Volume 44 — On Display — One of architecture’s histories is that of the art of display: architecture displaying power, political ambition, economic success, social agendas, or less mundane notions like dreams, convictions and belief. These days architecture has also become subjected to display: the display of architecture – in museums and collections, and in auctions for example. That adds but also distracts meaning; not every aspect of architecture can be displayed as easy. And what does a culture of display (be seen or perish) add to this condition? Thinking of the value of architecture beyond purely financial terms, ‘display’ is a factor of influence. For better or for worse.
2 Editorial Arjen Oosterman 4 Under Wraps Abla el Bahrawy 15, 65, 73, 86, 87, 109, 119, 133 Collecting Architecture Alex Retegan 16 The Art of Collecting Architecture Mari Lending 26 MIPIM Rotor/Maarten Gielen 33 1:1 Insert 66 The Trouble with Provenance Brendan Cormier 74 Temples of Money Jana Pavlová 82 Where Imagination Survives Display Ole Bouman 88 From Selling Products to the State and Back Again AMO / Stephan Petermann 92 Depot on Show Sjarel Ex Interview 100 The Project of Display Hans Ulrich Obrist Interview 110 Presenting Architecture Tina DiCarlo 126 All of This Belongs to You Rory Hyde 134 My Flip Phone Brought Me Here AIRBNB Pavilion
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On Display — Arjen Oosterman — One of the more recent phenomena in a city’s public space is the ‘wrap’. Passing through the city, all of a sudden a familiar face is hidden from view, covered by a mesh of steel tubes and fine-grained nets. This all has to do with scaffoldings’ scaffoldings’ safety regulations, erected for a building façade’s maintenance. The nets hung around the temporary structure hide the building from view, making one wonder what it’ll look like when the job is done. Maybe the more familiar association of wrapping is with giving; the wrap ritualizes the act, postponing the moment of surprise for when the gift is liberated from its packaging. It stresses that the act is as important as the gift itself, an essential component in this ‘bonding’ ritual. The building owner’s gift to the city is the rejuvenation of his property – fresh looks – or a makeover, usually called an ‘upgrade’. In the meantime, the wrap introduces a semiotic game of sorts, made more complex by the use of the wrap’s surface as blank canvas. As measure of precaution, it performs as an element of suspense – the announcement of a piece of architecture’s renewed display – but also changes into a billboard and transforms the city likewise. likewise. The wrap displays another message, creates another space as part of the ‘brandspace’ phenomenon.1 When the temporarily wrapped building has monumental quality, the owner can decide to replicate its image on the wrap’s surface, a Shroud of Turin, and in doing so attempt to neutralize the disturbance caused by the construction work. That this option is available at all has all to do with developments in printing technology, but the phenomenon itself underlines that once a monument, a building primarily displays itself. itself. The building is the message. Message rhymes with broadcasting and that suggests we’re on familiar terrain. One of architecture’s histories is that
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of the art of display: architecture displaying power, political ambition, economic success, social agendas, or less mundane notions like dreams, convictions and belief. Architecture is one of the oldest media to use towards such ends. So what happens when architecture itself is subjected to display as regime, when it becomes one of the candies in the city’s gift box? And who’s doing the display anyways? The word ‘display’ is associated with selling, with shop windows, with commerce. If something is on display there, the owner wants to get rid of it, and the object can change hands when the price is agreed upon. Display ‘objectifies’ the object. That becomes problematic when the ‘softer’ or less visual values of architecture become overtaken; its inherent violence, for instance, or its ability to move (emotionally). The reductive tendencies of the hyper-attention economy (be seen or disappear) add to this effect. Let it be said however, that display is not a condition one can simply push aside or escape from. Scientists are well aware that display plays an essential part in interpersonal behavior and the reproduction of society. The networks within which architecture is put on or puts on a display have expanded, dramatically. What, where, how, why and by whom architecture displays and is displayed has a reflexive influence on architecture. That is a point this Volume wants to make and one of the reasons it started to take a wider, and closer, look at the art and architecture of display. Brett Steele, ‘Brandspace’, Archis no. 1 (2001), pp. 9 – 17
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Under Wraps — Abla el Bahrawy with Luca Casarano — Fashion is, amongst others, the art of revealing by covering. Identity, ambitions, and physical attractions – or the lack thereof – are presented and emphasized. Various tactics come into play: thicker or thinner fabric, loser or tighter fit, opaque or see-through and much more. In the city, the wrapping of buildings as a necessary act during construction or refurbishment has a comparable effect. One wonders what transformation is going on behind the screen surrounding the building behind scaffolding, or what the situation was like before. Apart from some earlier art projects, projects, since the 1990s, the innocent act of temporarily wrapping buildings gained double meaning: hiding was combined with showing. The surface became an ad space for commercial messages or for expressing the value of what is inside. The city, a gift box.
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Repro wrap. Amsterda
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Hoarding in Amsterda
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Shrink wrap
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Shrink wrap as blank canvas
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Ponte dei Sospiri
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MIPIM — Rotor/Maarten Gielen — What’s on your summer architecture event list? After the Biennale last year it might feel a bit like a lull, but let us assure you, there’s still lots of good stuff out there, plenty of events to bring all your friends back together from all over the globe and have a proper good time, all the while reveling in the culture of architecture. There are some other events though that no one is likely to go to with you, not even to mention convince to pay the ticket, that actually might be a bit more radical, progressive or visionary than what we think we want and what we’re comfortable with. For a few days earlier this year, Rotor took that step outside of our disciplinary comfort zone into the world of international real estate estate and has brought back some sights, sights, stories stories and insight to share.
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MIPIM is a fair designed to bring together decision makers from the real estate sector. Each year investors, corporate end-users, local authorities, industrial and logistics players, and an army of consultants gather in Cannes to network and familiarize themselves with large scale developments all over the world. This is the fair where the Burj Khalifa was presented to investors, but it is also the place where European local authorities would announce their ambition to tender a new rugby stadium and shopping complex, or would lay out their renewed zoning rules. With roughly 20,000 professional visitors, the deals and alliances forged at MIPIM are without a doubt of huge influence on the built environment. The fair is an interesting exhibition format in as much as it situates the building process within the economic frameworks that shapes it. This practice contrasts with typical ‘blockbuster’ architecture exhibitions that tend to attribute all of the merits of a project to just one actor: the architect. At MIPIM buildings and projects are presented along with financial analyses and business plans. Roundtables are dedicated to prospective outlooks on the evolution of building code and planning in a given region. Events are organized around emerging business strategies, such as an innovative cocktail for mixed-use buildings that optimizes the overall occupancy of the site and maximizes profitability. In short, the kind of stories that one doesn’t come across often enough in a conventional architecture exhibitions – and yet of which we all know are fundamental for a better understanding of the architects’ output. Critics and historians are probably not part of the target groups of the MIPIM organizer Reed Midem, and they shouldn’t expect a similar warm welcome as at the openings of architecture biennales, triennales and exhibitions. Even those interested (and willing to pay out of their pocket a € 1,500 entry ticket) will have a hard time capturing what goes on there during these four days. Shiny models on pedestals scattered around the booths are the most concrete materializations that prove MIPIM is indeed concerned with buildings and is not just a fancy wine fair, as the constant popping of champagne corks might suggest. The models’ presence does not seem to be dictated by a need to present architectural projects. Rather they aspire to a symbolic presence of the project at hand, a decorative element in an otherwise dull booth. Specifically designed to intrigue, they act as conversation starters, allowing the booth staff to offer the visitor additional information relative to their profile. Roughly 2,200 staff members occupy the booths, a ratio of 1 exhibitor to every 10 visitors. This allows for a highly customized and personalized visiting experience. A middle aged man wearing an expensive suit and presenting himself as the representative of a major real estate company will quite probably be given a more complete story than a casually dressed young man wearing a camera with a lens that feels too big. Everyone can feel that the air is heavy with expectations, but without a good enough reason to engage with the staffers, only very little sense can be made out of the different projects presented. So on the one hand MIPIM-as-an-exhibition shows the wonderful potential of what could be a very interesting large scale exhibition format; two or more highly educated experts for every model present, eager to please, offering insider information and adapting their presentations in function of the visitor profile. In practice however, it would be hard to adapt this strategy to the
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relatively resource-deprived world of architecture exhibitions without similarly limiting the experience to a very narrow target group. For now, therefore, for those interested in the stories behind the models, the best option might be to rent a suit, print some real-estate business cards, and go along with the game.
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ANDREAS ANGELIDAKIS PETRA BLAISSE HETTY BERENS
gr a Ba phi rt c d de es Ba ign et s
In And sid re e O a s c ur a u t s A n g to r s ide eli / P dak etr i s a B an Jo p h h a oto lai d nn gr ss es ap e S c hy hw ar tz
Het Nieuwe Instituut
PATRICK HEALY
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A documentation compiled by the Jaap Bakema Study Centre as a reflection upon recent installations produced by Het Nieuwe Instituut that are part of a new curatorial practice.
programme Landscape and Interior
files Interior triptych in annual instalments and Sonneveld House Interventions
projects 1:1 Stijlkamers and Huis Sonneveld 2
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The exhibition Period Rooms investigates the story of a set of rooms taken out of their original context in the late 1800s. The rooms, salvaged from soon to be demolished canal houses in Amsterdam, were installed in the then newly formed Stedelijk Museum as stijlkamers, or period rooms. The opening of the Stedelijk was partly funded by Lopez Suaso, a wealthy Jewish Portuguese lady with a collection of bric-à-brac in need of an exhibition context. The rooms became the main exhibition device for her collection. In the late 1930s, Willem Sandberg, a proponent of the De Stijl movement, became part of the Stedelijk team. He became famous for painting the museum interior white overnight, a move that echoed similar gestures at MoMA and other museums spaces eager to host the new abstract art of the early modernists, for which the period interiors were deemed unusable. Thus the white cube exhibition spaces replaced the period interior as the reigning exhibition device of the time. Researching Sandberg’s gesture, one finds that he also spoke about wanting to ‘bring the street inside the museum’, and one can only imagine that the street he was referring to was not the
typical historical street of Amsterdam, but the white facades that his architect friends like Mart Stam and J.J.P. Oud were proposing. At this point in the research, we decided to hallucinate that what replaced the period rooms was not just a white wall, but an inside-out modernist street facade. While modernist facades were taking over the interior of the museum, preservation was overtaking
Amsterdam. Instead of replacing the historical street with white modernism, the city had decided that repairing and preserving the canal houses was a better strategy for development. Today, the standard process for buildings in central Amsterdam is to have their structural frame replaced and their interiors redone, while the original facade is reassembled piece by piece on the new structure. The process of taking off the original facade and re-assembling it on a new frame is ironically the exact way that old rooms became period rooms at the turn of the 20th century. In summary, while the modernist street facade took over the interior of the museum, the period room took over the city. And currently both techniques have become devices of consumption: The white cube became the best way to sell art in galleries by providing a neutral context and detaching artworks from reality, even forming temporary microurbanism in the form of art fairs that pop-up and disappear every other week in some part of the world. The period city has, on the other hand, become the ultimate tourist attraction, providing the perfect context for the consumption of travel packages, bric-à-brac and ‘authentic’ city experiences. This hallucinatory reversal of fortunes of the white modernist facade and the historical interior, the one becoming an exhibition interior, the other a reigning urban tool, becomes the guiding principle for a series of further reversals in the exhibition Period Rooms.
Installation overview
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Ghost
De Stijl Cube exterior
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From left to right: Empire Room, Crate Room, White Cube
Crate Room interior
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Instructions for handling the mirror plates, Inside Outside / Petra Blaisse
You can visit house museums everywhere in the world: from the Goethe House in Weimar or the Spinoza House in Rijnsburg to Gandhi’s ashram in Ahmedabad. They form a concrete, physical link with the past and are often deployed as educational exhibition models to convey to a wide audience a historical story about the occupants of the house. Houses designed by architects occupy a special place in the assortment of house museums. Not only does the house form the backdrop intended to bring alive a particular history, but it is actually the key element in the story. Be
they the many Frank Lloyd Wright houses in the United States or the Rietveld House in Utrecht, they are the supreme opportunity for the public and the professional world of architects to get as close as possible to the original historical experience. Recently the international Iconic Houses network was founded, specifically with a view to exchanging information on “architecturally significant houses from the twentieth century that are open to the public as house museums.” Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Sonneveld House are part of that network.
The Sonneveld House, designed by L.C. van der Vlugt and built in 1933, occupies an unusual place in the history of modern architecture. It does not feature in reference books: authors like Henry-Russell Hitchcock preferred more distinctive examples of buildings based on light, air and space, such as Mies van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat and Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye. Among the Dutch houses representing the Nieuwe Bouwen movement (Dutch Functionalism), the house at Kralingse Plaslaan in Rotterdam belonging to the director of the Van Nelle company, Kees van der Leeuw, was the most discussed. Van der Leeuw was seen as the protagonist of the modern lifestyle: crazy about airplanes, cars and travel. Unlike the Sonneveld House, his home had gym facilities on the top floor. In addition, he was a confirmed theosophist, which also adds to his appeal as a subject of research. Absolute spiritual and spatial freedom characterize this Rotterdam entrepreneur and his architecture. The principal of Sonneveld House, Arie Sonneveld, headed the Van Nelle factory with Van der Leeuw, an icon of Dutch Modernism. But the history of Sonneveld House’s design contrasts sharply with other examples mentioned. In spatial terms the house does not constitute the history of the ‘grand gesture’, but of a series of small
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Detail bathroom furniture
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It is not uncommon to say that we build in order to create shelter, to guard ourselves, our activities, our very moods; we build to create milieu and habitation, to assuage hostile forces and ward off external threat. Unlike sculpture and painting, architecture allows us to in-habit, to be within, and gain through its protective and disclosing existence our own well-being, our own ‘how-we-are’. Every building begins as a barricade, and some end up, as a book on Swiss chalets once remarked, a bower.1 However, that bower is a product of standardization and the beginning of portable prefabricated elements in architecture from at least the 1740s, and raises the issue of how the construction and dream meet in the image of home and dwelling. In Gaston Bachelard’s La Poétique de l’Espace there is a startling claim that reminds us of just how intimate and complex dwelling is, involving functions, dreams and memory. Bachelard claims that “our birth place inscribes in us a hierarchy of the diverse functions of dwelling”.2 He will add that this house of our birth is also a place of dreams, dreams that only poetry will evoke; and for all of
us the natal place of a home is a dream house. For the material imagination then, the spaces we have loved and known can be entered as much in reverie as in any other state and it is there, and not in the domain of facts, that childhood remains alive in us and poetically productive. Something lies in the idea of shelter and sheltering, the dream of habitation, and in the first place for the custody of feeling, which remains often unspoken: the intimate connection of architecture to the weather. The weather has the characteristic of mood, and it is like mood only changed by itself. We probably say most about ourselves when we talk about the weather. From what Bachelard argues we can conclude that functions and the dream, the secluded and the open, meet in architecture. Either enclosed or covered, to create such space requires adroit intelligence to achieve, but these spaces are always being imagined; they belong to our most fundamental layers of natal feeling, ‘the image of well-being’. The idea of somewhere on earth with an ideal climate and a place we can rest is the repose and flourishing all buildings seeks. Stable structure offers us a glimpse into an order we belong to because we can understand it.3 We speak today of weather events, and point to the unpredictable and that which escapes measure. THE IMAGE OF THE HABITABLE There is a line then that leads from a humble hut of an Etruscan shepherd to a tremendous Roman temple, and in the history of Rome that connection was constantly revived and remembered. Augustus maintained a restored replica of the hut of Romulus, reminding one, as the Jesuit Marc-Antoine Laugier would do in
the early 18th century, that shepherding and shelter remain fundamental to the image of the habitable, and in that account architecture always had architecture as its main motivation and generator. Both the hut and the Capitolium were meticulously preserved and fastidiously restored after any injury or depredation or loss.4 It is in this piety of restoration we find the demand for an authentic one-to-one that insists on the physical requirement of the built form as a necessary presence. The hallowed hut of Romulus functioned, just as much as the Capitolium temple, as an exemplary frame in which the power of the present was sustained and the acknowledgement of traditional mores legitimated.5 A central founding myth of the city of Rome was that it had been a place of asylum for the poor and outlawed. Romulus’s hut pointed against ‘royal’ pretensions and towards the simplicity, virtues and models of a rustic past (an essential reference in elite self-fashioning, even at the height of Empire). However, it also reminded one of the permanent dangers of civil strife, and the loss of estimable character traits due to enfeebling influence.6 Such sustaining myth also point to the fact that no one is really at home: the Romans would ‘absorb’ their Etruscan neighbors but retain their rituals and weather lore until almost to the end of the Empire. The contingent nature of life tied religion and superstition together, much as even today on a train journey one sees people reading the page of a paper which has both the weather forecast and astrological charts; as if the precision of destiny belonging to a date and astral influence was always taking place in the dream and uncertainty of change and movements of atmosphere. The uncertainty of forces and individual life was the
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Detail of bedroom furniture
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The Trouble with Provenance — Brendan Cormier — The story behind the design has become increasingly important in the critical reception of any project. We have learned not to trust appearances, which is perhaps not such a bad thing, seeing as how our eyes can really only see and not interpret. It’s not just criticism that needs to know where the thing we’re looking at came from and how it got here, but also shopping. The time of the faceless and nameless sweatshop laborer is over! Or its this that at least some of us with enough privilege to do so like to think. Brendan Cormier directs his gaze to the amount of focus that is placed on telling the story behind absolutely whatever and probes at an important question: to what extent can something, say a piece of food or furniture, be evaluated or appreciated just for its immediate aesthetic qualities? And if not, how does this influence our critical faculties?
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Everything comes from somewhere. It’s a fact so selfevident it hardly feels worth saying. But beyond this obvious truth, provenance is a powerful industry. As a capitalist tactic, it addresses the problem of anonymous mass-production through the added-value of meaning. And it is everywhere. As such, our daily routines have fundamentally changed. No longer a simple succession of actions, they are now a complex sequence of meaningful objects, objects that reveal stories reflecting our moral and personal character. In the shower we lather with locally produced handcrafted soap. Our coffee packaging reassures us that the Ethiopian crop worker – his name is Abraham – earns a living wage. The mug we drink from, as told by the sales clerk, is a Scandinavian classic. We slice into a tomato, knowing that at the farmer’s market we shook the farmer’s hand. These things make us feel good; they reaffirm our egos, assuage our guilt, and remind us that we are interested and interesting individuals. It is 8:30 in the morning. Provenance isn’t the backstory anymore, but the story. It has come to the fore, while objects recede into the background. A designer can no longer design a chair without a team of experts ready to craft its message and another team to convey it. Provenance has become the starting point of the design process; the search for the story is now the real design. Design, in the traditional sense, is thus positioned as a secondary act, the fashioning of the look of something so that it confirms the story. A humanitarian water bottle must look as if it came from a humanitarian project. A piece of starchitecture must look as if it came from the hand of a starchitect. A retro barbershop must look retro. When provenance is combined with humanitarian efforts it is easy to become cynical. For years, the Turquoise Mountain project worked to rebuild a traditional neighborhood in Kabul and provide special artisanal skills training to its inhabitants. Now Turquoise Mountain rugs are on sale at Milan Design Week for prohibitive prices. Was this the ultimate goal? Or alternatively, when a tsunami hit the village of Ishinomaki, a workshop was set-up to create simple but beautiful street furniture. Hermann Miller lent a hand, and now the Ishinomaki brand fetches top design prices in boutiques around the world. Did the gods summon up a tsunami so that these designs could exist? Of course not. But in a world where everything relies on a sellable provenance, cynicism is the inevitable conclusion. And the provenance industry is forced evermore to prove its authenticity. Distinguishing between meaningful and trivial provenance is the new consumer burden. Provenance has an authenticity problem that only worsens with its growth. In one sense, a lot of good has come from talking about provenance. More information exists today than ever before to help us make informed considered choices about how we live and what we buy. But more information exists, good and bad. As the provenance industry sharpens its means of communication and expands its presence it becomes virtually impossible to distinguish between truly meaningful facts, disingenuous half-truths, and meaningless trivia. If provenance is the message, then video is the medium. An object rarely reveals provenance on its own accord. It needs others to do the heavy-lifting. Retail is a good place to start. Walk into Shang Xia, an upscale design boutique in Shanghai, and you will quickly see how an environment becomes a machine for conveying provenance. First, the interior design sets the ambience.
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In this case, it’s a womb-like space with walls of tri-axially folded white fabric designed by Kengo Kuma. It creates a calming antidote to the bustle of the street outside. But spatial design can only do so much. To tell the story behind the products, you will be ushered around to a series of video screens, which show in obscene detail the material technique by which each object is crafted. In one video bamboo is carefully shaved into fibers, and then those fibers are hand-woven to form a band that wraps around a delicate porcelain teacup. In another video, yak fur is meticulously hand-rolled into cashmere felt and pressed into sculpted seamless garments. Everything is shot in close-up, with a shallow depth of field focused on calloused knowing hands while rays of sunlight dapple in the slightly dusty air of a cozy workshop. Playing over this is the lamenting sounds of an erhu, a reminder that this is all part of some deeply historical trajectory. Scour the websites of manufacturers today, and each will feature a litany of high-production value videos telling you the stories behind the products, interviews with the makers, narratives about grand aspirations and humble beginnings, and ‘making-of’ sequences which prove the ultimate quality of what is on offer. Of course graphic design, interior design, architecture and product design all play their part in conveying provenance. But the sensory capacity of video, its ability to stimulate both sound and sight, and to tell a story in the most efficient way, insure it as the most important medium of the provenance industry today. As we move deeper into a digital world of online shopping and embedded auto-streamed content, provenance-related video will increasingly form a wall of everyday white noise battling for our attention. Word-of-mouth is the other indispensable tool of the provenance industry. It’s not enough that the industry conveys to you an object’s provenance. They count on you conveying it to everybody else. When you buy into provenance, you also purchase the right to talk about it. For every person who quietly buys an Ishinomaki stool for the sheer pleasure of the object, there is another who recounts its feel-good story at their cocktail party, blogs about its phoenix-from-ashes roots, and tweets about its innate Japanese sensibility. The stool, once purchased, can’t just be a stool. It’s a story that needs to be told and retold. Museums too are in the provenance business, telling and retelling stories about the objects they contain. Showing original works from masters has long been the museum’s main point of attraction and with fine art provenance is a relatively straightforward affair. But a curious problem is encountered at a design museum, where classic objects are mass-produced and owned by many. It feels somehow not enough to simply show a Sony Walkman, of which hundreds of thousands were made. Its presence is too everyday, too familiar. As a result, curators employ a host of strategies to elevate its provenance. The first is to build a narrative that adds depth and meaning to the object. Sound clips, video, and exhibition design all attempt to lend significance to an object through elaborations on history, context, and attitude. In this respect, for better or worse, the museum moves closer to the tactics of retail design. Another strategy is to find a version of an object with particular significance. For instance, at the Victoria & Albert Museum there is an Arne Jacobsen chair, a design classic that can be found in tasteful canteens and cafés around the world. But the chair that the V&A owns has a special provenance: it was sat on by Christine
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Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum
Video stills from a promotional video for Shang Xia, showing in intricate detail the hand-production of bamboo weaving.
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Photo: Victoria and Albert Museum
After the destruction of Ishinomak i by the 2011 tsunami, designer Keiji Ashizawa set up a workshop in the town to teach people how to craft simple refin ed wooden furniture. Ishinomaki furniture is now sold in design stores around the worl d.
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is Morley. ir for photographer Lew Arne Jacobsen 3107 cha olvement inv this s in ler’ ed Kee pos by ler d ate Kee ne rks, elev In 1963, model Christi it side rley’s most prized wo ys pla Mo of dis A one V& e om the , bec to ardless The photo would go on turns out is a fake. Reg it as e. ir, anc cha ven The pro ir. of o Affa plex display in the infamous Profum photograph, in a com l, as well as Morley’s by side with its origina
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Depot on Show — Sjarel Ex interviewed by Lilet Breddels and Arjen Oosterman — When we think of goods or products on display we think of a market stall or storefront window. When we think of art on display, we think of the museum or gallery. The public art Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam Rotter dam held a competition in 2011 to design its depot, depot, the storage facilities for the collection that was not on display at present on an adjacent plot next to the already impressive Adriaan van der Steur building. Boijmans came up with the radical idea to open up their depot to the public and create space for private collectors to do the same. Will this new way of treating a collection become a precedent? Volume interviewed Sjarel Ex, director of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, about what the progressive nature, challenges and stakes of this gesture are and how architecture plays a crucial role in (re)framing the relation between the public, its institutions and art.
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Arjen Oosterman Let’s start with a list of your various experiences working with architecture. Sjarel Ex Well, I’d actually like to start a bit earlier, because my first experience of working with art was that I had no space whatsoever. In 1985, when we were still students, I thought up ‘Century ’87’ together with Nicolette Gast and Els Hoek, because we had absolutely no faith in museums. We were in fact averse to them. The project consisted of 30 exhibitions throughout the city of Amsterdam developing along two lines: unknown locations showing art by well-known artists and very well-known locations showing art by less known artists. For instance, Georg Dokoupil and Rob Scholten were shown in a horrible alleyway in the red-light district, and Peter Struycken had an awesome light ceiling in the Palace at Dam Square, or Daan van Golden, who colored the paths at the Hortus Botanicus blue with 84,000 kilos of blue gravel, and so on. Initially the plan was very simple. To illustrate the significance of the interaction between location and artwork: when De Wilde left Amsterdam’s Stedelijk – Municipal – Museum, his successor Wim Beeren decided to re-hang the Baselitz painting De Wilde had acquired. All of a sudden the work seemed entirely different. That was actually when the realization of the great importance of context began to dawn. We aren’t artists – thank heavens – but everything in our presentation is pivotal for the way others see a specific artwork. That’s how it all began.
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AO And here at Boijmans? SE Here it’s very simple. First and foremost, Boijmans is
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a crazy building. A good collection, far better than you’d expect in a city this size. Rotterdam’s done a perfect job collecting, in its 166 years, with tremendous help from private individuals. They have contributed about half the collection. The collection itself deserves an attractive building. Van der Steur built a fantastic, homey museum with ‘twilight’ for evening receptions, with a special lighting system above the glazed roofing, meaning it could also be cozy here when it was dark outside in the evening – after all, fluorescent lighting isn’t exactly congenial. So a homey museum with gizmos, attractive recesses, natural stone; for which they did a lot of research in the ‘better’ museums throughout Europe – features you can literally recognize. Whole sections from Basel, Stockholm are repeated here, but on an appropriate scale. When the late Coert Ebbinge Wubben (who passed away last year) suddenly discovered you can’t carry a museum forward without collecting modern art, he went on to build in 1972 together with Bodon what is still the biggest uninterrupted gallery space in the Netherlands, and one of the largest in Europe. It was intended to give scope to a city that was evolving along modern lines. What a program…! Isn’t it amazing? When we were still students we entered, coming in via the steps, and we saw that one sign by Wim Crouwel, with an arrow to the left and right … you actually felt you were in heaven! It was an instantly sublime experience. And it got busy, and even busier and then it was so busy that all of a sudden 300,000 people arrived for certain exhibitions. It was truly incredible. Boijmans wasn’t built for blockbusters, it was built for 40,000 visitors a year. Then what did Wim [Crouwel] come up with? The Kunsthal! It was intended to be the solution to the museum’s emancipation in the eighties. Nowadays the Dutch museums have in total 26 million visitors a year, but it all began back then. It was to be a massive communication experience, in which you were there for the art, but mainly for one another.
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The Kunsthal opened and has indeed attracted vast audiences, yet Boijmans hasn’t benefited much, because the Kunsthal pursues an independent policy. Meanwhile time marches on, and for about nine years (I’ve been here eleven years now) I’ve been looking at some of the museum’s Achilles heels. That’s my job. After pumping water out of the flooded cellars of the depots nearby, a couple of times, I began to wonder: is it acceptable? who’s responsible? can it be insured? You know if something goes wrong, the director’s the scapegoat. I’ve pestered five successive aldermen with it and suggested several solutions. One was a Fort Knox outside the city fenced in with high railings. Another was to do something new and make the collection accessible. In 2010 the Municipal Executive asked: isn’t there already something like that? No, but it’s feasible. And more expensive? Yes, somewhat. How much? Around 15 million. So of course we won’t be doing that. But if I can find someone to make up the difference? Go right ahead. A year later I’d found that person. The rest is history. Suddenly there was a new museum typology. It’s being closely monitored by many museums worldwide. Because everyone can see it isn’t just a summer show in gallery 34, with everything hanging cheek by jowl. No, it’s a radical solution, using your stock to turn a back into a front. The stock is brought into the museum experience and its concomitant exploitation. AO You say “it’s new, there’s nothing like it”, but I’m thinking of Schaulager and other museums that have previously opened up part of their storage facilities. SE No, that’s not correct. Schaulager has five floors, two for exhibitions that are only open for six months a year, three for the collection: 2,500 works belonging to the Hoffmann family. Those works are in galleries that are closed galleries that are open on appointment, at least if you know where a specific work is located. That’s not the case here. We’re talking about 60,000 works that are going to the new depot. They’re displayed in the same way a storage facility is organized: paintings with paintings, pottery with pottery, et cetera. If we were to do what they do at Schaulager we’d need the whole Ahoy complex in Rotterdam. Lilet Breddels What gave you the idea? It starts with necessity: the cellars flooded. SE Deduction. You can turn a disadvantage into an
advantage. It’s a feeble cliché, but nevertheless. The museum as a model is two centuries old and has never been threatened during that long period. Outdoor exhibition centers, traveling panoramas and movie theaters, innumerable forms of communication and commerce have disappeared, but not the museum. There’s an essence underlying the museum: people want to see something special, certainly if someone else has seen it. That’s the essence of the model. And time and again the model has evolved further from that essence. And then those wet shoes. When I started, following turbulent times for the museum, I listened to all the stories. A great many were about the flooding that had been ongoing since 1999. They sounded like wine-years. “The year the Dibbets floated off – that was bad.” Stories like that. A third point: I often visit collectors and then you see how they store their artworks. At one architect/collector’s place the basement was literally jam-packed. People
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The Project of Display — Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed by Fabrizio Gallanti — Framing is an art. When going to historical museums, sometimes the frames on paintings are significantly more intriguing than the paintings themselves. Other times, it’s not one painting that is interesting, but the relation between it and others that uncovers new meaning. There is a very delicate relation between what we see and how we see it. While artists have been cognizant of this fact and used it as a site for critical intervention for quite a while now, architecture is also a privileged, though perhaps neglected, means to change the way we come to understand art. Fabrizio Gallanti interviewed Hans Ulrich Obrist about the relationship between art and the architectural design features of its display. From the frame to the room to the art work itself and beyond, the techniques by which way we see art not only has a long history but have deep epistemological implications and are, in fact, quite supple.
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Fabrizio Gallanti Dear Hans Ulrich, I would like to initiate our conversation by considering some of your more recent projects and publications. You recently published a wonderful curatorial autobiography, where in a very generous way you reveal your education, how you entered in the art world, and your references. In particular, I am intrigued by the way how you inscribe your trajectory within a wider historical reading about the role of the curator within the arts. You have always been an amazing mirror for others to express themselves, through your conversations, while in the book you expose yourself with an exemplary clarity about the intellectual position you occupy. I also think that we could use this book as a springboard for our dialogue together with the curatorship of the Swiss Pavilion for the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice, where you reflected on the modality of presenting material, gathering numerous authors such as Tino Sehgal, Herzog and de Meuron, Atelier Bow-Wow, Philippe Parreno, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and many more. Where are you now with your reflection on the way to display content and to engage audiences? When I read your book I really had this amazing sensation that you are in a very long durational process of constantly rethinking the practices of dialogue with the public. Where will it go next? Hans Ulrich Obrist In general, as curators we should
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also consider history and think about a history of display because obviously it is very often transient, ephemeral; it has, as Cedric Price used to say, an expiry date. It is a paradox that even within practices of architecture and visual arts where one can identify radical innovation, the question of display seems overlooked. If we look at the architect’s coffee table book, they usually cover everything from designing hospitals to luxury condominiums and schools; any architectural form. They might include interior design projects and even design for pottery or cutlery. In these massive volumes what usually is missing is the very often significant invention of display features that architects develop through exhibitions. If you consider this issue, there seems to be two parallel histories related to how architecture has to deal with limited life spans. On the one hand, the pavilion offers a great condition for permanent invention. This is a format that is rooted in notorious examples from the 20th century such as the Barcelona Pavilion by Mies van der Rohe down to today’s young architects as SelgasCano or Sou Fujimoto and Smiljan Radic´, who in the past years were invited by Julia Peyton-Jones and I to design the summer pavilions for the Serpentine Gallery in London. Pavilions are better known because they often become iconic and sometimes spectacular. On the other hand the projects for exhibition displays, which in some cases have been very important ground for the research of architects, seem to be victims of an impressive form of collective amnesia. There is of course an amazing history of display features in the arts that can be traced back to the interior decoration of the Louvre in the 18th century that marks the beginning of the idea of the museum, which up until that moment there was only a standardized practice of display of the artworks in the academies. Since the French revolution, museums start to manifest a sort of mainstream style where you walk from room to room. The museum is a site that creates the national identity through its art collection: you induce the visitor to explore the nation through a carefully orchestrated journey. Then in the 20th century there was a major shift in the spatial and conceptual configuration of museums. It is crucial to
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mention Brian O’Doherty because of his fundamental essays on the idea of the ‘white cube’. He is one of the great geniuses of our time, who besides his activity as an art critic, has conducted a multifaceted trajectory as artist, novelist and as a member of the National Endowment for the Arts, generating crucial programs of support of the arts. His essays from the 1970s published in Art Forum provided the most acute understanding of the cultural, ideological and political conditions of display. He analyzes how since the decorative arrangement of the Louvre and still through the nineteenth century paintings were actually hung in very densely packed constellations, from floor to ceiling with frames touching each other. The Mona Lisa was juxtaposed with dozens of other paintings. It is with Claude Monet that we have a shift of attention, from a vertical depth of representation to individual works that grow in size and command a new typology of space so that the spectator can start to no longer see the work in the proximity of other works. Another relevant step is when William C. Seitz removed all frames from Monet paintings for an exhibition at MoMA in New York: so the gallery became the display device. Or, if you wish, the framing device. We can say that the visual cues of the space are used more and more and we ended up with the ‘white cube’. In the words of O’Doherty, we could really say that the whole history of modernism is framed by the white cube. From that moment on the gallery itself became understood as potential field of intervention for the artist, who then started to innovate and invent display features within this expanded format. Richard Hamilton always mentioned Marcel Duchamp in our conversations as a key example, that he only remembered exhibitions that also invented a new display feature. For me, I think the same is true for architecture. I recall the Herzog & de Meuron show at the Centre Pompidou where all the material was presented on tables. I remember OMA ‘Content’ exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie by Mies van der Rohe in Berlin with the possibilities of actually seeing it from high above. I loved to literally go through the space and experience it from different heights. I remember ‘Les Immateriaux’ curated by Jean-François Lyotard at the Centre Pompidou in 1985 and being fascinated by the maze that was created to alter constantly the perception of the visitors. In general I think that the modes of exhibiting operate as corkscrews to drill your brain and activate your memory. Coming back to the arts, two of these ‘corkscrews’ are from Marcel Duchamp. His surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1938 – with a room with hanging coal sacks creating a cavernous dark space – and then in 1942 the ‘First Papers of Surrealism’ exhibition in New York – where a mile of strings created a web, incorporating in the three dimensional lattice paintings and sculptures of other artists. The display occurred to make the experience memorable, in the word of numerous persons who saw the exhibitions. We can say that there is a robust historiography about artists exploring display techniques, while the same cannot be said for architects. It is revealing, for instance, that someone who had a crucial role in this, as important as Duchamp, Lily Reich, is not better known. One of the main regrets of Philip Johnson was not to have convinced Lily Reich to move to the USA, as he told me he believed that the history of American architecture and exhibition design would have been very different. Her relative obscurity is a proof of the amnesia that we experience about this issue even in the era of the internet.
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John D. Schiff. View of the Exhibition First Papers of Surrealism with the piece by Marcel Duchamp His Twine (“sixteen miles of string”), New York, 1942.
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choreographed the exhibition, suggested to avoid tables and just have the trollies be wheeling out documents by students and young architects who would engage the audience in conversation. When you entered the pavilion in the morning it was completely empty and as the first visitor arrived a trolley was wheeled, and so on, so that when you have many visitors you have many trollies and students and the participants engaged conversations. Reproductions of the original material are constantly moved and rearranged as part of a conversation, mediating between the 20th century institution and 21st century future. A replica of the Fun Palace was put on wheels, as Cedric always wanted it to be. Lucius’s mental universes were suddenly floating in space, bringing us to launch a summer academy, managed by Lorenza Baroncelli and Stefano Boeri, so that during all of the Biennale every day there was another group appropriating the pavilion and converting it into their own mini-production. Every day we had a lecture by Dorothea von Hantelmann about the ritual of the exhibition. She basically wrote a book in public, a chapter every day. I think it is interesting to include art historians reflecting in vivo on the experience of the exhibition, as it happened with Molly Nesbit during the ‘Utopia Station’ exhibition at the 2003 Venice Biennale, which was co-curated by her, artist Rirkrit Tiravanija and I. The very complex mechanism of the Swiss Pavilion was very much influenced by the ideas and thinking of the anthropologist Margaret Mead, who observed that if we look at exhibitions, visitors do not actually spend a lot of time in front of art works. I think that it was once measured that people in front of the Mona Lisa on average spend on average ten to fifteen seconds. Mead suggested that it is not only about appealing to the visual but to include touch, smell, to sound, so you weigh all the senses. Mead analyzed ancient ceremonies, such as barley rituals or a medieval mass, which appeal to all the senses. So we were very interested in this idea of the gesamtkunstwerk and how to develop a display feature involving all the senses. We included sound, Philippe Parreno developed the blinds so the space could suddenly go dark and allow film projections on the model of the Fun Palace or the walls of footage showing Cedric and Lucius. A more abstract notation was included in the signage developed by Liam Gillick, with the large black sign “Palazzo F” and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster with the neon “Lucius & Cedric”. The next step would be to introduce an olfactory dimension. There was also a very tactile component, because visitors could manipulate facsimiles of the original documents. The pavilion became an ever changing and dynamic environment, which was different every day and allowed for multiple surprises. I recently spoke with the artist Christopher Williams, who told me that he came with his students to Venice to do research and suddenly they realized that they could actually spend time in the Swiss Pavilion, so they just appropriated it and did their entire research in there. FG Thank you very much, this journey is fascinating, as it reveals two crucial issues. When you mention the sensorial component and the work of Margaret Mead, do you see that as a possibility to differentiate the space and the experience of a physical display from the digital and internet, where the predominance of the visual is obvious? On the other hand, connected to the book that you just published with Shumon Basar and Douglas Copland,
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Coming back to your initial question, when I assumed the role of curator for the Swiss Pavilion within the last Venice architecture Biennale, I started to wonder who would actually be the architects who were really significant for exhibitions during the 20th century. I came to the conclusion that it would be really fascinating to talk about Cedric Price and Lucius Burckhardt. In the forefront was the idea of an unrealized project of Cedric Price, the Fun Palace, which was originally imagined with the theater impresario Joan Littlewood and conceived to have a limited life span. For the Venice pavilion we wanted to mix the choreography of the 21st century with a more object-based display of the 20th century. Price already anticipated this idea in the 1960s because obviously, from the 19th century until that moment, the history of art was mostly the history of objects. But precisely in that period, arts historian such as Lucy Lippard started to understand the dematerialization of art, and we begin to see more time-based exhibitions and displays that foster a more communal experience outside the material limits. Price once said that the 21st century museum and display would utilize “calculated uncertainty “and “conscious incompleteness” – he was obviously aware of Heisenberg’s physics – to produce a catalyst for invigorating change. In the exhibition that attitude was mirrored by the concept of ‘strollology’ by Lucius Burckhardt, a new science of actually going on a walk far beyond the limits of architecture, to the streets, in order to say that maybe the darkness of the night or the dirt in the neighborhood or the dust, the relationship between neighbors, could actually be as important than the built architecture. Environmental and social circumstances could outweigh the city’s visual environment, to quote what Burckhardt told me during one of the many walks we did together. It felt important to show together the archives of these two figures, and so I obviously had to address the conundrum of presenting archives. I tend to avoid models, as I think that they are not a pertinent way to experience and present architecture, and even more so architectural plans, which are like musical scores or computer programming, totally obscure to the non-expert. Hence, the rejection of the possibility of showing models and drawings led to this challenge of how we can show an architect’s archive differently. We had access to documents, photocopies, watercolors, sketches and videos, from the Canadian Centre of Architecture, where the largest part of Price’s archive is, but also we included material from Eleanor Bron, the partner of Cedric, and we worked with the Lucius Burckhardt library in Basel. The goal was to create a dramaturgy to bring these dead materials alive. It was very important to build a team of artists and architects so I invited Herzog & de Meuron to conceptualize the exhibition, Atelier Bow-Wow to design a roof garden over the pavilion and who developed a Cedric Price kind of open birdcage where birds could fly out on the roof so visitors could go upstairs. I also invited the artists Tino Sehgal, Dominique GonzalezFoerster, Philippe Parreno and Liam Gillick, the scholar Dorothea von Hantelmann and the producer Asad Raza to be part of a pluridisciplinary team. When we visited the library in Basel where the Lucius Burckhardt archive is with Herzog & de Meuron the librarians reeled out these trollies with original material in glass, and Jacques said, “it’s trollies”, because its this idea that they can be constantly moved and rearranged. So our strings as in Duchamp became the trollies, allowing us to develop a presentation of a dynamic archive. Tino Sehgal, who
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My Flip Phone Brought Me Here — AIRBNB Pavilion — We live in a world where, regardless of whether we’d like to or not, we – our bodies, our identities – are constantly put on display. Be it by social networks, embedded RFID tags or surveillance cameras, what we used to think of privacy or public-ness aren’t particularly appropriate ethical and existential categories for today. In bridging the digital divide, these networked technologies of the self have had a profound influence on the way we think of architecture and the city too. While we are able to feel at home in more places than ever, urban web platforms like Airbnb allows us to rent our house by means of putting our previously most intimate spaces on show. AIRBNB Pavilion questions the relevance of the historical relation between house and home, identifies the contemporary city as a project through the lens of their detachment, detachment, and points towards the project of the post-contemporary city.
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The Modern subject is usually defined by its epistemological capacity. Enlightened at heart, it is composed of a body and a mind evolving in an homogeneous space and time; it is mostly conscious, aware of the world to the extent of his/her knowledge. This model for subjectivity continues to produce the city both formally and as an abstraction. If this model has been under criticism since it emerged, today, the lived experience of space is being transformed more directly than before through the devices, software and networks that affect the sensing capacity of the subject. As it is possible to access quantities of information at a distance, through deserts and walls, it is also possible to be governed in the same manner. This aspect of the contemporary urban experience has notably exposed the inadequacy of the dialectical separation between spheres that have produced the modern subject and its habitat: the modern city. How to think the city when the domestic is public, the personal is political, and reproduction is production? How is the city transformed by the digital quantification of space which indexes both the living and nonliving and allows it to be managed in almost real-time? These are only partial formulations of the actual challenges brought by the heterogeneous dynamics at work today with the evolution of labor, technologies and subjectivity. A contemporary analysis of the city needs to account for the destabilization of the dichotomies that still constitute the subject at large, whether they are body or mind, human or nonhuman, and material or immaterial. In this regard, there is something actually fascinating in the fact that objects or cities are now wished with a particular personality trait, and be called smart. The image of the smart city made of an endless assemblage of automated connected machines is impressive and daunting. Whether one sees it as exploiting or liberating, it is problematic to reduce the smart city to a perfectly oiled system constantly monitoring and optimizing everything and every one’s behavior. Technoutopian enthusiasm and the total hopelessness of usual critique are mirror images of each other. Both views bear many traits of that fin de siecle feeling that was generated by the industrial city: the anxious fascination for the machines that dehumanize, for the labor that individualizes and for the spectacle that depoliticizes. Yet, the industrial city hasn’t produced only evils, or eradicated the political altogether. The technological has a sublime and it is ambivalent: machines do not serve or enslave, they do both and neither simultaneously. This is an important premise for a conceptualization of the interplay between subjectivity, technology and the city that doesn’t essentialize burdensome humanisms. In the project of the smart city, it is the smart home that raises the most concerns. The infiltration of sensing and connected machines within the domestic unit disturbs. Not even the home is safe; there is no place to go, no room to hide as surveillance appears to be ubiquitous and commodification is subsuming the unconscious. Faced with these observations that imperil the precious separations of spheres, some architects turn to Ray Kurzweil (the inventor of the ‘singularity’) or opt for an exodus from technology, while others attempt to reincarnate the past home by building Faraday cages like they used to build atomic bunkers. It is not that the techs of the smart home are innocent but that it only seems difficult to analyze a condition based on the uncertain effects of objects and gadgets that are still at the stage of prototypes. It is more productive to analyze the
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infrastructure and the habits that are already in operation and have allowed the imagination of the smart thermostats and fridges that are threatening to invade our homes. Technology isn’t reducible to machines and techniques. It is an immersive presence that hardly leaves anything spare, especially in this so-called information age. From the street to the home, from the self to the world, the city as a whole has already been transformed by portable personal devices, the internet, and the oligopoly of online platforms. The home points somewhere, to a place which doesn’t need to be described too precisely. It is diffuse, but it has a permanence which confers comfort and belonging. It brings psychic appeasement and physical protection. It is the space of personal intimacy and of the ‘family’, that inalienable and natural-ized datum of the community, the one that continues to condition all futurity. In spite of the generalized precarity that is hitting our cities and turning our houses into temporary places of occupation that are most often impersonal, dysfunctional and constantly subject to the landlord’s or the state’s invitation to leave, the home doesn’t show much wear. The home is a (idealized) feeling rather than a typology. Renting, short-term jobs and serial monogamy are destroying the house-home, yet the home can exist quite autonomously from its architectural concretization. Even the homey aesthetics – an image, an ambience, a feeling – is seemingly strengthened by the very processes that are destroying its typology. The abundant flux of images that are produced and shared online show the home clearly and coherently even if its actual access is increasingly hazardous. One only has to compare the domestic reality glimpsed on a Skype catch-up with the CG imagery of the IKEA catalogue to see the gap between reality and representation. This tension is certainly unsettling yet it doesn’t only lead to somber conclusions. The widening distance between image and reality may very well be a heightened form of alienation with techno-fascist undertones, but we should prevent ourselves from this modernist masculine idealism that believes in actual reality and fears illusions. We should also avoid regretting the home as a safe haven of peacefulness. That would blatantly disregard the invaluable feminist critiques and only demonstrates a conservative empathy for one of the keystone of the bourgeois project and its rampant forms of oppressions. Without belittling the violence of the neoliberal dynamics that are currently at work, it is politically more promising to see the tension between the reality and the image of the home as the chance to liberate hominess from certain power relations. There might be opportunity in crisis, even for emancipatory politics. Thus, could we disentangle these questions by considering that it is not a disappearance of the home, but a displacement? What if the home was able to detach itself from the house as a consequence of the devices and platforms accommodating some of its qualities, or rather providing aspects of its presence? It is frightening to know that the companies of the smart city are now developing ridiculously small and cheap sensing devices powered by the electromagnetic wave of surrounding WiFi signals and communicating with their headquarters on 3G. Even if there are Smart TVs that have already been busted recording all our living room conversations, it is still unlikely that the appliances of the smart home have more potential for evil than the portable devices that centralize our sociability and have
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2015. #1, AIRBNB Pavilion, Interior illusions lounge cies. den Ten d Bol by ed sion Exhibited and commis
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