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We Are Out of Place


Until 1999, my sculpture was participatory in the sense that I built reading rooms, reading gardens, bridges, workers' lounges, etc. Previously, I knew architecture not as a "thing between four walls in a spatial sense, but as a place for resting, sleeping, working." But since then I have enclosed the sculptures so that people cannot enter; they have to walk around the sculpture and view it. Adorno's ironic statement—"it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home"—now guides my work. Outside of these enclosed spaces, we are out of place, as though banished, estranged, expelled, or as Lukács says, experiencing a "transcendental homelessness."

Siah Armajani
from Notes on Exile