Drinks with performance artists tend to keep you on your toes. You’re always wondering if something they say, the way they walk, or the thing they’re holding in their left hand might be part of the act: a highly scripted, reactive, and meaningful performance intended for your immediate apprehension and interpretation in the context of decades of work. Take performance artist Danielle Freakley, who last week launched a piece spanning the next year of her life, wherein she’ll speak solely through quotes. This will be “her normal mode of speech, in everyday public life”.

Yet Guy Ben Ner’s film, “Drop the Monkey,” which showed at the Performa 09 hub space at 41 Cooper Square, reminds us of the danger of mixing art and life, and the reception for Performa’s Live Architecture launch heeded its warning. It was booze and business, and one last chance for a good look at the commission constructed by nOffice of Berlin. The interior, consisting of plywood paneling, with clean and inventive angles, and a stadium-like staircase climbing an entire wall, figures as a place where imagination can thrive. RoseLee Goldberg, historian, author, critic, and curator of Performa, wanted the space to function as instant architecture, a just-add-water performance space. A built-in cube for radio and TV recording features a wall that pulls down for use as a stage. Flavin-esque flourescents parcel out light, playing with perspective. There is a secret door, a kiosk, a screening room – it is a larger-than-life wooden toybox.

Other than some A/V recording, nOffice’s space was not used for performances this year: Performa, says Goldberg, has always been about the city, and moving theater out of traditional, faded venues into spaces that add to, rather than detract from, performance. As Vito Acconci demonstrated with his Following Piece, presented by the Architectural League of New York in 1969, the city as venue increases performative possibilities, while traditional theaters constrain performance. Goldberg believes in performance as a much-needed activism on architecture, and she deems the recession to be as good a time as any to enact this activism, this curating for the city. The hub space, she said, was always just “a nice idea.”

Now, the hub space incarnate performs, itself, as a place for ideas. At the reception to launch Performa’s first architecture commission, Goldberg invited a conversation about the future of architecture at Performa. Enthusiastic guests ranged from Markus Miessen of nOffice, to the An Architektur crew, to practicing architects, to aspiring performers and young urbanists. The AIA and the Van Alen have already signed on to take part in the dialog, and if the conversation grows as planned – with the aide of a few fundraising efforts – we should have a lot to look forward to come Performa 11.

Earlier on in the evening, as I entered 41 Cooper Square, I heard a passing neighbor remark to an equally besotted companion, “Oh, so they’ve almost finished this one.” He must’ve mistaken the plywood for construction materials for the Thom Mayne building.

As with all review and opinion pieces posted on Urban Omnibus, the views expressed are those of the author only and do not reflect the position of Urban Omnibus editorial staff or the Architectural League of New York.

Sarah Snider is the Executive Assistant at the Architectural League of New York. She has lived in London, Paris, and the Bay Area, and she now lives at Treehaus Brooklyn.