What's alarming about this tidbit, submitted by trusted reader BS, is how utterly normative normal it is likely to appear to those of you, poor souls, reared in the academy and toiling in the field. No efforts at willful obfuscation, no obvious phantasmagoria of blather, no overt attempts to mask with words an idea that simply ain't. No, the boilerplate nonsense you will read after the jump—a description of UN Studio's Holiday Home installation at the ICA in Philadelphia—is your quotidian jargon, straight-up, insidious in it's banality. Nevermind that the firm employs the lovely Caroline Bos to serve as an "in-house critic [and] all-purpose debunker," one line is the finest intellectual get-out-of-jail-free card we've read in some time: "The interplay of what is real and what is virtual transpires on a number of levels touching on ideas of collective memory and phenomenological perceptions."

The "Holiday Home" is an experiential installation exploring and quantifying areas in which the holiday home departs from modern design conventions. The orthogonal surfaces of the archetypal house are extruded and skewed creating the sculptural armature within which the dichotomies of home and holiday home are played out. The new architectural shape emulates escapism, the expectation of a holiday as removed from the everyday experiential routine. The interplay of what is real and what is virtual transpires on a number of levels touching on ideas of collective memory and phenomenological perceptions.

The unadorned construction allows attention to be directed towards the spatial configurations of the structure. Visitor movement through the installation activates unexpected views and the multidirectional shadows cast create unpredictable perspectives as they fall onto faceted surfaces. The perception of time is intrinsically interwoven into the project as light conditions subtly modulate referencing different atmospheric qualities; the sense of season and time of day become more abstract as you may find on holiday where time has a different rhythm as it is unbound by the frameworks of contemporary patterns of living and dwelling.

Based in Amsterdam, van Berkel and Bos have realized several internationally acclaimed projects, including the Erasmus Bridge (Rotterdam, 1990-96), the widely publicized Mobius House (Het Gooi, 1993-98), and most recently, the opening of the Mercedes-Benz Museum (Stuttgart, 2006). Their work was also featured in the International Architecture Exhibition of the 2004 Venice Biennale. Van Berkel and Bos's firm, UN Studio, is meant to act as a powerhouse in which architects, graphic designers, stylists, engineers, and other building and creative professionals can collaborate dynamically. Van Berkel, a self-described hyper-modernist, strives to design on the cutting edge while maintaining coherence with the surrounding landscape, and credits the computer for his designs' noted fluidity. Bos, an art historian, serves as in-house critic, all-purpose debunker, and producer of conceptual and theoretical literature.

· Holiday Home [Philly ICA]

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