would choose to be an architect or a sommelier. Because, under these occupations consenting to lecture is a corrugated blemish,  nothing is made of plastic, and some things actually become gorgeous when you realize they have a body. 

Body— Something that houses a brain 

Body— Something breakable  

Body— Something covered in skin. 

108) Learning 

I expected bodies to be hard. Expected good bodies to tangibly represent their ascendency. Was disgusted to find something inside everyone that crushes like the fabricated  beads of a reusable ice pack; not at all, then, contemptibly, all at once.

To this day I don’t know what it is inside a person that gives way so specifically. I know what it is not: muscle, bone, skin, tendon. I have felt those things break within myself, can identify them on a map of the human body darned into tight, hostile skin. But when I angrily, fistedly, laboriously bowed someone inward all I felt crush beneath me was some perversion of a hydroxyethyl-cellulose-silica-encased-sinew-laced-vinyl-skin-coated excuse.

We are raised to be hatefully concavable people. Therapeutic ampules that can’t be thrown away. 

Level 2 Experiences 

201) Exploring New Worlds 

The concept of special exhibitions has certain implications. For instance, that there are some moments when the room is entirely empty, between what was and what will be. That there are artifacts somewhere which remain unexposed. That there are features as yet unseen.

202) We Are 12 

I know that I once did not know the meaning of the word “contemporary,” because my benchmark for the feeling of relief is, while being split and pushed as if desirous to drive somehow through one of the two sets of ribs which lathed each other, the time I did not say what I erroneously believed it to mean.

Of course— there are many things a house can’t do: stretch, grow, fidget, be satisfied. For  a long time, it was not for an I-beam to reason why. 

Of course— a question is simply a desire to be edified.

203) WOW:  

There were many costumes of deprivation, aerosol-colored contingency plans and acidophilus-enlightened cortexes. There was wall-papering.  

There were competitions to see who could. Tournaments even. 

Gallons of water were sealed, held up by resin-laced elbows, then audibly dropped to the  floor. 

Level 3 Experiences 

301) Culture Kitchen 

Exercises in isolation. Can you make your hips move independent of all else? Never lose riveting eye contact? Contextualize verity without contracting acrimony? The old designs were just fine. But a benefit of this new way? Always somewhere to tack on excess material.

I have prepared for you today, a deconstructed individual: a heavily coated head atop a  bed of underdeveloped chest, a strip of belly pounded nice and thin, and on the side, a smear of  marrow. I wanted to use every part to construct perfection. Let nothing go to waste. By my appraisal, the swatch of what was inside, now out, will be most pleasurable against the subway tiled roof of your mouth. Your backsplash of brains. 

302) Fantasy Worlds of Myth and Magic

I have part-ownership of coveted square feet. The foundations of arts and culture that strong communities spin on laid thick and orange to cover scarring. Bricks laid on the arches and left for hours to extrude an improved shape.

There will be a senior day, a veteran’s discount, a student discount (with identification),  and a playground outside full of cavernous sound. When I am through, no one will say this place does not belong to its people.  

303) On Stage 

A cut-and-choreographed-stainless-steel-and-rouged-aluminum something encases the outside of the building, responding to different light conditions and changing when viewed from different angles. And amongst buildings made of ribs and covered in skin, I wondered what it is that covers me.