Dionisio Cortes Ortega

Statement

Do ideas and memories inhabit the mind like people inhabit buildings? As a practicing architect, a large portion of my job is to design spaces for the inhabitation of the human body. Driven by the anatomy of the human body, our surrounding spaces, objects, and obstacles are specifically proportioned to us. Although we all have different body types, there is an average width of space for all the things around us. Our shoulder to shoulder measurement affects the size of door openings. Chairs have a specific height for the seat which is based on the average height of our leg joints. Stair treads and risers, similarly, are determined by the average rotation range and radius of our hip and knee. This got me to question if our minds create specific spaces for our memories and ideas? Rather than dive too deeply into the neurological or scientific meaning, instead my latest drawings are a poetic interpretation of such ideas. The human body, in these scenarios shown as asexual, represents an idea or a memory and the tree branches the neurological network of our mind. The ideas and memories, like people in a space, move around, interact and navigate through an intricate and complex world meeting, influencing, and caring for each other.

Bio

Dionisio Cortes Ortega is an architect, artist and educator. He is an adjunct instructor for Representation I as well as Co-founder and Principal of Reform Architecture, a full service and multidisciplinary architecture and design practice based in the Bronx. Reform Architecture is committed to conscientious design through the following process: questioning, reasoning, analyzing, dissecting, re-examining, rejecting the status quo, creatively obsessing, and visualizing the invisible. Reform Architecture's current ongoing projects include a dance school in Michoacán, Mexico; a community center in a repurposed church in Brooklyn; and several historic restoration projects in lower Manhattan. Dionisio graduated from The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture in 2009. He is a registered architect in the State of New York and a member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Bronx Chapter. Before co-founding Reform Architecture, Dionisio worked on a number of institutional and residential projects while at Selldorf Architects and more than a dozen restaurants projects while at Hapstak Demetriou+ in Washington DC. Dionisio has been invited as guest critic to a number of studio and drawing reviews at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, and at the National University of Singapore. Concurrent with his architectural practice, Dionisio designs outdoor interactive sculptures. His two latest installation are:

Sitting Together, built by Reform Architecture, was on view at the Joyce Kilmer Park in The Bronx in 2019.

Croton Arch of Triumph, a sculpture/monument that was on view from August 2020 to May 2021 at the Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens.