New Structures: Gregor Kregar

In 1962 architect Buckminster Fuller imagined a floating city of Cloud Structures thatwere intended to alleviate the politics of land ownership, aid conservation of nature and liberate humankind's dependency on the earth. The imaginary potential and influence of utopian architectural aspirations is an important underlying influence of Gregor Kregar's practice, and forms a beginning for New Structures.

This premise was originally developed in-depth in a series of projects exhibited nationally and internationally between 2006-2012. During this period Kregar explored, through a variety of materials and scales, the tensions between modernist architectural theory and its physical reality.

In New Structures, Kregar utilizes recycled materials, paint and recycled neon lights to transform the interior of Gow Langsford Gallery. By using recycled timber, the majority of which comes from demolished leaky homes, Kregar explores the potential use of humble materials to take on architectonic forms. This motivation, as an artistic strategy, can be found throughout the development of installation practices ranging from Kurt Schwitters' seminal work Merzbau (1933) to the contemporary work of Christo, Tadashi Kawamata, Maya Lin, Sarah Sze or Hector Zamora. Kregar's work engages with the legacy of such artists by innovatively coupling the grand history of architectural logic with the detested debris of society to cunningly provoke the collective conscience.

White cube no longer, Kregar’s structure is a space of sanctuary, but also a functional space that visitors can experience as a place to walk through and socialize. New Structures is is an exercise in architectural imagining with tangible application, which reconsiders waste for its real potential of spatial change.

Text adapted from “Floating ideas for falling cities”, Bruce Phillips, The Dream House Project catalogue, Te Tuhi, 2012