CONCRETE DREAMS

How does one exhibit architecture in a museum? Drawings and models engage, but they cannot take the place of the thing itself, the building. The architecture show at MoMA, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, falls into this trap. It’s a supremely elegant installation. Each one of six small second floor galleries is given over to one of the six brilliant architects celebrated here: Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Models and prototypes are set out on small white stands, and drawings and quotes are pinned to pale grey walls. Photos and renderings, about the size of 11x8 sheets, are projected onto floor-length white linen scrims. The overall effect is low-fi and dreamy, as much of the work here is.

The exhibit designers might have decided to project photographs to avoid visible monitors, to emphasize the handicraft in the work. But the images are small and the linen blurs them so much that they’re practically illegible. We never see what these buildings are meant to look like or what they actually look like, and this is a tremendous disservice, because almost all of them have been built. The ideas and geometries given expression in the drawings are models are astounding: at once simple, obtuse, lucid, startling and lyrical. But having ideas about a building is dreaming, not architecture. Since visitors don’t see the renderings and photos clearly, the work remains paper architecture.

Fujimoto conceived a small house in Tokyo, House NA, by splitting each of its rooms, halls, closets, and stair runs into a separate volume, building each one from glass, and stacking them in a shifting, ramshackle pile. The wood and board model of the building at MoMA is lovely, like a spirited doll house, but photographs of the house itself – that show clearly its modest scale, its precarious foothold along the sidewalk, its bamboo-thin metal frame, its unapologetic transparency – are surreal. As astonishing as the concept of the house is, it’s more astounding that it’s been executed skillfully, with each of its quietly radical propositions (about space, about structure, about domesticity) intact. That might be true for all the projects included in this show. We understand the ideas, now show us the buildings.

House NA, Tokyo, 2011, by Sou Fujimoto. Photo by Iwan Baan.

July 03, 2016 by Nalina Moses

The Renzo Piano show (Fragments) at the Gagosian gives us one table piled with things (books, drawings, sketches, photographs, prototypes, models) for each of twenty-four of the architect's projects. So there’s a table for the Jean-Marie Tjibaou Cultural Centre in New Caledonia, another for the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and another for the New York Times Building. More models and prototypes hang from the ceiling on wires, twitching like helium-filled balloons, while the walls of the gallery remain entirely empty. If the curators wanted to steer clear of a conventional installation, they’ve succeeded, but the tables don’t serve Piano’s work well, giving a confetti-like blast of information (fragments) for each building rather than a sense of what it is. It’s especially disconcerting because Piano has a gift for synthesizing various building components (image, skin, structure, mechanics) in a single form. Many of his buildings are skeletal; they take their origin in a frame (interior or exterior), and all their workings cling to it.

The best parts of the displays are the large-scale mockups and prototypes for individual building parts. Ceramic blocks (glazed in sun-drenched yellow, orange and green) from the Central Saint Giles office blocks in London have a high class kookiness. A wood cladding prototype for the new addition to the Fogg Museum, with boards nestled snugly over one another like a row of sleeping animals, promises that the project will be beautifully crafted. And an arm-long structural rib from a 1983 IBM Traveling Pavilion, a delicately cambered redwood arch with a worn aluminum Celtic-cross-shaped connector, has the presence of a relic. These and the other large-scale models get at the constructedness of Piano's buildings. While they’re pragmatic things – like machine parts – they’re supremely elegant, designed with care but little fuss. (Compare that to the parts of Santiago Calatrava’s building, which embody a lot of fuss.) We can find all sorts of things (drawings, photographs and narratives) about Piano’s buildings online. Why didn’t the curators just pack the gallery with those things we can’t?

Studio at Renzo Piano Building Workshop, Genoa. Photo by Fregoso & Basal. Courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

August 13, 2013 by Nalina Moses

The Thorne Miniature Rooms the Art Institute of Chicago are a collection of 46 historically accurate models of various European, American and East Asian interiors. They were imagined and commissioned by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the 1930’s to house her collection of miniature furniture, and donated to the museum in 1940. Today they’re installed in a basement gallery, within the walls, behind glass, at chest level, so that small children can peer right into them, and with a carpeted ledge running around the entire room so that very small children can do the same. The rooms certainly have a dollhouse appeal. They’re built at 1:12 scale, each about the size of a breadbox, and capture the places they represent in mesmerizing fidelity. One takes in their period furnishings first (elaborately turned matchstick-sized legs on tables and chairs, hand-threaded carpets, plaster mouldings as fine as lace) but ends up transfixed by the ordinary objects with which the rooms are furnished to give them a sense of scale and warmth: a pair of eyeglasses on the kitchen table, a folded newspaper in the living room, the electrical cord on a lamp, a dinner fork. While the rooms faithfully render the proportions and splendor of a Tudor hall, a mid-century modern living room, and a traditional Japanese house, they trade less in architecture than a kind of special effects, conjuring other worlds.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms aren’t really individual rooms; most incorporate a cluster of rooms, one central space and also the rooms and passages branching off of them, as wells as the stretches of outdoor space beyond their doors and windows. Each model is lit from within, from various hidden sources, that establish a specific time of day and time of year. We see the morning sun spill over the slate floor of a Cape Cod kitchen, and the setting sun graze the curtains of a Charleston drawing room. It’s easy to look at each room and imagine what kind of life unfolds inside. There’s a fancy feathered hat on a stand in the dressing room of the Biedermeier apartment, as if the lady of the house is preparing to meet later with a gentleman friend. There’s a clarin trumpet lying on the window seat in an eighteenth-century English study, as if the lord of the estate has just unburdened his heart in a letter, in pen and ink, and summoned a servant to deliver it on foot. There’s a bronze statue of Shiva presiding over the desk of a prim eighteenth-century Virginia drawing room, as if the wealthy merchant who lives here has ties to the East, as well as a hankering to leave his life here behind and explore the far corners of the world. In the end the Thorne rooms, historically faithful, are less evocative architecturally — in their expression of space through forms and structure — than novelistically — in their expression of character through a cloud of details. Each period room is set in the dramatic present, where anything can happen.

Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.

April 09, 2013 by Nalina Moses