The “architectural performance” Superpowers of Ten was performed in front of five sold-out audiences last weekend, packing the Tank, the newly renovated exhibition space on the first floor of the Chicago Athletic Association on Michigan Avenue. The performance was a narrated rendition of Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, Charles and Ray Eameses’ nine-minute-long film from 1977 that explored the distance from deep space to an atom found in the palm of a hand through linear jumps in space measured by increasing and decreasing powers of ten. The performance reframes this film to contain a more political message, using more than 50 homemade props and costumes to explore messages and societal details that lay outside the film’s apolitcal frame.
Although most of the time I was quite confused (it might have helped to see the 1977 film before attending the performance and not after), each prop piece—notably a human-size papier-mache hand, a manual sausage machine that turned a prop pig into sausage, and a one-piece AstroTurf suit—was more imaginative than the last, with cheers erupting from the audience as each was carefully rolled onstage. A bizarre interpretation of the biennial, the performance was a refreshing take on architecture seen from a sociological perspective, through the lens of performance rather than through the scale models and static images of architecture.
