An architect I admire describes the discipline as “a negotiation between different desires." The hardest part of it, I think, is to honor both the dreams in one’s head and the realities of construction. Well-known architects who can perform this trick include Zaha Hadid and Herzog and de Meuron, who build museums and fire stations and soccer stadiums that are also shimmering, magical things. These are buildings forged in the flames of creativity and bent purposefully to program. But there’s something to be said for architects who just take a vision and run with it, however impractical, improbable and expensive its execution is. Alvernia Studios outside of Krakow, Poland, where Radiohead guitarist and composer Johnny Greenwood is recording new symphonic work, is one of those buildings.

Although there’s no architect of record, we know the studio was built by businessman Stanisław Tyczyński in the style of H. R. Giger, the Swiss visionary who designed the effects and sets for the Alien movies. It is, essentially, an array of huge metal half-domes linked by raised tubular glass walkways. The studio interiors look just like those of the Alien spaceship, encrusted with eery futuristic, biomorphic, Gothic embellishments. It’s all especially impressive because these are film and sound stages; they don’t need have to have any kind of identity of all. A bunch of big cinder block sheds would have done the trick, but someone (the client, most likely) dreamt this up and made it so. It’s an entirely uncompromised architecture.

March 16, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Jimenez Lai, the young architect and academic who heads Chicago office Bureau Spectacular, spoke recently at SVA about “Cartoonish Architecture." Lai makes striking monochrome cartoons that explore the narratives and personalities of buildings. The cartoons are, in their lyricism, economy, and sincerity, quite powerful. Lai has also completed a number of architectural installations, with another one planned for the fall. He described his own work, unabashedly, as "paper architecture,” and said that that he was working hard to get all of his ideas from drawings into architecture.

There’s a long, fine tradition of paper architecture, from neoclassicists like Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Étienne-Louis Boullée to contemporaries like Lebbeus Woods and Raimund Abraham. Their work seems to swing between two poles: the geometrically idealizing and the apocalyptically ominous. More than they’re drawing buildings, these paper architects are drawing new worlds. Lai’s cartoons are smaller-scaled and gentler. They remind me of Archigram’s happily futuristic renderings and Madelon Vreisendorp’s funny, lovely illustrations in Delirious New York. There is so much pleasure and grace in Lai’s graphic style. One part of me wonders what sort of architecture they will inspire, and another part of me thinks they don’t need to become architecture at all.

March 15, 2012 by Nalina Moses

A young woman at the Cindy Sherman retrospective at MoMA missed the point rather badly, observing about the artist, “She’s pretty. Why does she do all of this?" Sherman has made a career of dressing up in costumes, makeup and wigs and then photographing herself. One one level her project is about how superficial social identity is, and specifically about how women are so often called upon to be something that they’re essentially not. But the seductive quality of her work makes it difficult to categorize simply as feminist or media art. I look at these pictures and fall right into them.

It was stunning to see Sherman’s small black and white photographs from the late 1970’s, film stills, mounted together in groups. When seen one-at-a-time in magazines and online, each one has a smart, iconic presence. But when seen en masse their artifice is apparent, and it’s at odds with their poignancy. The women pictured in them, observed without their knowledge, are psychically and physically vulnerable. They fall into recognizable feminine archetypes (abandoned, ambitious, ruined, hunting) but also arouse sympathy. (Sherman’s later works, when she’s disguised so elaborately or pointedly that no part of herself shows through, don’t have the same emotionalism.) Sherman strikes an even finer balance between honesty and artifice in her color photographs from the early 1980’s, the rear projection series. The washed-out stock image backdrops, and the absence of shadows connecting her figure to the scene, give them a special ambiguity. These are alluringly incomplete tableaux, without a middle ground and without a simple explanation. Who is this lady, where is she going, and what’s troubling her? With simple means, the pictures harbor mysteries.

March 14, 2012 by Nalina Moses

Last week I had a charged discussion with a friend, also an architect, about the future of our profession. She’s an expert in sustainable construction and feels that as fuel prices rise, the need to remodel existing structures for energy-efficiency will furnish an important new stream of work. I tend to be more of a doomsayer, and see years more of rough going. The conversation left me rattled. While we have different viewpoints, specialties, and lifestyles, we could both agree that economic instability and climate change are reshaping the profession. After the dust settles, architecture will not be the same.

What bothers me most deeply, which I wasn’t able to articulate during our discussion, is that the traditional role of the architect, to shape form and make place, is at risk. I’m not invested at all in the identity of the architect; I don’t need to play the part. But constructing buildings is a primal act, like making music or telling stories or preparing food. I was stunned when I reread Vitruvius’ Ten Books of Architecture last year because so much of what the Roman architect discussed more than two thousand years ago is still pertinent, like siting, orientation, scale, and proportions. Architecture has been around for a long, long time. And if architecture suddenly becomes something else, like super-insulating existing structures or remodeling kitchens or securing building permits or creating backdrops for video games, then who will shape form and make place? At one of my first architecture jobs my boss took me with her to a rural job site. She stepped forward, waved her arm in the air, and described the building she imagined there – she simply conjured it. Isn’t this what architects do?

March 13, 2012 by Nalina Moses