B-Sides of the Wex

By COURTNEY COFFMAN

The challenge to curate a large exhibition with a cohesive flow poses to be a challenge, but Chris Bedford and team pulled together six, young artists, and began the musical movement that pulled me from gallery to gallery, titled Six Solos.  All of the pieces have a common self-awareness in terms of historic context and contemporary art.  Upon entering each gallery space, moments of awe, surprise, even shock, arise like movements in a musical composition.  One such movement evoked playful, energetic, and imaginative melodies: Geckler’s big-top colors, Putrih & MOS’s escapist ship, Godoy’s alabaster playground, and Morrison’s chromed-out trash. A secondary movement, a particular attitude about the Wexner Center, underscored the exhibition.  Eisenman’s architecture is credited as “conceptual,” visitors do not need to actually be in the space to understand the diagram.  Redl, Morrison, and Geckler would disagree; their installations require perspectival points-of-view within the frame of the Wexner Center to produce specific architectural effects.  The only odd-man-out in Six Solos was Moran, also the only painter exhibited.  Moran’s exhibition was truly a solo; it sang a different melody than the others, but her pieces instilled the overall theme of sensation, a theme that changed the viewing lens with which to experience the other solos within the symphony of Eisenman’s Wexner Center.

Fluorescent Adolescent

Approaching the Wexner from High Street, my voyeuristic view down into the atrium lobby is denied by polychromatic striations adhered to the glass from inside.   Descending upon the ticket lobby, a column wrapped in neon tape glows while a backdrop of pink, yellow, and blue tape falls softly on the wall behind the reception desk.  Turning around to descend the stairs further into the Wexner, Megan Geckler’s color explosion overtakes the space: the neon colors of flagging tape create woven patterns of pink, yellow, green, and blue. 

Spread the ashes of the colors, comprised of one-inch tape, engages a massive volume of space by wrapping, covering, and encapsulating the architecture.  The precision required for a project at large of scale weaving color and material is impressive and demands further attention to technique and hand detail.  Following the implied lines is as frustrating as deciphering a Spirograph drawing but the effect is still sensational. 

Standing underneath the core of the installation, layers of pink, yellow, and blue geometrically align like a two-dimensional image, evoking the Op Art aesthetic of Richard Anuszkiewicz.  Upon studying the layers of color, subtle ribbons of green run begin to emerge.  My eyes follow these green ribbons across the space; they all converge on a crossbeam.  As the crossbeam approaches Eisenman’s tricky faux-column that hangs in the way of strategic taping, Geckler simply surrounds the column in a myriad of green tape.  The green tape reaches out beyond the column, clinging to the windows and walls.  Arriving on the tectonic surfaces, the flagging tape waterfalls down to the baseboard where it is pulled taught to a perfect 90-degree angle with the floorplate.  It is on these flat, stripped surfaces that Geckler’s precise mathematical process is observed.

Anuszkiewicz: Intrinsic Harmony, 1965; Lambie: Touch Zobop, 2003 at Tate Britain

The green wall plays a role-reversal with the adjacent pink, yellow, and blue wall where my eye started to follow the green ribbons. Here, green becomes dominant color with sporadic stripes of blue, yellow, and pink.  The order is backwards, a sweater turned inside out.  Games of juxtaposition are constant in the space: the tectonic surfaces, where the form of the tape is most static in nature, contains the most color variation within an area; the free-floating, geometrical weaving of single colors is the most complicated in form.  The catalysts between these two oppositions are the columns. 

The columns resembled a Jim Lambie installation with their precise stripes of color, but Geckler’s columns are performative.  The columns create a dialog about the installation as a whole and how to read the colors of tape as they move through the large weave.  Geckler has created an environment of palindromes.  Each column is assigned its own color gradation unique to its position in the Wexner.  The large column in the middle of the stairs reads like a totem pole: pink to green to blue to green to pink.  The two columns upstairs in the ticket lobby are a continuation of the same columns below in the café.  Because the columns are side-by-side, the rhythms of the colors are different.  One column reads: yellow to green to pink, floorplate, pink to green to yellow; the other columns reads: green to blue to green, floorplate, green to blue to green.  This is the most exciting part of the installation for me simply because Geckler exhibits an awareness of the floorplate.  While she cannot remove the architecture, she constructs a conceptual, volumetric implied line.  This requires the viewer to be in proper position to view this architectural effect: partially up the stairs and slightly leaned over the banister, channeling a specific perspective of dissected parts, a la Matta-Clark.  And yet, this moment is only captured as one ascends the stairs to exit the Wexner, in which case the columns foreshadow Rudi’s chasing colors in FETCH just outside the doors, a continual and theoretical loop of color and entering-exiting the exhibition. 

Time to Pretend

During the opening-weekend panel discussion, Tobias Putrih indulged the audience with the lineage of his work and the new collaborative exhibition with MOS for Six Solos.  He presented eight previous projects, all commissioned from the independent film industry for temporary screening pavilions.  Putrih’s obsession of the movie screen begins with the audience perception: a typical flat, two-dimensional plane within a black box.  His endeavor was to break the black box formula and implement a new model, one of “architectural escapism.”  He cites the Bronx’s Paradise Theater as a key inspiration for this escapism device to transport viewers to another place and time.  Thus the installation’s title, Majestic, is a reverie on these historic theaters that did more than screen a film, they created an environment. 

Architectural Escapism at Paradise Theater

Putrih’s temporary film pavilions use untraditional surface finishes, like wood panels and metal scaffolding, for dynamic spaces to present the film programs; they substitute painted stars on the ceiling for cellophane membranes.  “It’s not architecture, but more like set design,” Putrih claimed.  One such project, cinema attitudes,¹ appears to be a precursor to Putrih’s collaboration with MOS.  The intimate interior of cinema attitudes is warm, comprised of strategically cut plywood that is assembled to create an organic-formed, fractured envelope.  When inside the smooth envelope, the fractures become lines of light and exhibit Putrih’s ability to transform banal materials into graphic environments.  But the exterior of cinema attitudes is where the work is done; the steel scaffolding, zip ties, rope, and OSB plates are all exposed.  These construction materials create a complex superstructure, holding each of the plywood surfaces to keep the linear crack of light that produces the delicate interior effects. 

The first collaboration between Putrih and MOS, Overhang,² began the white styrofoam-block series.  Overhang, a sculptural object for visitors to walk around and under, resembled a Jenga game, an object in a field.  Intervention #10³ was the second styrofoam-block sculpture; the collaborative project moved from a static object to a hollowed out volumetric-object.  This new generation of styrofoam-block sculpture was to be explored by walking into the mass and experiencing the space within an object.  The styrofoam-block evolution concluded with Erosion,⁴ a volumetric expression of the typological “white box” gallery space.  The resulting sculptural space was carved out of a cubic mass and played with positive and negative space, reminiscent of Rachel Whiteread’s Ghost.⁵ The generational dialog created within these white block collaborations is critical in understanding the Six Solos entry Majestic.  

Putrih/MOS collaborations: Overhang, Intervention #10, & Erosion; Whiteread: Ghost

The redundant nature of the structure is apparent when experiencing Majestic, after all it is an object within a box, holding yet another small box to screen films. I would argue that this nesting of space is parallel to the white block project: the thesis of the object (the figure), the antithesis of the habitable void, and the synthesis of the habitable inverse-object (the field).  Majestic is inventing a new genetic lineage, beginning in the second phase of “habitable object,” an object within a field-within-a-field, a spatial Matryoshka doll. 

This new generation of collaboration requires a new form: crystalline.  Avoiding the Aranda/Lasch solid crystalline forms, Putrih & MOS instead relegate their white blocks to an exoskeleton structural system, defining edges and conceptual facets of negative space.  The metal frame was fabricated with computational software, exhibiting strenuous mathematical calculations and covered with the soft, fuzzy haze of spray-on installation--the offspring of MOS’s furry Afterparty,⁶ or as the curators describe it “as “a collapsed spaceship covered with foam sediment (or maybe a sunken ship covered in shells and seaweed).”

MOS: Afterparty

Putrih mentions that his film pavilions are most effective when “the architecture of the black box disappears as the film engages as spectacle.”  However, Majestic does not dissolve as the film rolls: instead the magic of this structure occurs when it behaves as an object, or a prop.  The sunken ship metaphor is employed as a device for the general public to understand the structure as a contextual armature for the variety of films screened within.  Furthermore, the structure expels on Putrih’s exploration of architectural escapism. 

The first film to premiere in the small theater is an underwater documentary filmed in Vietnam, in which the fuzzy structure clearly plays its part of an underwater artifact.  The second film scheduled captures the faces of a female audience engaged and watching a movie, here the tectonic structure reinforces and emphasizes the context of the black box theater.  The next film is a scripted documentary that follows Catherine Deneuve through the destroyed Lebanese countryside; the steel structure begins to resemble a war-torn architectural ruin.  The final film juxtaposes two children into a post-apocalyptic world, an appropriate setting for the collapsed spaceship to encompass the viewers.

Beyond the programmatic film screenings, the project Majestic proposes remains promising, pending the continuation of Putrih & MOS’ collaboration.  But another set of nested objects only stimulates if the envelope evolves into habitable poche for new programmatic activities besides the black-box-theater-in-the-white-box-gallery, where the field begins to engage and has the potential to become occupied, like Erosion.  The potential a fantastical space of fuzzy webs encapsulates the space of the gallery and allows visitors to occupy interstitial moments, like Jimenez Lai’s Point Clouds. 

In a discussion with Putrih, he revealed that MOS wanted to cover the floor of the theater with a highly reflective surface.  Putrih protested this design decision for fear that the light from the projection would be impossible to control.  But a reflective surface has potential to produce interesting architectural affects; the complex geometries in the structure would become exponential.  Within the space of the actual structure and the reflection of the object, visitors would occupy in a conceptual interstitial space; a project of this nature would call into question the program, but it also proposes yet another dimension, where the visitors occupy the celluloid medium. 

City of Delusion

Access to Gustavo Godoy’s fragmented installation is through a hidden, claustrophobic staircase.  The treads of the stairs glow with bright, white light.  Popping out through the narrow passage into the gallery, Fast Formal Object: Flayed White is a large mass containing sharp white planes of plywood and metal.  The highly reflective floor and the glow of cool fluorescent light make the jagged assemblage appear to float. 

Flayed White is part of Godoy’s series of site-specific installations titled Fast-formal Object.  Each sculptural object is comprised of different materials, some containing foam, netting, dowels, etc. and others are painted an entirely different color like Big Blue, or left as raw material.  The collage effect of forms and materials lend to precedent, like Louise Nevelson, particularly when Godoy’s installations are painted one solid color and situated within a white-box gallery. 

On the wall hangs a plexiglass box; it contains information packets with a “Release, waiver and assumption of risk agreement.”  Damn the Establishment!  This is an opportunity to experience a piece of art not by looking, but by climbing over and crawling onto the object, initiating an intimate engagement with the art.  Unfortunately, protective gear is required, as well as a specified appointment time to play. 

The bright glow and hum of the lights frolic together like a warm sunny day immersed in the sounds of summer.  Circling around the playground, I discovered a ramp that continued the shiny white surface of the floor up to a tree house of sorts.  And like most tree houses, there was more than one way to enter; a set of stairs had been laid off to the side. 

“…a minimalist playground, a monumental sculpture, and a meditative space all while working in dialog with the Wexner Center’s architecture…” (Bedford)

The kit-of-parts appears to be scattered about haphazardly, but upon close examination, the craft of the object is pristine, it is not hard to imagine these pieces as the scraps left over from the construction of the Wexner.  Ironically, the object never physically engages with the architecture.  There is a column that slightly impedes into the gallery space, but unlike Putrih & MOS, Godoy does not incorporate the column into his installation.  The only time he acknowledges the gallery’s plan is at the secondary entrance, where he creates a framed void for visitors to walk under and through.  

Zaha Hadid: a faceted Hong Kong plays with light and form

Standing in this void and looking back towards the narrow staircase, the sculptural object flattens into a two-dimensional space evoking deconstructivist art, specifically Zaha’s design for The Peak in Hong Kong.  The angular planes in Godoy’s installation are captured by facets of highlight and shadow—like the city in Zaha’s renderings.  In this context, Godoy’s object becomes a mini-metropolis that unfolds across the land, or around its own peak, the tree house. 

And the sun never sets on this city.  The lighting design incorporates a variety of features including floodlights, spotlights, single, and double bulb fluorescent lights in various lengths.  The glow from the lights pulls visitors into the gallery and around the object: children gawking into a candy store.  The meditative affect of the space is an effect of the bright lights in combination with the pristine white surfaces. 

Everything in Its Right Place

Despite the small scale of Katy Moran’s paintings, they require interaction and physical choreography as much as the large-scale installations featured in Six Solos.  Bradford characterizes Moran’s work as: “fluid energetic brushstrokes and evocative use of color…using found materials and collage (which) straddle the boundary between abstraction and representation.”  However formalist the rhetoric classifying Moran’s work, she prefers to define her work under the auspices of sensation. 

The sensation of these petite works, like French Impressionist painting, occurs at a distance.  The brush strokes are so expressive that the subject of the painting only comes into focus by stepping away from the canvas.  But Moran’s the material specificity from any specific movement or genre.  It is instead a synthesis of Jasper Johns materiality and the J.M.W. Turner’s romantic composition.  Moran’s rendition of romanticism deploys the color palate of warm umbers with the occasional pop of cool tones depicting a blurry picturesque landscape.  Through abstraction of formal composition, Moran evokes emotion through scumbling and drybrush techniques, revealing layers underneath, and adding a dimension of optical depth.  

Moran’s solo is not organized chronologically, but by material deployment.  Her most textural work is placed on a secondary wall, forming a perimeter, like an exterior skin protecting the fragmented pieces within.  These paintings resemble the formal composition of Romantic, picturesque painting.  Stepping back from the glossy extruded surfaces of paint, a horizon line emerged and a clear landscape of fore-, mid-, and background came into focus.

Moving into the next and final room are the multi-media paintings.  On the wall to the right hang the collage pieces with the exception of a diptych entitled Moonmen.  The collage pieces require the viewer to hover in close proximity to the painting to see the layers of media, sometimes revealed through windows of transparent paint or precisely cut contours, creating the same field of depth as the abstracted romanticism paintings through new material deployment.  Stepping back from these highly detailed collages, sensation comes into play.

Moran’s work produces ethereal effects that began to overtake viewers as sensation.  The paintings contain an all-too-familiar feeling, if only the image could come into order and focus; it is just within reach, but never obtainable.

Good Ol’ Fashioned Nightmare

Transitioning from Moran’s exhibition transports visitors into yet another rendition of formal artistic tropes, this time it is sculpture interpreted with new material ambitions.  At first glance, Joel Morrison’s solo strikes a whimsical tone. 

His first, ambiguous sculpture Untitled (Pink), is a fleshy mass resembling a large scale biological model used in science class.  Lending to this scholastic nostalgia is the soundtrack of children singing in the schoolhouse while Tippi Hedren lights up outside in Hitchcock’s The Birds. Morrison’s Birds/Lewitt splices Hitchcock’s scene with a Sol LeWitt Modular Cube sculpture in the background, another piece of playground equipment for the crows to congregate upon.⁷ Eisenman’s own white modular grid is just 100 feet away, resting outside the glass…just when you thought it was safe…

 Morrison: Birds/Lewitt plays inside the Wexner

Moving around the corner, a vicious sculpture is mounted onto an otherwise empty wall.  Romeo is a small piece but it packs quite a bite; a four-inch wide mandible packed with bullets for teeth, it has street-cred to put Flava Flav to shame.  The maw is the perfect scale; it could potentially be molded from a mammal, or it could just be another piece of repurposed garbage as in other Morrison pieces.  Whatever the origin of the object, the curator placed the piece on a blank wall at eye level, a cinematic technique reminiscent of the grotesque creature’s mouth in Aliens. 

Continuing onto Totems, Towers & Black Bongo, Morrison tinkers with kitschy objects and layers them onto a post like the traditional totem pole.  Odd juxtapositions of objects include Aunt Jemima and Mrs. Buttersworth bottles, water bottles, a teddy bear-shaped honey bottle, a pickle, and a skull with a latex glove as a crown.  Together these objects form a field of reflective metals of varying heights and tones of chrome, pewter, and black, appearing as light as a balloon animal.  Across from them is Untitled (Green), from the same series as the previously mentioned Untitled (Pink).  Another cartoon-like object, the blob feels alive with objects poking and prodding to get out.  Morrison’s Untitled sculptures are often paralleled to the work of Christo and Jeff Koons.  

The perspectival effects of Morrison’s Victor (rat trap) & van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage

Moving from the plasticy Untitled (Green) to the shiny chrome Victor (rap trap), the familiar feeling déjà vu sets in.  Four years ago, the Wexner hosted Shiny, an exhibition that featured reflective objects, one of which was Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog. Victor is located in the exact same where spot Balloon Dog was previously displayed, so the parallels between Morrison’s and Koons’ work do not just stop at materiality.  Whatever politics this relationship between Morrison and Koons may evoke, the location showcases these two pieces as two different arguments – Victor creates an architectural effect within the gallery, and Balloon Dog merely occupies the space.  Standing in front of Victor is like looking at Jan van Eyck’s The Arnolfini Marriage; the reflection of the round, convex mirror hanging on the wall behind the Arnolfinis.  This reflection not only captures the space between the viewer and the reflective surface, but the convex bounces back the perpetual space behind; the perfect way for curators to cue a turn-around point in Morrison’s exhibition.  Leaving Victor behind and moving towards the top of the ramp, the final piece of the solo rests. 

Lupe, is nickel-plated neoclassical bust: frivolous and witty, evidence of a Damien Hirst-type of sensibility.  The base of the bust, typically reserved for architectural decoration, is rockin’ with bands of studded and spiked necklaces.  Lupe’s garments maintain the classically draped style with a corsage pinned upon her collar; the corsage is not a typical carnation on prom night, but instead chunks of a honeybee hive placed as several overlapping pieces to create a geometric bouquet.  How sweet. 

Lupe is sporting a fancy coif for a classical lady.  Like Morrison’s other nickel-plated female bust, Wiffle Ball,⁸ they both bear an uncanny resemblance to the Chiquita Banana Lady.  Instead of commercial fruit, Lupe’s headdress is comprised of found objects: wiffle balls, fake diamonds, and metal spheres.  These objects are scaled up and down to create a sparkling and textured piece.  Although her hair may be flamboyantly loud, Lupe’s ears are plugged in Mid-West fashion with corn-on-the-cob holders, poking out like earplugs. 

Viewers are denied a view to Lupe’s face by her metal surgical mask.  The only visible features are her eyes, which strategically look down the ramp to visitors approaching (kudos to the curators for the subconscious way finding).  Following Lupe, the impromptu tour guide, visitors descend back down the ramp and out of the exhibition. 

Electric Avenue

Leaving the museum at dusk, the final solo of the day is about to begin: Erwin Redl’s LED light installation FETCH. The magic of the installation happens in the interstitial space: between two buildings, situated in Eisenman’s white grid, playing with the perspectival effects the grid creates when looking down the alley. 

Redl’s light show begins at a vanishing point framed at the northernend of the grid structure.  As the suspended LEDs pulsate in programmatic and chromatic order, the grid and coordinating mullions of the buildings are lit up, creating a powerful sense of space coming forward and then receding.  Redl’s installation is resonant with Wexner’s presentation of Miroku by Karas earlier this year.  Miroku’s set design played with the light through projection in the auditorium darkness to create movement in an otherwise static environment and stage set. 

Redl choreographs the lights by using various rhythms, colors and looped patterns.  FETCH, as the name would suggest, is literally played out, as a burst of color is thrown across the white grid, reaches the end of the grid, and returns back to its master.  By gradating the color as it is “thrown,” Redl accelerates the effect. 

Occasionally there are moments where the lights sporadically flash, like the staccato photoflashes of the paparazzi.  Then the ‘house lights’ come up and a bold note holding the fermata illuminates the entire space, catching the attention of those wandering by the museum, pausing in the framed space of the grid.  Clearly, the interaction of the audience is included in the scope of the project. 

Walking under the installation is like walking under a roller coaster as it soars above.  The fantastical flight overhead invigorates the narrow space as it bursts into a rainbow, an affect Geckler’s installation also achieves through woven clouds of color hovering over the lobby.  FETCH moves back and forth, from one end to the other, lending a cyclical appropriation as the final, or perhaps the beginning of experiencing Six Solos. 

Six Solos will continue to entertain its audience via scheduled panel discussions with an accompanying artist to flesh out their project and gauge their current trajectory within the discipline.  Each artist is clearly at a difference place within his or her own personal project, but the discourse created within these projects begins a necessary evolutionary process.  It is an intrinsic process much like the physical flow of experiencing the exhibition.  The symmetrical loop upon created by Six Solos became more apparent with progression through the Wexner.  A musical masterpiece has been curated: a trio constructs an architectural melody and a quintet embraces a lighthearted harmony, demonstrating multiple interpretations of the exhibition.

Notes:

¹Tobias Putrih: cinema attitudes, 2008; Attitudes gallery, Geneva, Switzerland.

²Tobias Putrih & MOS: Overhang, 2009; BALTIC Centre For Contemporary Art, Gateshead, United Kingdom.

³Tobias Putrih & MOS: Intervention #10, 2009; Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

⁴Tobias Putrih & MOS: Erosion, 2009; MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA.

⁵Rachel Whiteread:  Ghost, 1990; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2004).  Whiteread pours concrete into the space of a room, casting a solid from the shell.  Ghost captures the air of a room; the result is a volumetric inverse-relief of the room’s features: wallpaper, moulding, and the fireplace.

⁶MOS: Afterparty; MoMA PS1 Young Architects Competition, 2009.

⁷Joel Morrison’s Birds/Lewitt was originally part of an installation, Kalifornia Über Alles, for the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art.  The installation was comprised of two screens, one that is blank, and the other plays Birds/Lewitt.  “Kalifornia Über Alles turns Hitchcock’s Atomic Age Cold War scenario away from a pop-narrative of nature’s revenge, released in the year of the Kennedy assassination. It becomes instead a provocative story of culture’s retribution. The image echoes in the present, when ‘60s ideals lie in a shambles,” as quoted by Christopher Knight, a Times staff writer in 2006.

⁸Joel Morrison: Wiffle Ball, 2010; Gagosian Gallery, New York, NY.

Where have all the children gone…

By JOSEPH EBERT

First Prize, Hungarian architects Tamás Lévai, Ágnes Jószai

The Maribor Art Gallery Competition shows that a young generation architects have lost their revolutionary momentum.  With all of their pretension and rebellion, the architects trained in the late nineties and the early ought’s are finding that their will to inject a venom of computational philosophy into the practice is drying up. Architects can’t help but be enthralled by the youthfulness that the young guns are bringing to the practice.    The entrants, whether of this adolescent generation, or of a more veteran generation, are products of drinking too much of the “[cool]-aid.”  The results can be viewed as a sort of collage of the Starchitects of the nineties, reconciled with architectural platitudes of a parametric age.  The Maribor Art Gallery Competition projects an unresponsive and diluted outlook for the future of architecture.  Truly, history rhymes rather than repeats.

The entrants of the competition tend to regurgitate the works of figures like Steven Holl, Zaha Hadid, SANAA, Rem Koolhaas, and R+U, figures not amongst the finalists, or gaining honorable mention. In a way, this is not a bad thing.  The work of these canonic designers is smart in its ability to address site, culture, and politics, and ineffably consistent at presenting the discipline with new authenticities.  Yet while these figures are the ones being copied and their styles fragmentally collaged, the younger generation is borrowing inadequately, misleading our culture into a belief that all of the talk about computational philosophy is finally reaching a material reality.  

The absurd tragedy lies in the reality that even the canonic figures are beginning to be affected by computational philosophies.  Whether it’s the interns they higher, who bring with them the ability to form any seemingly amorphous object, or the competitive need to keep up with the times, the overall work is falling to a certain ambiguity for the discipline of architecture.  This ambiguity could mark the beginning of a new epoch for the discipline, or position a mood of indifference from moving on, chasing an avant-garde in close proximity, but seemingly light-years away.  An ambiguity which is parallel to the general mood of the public which architecture tries to affect, a mood of anxiety fettered by the reality of a failing economy. 

Europe is trying to counter this mood of anxiety by seeking to enliven its image by bringing to the fore the variety of cultures that exist in the European Union.  One of the ways this is being done is by choosing a particular city, giving it the opportunity for a year to highlight all of its cultural dynamics, and allowing it to re-present its image in a European dimension and at the international level.  Maribor is the second largest city in Slovenia up until the mid-nineties, had trouble defining its autonomy.  Ergo, Maribor has received the position as the European Capital of Culture for 2012. 

The Maribor Gallery of Art is to be placed along the river Drava, situated within a monotonous field of white buildings with red-clay tiled roofs.  What the entrants have done is extract an architectural dialogue of culture that discusses the importance of the museum as a cultural stimulus.  “Museums, as we know, don’t simply reflect the identity of a city, they transform identities through the material life of architecture,” presenting the city and the architecture with the chance to respond to the changes of an ever evolving living culture.1 The project entries all attempt to step into this cultural fold, yet in doing so, the entries all dismiss the actual living culture and identity of Maribor.  The entries are too disjunctive to sustain an identity of consistency. 

The results force upon Maribor an alien identity, one that proposes something different from what exists.  Now, some may say this is a matter of modernity existing within the city, bringing contemporary ideas to a form of adolescence.  But there’s some flavor and truth to the cliché that parents have to let their children go, allowing them to make mistakes on their own.  However, what the entrants present is an ideal not familiar to Maribor, nor to consistency of new authenticities in architecture.  If the entrants want to make a mark for a city on the up, then they should revert back to their own experimental ages of adolescence, seeking to bring into focus all of the memories in which fun and play were catalysts for creating.

The winning entry is imaged in black and white, a repurposing of the coastal site different from the hues of white and red.  The architects: Tamás Lévai and Ágnes Jószai of nearby Hungary.  What this repurposing does is generate the fabric anew.  By doing this, the architects position their ideal notion about how the building will mesh into the rest of the urban fabric.  The black and white images ameliorate the hard, yet fluid geometrical lines of the project against a regiment of vernacular forms. This is what the architects want the public to think, but in real time, the existing vernacular colors will be too vivid for the alien object.  The banal form is a blurring of Steven Holl’s Nelson Atkins addition, Zaha Hadid’s Contemporary Art Center in Cincinnati, and Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam’s Knowlton School of Architecture.  These examples represent solid and coarse geometric forms; most of which discuss a fluid continuity, but emphasize the importance of individualized spaces. 

In plan, we can see almost a programmatic tracing of the design methods SANAA presents in their Glass Pavilion in Toledo.  Spaces become contained as individual and separate environments; again, the echo of Knowlton Hall, its wrapper containing within it multiple autonomous programmatic spaces.  The architecture is pristine and white, but too neutral even for contemporary art.  The architecture makes no attempt to acknowledge or be acknowledged.  It subtracts itself from the occupant and the artwork.  This conflict of separation doesn’t seem to be an issue for the presentation of art, but the pristine, banal blankness carries throughout the building and all of its individual spaces.  So where the art isn’t present, in the three restaurants, the library, and the children’s museum, the architecture becomes an amorphous alien of white ether; it cares very little for what exists within.  In architecture’s attempt at separation it fades into a white oblivion, leaving a void in the line of coastal vernacular.

Left: Stan Allen Entry;  Right: Neil Denari Entry

Two entrants that weren’t finalists, or honorable mentions, were Stan Allen and Neil Denari.  One represents the canon of the veteran, and the other a middle-aged designer fraught with the notion of being stuck between the elders of architecture and the adolescents; one wonders whether this identity of ambiguity is the position needed for making a synthesis, producing for the discipline a new stage for the avant-garde.  But in this conversation, the two ultimately fail to direct their ideology onto a culture that doesn’t want it.  Allen and Denari represent a dialogue outside of the competition, a dialogue about where the discipline is going.  Like the Lévai and Jószai project, the architecture works as an alien object, abject from synthesizing with an adolescent culture that just needs to play with children its own age.  Or rather, with children that just want to have fun, experiment and play.

The competition portrays an instance of architectural ambiguity and cultural anxiety.  The architects, for fear of hearing the ideologies of their discipline fall upon deaf ears, enter fight-or-flight mode as a way to counter the demise of architecture as shaper of culture.  The architects are making these designs to fit their need, rather than the need of the culture, and in doing so threaten to destroy the culture it so desperately wants to effect.  These architects have figuratively graduated from college, and don’t have a clue as to how to enter the real world.  What they should do is realize that the most prosperous way they ever existed was when they were children, when nothing mattered but understanding the world as it was and learning its nuanced beauty.  What we have now is a generation of architects that are numb, and with meaningless verve, unknowingly endeavor to use architecture as a means to destroy places, cultures, societies.

 

 

1 From Neil Denari’s competition entry.

Let the Sun Shine

By TOM CHERRY

Team enCORE developed a unique, interlocking design of an eight hundred square foot house for the Solar Decathlon, a competition showcasing both design and solar technology in the home environment. Representing The Ohio State University’s College of Engineering and the Knowlton School of Architecture, Team enCORE will construct its design on the National Mall in September 2011, joining nineteen other teams from around the world. The design and energy efficiency of single family, solar powered houses are evaluated in ten categories via performance metrics and juried contests in the biennial Solar Decathlon competition.

The enCORE design is an open, interconnected interior space that spirals out from a central service core, ending in a perforated screen skin that modulates internal lighting. Replacing Frank Lloyd Wright’s hearth with the service core encapsulates the shift from ur-fire to technology as the heart of sustainable design. Comfort comes from the cool wind of self-sufficiency and energy management. The centralized core concept, vaulted ceilings and expanses of triple pane glass help to disguise the small footprint of the house. 

While the interior unwinds, the exterior works in the opposite direction, winding around the interior spaces and the core. The house rises off of the ground plane via ramps that access a plinth. The ramps wrap the corners of the house and the ninety degree turns amplify the winding/unwinding tension between the interior and exterior spaces. The perforated, movable exterior screens create the illusion of a colonnade via the skin panels. The screens stand away from the mass of the house, so the house fades into existence in layers, like pulling aside curtains: through the screens, across the plinth, through the glass to the interior. The canted roof segments also focus attention inward while supporting solar cells and a rainwater collection system. However, the technology in the house remains at one remove, just out of sight, behind the curtain.

Kitchen

Eight hundred square feet, the size of a one bedroom apartment, is a small space to accommodate a contemporary family of three. However, the spaces in enCORE flow together, creating tension and interest within the footprint of the house. Tension between the interlocking interior and exterior spaces creates a dynamic spatial experience for the house and energizes the design. Evoking the simplicity of Wright’s Usonian home, Team enCORE avoids creating a sterile technical domain.


Living Room

Concepts like enCORE will ease the way to wider acceptance of solar technology with the general public and help the green design movement overcome image issues related to poor design. A continuing design challenge is the scalability of the solar and energy management technology of enCORE to larger new builds or the applicability of such technology to existing housing stock. The Solar Decathlon competition demonstrates how design and technology can work together. Translating designs like enCORE into common practice is the next step; Team enCORE’s house will help keep design in the sunlight as the implementation of solar technology evolves in domestic architecture.

Author's note: Follow Team enCORE at solardecathlon.osu.edu.

Wish You Were Here

By BEN WILKE

“It isn't necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paperwork, and the other is nostalgia.”  

Frank Zappa

The first of these images is merely paperwork and a cataloguing; the second is nostalgia.  Susan Sontag discusses the inability of photography (and of the photographer) to emphasize any event or identity of event, given the saturation of competing images now prevalent.1  Images are quickly digested and new ones emerge in their place.  Being now surrounded by histories, geographies, cultures, and images, we are in fewer ways ignorant of both the present and the past.  This lack of ignorance has become a plethora of information; the supply of imagery now exceeds the demand.  Past generations could lean on a single image to describe an era or an occasion of the recent past, but we are now hard-pressed to locate a singular image for any event.  In addition it has grown increasingly difficult to imagine how we will archive and remember the current glut of still-frame and video imagery.  It would not be excessive to claim that there will be a desire to identify the images of our era as special or unique, and as having been made in a particular time where the unique medium of capturing our events did part of the work, and imbued the images with a particular patina, instantly recognizable by those who inherit the images somewhere in the future.

The nostalgic photo exists in a vacuum.  The only way to get to the photographic place is through an abstracted and imagined remembering.  The word “nostalgia” comes from a pair of Greek roots: nostos, which means to “return home,” and algia, which is “pain.”  Each condition requires movement in order to resolve; such movements, in the case of nostalgia, are impossible to achieve physically. 

Photography and the published photograph amplified the tendencies toward nostalgia.  This partial fallout from the consumption of the photographic medium coincides with another cultural phenomenon: the shift from ethics to aesthetics as a primary compass for action and living.  As snapshots, photographs do not pose significant questions or challenges to ethics, yet are subject aesthetic critique.  The philosophy of most amateur photographers is that one in five shots will be worth keeping.  The photojournalist or professional photographer does very much the same thing, but with an editorial caveat: they produce a series of proofs from which they or the client may select a preferred moment of (or in) time.  

175 years into its history, it is easy to see how the photograph became, and continues to be, so pervasive in cultural history; it is a perfect distiller of time.  Both because of and in spite of their often-editorialized nature, photographs are able to deliver immediately.  It only makes sense that the trajectory of the photograph went from acting as a mode of preservation or documentation to acting as a mode of remembering.  The historical and the idealized frequently overlapped2 prior to the advent of photography, but the photograph allows a heightened and more accurate sense of memory.  The photograph allows a more perfect version of nostalgia.  

What is it that we find in photographs and images that we do not find in other forms of account like, say, literature or story telling?  What can the photograph say while isolated from these other modes of remembering?  Yearning and longing are terms bound to the definition of nostalgia, and each of these emotions are understood as being accompanied by a sense of loss and a sense of distance, in this case of time.  Time and the idea of the past create a line of resistance that cannot be crossed from where we are.  Our sense of nostalgia for a particular image and for what the image suggests is held in place by desires that the photograph excels in delivering for the viewer: escape, timelessness, interpretation, and narrative.  Nostalgia is a longing for both escape and return.  In order to facilitate our doing this, the photograph must be read in ways that detach it and isolate it from other interpretations.  We must make it our own.  

The nostalgic image occurred in places that are elsewhere; the occurred in places that have been erased, even if we are able to occupy the same Cartesian coordinates represented in the photo.  Real places now belong to us.  The place is part of something that we know, included along a timeline of learned traditions, physicalities, and relationships.  We are bound to these places.  The nostalgic photo is outside of that timeline, even if it has informed what we now know.  These images can remain pure and open to interpretation; they are invulnerable to the norms of our own activity.  Such images become transcendental in that they are indicative of an eternal present tense.3

The first photograph taken4 marks a turn for our own ability to long for the occupation of a place that is elsewhere.  We can construct a make-believe chronology that is free from imposed histories.  Within this fictional chronology, we hold the potential to move from objective (third-person) account to subjective (first-person) account.  The borrowed image becomes adopted time and will absorb the tradition and order that we choose to impose upon it.  The nostalgic photograph is one that recaptures lost cultural ‘signs’ and saves them from eradication, at least in our mind.

Our current pace of image production and image consumption creates a saturated and unique condition.  For nostalgic photos, we can easily read their position as being of the past and disconnected from our present.  But we are unable to dislocate ourselves from our own collections of self-made images.  We automatically locate the order of our own such images in both place and time, and being able to do so binds it to the symbolism, norms, and sequences of our own personal timelines.  In the same way that uncharted locations remain secret and dreamt of until they are mapped, so too with the nostalgic image.  Despite our ability to mimic the techniques, filters, and chemical processes of visual nostalgia, we are unable to render our current collection of imagery with the same type of weight5 that prior mediums carry through to us now.  The possession of so much current contextual awareness pushes nostalgia out of reach; we are left only with self-awareness.

As much as we may like to create our own instant nostalgia of self, our own interventions render the objective recording of events unattainable.  Our self-made images are a monologue, and we are both the audience and the speaker in most cases.  We can incite a sense of desire in others with such images, but to create a sense of nostalgia with such images is impossible given the proximity (in both space and time) to those from whom we are likely to have feedback.  The nostalgic image is with specific (but inaccessible) place and outside of the moving timeline.  The self-made image is bound to its author’s respective timeline and experiences.  The former type is very material in its physicality – it has aged because of a physical nature; it is a recorded moment separated from the reality that bore it.  Lost is the real-time experience of enunciation and reception; gone is the context of before and after.  The nostalgic image can refer to lost narratives.  Conversely, the self-made or digital image is one that cannot give away its narrative.  It is inundated with the idea of before and after and subject to revisionism and re-enunciation.

 

These self-made or digital images reinforce our actual timeline; they surround and enclose our actions and motivations in the same way that property lines enclose territory.  The line is always there and always understood as designating something that is necessarily our own, for better or for worse.  The notion of self and separation from others is what allows our individual timeline to be experienced as a collection of unique memories and ideas.  The nostalgic image allows us to momentarily escape that island and to partake in something that was not our own; the nostalgic creates an autonomous place that holds the ability to affect our own self-constructed narrative.  The creation of these hybrid narratives enable us to somewhat escape; they allow us to create new references and validations for our choices and projected selves.  In this sense, the nostalgic is adopted, lived-in, and composes a kind of artificial history and truth.  The artificial remains real. 

Robert Venturi’s position that old buildings were “not just worth saving, but could inspire new buildings,”6 provides a tenet to how we may approach nostalgia, and in particular, the nostalgic image.  Because it insists on existing in the past, yet still impacts and in some cases steers our present, the nostalgic image – by way of immunity to critique, escape from master narratives, and the fostering of necessarily subjective lifestyle interpretations – will continue to suggest possibilities for other lives or the projections of those lives, somewhere other than the present.

1. Sontag, Susan.  On Photography.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

2. A primary example being the nostalgia attributed to classical cultures.

3. It is interesting to note that the development of the photograph is barely predated by the invention of the chronograph, which is a timepiece made to both keep time (like a standard timepiece) and stop time (i.e. perform basic stopwatch functions).

4. Nicéphore Niépce's “View from the Window at Le Gras”, Saint-Loup-de-Varennes, France.  1826.  

5. (Or perhaps weightlessness…?)

6. From Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, The Museum of Modern Art Press, New York 1966.