Asphalt Canvas
Christopher Dorr
Prototypes with Aggregate Industries, Chelmsford, Massachusetts
2008
Asphalt Option Studio | Paula Meijerink | Harvard Graduate School of Design
Photos by Christopher Dorr

The parking facility currently serving Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art is slated for development in 2010, presenting the museum with an opportunity to sponsor the lot’s temporary transformation. Inspired by Rauschenberg’s work with Cage and De Kooning, the proposed intervention explores driving as a new form of creative collaboration among contemporary artists. Tests using a remote controlled car illustrate how invited artists will gradually refigure the lot’s asphalt surface using a truck as a brush. The resulting multivalent web of tracks will redefine the experience of parking for patrons in the short term, while embodying a work of art which can be extracted and sold to benefit the museum at the end of the interim period.