Time Travel

New York City–based American artist Daniel Arsham fashions sculptures of objects dating from classical antiquity to the present day that appear to have been unearthed by archaeologists years from now, thereby confounding the past, present and future

- Y-Jean Mun-Delsalle

Architecture was Mr. Daniel Arsham’s first love. However, as fate would have it, his application to architecture school at The Cooper Union in New York City was rejected, so he ended up studying at the college’s equally well-known art school instead. “I also didn’t get in initially to the art program, so I applied again and eventually got in,” the Cleveland-born, Miami-raised artist, 39, discloses. “I don’t know if I would have lasted in architecture school there. Architecture has rules to it. Obviously there’s a reasoning behind it, but it’s a bit more rigid than I’m interested in engaging with.”

Then after graduating, a number of the artworks he was creating manipulated architectural surfaces, so it soon became necessary to collaborate with an architect, which led to the formation of Snarkitecture, the design and architecture studio he co-founded with Alex Mustonen in 2007 occupying the same space as his art studio in Queens. “So I’ve gotten back to it without actually being the one to do the architecture work. My role there is to come in, critique and alter, more as a kind of advisor and critic,” he notes. True to his dreams of being a builder, with Snarkitecture, he has designed boutiques for fashion brands Kith and COS, a giant pillow fort in California comprising hundreds of cushions to stack and climb, and an artificial beach made from nearly one million recyclable plastic balls inside the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. In the meantime, his artistic creations make architecture do things it’s not supposed to do: figures burst forth from flat surfaces, the skin of a room’s walls are pulled together and tied into a knot, and there are environments with eroded walls and stairs going nowhere.