Hernan Diaz Alonso introduces Mark Foster Gage, characterizing his current installation and design studio at SCI-Arc as formalizations of the informal exchange that has long existed between SCI-Arc and Yale. He characterizes Gage as a designer and shaper of current critical discourse, with a unique awareness of history and pop culture.

Gage describes his strategy of aesthetic disruption of the real through para-fictions as a response to The Great Flattening – the removal of systems of hierarchy, flat equality, flattening of the media. He cites Jacques Rancière, “Black Mirror,” “Handmaid’s Tale,” Damien Hirst’s “Treasures from the Wreck of The Unbelievable,” and Hal Foster. Gage stresses that architects have been engaged with para-fiction and calibrations of perception from Vitruvius through Brunelleschi, August Choisy, Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, and Viollet-le-Duc.

Gage discusses a number of projects, including the Helsinki Guggenheim Museum, the H&M Pavilion at Coachella, a vertical addition to a theater on 42nd Street, NYC, a 102-story residential tower for West 57th Street, NYC, a house on Ile-Rene Lavasseur, tower/residence in Ad Diriyah, the National Science & Innovation Centre of Lithuania, the “East River Valley” proposal to protect Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens by draining the East River, a single-family home in Calais, France, and the “Geothermal Futures Lab,” installation in the SCI-Arc Gallery (January-March, 2018).