Michael Abel Deng & Nile Greenberg
Founding partners, Abel Nile New York, LLC
Egg Protocol
An egg is complete in form but unresolved in fate, a field of protected but undifferentiated potential. Wile E. Coyote, suspended in midair before looking down, occupies a similar state in which the consequences have not taken place. But Wile always falls, and the egg either cracks or hatches. What does this mean for architecture? Egg protocol attempts to examine this tension between possibility and consequence as architecture is increasingly asked to be a kind of prediction engine. Architecture must accommodate changing uses, new regulations, fluctuating markets, evolving technologies, environmental risk, and occupants who may not yet be known. The result is a peculiar contemporary condition: exteriors become more tightly specified even as interiors become more indeterminate. Abel Nile New York asks what happens the moment before the fall, the crack, or the hatch. What is architecture in this suspended condition?
