I have found that I am not solely a studio artist. I know how to work in a studio and I’ve got lots of conventional studio skills, but it really doesn’t engage me week in week out. I realize that what I am really interested in is the tourism outside my front door.

My research is about working with entropy. I’m drawn to buildings as metaphor for system breakdowns – and as opportunities to learn more about how humans interface with the world through architecture. I use neglected structures as my raw material. In this way, I am able to reveal their hidden construction, provide new ways of perceiving space, and create metaphors for the human condition.

St. Louis is truly in a state of entropy. My work helps me to address critically the fate of our neighborhoods, which are presently filled with unoccupied structures, abandoned warehouses, idle factories, and empty lots. My experiences have been open-ended, complex, and suggest that fate is malleable. Through allocations of time and circumstance I become another layer on top of the dynamics at play in the places I work, taking advantage of a great opportunity to talk. My engagements are on-going and constantly in flux, much like the built environment itself.

In architecture, you focus on the box; this box can be understood as a social weapon – are we protected, have we become isolated? We have preconceived ideas about a structure protecting us, and when choruses of unoccupied structures no longer protect us, it raises all sorts of issues that we don’t normally associate with a neighborhood.

We all leave a layer of skin on our buildings, and as an artist I am sharing skin with the idiosyncrasies of those who have built, painted walls, and hammered nails. In my current work I intend to represent and reinterpret this relationship. I hope to offer audiences new ways to think about architecture while inciting questions concerning the social, political, and geographical circumstances that give architecture its meaning.

Brick by brick, that’s just the way the game go…

Robert Longyear

Studio Artist

Craft Alliance Community Outreach Manager

CAT Fellow 2003

St. Louis