Vito Acconci's design and architecture comes from another direction, from backgrounds of writing and art. His poems in the late 60's treated words as matter and the page as a field to move over, his performances in the early 70's shifted art from object to interaction; his installations in the later 70's turned museums and galleries int community-meetings. By the late 80's his work crossed over and he formed Acconci Studio, a design firm that mixes poetry and geometry, computer-scripting and sentence-structure, narrative and biology, chemistry and social-science. The Studio treats architecture not as nodes but as circulation-routes, and about time more than space; their design starts with clothing and ends with vehicles - in-between, they design buildings that slip into landscape and vice versa; they make spaces fluid, changeable and portable; they make architecture subservient to people and not vice versa - they anticipate cities on the move. Built in the last decade are, in Graz, a person-made island; in Tokyo, a clothing store as soft as clothing; in Coney Island an elevated subway-station facade that waves and bulges to make views and seats. Being built now, in Indianapolis is an interactive tunnel through a building; in Toronto, a building-complex fence that twists and rises up the building to make wind-screens, and splits to make public-places. They're designing now, near Eindhoven, a meditation park around an archeological site; in Gwanju, interactive toilets; in Santiago, a plaza divided into cluster-places for self-organization.

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