Potlatch 2

Potlatch

Issue # 2 Spring 2011 US $ 8

A Journal of the Potlatch Lab at GSAPP, Columbia University

Potlatch Customers Yehuda Emmanuel Safran The Evora Lecture Daniel Sherer Analogues of Distance: F. P. Boué’s Infinite Instant Manuel Corrada Useless Pleasures Guillermo Acuña Arquitectos Precision Headquarters Richard Hamilton Variations on the Theme of a Reaper KUU Minus K House Jaye Rhee Swan & Niagara Cecilia Brunson Performance or Anti-Performance: A Poetics of Visual Action Gerardo Pulido A Gallon, an Action

Potlatch Published by GSAPP Columbia University 413 Avery Hall 1172 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10027 Visit our website at www.arch.columbia.edu/publications Copyright 2010, by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.

All rights reserved.

ISSN 2156-4906

Spring 2011, Issue 2 GSAPP Dean Mark Wigley Potlatch Director Yehuda E. Safran Potlatch Editor Cristobal Amunategui Translations Kristina Galvez Special thanks to Dean Mark Wigley Craig Buckley And to all those who generously donated their work for this issue Guillermo Acu単a Arquitectos Cecilia Brunson Manuel Corrada Richard Hamilton KUU Gerardo Pulido Jaye Rhee Daniel Sherer

This publication has been produced through the Office of the Dean, Mark Wigley, and the Director of Print Publications, Craig Buckley.

Cover Reaper (f) 1949 Intaglio print on paper Courtesy Richard Hamilton

Potlatch is a non-profit magazine published by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University. Claims and comments should be addressed to Customer Service, Potlatch Journal, 409t Avery Hall, 1172 Amsterdam Ave., New York, NY 10027.

Contents

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Customers POTLATCH

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The Evora Lecture YEHUDA E. SAFRAN

11 Analogues of Distance: F. P. Boué’s Infinite Instant DANIEL SHERER

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Useless Pleasures MANUEL CORRADA

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Precision Headquarters GUILLERMO ACUÑA ARQUITECTOS

51 Variations on the Theme of a Reaper RICHARD HAMILTON

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Minus K House KUU

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Swan & Niagara JAYE RHEE

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Performance or Anti-performance: A Poetics of Visual Action CECILIA BRUNSON

73 A Gallon, an Action GERARDO PULIDO

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Customers C.A.

W

hen it comes to the occupant of a given building there exists, of course, an infinite variety of customers. Certain buildings render most evidently the type of customer one can be.

There are those whose restrictive nature rouses no revealing peculiarities among their occupants. The library will make of a diverse crowd a rather homogeneous one. So much for the temple, whose solemn aura and the rites it hosts may naturally lead people to disguise their baser passions. Here and there only subtle signs of other’s character may seldom emerge – often out of distraction or boredom, and much to the joy of the attentive eye of the curious. Other buildings bear a distinctive neutral character, which is often born out of the specificity of a function. It is this very neutrality what prompts behaviors that are germane to those buildings alone. A movie theatre makes even the shyest soul react, if only with a furious gaze, against the perennial, talkative individual who’s always keen of exercising his own narrative abilities. Time and capitalism have made of some buildings places whose

physiognomy reminds us of better days. Such is the case of the museum, which has slowly fallen into an irredeemable aboulia, so typical of those places which once were meant for the nobles and learned, and which are now seized by a rather unworried, joyful consumerism. Were this untrue, where would a contemporary Reger go today to see his Tintoretto? Certain buildings render most evidently the type of customer one can be. In the hotel lobby, Kracauer says, people behave as the faithful do in the temple. “In both places people appear as guests. But whereas the house of God is dedicated to the service of the one whom people have gone there to encounter, the hotel lobby accommodates all who go there to meet no one. It is the setting for those who neither seek nor find the one who is always sought.” Dandyism cultivates the same kind of detachment. Not only from “the one who is always sought,” but also from life’s customary burdens. The dandy looks for places with no function other than to encompass his existence. He represents the constant dweller, for his only ally is the space. Of all characters, he may well be architecture’s favorite customer.

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Giorgione, La Tempesta (1506-08)

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The Evora Lecture Yehuda Emmanuel Safran

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would, first of all, like to thank João Luís Carrilho da Graça and the faculty for the kind invitation to Evora. It was one of the first cities I visited in my first visit to Portugal in the eighties. Above all, it was a voyage to see Alvaro Siza’s Housing Project. José Paulo dos Santos introduced me to Alvaro and Eduardo Souto De Moura in Oporto; Eduardo was building his first two houses following the market project. I returned much later, twice, to see Dos Santos’s Posada near-by.

I also want to thank you for the invitation to offer here a discourse on the occasion of a new cycle of doctoral studies in this ancient university established by the Jesuits in the 16th century. Yes, we know that in the course of time even these learned monks were expelled from Portugal.

Perhaps, in order to remind us that mere learning is easily misguided, misused and misapplied. The motivation of reason is no less important than reason and its ability to project a world, to invent with relatively few words, a mind and world.

Flying over Portugal one is struck by the pattern of settlement on the edge of the old world. Unlike Italy, Spain or France, where there are distinct, concentrated clusters of urban centers and rural sites, habitation in Portugal is marked by a greater spread and diffusions in an arabesque of meandering lines. Indeed, it is as if the topography was followed, water like, flowing in and along the lines traced by the pressure of water on the earth. As if the people of this land have made a pact of obedience to gravity. It is into this age old nexus of relations between these

people and their land that we have to imagine ancient and recent architectural intervention. Indeed it is in keeping with the tradition as much as the tradition of the new that so much is gained by being in tune with the topography of the site.

It is not altogether surprising that so many of the projects in this country have chosen to mimic the lay of the land in some manner.

Not unlike Plato’s Cratylus and a tradition that believes in essential links between words and things, architects, in this country, act as if they believe in the essential links between the shape of the built environment and the topography.

Nowhere else is architecture predicated on the pressure of light from above and the resistance of the earth below as it is observed and practiced in Portugal. We could hardly speculate on the origin of this sensibility. Certainly the constant proximity of the mountains to the sea must be part of this common and unique experience. Working on the mountains and between the rivers that offer so much of the land to be cultivated in this part of the world, demands no doubt this kind of vigilance and constant attention to the flow of water and the resistance of the earth. Ever since the Arab period, the terraces are strictly conceived in alliance with these parameters. But I do believe in the a priori of the subject. Deep subjectivity takes every given fact in order to reconstitute it.

Without repeating life in the imagination you can never be fully alive, without imagining your act in advance, how could you act? It is commonly said that reality is that 3

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which exists, or that only what exists is real. In fact, precisely the contrary is the case: true reality is that which we really know, and which has never existed. The ideal is the only thing we know with any certainty, and it surely has never existed. It is only thanks to the ideal that we can know anything at all; and that is why the ideal alone can guide us in our lives either individually or collectively. “Philosophers and philologists should be concerned in the first place with a new discipline that could be called poetic metaphysics; that is, the science that looks for proof not in the external world, but in the very modifications of the mind that meditates on it. Since men made the world of nations, it is inside their minds that its principles should be sought.” (Giambattista Vico, Principles of New Science, 1759.)

And where, if not in the imaginary reality of architecture, can the rehearsal take place?

If Leibnitz said of music that it is counting, but unconsciously, the relationship between counting and telling explains pattern, which emerges, suggesting that a national language exerts a “gravitational pull” on the structure of every conceivable human activity from music to architecture. In many languages, to tell a story also has the sense of counting, as in the word “to tell.” There is no doubt that the memory of the Homeric lore was preserved thanks to dance and song somewhat like the navigation logs of the South Seas islanders. Indeed, the imagination of rhythm may be as neurologically potent as actually listening to it. The rhythmic movement of the body intimately determines the use of language as much as practically everything else. It is just as rare as it is difficult to articulate a new concept of space. Architecture, with its pride, defeats gravity and embodies a specific form of the human will to power. It is the slant, or the style of resisting gravity that determines so much of the quality of the architectural intervention. It is particularly poignant when it 4

is considered in relation to homes and schools.

Of course, there is an ongoing conversation with other cultures and languages. In the Iberian peninsula we have not only Roman occupation, but Arab culture which was highly sophisticated in its use of water, or its way of imagining water, fire, earth and air. Listening to Siza describing the lay of the land in Santiago de Compostela, the way in which the ground was modeled to channel streams and master irrigation left indelible traces, we were made sharply aware of this heritage. In the same lecture, Siza spoke eloquently of the Inca building in stone, Machu Picchu, which impressed the Iberian invaders so profoundly that they too brought home some of their impressions. Today the conversation is not only wide open but has the character of great traffic. Much is being assimilated from far away; recent projects are a step further in the saga of the Portuguese architectural achievement in our time. We are grateful, for this experiment makes the results that much richer, everywhere and for everyone. It was the desire to establish some regional, national character that only a generation ago dictated so much of the discourse. But surely critical regionalism was regional in so far as it was not critical and it was critical in so far as it was not regional. In other words, if the regional sensibility and concrete local conditions made some development possible it is precisely this that made it critical and therefore no longer regional.

ENTROPY: WE ARE DRIFTING IN A HALL OF MIRRORS, OR: AT THE TOP OF THE HEAP Every little boy has the dream of building a Perpetuum Mobile, the desire for a Machine capable of moving endlessly. Alfred Jarry created his version in Le Surmâle, a portrait of the ultimate cyclist, and Marcel Duchamp repeated it in his bicycle wheel mounted on a chair: a bicyclist with four legs. If the

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certain definite quantity of force and as a certain definite number of centers of force — and every other representation remains indefinite and therefore useless — it follows that, in the great dice game of existence, it must pass through a calculable number of combinations. In infinite time, every possible combination would at some time or another be realized; more, it would be realized an infinite number of times. And, since between every combination and its next recurrence all other possible combinations would have to take place, and each of these combinations conditions the entire sequence of combinations in the same series, a circular movement of absolutely identical series is thus demonstrated: the world as a circular movement that has already repeated itself infinitely often and plays its game in infinitum.

If the Eternal Return is the essence of life, “diminished repetition” is perhaps a more accurate description of our more limited terrestrial existence. Bicyclists leading an endless line of other bicyclists, scaling another mountain, remain the stuff of which dreams are made of.

“Spending, spending, spending” was the motto of George Bataille. This is symmetrically in opposition to the myth of Sisyphus. Rolling a stone to the top of a mountain, just to see it rolling down again is an adult view of life. The Tower of Babel was exactly such an enterprise; it bound architecture to language. As there is nothing we are capable of which is not first rehearsed in the cavity of our mouth, it was the inability to speak a common tongue that was designed to prevent this archaic desire from being realized. The Adamic universal language clearly would have allowed mankind to build a tower to reach heaven. The confusion of tongues (bilbul, in Hebrew) meant that chaos interrupted the enterprise, never to be resumed again; or perhaps, yes, only now it has resumed. These days, reading of a million-letter genetic code imprinted in a newly minted fun-

gus, life as we know it can no longer remain the same.

At the top of the heap. At the top of the leap. Is the bicycle dead? In a world without certainties, there are few things that are fundamental. The certainty of our death, above all, is among those things. In our time, more than in any other time in history, human inquiry has turned again to the study of nature; philosophy has turned to the study of external Nature, rather than to the study of man and of the purposes of human action in society. But, of course, the study of nature itself is bound by analogies constructed on the way we live humanely and, subsequently, projected on the world outside. It was Karl Marx who responded to Darwin’s hypothesis by commenting, “How far this man, Charles Darwin, had to travel to discover the laws of his own society?” Indeed, as children we were told how Monet changed the course of painting by turning to the open-air landscape, outside his studio, and developed planair painting. But only a little later we discovered that these paintings, painted in the open air, were much more similar to the Japanese prints in his collection than the natural scene facing him. As soon as he could afford it, Monet invited a Japanese gardener to create a Japanese garden outside his studio, and the circle was closed. What he now observed so carefully outside was nothing less than what his gardeners had laid out before him. Indeed, Plato, in the Republic, established the most important analogy in architecture theory when he argued that the wellmeasured and well-proportioned city would, by analogy prompt the citizens to be more just.

Elaine Scarry in a recent book, On Beauty and Being Just, has repeated this argument, without reference to Plato, and without any difficulties, that is to say, as if there were no instances in which the well-ordered city produced tyrannies and other aberrations. There is no element more fundamental to our construction of reality than a 5

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measure of paranoia, its need and inspiration to invent a causality all of its own. Agassi and Fried have written an entire book arguing this thesis. In fact, “Anything Goes” was the title of one of Paul Feyerabend’s final lectures. Salvador Dali called it: Critical Paranoia. Reason, being contaminated by social and cultural constraints, requires devices which allow her the relative autonomy which will release her in its full protean measures, permitting invention and celebrating the creative potential of creating a world.

Entropy attracted so many writers, painters and sculptors only a generation ago because it corresponded so convincingly to their own despair at being at the top of the heap and having to leap, to commit themselves to a “salto mortale.” Among the novelists of the 1960s and 1970s, Thomas Pynchon in Gravity’s Rainbow and Donald Barthelme in The Explanation certainly experienced moments of delirious entropy.

The hero is aware that an increase in paranoia generates meaning as much as the luck of convincing paranoia generates a meaningless chaotic environment. The earthworks of the same period, above all those by Michael Heizer and Robert Smithson, leaned heavily on reversing Entropy, investing a moving earth with cosmic significance.

In the Architectural Association in the eighties, there was Gordon Pask, a mathematician with a cool passion for what he named the Second Cybernetic, or the New Cybernetic; he generated calculations which could describe accurately the effect on the inside of the adjacent interior of the accumulation of rubbish outside of a building, as well as the effect on the dynamic of human interaction. But what are we to say of today and tomorrow?

In 1647, an earthquake destroyed the city of Santiago de Chile. Nearly a hundred years later, in 1755, five years before the birth of Heinrich von Kleist, an equally terrible earthquake 6

destroyed the larger part of Lisbon. It was soon to be rebuilt by Pombal. These events shook the belief in the Christian world. Providence could not be trusted. The Western world was shocked and dismayed. The belief in the benevolence of God was shattered.

Every morning, I start the day with a macchinetta. I unscrew the top from the bottom, clean out the leftovers of the last round of the previous night, fill the lower half with water and fill the sieve with fresh ground coffee, screw the top, light a match and turn the small gas burner on. I watch the macchinetta heating up and spouting warm aromatic liquid; wars, revolutions and strikes I read about in the morning newspaper. I pour the brew into my cup; add a teaspoon of sugar and stir; after some minutes, calmly the liquid rests in my cup. The affairs of the world are mingled with the baroque fountain nearby in Piazza Farnese. Yes, in our everyday life we rehearse every conceivable process and event near and far in time and place. In the early days of the Spanish Civil War, Andalusian villages, having chased out the authorities, set out to create the anarchist Eden. Quite deliberately, they aimed at the simplification even of the poor life that had been theirs in the unregenerate past, closing the cantinas and, in their plans for exchange with neighboring communes, deciding that they had no further need even for such innocent luxuries as coffee. In La Guerre et La Paix, Proudhon drew a distinction between pauperism and poverty. Pauperism is destitution, while poverty is the state in which a man gains by his work enough for his needs, and this condition Proudhon praises in lyrical terms as the ideal human state, in which we are most free, in which, being masters of our senses and our appetites, we are best able to spiritualize our lives.

In fact, the very idea of Utopia repels most anarchists, because it is a rigid mental construction. Utopia is conceived of as a perfect

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society, and anything perfect has automatically ceased growing; even William Godwin qualified his rash claims for the perfectibility of man by protesting that he did not mean men could be perfect, but that they were capable of indefinite improvement, an idea which, he remarked, “not only does not imply the capacity for being brought to perfection, but stands in express oposition to it.”

The general distaste for the rigidity of Utopian thinking has not prevented the anarchist from adopting some ideas contained within Utopias. Anarchists-communists echoed the suggestions on economic distribution put forward by Thomas More in the original Utopia, while certain of Fourier’s ideas on how to induce men to work for passion rather than profit have entered deeply into anarchists’ discussions. But the only complete Utopian vision that has ever appealed generally to anarchists is News From Nowhere, in which William Morris, who came close to Prince Peter Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid, presented a vision of the world of the kind that might appear if all the anarchist dreams of building harmony on the ruins of authority had a chance to come true.

The idea of progress as a necessary good has vanished, and everything happens, not in the harsh white light of perfection or heat of machines, which Morris denies, but in the mellow stillness of a long summer afternoon which ends for the unfortunate visitor to the future, who has to return to city life in London or New York, and the acrimonious debates that are wrecking any collective vision.

The golden sunlight of that long summer afternoon when time paused on the edge of eternity haunted the anarchists too. “My conscience is mine, my justice is mine, and my freedom is a sovereign freedom,” said Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. “Such men,” said his friend Alexander Herzen, “stand much too firmly on their own feet to be dominated by anything or to allow themselves

to be caught in any net.”

The complexity of Proudhon’s personality and outlook, and his vigorous prose, tempted Saint-Beuve to write his first biography, and turned the painter Gustave Courbet into his enthusiastic and lifelong disciple. He inspired Tolstoy not merely to borrow the title of his greatest novel from Proudhon’s La Guere et la Paix, but also to incorporate in War and Peace many Proudhonian views on the nature of war and history.

Following the publication of his System of Economic Contradictions: or, The Philosophy of Poverty (1846), Marx chose this occasion for a complete reversal of his past attitude to Proudhon by publishing The Poverty of Philosophy, which showed a complete failure to understand the originality and plasticity of thought underlying the apparent disorder of Proudhon’s argument. Proudhon was seeking a kind of equilibrium in which economic contradictions would not be eliminated – for they cannot be – but brought into a dynamic equation. This dynamic equation he found in mutualism, a concept that includes other elements, such as the dissolution of government, the equalization of property, and the freedom of credit. He examined the idea of Providence and came to the conclusion that, far from the state of the world confirming the existence of a benevolent deity, it led one irresistibly to the conclusion embodied in the aphorism: “God is Evil.” Political government was understood already by William Godwin to be “that brute engine which has been the only perennial cause of the vices of mankind, and which has mischiefs of various sorts incorporated within its substance, and cannot otherwise be removed than by its utter annihilation!”

If Locke’s definition of freedom as determination by the “last result of our minds” has its logical difficulty of a “free but determined will,” then in Godwin’s scheme he is eager to 7

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construct an exact science of morality, based on the predictability of behavior, the discovery of general principles, and the control of process. It leads him towards the more empirical form of free will, in which the distinction between involuntary behavior and voluntary actions suggests that involuntary behavior exhibits one sort of necessity, which is dictated by past experience, while voluntary actions are always determined by a judgment, and proceed “upon the apprehended truth of some propositions.” This second type of determinism, rational and teleological, is hard to distinguish from what is usually considered free will, or the Thomist doctrine of free will, where the will is determined solely by the superior goodness of the alternative chosen.

Men’s actions, Godwin wrote in Thought on Man (1831), the last volume of essays published during his lifetime, are indeed involved in necessary chains of cause and effect, but the human will is emergent from this process and, in turn, takes its place in a series of causes; man’s actions become voluntary —and by implication free— in so far as he can alter the direction of the chain, even if he can never break it asunder. Will and confidence in its efficiency “travel through, not quit us till we die. It is this which inspires us with invincible perseverance and heroic energies, while without it we would be the most inert and soulless of blocks, the shadows history records and poetry immortalizes, and not men. We shall view with pity, even with sympathy, the men whose frailties we behold, or by whom crimes are perpetrated, satisfied that they are parts of one great machine, and, like ourselves, are driven forward by impulses over which they have no control.”

In other words, he grants the contradiction between a universe dominated by immutable law and man’s sense of his own freedom, and he pragmatically welcomes the contradiction, thus creating one of those states of equilibrium between opposing conditions or ideas that delight8

ed many of his libertine successors, particularly, of course, Proudhon.

Shelley’s elopement with Godwin’s daughter is perhaps better known than his intellectual debt to the philosopher, or Godwin’s financial debt to the poet. But the irony of the Godwinian Utopia and Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound is compounded by the literary work of Godwin’s daughter, Mary Godwin Shelley: Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1817).

It is the story of a scientist who constructs an artificial man through the transformation of parts from dead bodies. The monster, conscious of the fear he inspires and his need for love – sentiments he cannot overcome – and condemned to solitude, turns against the human race and his inventor, Frankenstein and his family.

Inspired by the Romantic preoccupation in its structure, but above all a painful response to the Utopian thinking of her father, she found little in the man-machine dialectic of the modern era that did not partake in the adventure of this creature.

Heinrich von Kleist, seven years earlier, inspired by a misunderstanding of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, concluded with man’s tragic incapacity to perceive truth, and the vain pursuit of knowledge and a just world. Humanity was condemned to torture and useless gesticulation, with conscience forever divorced from the natural world. Feminine fidelity appeared to him the only absolute. His reflection on the theater of marionettes was written after he was engaged to Adolfine Vogel, a young woman suffering from incurable cancer, with whom he would commit suicide by the end of the year on the shore of Lake Wannsee in Berlin. Kleist’s reflection is a precise pre-figuration of that very same horror.

Only a marionette, a mechanical contraption, can be conceived as having the advantage of being anti-gravitational. Yet, it could make us believe that there is more grace in the

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mechanics of a mannequin than in the structure of a human body. The original fall of man from grace is translated into a mechanical device of wire and string, attached to weights, which precipitates a second fall, eating once more of the tree of knowledge and thus falling back into innocence.

A NEW CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD Kleist’s young man, at midday when the earthquake struck, finds himself free from the prison he was condemned to as a punishment for a forbidden love of a woman who was to be executed at that very moment. He starts his search for her and the child, the fruit of their forbidden love.

Finally, in the afternoon light, he discovers them beside a river outside of the town. To celebrate their happiness, they turn to the only church still surviving. There, the congregation realizes who the young couple with a child is. Thinking of the couple as the sinners who brought about the calamity in Santiago de Chile, they execute the young man and the woman, and spare the child.

Indeed, in Giorgone’s The Tempest, hanging in the Academia Museum in Venice, we see the same picture as in Kleist’s story. On the right, the young woman with a child and, on the left, the young man with his staff at a 7-degree diagonal. In the background, the city is burning.

If there is a moment of happiness, it is just after a terrible disaster and just before another calamity. In Laplacian determinism, God, having created his universe, has now screwed the cap on his pen, put his feet on the mantelpiece and left the work to get on with itself. Machines, and people acting like machines, replaced a good deal of human thought, judgment and recognition.

Few know how this or that system works, and for anyone, let alone the inventor, it is often a mystic oracle, producing an unpredictable judgment. Mechanical, determinate pro-

cesses produce clever, astonishing decisions. A “definite method” for living, playing (playing chess) – a mechanical method, in fact – does not necessarily mean the construction of a physical machine, but only a book of rules that can be followed by a mindless player. Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without shattering belief and without the discovery of the “lack of reality” of reality, together with the invention of other realities.

The power to speak of our inhumanity, benevolent or Mephistophelean, is often granted through the mechanical contraption. The inner consciousness of time subverts the possibility of transparent and communicable experience.

On the contrary, that which is communicable is based on the incommunicable. In order to stop the Golem of Prague in its ruinous activity, it was sufficient to remove the first letter, Aleph, inscribed on its forehead. The deletion converted the other two letters, Mem and Thet, into the word Meth, meaning Dead, as oppose to AMT (amet), which was originally inscribed, three letters forming the word for truth in Hebrew. In a history which was conceived as a ruined text, language itself mediated as a spectrum connecting the two extremes: the sublime and the monstrous. Each and every machine verges on this dialectic; it gives rise to new spectacular laws, which are then inscribed in our flesh.

I first heard of Santiago de Chile thanks to Heinrich von Kleist. I was a mere schoolboy.

Some members of the Jewish community in Eretz, Israel, at the time felt that every piece of literature of significance ought to be translated into Hebrew. Thus, I read Das Erdbeben in Chili, Kleist’s Earthquake in Santiago de Chile for the first time in Hebrew. Only in reading Borges in Spanish relatively recently, have I come to appreciate the deeply ingrained Arabic and Hebrew strains in the Spanish language. The same landscape which inspire the moral universe of the 9

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Old Testament was indeed in front of my eyes as I was reading this terrible tale at the first time.

Yes, I know it is a tale of the limits of reason and the axiomatic nature of human knowledge. Episteme seems to hinge on our human inter-subjective relationship. In the course of forming our human, all too human, relations, we are bound to project on the universe. Since Kant’s critique and the Copernican revolution of Der Ding an Sich, the thing itself, is unknown, forever unknowable, we are condemned to drift in the hall of mirrors. It is in this spirit that I wish you the capacity and courage to open new vistas, to paint the yet unpainted, with the full knowledge that it is like the horizon itself, forever deluding us. If knowing the self is the greatest task then we could only concur with Edmund Husserl’s wish to be forever the “absolute beginner.”

Thank you for your patient listening to a discourse in a foreign language, a language that is neither yours, nor is it mine. But one is always

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a stranger in one’s language. These considerations above all determine the character of our knowledge of ourselves and the world, they determine the scope and limits of every attempt to act upon an architectural desire. As the architect is bound to know himself as an architect and at once as a Zoon Politicon, as a human being. Neither the one nor the other is easy to accomplish.

When the two become commensurable we are in the realm of the truly remarkable, as Spinoza has put it: Excellence is as difficult as it is rare.

Thank you.

Yehuda Emmanuel Safran New York, September 2010 Opening lecture given at the international seminar ‘Investigar Arquitectura,’ held at the Centro de História da Arte e Investigação Artística da Universidade de Évora (CHAIA), Portugal.

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Analogues of Distance: F. P. Boué’s Infinite Instant Daniel Sherer Columbia University GSAPP, Yale School of Architecture

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he art of F.P. Boué, a panoramic sampling of architectures, topographies, and landscapes, is located at a complex juncture between film, video, photography, drawing, and sculpture. It is a singular instance of installation, one of the most internally heterogeneous “codes” in contemporary art. At the same time it challenges some of the conventions of this type of practice by inflecting them in a specific direction, taking architecture as its principal theme while opening the ensemble to multiple points of view and practices of representation.

As an aesthetic strategy installation can be read in a number of ways: as a constellation of elements mediating between diverse visual domains; as a sign of the overcoming of traditional divisions between art forms associated with the “expanded field;” as a critique of commodification emphasizing the multiple rather than the fetishized unique object; as the introjection of practices of curating and display into the space of the work. Boué’s approach partakes of all of these readings while moving into new territory.

In this it is motivated by a concern with the reciprocal translation between the two-dimensional representation of architecture and its threedimensional reality. The idea of an intersection of disparate readings of the built phenomenon straddling the boundary between art and architecture is the primary focus of his first New York solo exhibition at Participant, Inc., together with a meticulous exploration of this limit.

The exhibition’s title, “Infinite Instant,” is apt in this respect, as the ideas of the instant

and infinity challenge conventional notions of limitation, albeit in different ways. In both cases we are reminded that time is integral to aesthetic and architectural experience insofar as it is elastic, a quality which presupposes a specific complementarity. This can be summed up in the following way: one can imagine a moment extending to infinity; by the same token, it could be reduced to almost nothing. By joining the two sides of the problem Boué isolates the essential along a spectrum of seemingly incompatible alternatives.

Making architecture cross the threshold of art, Boué deprives it of its mass, volume, and function, along with its three-dimensional spatiality. This emptying out of the architectural object reframes its ideological and symbolic values, inviting the viewer to hold them at arm’s length. At the same time it establishes a network of implicit analogies between the elements and strategies that shape the work. Here analogy is used in its classic sense to refer to the process of discovering hidden resemblances between objects that are very different: a process that at once augments the distance that divides them and reveals their unexpected proximity.1

In this particular economy of representation, architecture’s loss is art’s gain. As a result, both the aesthetic domain and that of architecture undergo a transformation. This change finds its point of unstable equilibrium in Boué’s working method, which detaches buildings from their sites and reconstructs them as autonomous artifacts that simultaneously recall 11

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and negate their original characteristics. Displaced in this way, the built form recurs in the image, where it becomes different from itself by utilizing various mediums (drawing, photography, video, film) or even by proposing an interstitial condition between mediums.

From this, a paradox: while mobilizing architectural representation to explore new aesthetic potentials, Boué uses the most “grounded” of the arts to destabilize representation itself. The displaced building becomes the model for an infinite site corresponding to a totality of possible architectures, samples of which occupy the space of the installation. In this he agrees with Blanchot, who described the work of art, exposed in its essential solitude, as “the delimited site of an endless task.” 2 The result is a complex phenomenon which produces the effect of distance even when seen from close quarters or at different scales, combining the monumental address of a large structure with what at first glance would seem to be the simple intimacy of the miniature.

Yet Boué’s art has nothing to do with the miniature, understood in its strict sense as a reproduction down to the smallest detail of an object or building at a smaller scale. His work is essentially scaleless (although, conforming to the logic of site specificity, it is adjusted to the actual dimensions of the gallery space). And it has nothing to do with the canons of mimetic accuracy implicit in the true miniature, despite its production of model-like constructs resembling known or obscure buildings in Switzerland and Northern Italy. Instead, his is a strategy of dislocating these structures, removing them from their sites while preserving their essential form and the ideas they express. Boué follows a middle path between object and idea, repetition and difference. He achieves this by coordinating antitheses of time, contrasting fast and slow rhythms in the films and videos, with the dialectics of space, contrasting perceptions of near and far 12

in the built objects and drawings. In this respect the film and video projections that punctuate the installation have a specific function: to catalyze the analogical implications generated by its other constituents, while granting them full autonomy as objects of representation.

Boué’s simultaneous reference to two and three dimensions generates forms unanchored to any specific medium. Rather than matching features of an actual building with corresponding features in a model built to scale, Boué isolates the aesthetic nucleus of architecture by reducing buildings to objects whose visual form is paramount. This path leads him out of architecture through the detour of architecture. However, in his work the architectural analogy is used in an unexpected way, to highlight difference. In accordance with this method architecture is removed from its context and is represented in terms of a metonymic logic of part for whole; yet it is also shown to be the basic context for the enunciation of ideas unrelated to any singular existence.

This disjunctive logic is already manifest at the threshold of the exhibition. There, on the right near the entrance, one encounters Untitled 1933 (Schwandbach), a multiple work comprising a set of images and constructs, some still, others moving. The gray cardboard and wire model hanging about 6 feet above the gallery floor establishes an unstable counterpoint with the short Super 8 film, transferred to video and projected on a nearby wall, and a group of photographs taken from several angles attached to the surface of overlapping panels. These show the same bridge at different scales in its surrounding landscape. Not without a certain irony, the panels, made of homasote, an aggregate material, ostensibly fulfill a didactic function: like school blackboards, they are neutral backgrounds, surfaces for testing ideas, and, at the same time, devices for distancing the objects shown on their

Courtesy of the artist

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Untitled 1933 (Schwandbach).

inclined surfaces, supported at their base by cinderblocks. Leaning against the wall, one partly obscuring the other, their disposition in space has a provisional quality appropriate to an ongoing process, while attesting to the care with which the artist handles the most ordinary, even crude materials. It is as if the lesson were interrupted in medias res.

The contrast between the large panels, which resemble temporary teaching aids stretched to a height of a little over 8 feet, and the miniscule photographic images, slightly smaller than postage stamps, could not be greater: in this way BouĂŠ distorts, even as he thematizes, the scale of the visualization of knowledge. BouĂŠ thus provides a gentle reminder of the absurdity of schooling, as if looking back across the expanse of years gone by. At the same time the nostalgic associations of Super 8 film, conveyed by slow-motion

images of old cars traversing the Schwandbach bridge, invokes a documentary impulse that, despite its technical archaism, or precisely because of it, is entirely serious in intent: the intention being to capture the simple grandeur and daily use of Maillart’s achievement, in a simultaneous instance divided into distinct temporal frames.

The juxtaposition of different iterations of the same object raises a simple question: Where is the origin? The most plausible answer is that representation is its own origin, playing on the dialectical tension between allographic works of art (architecture, film, dance, cast sculpture, photography to a certain degree) which entail a clear separation between an anterior system of notation and a final realization or performance, and autographic works (drawing, painting, most forms of sculpture except casting) in which notational model and realization coin13

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cide.3 The act of representing Maillart’s bridge also raises the question of the antithesis between canonized and marginal works, as its dramatic tectonic logic, its forceful span across Schwandbach gorge in Kanton Bern, made it into a modernist emblem of concrete construction consecrated by the work of pioneer historians like Siegfried Giedion, champion of an emergent modernism.4 By refracting the unitary image of modernist engineering into a variety of competing image-forms, Boué effectively detaches it from the canon, referring its functional qualities and structural performance to a flexible viewpoint comprising retrospection and contemporaneity.

In contrast to the more famous work of Maillart, Boué singles out a largely overlooked warehouse by the same architect/engineer, the Magazzini Generali in Chiasso in Ticino, the subject of Untitled 1924-25 (Magazzini). This work consists of a drawing of squarish format showing the roof work of the warehouse next to a minuscule inkjet photographic image of the same element. The white drawing on black paper is a reconfigured tracing after stills from a film of the Maggazini. If the works on paper highlight the same detail at different scales and with varying luminous qualities, the film projects a moving image of this architectural feature on an underutilized part of the gallery—the concrete ceiling, whose protrusions and recessions break the image into uneven planes. In this way moving and static images are coordinated so as to enhance their respective effects by unexpected contrast: whereas the still images stress the tectonic expression of the represented span, the moving image simultaneously intensifies and disrupts this focus by emphasizing the actual structural articulation of the projective surface. As a result, a complex point of interference between architectural and artistic readings is generated, making the process of perception oscillate between these two poles.

A different side of Boué’s approach is 14

evident in Untitled 2008-2013 (Treppenhaus) (2010-11). This work, a small construction made of gray cardboard and a cinderblock supporting a lightbox, shows a detail of Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof, an entry to the underground passage by the contemporary Swiss architect Dürig, begun in 2006, that is still being completed. In marked contrast to the warehouse building, the architectonic element represented here is seen every day by thousands of people, yet is often overlooked.

Boué plucks it out of its noisy obscurity, returning it to a state of almost taxonomic immobility.

Again the logic governing this particular operation is metonymic, isolating its subject, focusing on its strongly contoured tectonic qualities, which reveal differences as well as similarities with the Maillart “sample” next to the entrance.

Yet unlike the warehouse, the Dürig structure is shown without movement, actual or implied.

By detaching this architectural detail from its context, Boué unveils the silence at the heart of the “frenzy of disappearance” characterizing the space of modernity.

Further down the gallery on the left one finds Urschweiz, a work consisting of a model, photocopy and projection of the Schwyz Denkmal, an unbuilt monument dedicated to the origin of Switzerland, by the Swiss neoclassical architect Nikolaus Hartmann. In the background one sees the Mythen, the mountain that is called “the myths” as if to underline the ideological character of the most monumental fetishism, that of the nation. The film projection shows the mountains at night in a dramatic Nachtstück in which the filigree of the peak stands out starkly against the night sky, inverting the relation of starlight and terrestrial darkness by including lights within the contours of the jagged mountain. Something of this flickering, intermittent quality is captured in the drawing hung on the wall behind the construct. This image in graphite pencil on light gray cardboard is all the more suggestive for its

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Untitled 1924-25 (Magazzini).

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Ur-Schweiz.

pared-down austerity: it figures, in elemental terms, the meeting of the mass of the mountain and the contours of the monument as if in negative outline. In the video projection, a daytime shot of the same mountain is shown from a different angle, revealing a towering mass of swiftly moving clouds that invert the pyramidal shape of the peaks by juxtaposing positive and negative modulations of the same form.

Utilizing low-tech materials and techniques, Boué returns to a possibility previously consigned to the margins of the monumental past of Switzerland: the model of Hartmann’s project is based on a photocopy of an illustration from that repository of the Swiss nationalist imaginary, the publication of all the monuments of Switzerland, the inventory Kunstdenkmäler der Schweiz, the first volume of which was devoted to the monuments of Kanton Schwyz. By 16

reworking this image from an archival census, the mythic origin of Switzerland is shown to be intimately constituted through the mediation of an all but forgotten work of architecture, here repositioned in a mountain setting that is neither denied nor evoked, but neutralized. The central model is flanked by the film projection on the left, and a photocopy from the Inventar on the right; in the center, above the model, a cutaway in black paper reveals the shape of the jagged peaks of the Mythen beyond. The process of neutralization is emphasized by the spatial organization of the elements, which stands out for its symmetry—indeed, no other group of elements in the exhibition displays such an explicit sense of balance. In this way, Boué replaces the positivist dream of the national archive with an ordered panorama effect of time.

The fact that Boué takes an unbuilt

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monument as his focus is consistent with the thematic texture of the installation as a whole.

This is centered on the idea of architecture as the intersection of different possibilities, and hence on attaining parity between an architecture that could assume different forms (an architecture of possibilities) and the possibility of architecture itself: a conception of architecture that bears within itself the potential for constructing a world differing from the one that exists.

This world refers to an architecture suspended between myth and reality, just as Switzerland’s status as a neutral state in the heart of Europe has revealed itself to be historically possible only by recourse to a reassuring set of nationalist fables. That Boué’s “sample” takes the form of a panoramic view of an unbuilt project is not surprising, since, as Roland Barthes has noted, the panorama signals the suspension of time, just as the monument registers an architectural idea that brackets, even as it seems to propose, a truth for all time, in line with the usual ideological claims put forth by nationalism.5 The viability of this reading is underscored by the fact that the monument is dwarfed by the majestic beauty of nature, whose power, as Adorno points out, derives from the fact that it appears to say more than it is.6 Or (Boué seems to ask) is this just another aspect of the foundation myth enacted by the Mythen themselves—to let the power of the mountains speak more eloquently than that of the monument represented?

Across from Urschweiz is Untitled.

Twisting Steps, a large square sculptural element (10’ x 10’ wide) made of painted plywood with six square platforms of diminishing size, each over a foot high, stacked on top of each other, each platform rotated clockwise in relation to the next. Occupying a large part of the passage through the gallery space, this multi-tiered, predominantly horizontal structure entices viewers to climb its various levels, thereby enacting an

ascent that provides “aerial views” of the installation. This unexpected vista also presents another unforeseen element: a drawing installed on the highest platform, Untitled 1918 (Trial and Error Method), which refers to a structural test

by Maillart of the strength of concrete slabs and columns. A composite, this work is an architectonic construction, a sculptural element, and a design element all at once, displaying a vortexlike character that powerfully reconfigures the surrounding space.

The most dramatic vertical element in the installation is the monolithic model of the Gossau grain silo, a modern building that in some respects suggests a decaying medieval castle (see for instance its dark crenellations and the small trees growing in them). This model towers to a height of over 12 feet at the far end of the gallery, initiating a powerful dialogue with the Twisting Steps diagonally across from it. Projected outward through a square aperture high up in this structure is a film of the same building near a set of photographs of the postwar Milanese skyscraper by BBPR, the Torre Velasca, which are also juxtaposed with different views of the Swiss tower. That the interior is regarded as having no aesthetic importance within the logic of the installation is underscored by the fact that is used as a de facto projection booth for the film.

The multilayered comparison between the Swiss and Italian buildings can be understood in light of Tafuri’s description of BBPR’s skyscraper as spur to a collective epoche, engaging Milan’s urban texture in a way that elicits “a radical reconsideration of the new in light of the temps perdu it encouraged people to seek.”7 By placing the model of the Torre Velasca, which performed a clear theoretical and historical role in relation to the city, within a “naïve” utility building from Switzerland that also resembles a medieval structure, Boué brings about a double phenomenological reduction. This maneuver is made 17

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Twister Steps.

even more complex by the simultaneous projection of the Gossau Turm film on the gallery wall next to it, along with a photograph of the Italian skyscraper as reflected on windows of an earlier structure near the same site, the Number 4 Piazza Velasca building by Asnago and Vender.

This superimposition of different buildings from distinct sites and from the same site concretely exemplifies Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. In particular, in the homasote construct the overcoming of spatial contrasts, dramatized by the alternation of near and far shots in the films, reminds us that what returns in the eternal return is not the same time, or the same space, but different times and different spaces, which occupy the same spatiotemporal frame. In this way BBPR’s attempt to supersede (or rather complicate) modernism’s clean break with historical time is revealed to be a specific cultural 18

possibility, equivalent at some deeper level to the unity of a timeless vernacular idiom, historical languages and modern functional building achieved “without effort” by the Swiss tower.

By emphasizing this unity, the Gossau Turm model evokes the monumental qualities that Boué perceived in this ordinary service building, giving it a unique sense of presence. Yet here there is more than meets the eye: as one moves around its monolithic mass, its perforated character is revealed, thereby compromising its appearance of hieratic solidity. In this way the phenomenal envelope of the building is shown to be a mere shell of its function. Precise affinities connect the materiality of the artifact with that of its origin: homasote, one of the earliest forms of recycled paper, provides a rough equivalent to the material out of which the Gossau Turm is built, as it approximates in its grainy texture the effect of the

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the industrial concrete of the actual tower.

If the prominence accorded to the Gossau grain silo within the exhibition space registers Boué’s interest in marginal buildings, it also attests to his ability to find artistic inspiration in the least likely places—something that is consistently evident in his films. Perhaps the most conspicuous characteristic of Boué’s films is their suspension of the immediacy of perception. In this they are like all films, but more so. They are films whose subject is architecture, built forms, constructions of every kind, even the most banal.

All the same, for that very reason, they demonstrate their medium specificity, their status as pure film. Paradoxically, their explicit focus on architecture serves to underline their immanent aesthetic construction as film. Boué’s chief artistic device in this respect is rhythm. His films break up the continuum of perception by juxtaposing a number of different devices, including short and long takes, near and far views, soft and sharp focus. In their complexity they offer a sharp contrast to the predominantly orthogonal arrangements of the models and drawings, disrupting any possible equivalence between the temporal and spatial orders that the different media engage. This strategy augments the sense of distance between the objects and the spectator and among the objects themselves, enabling the films to leap out of the circle of becoming that they themselves create. In relation to the models, drawings, and photographs these projections indicate a point where timelessness and time intersect, where the eternal return casts an oblique shadow on the path of time.

A complex negotiation between space and the objects it contains, enabling a dynamic transition from the exhibition area to the back office, is manifest in the next part of the installation, Untitled 1870s-1930s (Davos), a series which stands in direct contact with Untitled 1870-1899 (Drei Würfel/Three Cubes). The first element in

this group is Untitled 1926-1978 (Residence with Clinic), a drawing on black translucent paper, with white pencil, of a building with a flat roof in the Alpine town of Davos by the obscure modern Swiss architect Gaberel, while the second consists of three smaller models of vernacular cubic houses of similar typology from the same area.

The first hangs above the other three, all lined up neatly in a row at a sharp diagonal which subtly mirrors the oblique view evident in the drawing.

On the far right a color video projection showing the urban context of the buildings in Davos provides a reflexive commentary on the other works in this series. Perhaps even more than the models and the drawing, the projection vividly exemplifies Boué’s documentary intentions. At the same time it registers a new potential within the visual document by capturing the specific character of the buildings themselves, effecting a unique synthesis of their abstract and concrete qualities that brackets the perception of time.

This process is advanced by the multiple modes of representation that are deployed, the variable effects produced by the reflective and matte elements, and the specific visual properties of the films themselves, which utilize frontal shots as well as oblique and lateral views.

A similar set of tensions is evident in Untitled 1939 (Cementhalle), a construction on a pedestal made of gray cardboard (like the model of the Zurich station Treppenhaus) which reconstructs an exhibit meant to demonstrate the structural qualities of cement and to display examples of concrete objects and construction in the Landesausstellung Zurich in 1939, dramatized by the hyperbolic paraboloid of the continuous roof form. The disjunctive logic of this particular element suggests that an architecture once reserved for representational (in this case, expressly ideological) purposes is, in this new context, operating in accordance with a different set of criteria, i.e. in relation to the claims of a “pure” aesthetic 19

Courtesy of the artist

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Untitled Drei Wurfel: Three Cubes; Untitled 1870s-1930s (Davos).

representation, despite manifest continuities of form. A white pencil drawing on paper of the same subject is hung above the model, slightly to the left. This image dramatically flattens the shape of the paraboloid, as if to evoke a negation of its inherent torsion, in keeping with the flatness of the paper itself. In this way different ideas of projection coexist, some pertaining to film, others to drawing, yet others to architecture.

Similar considerations may be inferred from the multiple visual connections between the Davos models and the other components of the installation. These models read as reductive syntheses of the panoramic qualities of the contiguous Hartmann monument construct and the Davos video projection. In this case the discontinuous rhythms of the projection tie together the various syncopated elements. As such they offer an apt introduction to the part of the work cen20

tered on the Nietzsche Haus, located in the back gallery, in a room separated from the rest of the exhibition space. In this area the restrictive selection and fragmentation of visual elements is only matched by their extreme attenuation and the “pathos of distance” they elicit, one wholly apt for an evocation of Nietzsche, given the fact that he was the first to articulate this idea.

In this area of the installation, acting as a tacit interpretive key for the entire exhibition, there is a small drawing of Nietzsche’s house in Sils Maria. Due to the fugitive character of the image and the fragile, wispy path it makes the viewer’s eye pursue on its way to the house, this work evokes a dream image of the place where the philosopher wrote some of his greatest works, including Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which contains the most extensive exposition of the eternal return in the philosopher’s writings. Ar-

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Untitled 1939 (Cementhalle).

chitecture here assumes the contours of an internal image, temporally rather than spatially mediated, as if to comment on the thought that it did not house, but which could only temporarily inhabit it. This provisional relation between architecture and thought resonates with the fact that Nietzsche, more than any other philosopher, invokes the figure of the thinker as exile: we recall that in the final section of Human All Too Human he cast himself both as wanderer and as shadow, the one ceaselessly exchanging thoughts of existence and its limit with the other.8

Adjacent to the drawing of Nietzsche’s house is an image of its entrance, Tür Haus Durisch.

Made of cardboard and sandpaper, tilted at an acute angle like a book displayed on a lectern, this small work offers further insight into the theme of the wandering philosopher and his thought, a condition suggested by the errant, de-

tached door, removed from its hinges, flattened out and displaced from the vertical axis to the diagonal. Reading as a kind of crushed relief, Tür Haus Durisch enacts the paradox of a portal that impedes entry: the permanently closed and internally fractured door providing an emblem for the fatality that decrees that at every instant the eternal recurrence is a gate that leads back only through itself, to a threshold which signals its own overcoming, despite the lack of linear movement towards a specific destination.

From the perspective offered by the detached door, Boué’s depiction of the overall form of the Nietzsche Haus takes on a new meaning.

Although it is shown to be a solid Biedermeier construction, backed into a small forest-covered wall of natural stone at the edge of an Alpine village, Boué abstracts it from this context, reducing the house to its basic contours. The point 21

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Monolithic model of the Gossau grain silo.

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of this is not so much to provide insight into what Nietzsche actually experienced in this domestic space as to shed light on what is essential in his philosophical vision. In this regard, he did not envisage a Dionysian identification with primal experience as the immanent goal of a philosophy of eternal return. For such a philosophy had to unify distance and participation. Boué thus increases the distance from the pathos of Nietzsche’s philosophy by representing his house as a space not for actual thought but as a parallel, at once objective and detached, to the life of that thought.

Here Boué comes closest to Nietzsche’s own thoughts on architecture, which were historical through and through insofar as they underscored the distance dividing the sense of holy dread (Furcht) which in his view was the primary attribute of ancient buildings, from the empty, mask-like representation which he saw as the defining feature of modern architecture. (It is interesting to note that this reading presents strong parallels with the concept of his friend Semper, who emphasized the affinity between mask and architectural cladding in Der Stil).9 This flattening out of architecture is captured effectively in all the images of Nietzsche’s house, which have no three dimensional spatiality, and whose relation to its dramatic natural context is largely suppressed with the exception of the window view.

In this “poor” architecture, the richness of Nietzschean inner life is shown to be a fragile oscillation between an overwhelming power of thought and a meditative turn inwards: it thus approximates a murmur through a mask that is barely audible as it resonates through this modest house whose rootedness is called into question as it is transformed into the architectural equivalent of a wanderer.

In showing us what Nietzsche saw, Boué creates an image whose perceptual status is ambiguous, hovering imperceptibly between a

dream image, a mnemic image, and a schematic externalization of the form of the house in question. It is significant in this regard that the title explicitly refers to the Traum of Nietzsche as a key to reading the image; yet that does not exhaust its interpretation. For Boué gives us the architecture through which Nietzsche observed his surroundings—an aspect of the image dramatized by the woodland path which represents what Nietzsche saw from his second floor bedroom window, cut into the thick casement wall, detached from its natural as well as its temporal background. This “cutting out” is a simple movement, filled with possibilities, activating the mnemic dimension of architecture through metonymic visualization, interrogating Nietzsche’s conceptual universe in general and the law of the eternal return in particular. This last comes to function as a sort of cosmic memory, a memory played out on the scale of cosmic time, elevating human time out of its sphere by telescoping it into an “infinite instant.”

In Boué’s art, as in Nietzsche’s philosophy, the eternal return is purged of its apparent transcendental implications—a process set in motion by making architecture into the bearer of analogies emphasizing multiplicity and dislocation rather than unitary adherence to the site.

The result is an intuition of a space-time residing beyond normative conceptions of spatial extension or temporal passage. Despite, or perhaps precisely because of its reductive character, its mode of representation isolates the formal idea of architecture through an immanent dialectic with the technical and material properties of photography, film, and drawing. It is in this interaction of media that the space-time paradigm of Boué operates most effectively. Referring the built environment to its basic conditions, what he produces is not a represented reality, the real referring here to architecture, but an aesthetic representation of a built representation, a 23

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representation of the essential form of architecture rather than of any one architecture’s myriad formal qualities. This “architettura povera” is equivalent to a reduction of building to the aesthetic logic of an unconditioned neutrality: a “poor” translation, into two dimensions, of architecture—indeed of space itself—that is as radical as it is unexpected. In evading the false opposition of reality vs. representation, he also eludes the conventional dichotomy of time and space, which, in his view, does not apply to artistic production (though it may be a factor in the reception of the work).

Boué sees space-time as an indissoluble unity, not as an abstraction of categories from the real. He creates in this way a mode of representation utilizing common materials and austere forms to express a wealth of ideas. These stand out against a purely conceptual horizon. His reduction of architecture through a “sensory deprivation” of the transcendental aesthetic places the work beyond the opposition of the detachment of Apollonian representation and the dynamic, even

destructive identification with Dionysian pathos that the explicit reference to Nietzsche brings to light. This occupation of a midpoint between these extremes—between the stability conferred by the image when it is viewed from an infinite distance and the destabilization that the proliferation of representations introduces into lived experience—reorients our recognition of the horizon’s power, held in check by the closeness of the most abysmal distance. This is the panoramic instant as a cut made in the continuum of infinity. What we are confronted with here is the transformation of the instant into an instance in the fullest sense: a “sample” revealing that architecture, no less than its aesthetic representation, is one of the many possible “shapes of time” that the present still holds in store for us in the enigmatic forms of Boué’s art.

The author would like to thank Scott Cohen, Glen Fogel, Kurt Forster, Lia Gangitano, Brian Kish, and Yehuda Safran for exchange and insight into the art of F. P. Boué.

Notes 1 E. Melandri, La linea e il circolo. Studio logico-filosofico sull’analogia (Macerata, 2004), p. 9, citing Leibniz, De la sagesse: “Il faut s’accoutumer aux analogies, scavoir deux ou plusiers choses fortes differentes etant donnees, trouver leur resemblances.”

5 R. Barthes, The Neutral (New York, 2002), p. 163.

2 M. Blanchot, The Space of Literature, tr. Anne Smock (Lincoln, Nebraska, 1982), p. 22.

7 M. Tafuri, Italian Architecture, 1944-1985, tr. J. Levine ( (Cambridge, MA/ London, 1990), p. 52.

3 N. Goodman, Languages of Art (Indianapolis/Cambridge, MA: 1969).

8 F. Nietzsche, The Wanderer and His Shadow (1879).

4 S. Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of A New Tradition (Cambridge, MA, 1967), pp. 450-62. On the Schwandbach bridge, see pp. 459, 466-67. Giedion singled this bridge out for praise, calling it “the most beautiful example of a road bridge carried out in that material [concrete] with a sickle-shaped platform,” p. 459.

9 F. Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, (Lincoln, Nebraska/London, 1984), 130-31, aphorism 218; cf. G. Semper, Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts, or Practical Aesthetics (1861-63).

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6 T. W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, tr. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, 1997), p. 78.

Potlatch 2

Useless Pleasures Manuel Corrada

L

ondon, winter of 1992. The oasis of mid-day delays the grey sadness of the cold. We meet by the statue of Sir Joshua Reynolds, in front of the Royal Academy. We disorderly amble the Mantegna exhibition paying no attention to the circuit that has been established by its organizers. We follow, quite on the contrary, a random circuit; the one determined by the impulses that surge from our conversation. We go from St. Mark, epoch of Padua, to, a lot further, St. George, epoch of Mantua. We come and go from one to the other. However, in that of the Mantuan patron saint, the background scenery —a winding path climbing up a hill— obliges us to fix our gaze on the view of the Palazzo Ducale, which one perceives through the window in Death of a Virgin, a masterpiece that immediately lights questions about the illusion of space; real or fictitious? Norm or neurophysiology? May have Edwin Panofsky’s neoKantianism and the invention of cubism forced the historian to consider perspective as a mere way of drawing?

A while later, it is getting darker, we take a look at Shipley.1 It does not cease to surprise us that up to this point no one has yet developed a smart story about drawing instruments. If, and with any luck at all, all we come across is the catalog of a commercial exhibi-

tion. For dinner, a few steps away, we go into one of the many Chinese food joints of Gerrard St.: tasty, although undeniably, it is a shame to sip jasmine tea instead of wine. We talk about how schematic Peter Greenaway’s films are, far too many axis and symmetries, that in the end reveal his original profession, and of the apparent contradiction between his tendency towards balanced compositions, and the visual delirium provoked by the iconographic hypersaturation of Prospero’s Books. We change subjects. We touch upon the surprising housing emergency in North American academic environments; another half-turn, if perhaps the process that goes from the design of a building to its construction follows the Popperian thread as affirmed by Michael Brawne. Now we deviate towards the once prodigious child from the accordion, now an architect that reinterprets the mnemotechnical theatre of Giulio Camillo,2 and, just like that, we fly over the Chinese use of axonometric to illustrate different wooden joints, whose reference comes from the monumental work of Joseph Needham. And, on a different spin, while insinuating some parallel between the ideas of Louis Kahn and totalitarian thought, a lucubration surges: what influence did Anne Tyng have on him? We feel that there are moments when some things can be said, and others when it is 25

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convenient to hold back and wait for the right day to vent them.

Up to this point, an account of that conversation. Let us turn the page. For sure, there are different styles and fashions of conversation.

There are those kind of conversations à la française, the spiritual conversation, the mundane conversation, the illustrated or religious one; the hyperbolic or dry one, the one of appreciation or the condescending eulogy. There are also cities with a tendency to these, like Voltaire´s Paris, and others that prohibit them by decree, like Ferdinand VII´s Madrid; environments more favorable than others, sitting around the table after dinner rather than after a funeral; adequate postures, upright, seated, reclined, tumbled; under a roof, equestrian or on foot. What is the connection that captivates and seduces us to remain in the coming and going of the oral word, without a fixed destiny or predictable course? Marc Fumaroli has made a lucid reflection about this enigma. Conversation requires a commonplace that obeys the role of an invisible magnet. Sometimes we are attracted to it, others we are detracted from it.3 We can talk for hours and hours about what lines Rudolf Wittkower wrote in Baedeker’s guide of Italy, published in the thirties; of the comparison between Justus Perthes’ atlas and that of Vidal Labache. In all actuality, we rotate vis-à-vis commonplaces almost like Flaubert understood them in Le Dictionnaire des idèes recues, where the entry for “conversation” scathingly notes the sublime banality “politics and religion must be excluded.”4

Now then, do not perhaps these commonplaces constitute points where our desires converge? We talk about “x” which in that moment is my desire and yours. Both of ours. Our contact exists because of “x” which can be far off in time, Philibert de l´Orme; distant geographically, Shenzhen; alive, Rem Koolhaas’ periodicals of the seventies in Haagse Post; 26

dead, Robert Adam´s drawings. In this model of triangular relation, common desire transmitted by the narration moves, interrupts, swings, recapitulates, blurs, we change subjects. Emerson used an enlightening visual metaphor for this malleable aspect; “conversation is a game of circles.”5 Because at each instant, when one is about to reach the point of silence, then again a word gives closure, links and then ties, the continuous oral flux.

The character of the points that build a conversation often connote it as well. Literary, sentimental, economic, mystic. Because in and of itself the traffic of words is nothing but a physical exercise, and an organization of acoustic waves. There are, however, twists or flats.

The use of certain vocabs, the lightness of determined half-phrases, the solemnity of accents and the inflections of the voice, saliva, short pauses or prolonged ones, the movement of the lips, impulsive gestures to agree, in fact, sighs and coughs, offer a special timbre or twang that allows one to determine styles of conversation, be it in the fashion that emanates of a “repertoire so complete of out-of-style forms of the particular language of a career, a class, and a particular time,”6 or the musical sinuosities of the sound that lays bare a speaker, “‘ah, you have been in Holland, you know the Ver Meers?’ Mme Cambremer asks imperiously and by her tone she would have said, ‘you know the Guermantes?’ given that snobbism, when changing object does not change accent.”7 Or, that which lies at the edge of ridicule, like that of a vulgar woman whom Thomas De Quincey reminds us of. Instead of holding a conversation, she speaks like periodicals are written. For example, standing in front of a window from where she catches a glimpse of a shed, as she converses with a friend who asks what that building is, her vocal chords vibrate, “A shed, and anteriorly to the existing shed there was…”8

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From a different angle, one of the favorable particularities of a conversation without purpose or finality, one of those in which our common desires point to who knows what, to no pre-established or well known objective, that do not follow the script of a comedy nor that of a drama, is exactly that it does not have the pretension of an expectation. Of any kind or of anyone. It becomes extinct in an instant. This seems to be one of the current forms of human interaction that resists the predatory assault of time. Jean Françoise Lyotard observed how the question about whether knowledge has changed from the ancient imperative of truth, “Is it true?” toward the current interrogatory “What use is it?” whose current manifestations are translated into “Is it saleable?” or “Is it efficient?”9 Or, as Benedict the XVI reflects, in regard to reason, motor of the search for truth, “that reason would ultimately bow to the pressure of interests and the attraction of utility, constrained to recognize this as the ultimate criterion.”10

To converse means to waste time. Conversation is neither a consumer good nor a contractible service, because it is “dialogue without direct nor immediate utility, in which one speaks above all for the sake of speaking, for pleasure, in jest, for courtesy.”11 With this neat characterization, the sociologist Gabriel Tarde begins his “theory of conversation,” an attempt to systematize, organize, fundament, trace the history and evolution, estimate effects, of this social practice. However, a shadow hovers over the stigma of the superfluous blabla. Is it gratuitous? Does it come and go as nothing? Does it not perhaps awaken unknown panoramas? In a significant essay, Gilles Deleuze annotates a witty commentary, “Who searches for truth? The jealous man, under the pressure of the beloved’s lies.”12 Because there are ways and ways to approach truth and knowledge. There are those on method, who would doubt it. Treatises upon treatises deal

with these. Yet there are also those truths that arise haphazardly, half-truths or paths towards knowledge, those that emanate with the fury of jealousy and appear wrapped in fact, in frivolous dress or in the flow and ebb of an improvised conversation.

Apropos Baudelaire, Tzvetan Todorov adverts in him a posture that does not follow by instruction the doctrine of “art for art’s sake.”

Of course, science constitutes a form of knowledge but which is neither superior nor inferior to that which is generated by art. Perhaps they are complementary forms. The truth of ecstasy does not exclude that of intellect. However, the truth of poetry, “of songs,” is of another nature than that of science. The latter rests on the Aristotelian correspondence. The statement “there is sun today” is true only and if only, it is a fact of nature that today is a sunny day. Conversely, when Baudelaire says that the poet is similar to the prince of clouds, the albatross, what correspondence could be established? None. This is about another kind of truth, that of the “vérité de dévoilement.” If the Aristotelian truth aspires to know the physical world, the other leads us to approach the sense that “Turner did not invent the London fog, but was the first to perceive it in and of itself and, in having shown it in his paintings, has in some way open our eyes to it.”13

Precisely, one of the benefits of conversation is often to open one’s eyes. In the thousand twirls of words, in the drift of the object of desire shared between the speakers, in a common appreciation regarding the drawing held by a child in a painting by Caroto, in the informal narration that develops amongst two or many, in that collection of loose phrases in which neither says much but together they all say too much, we can reveal some kernels of knowledge, without treatises or methods, without organized quotes or predictable durations, but yes indeed with meat and dermis. Yes, with passion.

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Notes 1 Shipley was a bookstore in London specialized in the arts. Located in 70 Charing Cross Road, it closed in 2008.

8 Thomas de Quincey, Historical and Critical Essays (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1863) vol. II, p. 84.

2 The person in question is Daniel Libeskind.

9 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) p. 51.

3 Marc Fumaroli, “L´art de la conversation, ou le Forum du royaume” in M. Fumaroli, La diplomatie de l´esprit: de Montaigne à La Fontaine (Paris: Gallimard, 1998) pp. 283-320.

4 Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pecuchet avec un choix des scenarios, du Sottisier, L´Album de la Marquise et Le Dictionnaire des idées recues (Paris: Gallimard, 1999) p. 501.

5 Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Essays and Other Writings (New York: Modern Library, 1950) p. 284.

6 Marcel Proust, Â l´ombre des jeunes files en fleurs (Paris: Gallimard, 1988) p.9.

7 Marcel Proust, Sodome et Gomorre (Paris: Gallimard, 1989) p.209.

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10 “Lecture by the holy father Benedict XVI at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”, January 17, 2008, http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/speeches/2008/january/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20080117_ la-sapienza_en.html.

11 Gabriel Tarde, L’Opinion et la Foule (Paris: PUF, 1989) p. 87.

12 Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Howard, R. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000) p.15.

13 Tzvetan Todorov, La littérature en péril (Paris: Flammarion, 2007) pp.

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Precision Headquarters Guillermo Acuña Arquitectos Text: C.A.

Architect:

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Guillermo Acuña Arquitectos (Guillermo Acuña, Alberto Andrioli, Ste- fano Rolla, Pablo Castillo) Guillermo Acuña (Design Architect) Alberto Andrioli (Project Architect) 2009 - 2011 Mauricio Scheleff 5.700 m² Alberto Andrioli Santiago de Chile

t has been posited that Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre would epitomize the road modernism didn’t take. The non-doctrinal, albeit complex scope Chareau unfolded in the various innovations at stake in the house wasn’t altogether likely to be taken up by the Modern orthodoxy of the time. But if the Maison de Verre was not praised in the way it has been at least since the late 1950s, it didn’t undergo quite the same luck among the owner’s circle: a member of the Communist party, Dr. Jean Dalsace hosted regular gatherings in the double-height salon of the house, with guests including Louis Aragon, Walter Benjamin, Jean Cocteau, Paul Éluard, and Yves Tanguy. With its most sophisticated steel-and-glass palette of materials, the house made effective a curious displacement from the realm of the factory to that of the home. What remained unsolved, however, was the very source of inspiration, the origin from where the Maison de Verre emerged. In other words, the house became the architectural reincarnation of a build-

ing that had not yet been built.

The best work explodes with a delayed impact, one critic says, and such seems to be the case of the house completed in 1932 in Paris, for we know it gained consistent ground among later generations of architects. Eighty years after Chareau’s feat, Guillermo Acuña’s Precision Headquarters building enlarges this ongoing lineage of work, taking up again the “road not taken.” And so he does, invigorating the legacy of the Parisian house beyond any nostalgic approach. With the Precision Headquarters we could indeed argue that the industrial aura of the Maison de Verre has finally found a proper place in the realm of the factory.

The similarities between these two buildings are many, perhaps as many as the differences they show. Both deal with pre-existences –Acuña’s Precision Headquarters reorganizes a concrete structure left behind by a previous project built on the site– and both choose to negotiate with their surroundings in much the same way. But if 29

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reasons for the Maison de Verre’s visual detachment from the street are to be found in the nature of its domestic program, the motivations at stake at the Precision Headquarters can be understood in just the opposite direction. The building does not seek to avoid the gazes of the passers by, for there are no passers by in this area of the city.

Located in Santiago in one of the several industrial-office areas developed under Chile’s postdictatorship economical transformation, the site makes evident the way merely numeric considerations can not only overlook but also erode all possible human interaction between people.

The massive, translucent glass brick covering of all four façades seeks thus to reinforce the building’s inner possibilities. Aware of the weaknesses so evident in the surroundings, Acuña seems to build a world of its own, a microcosm in which only the internal relations are exploited to the advantage of the building’s occupants. Not unlike at Dr. Dalsace’s residence, carefully crafted steel work details are combined with the raw exposure of electrical fittings, turning the building’s circuits into a lively interior scape, led by the always in motion ceiling fans.

In this Acuña stands far from the visually striking outer display of elements one finds at the Centre Pompidou, yet closer to the simpler and perhaps more evocative exposed fixtures of A & P Smithson’s Hunstanton School. Altogether, the Precision Headquarters propose an interesting way out for a district that hasn’t yet found a character of its own, which is that of the overtly industrial type, not at all softened by substitutes taken from other, merrier imaginaries.

The programmatic organization of the building is defined by three chief elements: a plinth, a tower and a vertical axis of circulations.

Placed on the ground level, the main volume, or plinth, hosts the pedestrian entrance to a vast hall inside of which the company’s workshop takes place. There, precision balances and scales of all 30

sorts are cleaned and levelled by workers (hence the company’s name). Also a part of the plinth, an L-shaped second floor hosts a series of open offices, at the time that gives some sense of scale to the hall. Without partitions, only separated by the height, both offices and workshop share the same grand space. Reception and parking areas are located in the underground level, right below the first floor.

A second volume –the tower– runs from the fourth to the seventh and last level of the building, which in turn has been crowned by two clearly over scaled skylights (under construction by the time the photographs were taken), and a small patio placed between them. The tower comprises a series of four identically sized office floors where engineering, administration and management work occur. The air flows between them most naturally, for the glass brick curtain walls never really touch the slabs. In actuality, right at the level of each of the floors, a continuous, metallic band has been placed which hosts a simple –yet sophisticated– manufactured system of ventilation flaps, which is activated by a series of small sensoring devices located all along the band. Besides the top floor, where management and directive offices are placed, the rest of the floor plans have been organized so that only few partitions are needed, mostly for medium size meeting rooms.

In between the plinth and the tower one is to find an open-air, transitional floor hosting the canteen, which is the place where both workers and executives gather at lunchtime, and during coffee breaks as well. This is the only moment when one can enjoy long vistas over the surrounding hills of Santiago, thanks to a continuous parapet that makes us forget about the rather mediocre buildings spread over the area.

The vertical circulations constitute the last of the three programmatic pieces. Placed to the south side of the building, right in front of

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the vehicular and pedestrian entrances, the various circulation systems articulate the most visually striking piece of the project. In their careful exposure, they remind us of Richard Roger’s Lloyd’s of London, a building that also, and not coincidentally, pays homage to Chareau’s Maison de Verre. Built in opaque, black painted steel work, the system hangs down from the building’s pre-cast concrete structure, comprises an openair staircase, and bridges crossing all the way from the building to the elevator. The continuous movement of the elevator and the shadows of people coming up and down the stairs contrast with the otherwise serene, yet suggestive aspect of the façades. Altogether, the threefold system composed of elevator, bridges and stairs has less to do with the Constructivist imaginary than with the mechanical, authorless machinery one finds in those industrial landscapes Acuña is so fond of (and here the Bechers may well have a say).

The Precision Headquarters building is arguably among the best projects Guillermo Acuña has built so far. All the themes Acuña has been haunting throughout his work are here summoned and expressed in manifold ways. His persistence in the exploration of structural and programmatic issues, as much as the emphasis he places on the selection and arrangement of materials, all come from a generalist appreciation of architecture one hardly finds among current practices. Moreover, they bring us back to the consistency of former projects such as the Moro House and the Via Azul Studio and, in so doing, an interesting lineage of work begins to emerge, one that is grounded, above all, on the countless possibilities architecture can provide us with.

Santiago, June 2011

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S-E street view

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Staircase and elevator bridges, S-W view

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Staircase and elevator bridges, S-E view

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N-W street view

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Main hall and workshops

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Main hall entrance

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Open air staircase

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Fifth floor, west facade

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A bridge leading to the elevator

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Welding the bridges on site

Fourth floor, elevator hall

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Pedestrian stairs leading to the reception and parking areas located in the underground level

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Variations on the Theme of a Reaper Richard Hamilton This contribution is an excerpt of Richard Hamilton’s ongoing autobiographical book. When possible, Potlatch has kept the article’s original layout design.

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iegfried Giedion first published Mechanization Takes Command, his famous study of ‘anonymous history,’ in 1948. Hamilton, then a student at the Slade School, was quick to recognize the profusion of visual references as not only an analysis of recent industrial history, but also a ravishing encyclopædia of imagery.

The book includes many illustrations unearthed from the massive collection of drawings provided to the US Patents Office in support of patent applications. One chapter of Giedion’s book, examining the importance of a difficult interface between machines and the natural world, is devoted to agricultural equipment. Coincidentally, the words ‘Agricultural machine’ sit as a subtitle under the words ‘The Bride stripped bare by her bachelors even’ on a note that reveals Duchamp’s consideration, in 1913, of a possible title page for his Green Box notes.

During his studentship at the Slade School, Hamilton had access to a small print department run by John Buckland-Wright, and, using his sketches of reapers inspired by Giedion’s book, he took advantage of the opportunity to study the craft of working on copper. The reapers are broken down into a group of rudimentary components essential to the task of harvesting grain: the rotating blades that sweep the stalks into a bank of horizontally reciprocating scissors, a shield that nudges the crop into the cutters, simple wheels, a platform on which the harvest is deposited, and the typical cast iron seat pro-

vided for the driver on agricultural machinery.

Variations of these elements are often disposed against a blank background; occasionally they appear in an environmental context.

Hamilton’s title for the group of prints, Variations on the Theme of a Reaper, should be seen as an indication that as well as being variations in a pictorial sense they also play upon the variety of technical possibilities available in the medium. It is as though he had decided from the start to use the subject as an opportunity to explore the many ways in which copper could be treated, and the ways different treatments could be mixed on the same plate. The title of the series is suggestive of a much favoured musical form, the variation.

Those prints that come closest to a three-dimensional rendering in a rudimentary landscape result from an encounter with a vitrine full of wooden models of reapers in the Palais de la Decouverte in Paris. Hamilton took advantage of the opportunity to make some sketches.

It was necessary to apply to an office for permission to draw, and a fee was charged by the museum for each drawing. To ensure that each new sketch was properly accounted for, a guard was appointed to look over Hamilton’s shoulder.

In 1950, the 17 small prints were presented in a modest exhibition at Gimpel Fils, one of the more enterprising galleries in London’s West End. Few of the prints were sold.

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Reaper (f study) 1949

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Reaper (d study) 1949

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Reaper (a study) 1949

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Reaper (b) 1949

Reaper (a) 1949

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Reaper (k) 1949

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Reaper (d) 1949

Reaper (o) 1949

Reaper (l) 1949

Reaper (p) 1949

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Shared housing plan

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Minus K House KUU In the K House Kok-Meng Tan and Satoko Saeki have incorporated a dimension only too often missing from recents projects, the dimension of human interaction and inter subjectivity. Indeed, their ability to forge a new way of drawing, a mixture of tridimensional Chinese depiction of a plan and something of their own invention, gave them the freedom to conceive both the single house and the entire quarter of a city in collective terms hardly known in our time. By considering the subtle details of collective everyday lives —precisely so in a country that has suffered immensely from radical and largely destructive desires for collectivity— they and their enlightened client/patron have shown as never before that it is possible to create an architectural project that makes the sharing and the living together not only possible but desirable. Y.E.S.

Architect: Design Period: Construction: Floor Area: Location: Images:

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KUU (Kok-Meng Tan & Satoko Saeki) August 2009 October 2009 - May 2010 171 m² Nanhui, Shanghai, China KUU

he client for this project owns a slipper factory, exporting slippers to America, Europe and Japan. Two small houses will be built on a rural site in Nanhui Pudong, a suburb of Shanghai. One, an occasional weekend house for him and the other for his worker. His worker will look after the slipper factory’s warehouse. We designed two houses that are carefully separated yet form closely interconnecting spaces. They share a big table in the centre. Both the kitchen and courtyards of each family surround the four corners of the table. Each family cooks facing the other. Beyond, views connect these homes; diagonally through the centre, as well as

through window openings in some spaces. The families are aware of the other’s presence. Each home is a collection of 3m by 3m rooms with openings that connect spaces in various ways.

We tried to allow passages through each room as far as possible, so that there is an open and free feeling in the house. The brick walls separating spaces are also structural. Walls are all unplastered; the inside is also like the outside. Outside, they look like a cluster of rooms with different heights. These two houses with a shared feeling, would be an example of our idea of Shanghai Shared Housing studies at a smaller scale.

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House A & B, S-W view

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House B, from house A’s kitchen patio

House B, bedroom and kitchen

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House A & B, S-W view

House A & B, N-W view

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House A, bedrooms’ patio with ladder

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House A, interior

House B, interior

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House A, interior

House B, interior

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House A, from house B’s kitchen

House B, from house A’s kitchen

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House A, kitchen

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Ground floor level

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Second floor

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Section B-B’

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Swan & Niagara Jaye Rhee Text: Y.E.S.

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unattained beauty with its death chant could not be avoided; they are inevitably on the horizon of our thought. But here, on the projection screen, we are seeing poorly painted swans on ceramic tiles of what look like a public bath spread on the entire screen. In the foreground Jaye Rhee floating with headgear, made of a towel, which made her oscillate with the swans in the background. The analogy is inevitable, for a few moments we are transported; we are carried by her wings of imagination, relatively liberated, from the burden of our lives, if only for an instant.

Courtesy of the artist

ahe Rhee Jaye was born in Seoul and studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. She lives and works in New York. Among her best works are her video installations, where she is able to use fragments of everyday life in order to create environments, or situations in which one finds the possibility of a dreamlike independence from reality. What is real is no longer in question. Our desire for mental autonomy, which will liberate the mind from collective and personal illusions, is paramount. “Swan� is a short video.

The impossible black swan and the symbol of

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Swan, detail

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Swan, detail

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Performance or Anti-performance: A Poetics of Visual Action Cecilia Brunson

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he series A Gallon, an Action by the Chilean artist Gerardo Pulido (1975) has been exhibited in only one opportunity: in the year 2009 at the Museum of Visual Arts in Santiago, Chile, during my work as a curator in the exhibition Flux: Gerardo Pulido and Tomás Rivas (Flujo: Gerardo Pulido and Tomás Rivas).

The work was born from the pursuit of two basic objectives: 1) to continue a line of work based on materiality and 2) to diminish the importance of support in the practice of painting.

Regarding the first objective, Pulido insisted on converting a particular material into the principal argument of his work, attending its connotations as well as its perceptible traces. Regarding the second objective, which is conditioned by the first, in some way we are encountered with the fantasy of making painting self-sustainable, of managing to render it physically self-supportive, dispensing of a surface to give it form and support.

Jackson Pollock´s action painting is the quote and main technical resource Pulido counts on, paying homage, yet while distancing himself from it in many aspects. He pours a gallon of gold paint throughout a continual motion, something the surrealists achieved with their automatic drawings (a system that Pollock borrowed in turn). Pulido configures three types of situations that intertwine: gestures, stains and recognizable figures. The paint is poured over a plastic support, which facilitates detaching it once it is dry. Then he treats it as a self-adhesive, fixing

it to the mural by means of transfer paper and transparent adhesive; this allows the attachment of “the stain,” and the illusion that the work was done directly on the wall.

The artist attempts to provisionally separate three habitual variables in the practice of painting and, specifically, three possibilities of dripping: laying the accent on the body, on the material itself and on the ability to represent.

Hence, the material appears indissolubly linked to the subject, to the ability of leaving a trace and of recognition beyond the material. That is to say, the materiality of the work reveals an impurity, that there is no material lacking experience.

In spite of his evident debt with the history of art, Pulido invents a particular technology to paint, which is trade fair of the technical challenge he imposed upon himself. These kinds of questions have an undeniable weight on his work and on his way of conceiving the history of art, where he re-invents or at least contributes to the tradition of painting by exploring new solutions in its execution, where technique, as well as transcending technique, plays a key role.

The interesting aspect of the pretension of self-sustainability in painting is that it contrasts with the emphasis on gravity: the series exposes a tension between its horizontal execution and its vertical mounting. Let us note by the way, that the relation between both axes was the leitmotiv of most of the geometric art of the 20th century and is cunningly relevant in Pollock´s work: in the “journey” from how the work was made to how it was hung. At the same time, the 71

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relationship between horizontal and vertical represents that which symbolizes the other: the encounter between high and low culture, between solemnity and triviality, between religion and money, between cathedrals and malls.

A Gallon, an Action, asserts itself by means of an impostor material (acrylic paint), a clear example of the substitutes (golden) that industry and market provide us with. In this way, the deceit with which gold has been associated, ichnographically liked –in the work– to the European conquest of America, is thus endorsed: a Mayan pyramid, a pre-Columbian figure, to a craft object of the Chilean town of Pomaire…

Parallel to this, the series endorses the illusion of painting itself, undoubtedly, a permanent conundrum in art, which Pulido briefs when speaking to me of the “further and beyond of painting.”

There is a situation, a double entendre in the work, a condition of the auratic deriving from the dominion of religion and golden paint, that lies in the fact that the work or the material returns its gaze upon the spectator. The captivating aspect of A Gallon, an Action is that it pro-

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poses an aesthetic experience close to the vital experience of “becoming blinded by gold” or “auratic blindness.” There is, in Pulido’s proposal, an unusual degree of awareness and optimism in exploring and polarizing, often simultaneously, the possibilities of the real immediate experience and the theoretical, aesthetic and political possibilities offered by means of the painting as of the actions of the body in the construction of the work of art. A Gallon, an Action appeals explicitly to pure instantaneity, it makes attempts to reconstruct the auratic and the ceremonial component of the work of art in the moment of its major crisis.

Lastly, I must say, that Pulido´s technical astuteness does encounter the impossibility of recuperating the work once it is mounted. As it happened with his fragile sculptures made out of breadcrumbs and presented in glass cases, the artist is content simply by having produced and shown the work.

London, May 2011

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A Gallon, an Action

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Gerardo Pulido

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Richard Hamilton

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ast week we learned of the death of Richard Hamilton. If Duchamp taught us that life is a long delay, then Richard Hamilton was one of his greatest disciples. Not only did he fabricate his own reconstruction of The Large Glass with the approval and positive support of Duchamp, thereby extending the idea of artistic authorship in an openened manner, but his life itself was a long delay. Yet death hardly ever arrives too soon, since it is always too early. We want to cry out aloud, but we are reduced to a silent cry instead. Full of the sounds of the world, the world we have learned to see so differently, thanks to the meticulous incisions, colors and images Richard Hamilton put together over the course of his life and work.

After lunch, or dinner, at his house in the country he would ask politely if we were ready to see his new prints with a magnifying glass. Once your encouragement was given you were led to the studio were in due course you would find yourself examining the prints with a large magnifying glass. The finest nuance of colors and lines had to be appreciated through the minute details that only he the great master could control to perfection. Nothing could escape his eagle’s eye. That was the greatest dialectic in his entire oeuvre - an extreme, radical conceptual setup embodied in the most detailed material presence on the canvas or paper. He was the first to use digital tools in painting; he was able to invent pictorial language almost daily. He gave the Independent Group the power to express itself visually as much as with words. The transformation of post second world war art in England without him is inconceivable.

If in general his art was highly subversive in relation to the existing social and cultural order, on the issue of Northern Ireland he was overwhelming. His reaction to the hunger strike in Belfast was like the dark paintings of Goya in reaction to the French occupation of Spain. You felt the fingers at your own neck closing fast. I still remember his exhibition in Dublin, which embraced his entire spectrum. One cannot contemplate his work without a shiver in the spine. One cannot but feel his absence as an immense lack that must drive us to a comparable embrace. “Brush up your Duchamp”, he inscribed in my copy of his translation of Duchamp’s notes. It seems as if all he wanted was that we could know ourselves better as individuals, and therefore collectively as well.

Ultimately we cannot express our feeling of having lost such a dear friend, and such a great artist.

Living as he did among us change our lives forever, and for ever after.

Y.E.S. New York, September 18, 2011

Spring 2011

Contributors Guillermo Acuña

lives and works in Santiago de Chile. He received his professional degree from the Universidad Católica de Chile, and worked in partnership with Sebastián Irarrazabal until 2000. That year he established Guillermo Acuña Arquitectos, a small office focused on projects covering a varied range of scales and programs. Guillermo has taught in different schools of architecture, and published his work in several architectural journals and magazines from Chile and abroad.

Cristóbal Amunátegui

received his professional degree from the Universidad Católica de Chile. In 2010 he was awarded a Master of Science degree by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, New York. Cristóbal has taught in different schools of architecture, in the departments of Design and History and Theory. In 2011 he founded Amunátegui Valdés Architects.

Currently he edits the journal Potlatch (Columbia GSAPP) and is a PhD candidate at Princeton University School of Architecture.

F. P. Boué lives and works in New York and has been showing three-dimensional works involving architecture, landscape and urban situations since 1981. He began showing films in 1999. His films have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Kunstmuseum, Bern; Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, and the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, among others.

Cecilia Brunson is an independent curator based in London. For more than a decade she has worked in New York and Latin America. In 2001 after graduating from the Centre for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, she was appointed Coordinator of Exhibitions at The Americas Society in New York. This was followed by an invitation to be Associate Curator of Latin American Art at The Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas.

She is the founder of INCUBO, a residency program for international curators based in Chile, to 82

innovate and experiment with different formats for exhibitions, lectures and publications. She recently co-founded the AMA Fellowship, a grant that facilitates residencies abroad for Chilean artists. Her writings appear in Artforum and in numerous artist catalogues.

Manuel Corrada is Professor at the Facultad de Matemáticas, Universidad Católica de Chile. He studied mathematics and was a researcher on logic. He was the author of more than 40 published articles before writing and lecturing on the relationship between science and the visual arts, Suprematism, Duchamp´s visuality, perception and Minimal Art. Currently he works on the subjects of luxury, design, capitalism, consumption and every day life, and on the theory of electronic spaces.

Richard Hamilton studied at Westmin-

ster Technical College, St. Martin’s School of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts and Slade School of Art, starting to exhibit in 1950. Between 1941 and 1945 he worked as a draughtsman. The first exhibition he designed himself was «Growth and Form» at the ICA, London, 1951. In 1952 he became a teacher of silver work, typography and industrial design at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. He was a founding member of the Independent Group at the ICA. In 1953 he became a lecturer in the Fine Art Department at the King’s College in the University of Durham. In 1955 he devised and designed the exhibition “Man, Machine and Motion” at the ICA. In 1956 he made his first Pop collage. Between 1957 and 1961 he was a teacher of interior design at the Royal College of Art. In 1965 he began the reconstruction of Marcel Duchamp’s «Le Grand Verre.»

He organized the Duchamp retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1966. In 1992 the Tate Gallery in London showed a retrospective of his work, and in 2003 the Museum Ludwig exhibited in cooperation with the artist a work show with the title ‘Introspective’. In 1993 Richard Hamilton represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.

Potlatch 2

Gerardo Pulido lives and works in Santiago. His work has been shown in Bogotá, Buenos Aires, London, New York, Melbourne, Porto Alegre, Tours, Santiago, Valparaíso and Valdivia. A candidate for the PhD in Art Education at U. de Sevilla (Spain), he obtained Baccalaureate and Graduate degrees in Art from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has participated in the RIAA (Argentina) and the VCA (Australia) residencies. His awards include the AMA (Chile) and MAE (Spain) scholarships. He currently teaches in the Baccalaureate of Art in Santiago. Since 2010 integrates and creates, together with four Chilean artists, the project BLOC/Tutorías de arte, a studio dedicated to the production and training in visual arts in Santiago.

Jaye Rhee is a New York-based artist from Seoul, Korea. She attended the School of The Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, MFA). Her exhibitions include Kobe Biennale 2007, Queens Museum of Art, Bronx Museum, and Seoul Museum of Art. In 2009 Rhee was artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and took part in the Palais de Tokyo Workshop. Her work is discussed in Carol Becker’s essay ‘Intimate, Immediate, Spontaneous, Obvious: Educating the Unknowing Mind’ in Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art and has been reviewed in The New York Times, Art Asia Pacific, and Art in Culture. Her awards include the Franklin Furnace Fund and the Korea Arts Foundation of America.

She recently released an artist’s book Imageless.

KUU is a Shanghai-based design practice run

by Kok-Meng Tan from Singapore and Satoko Saeki from Japan. It grounds all scales of design from interiors and installations to architecture and planning with the same mix of abstract disciplinary thinking and situated contextuality. Above all, KUU strives to make novel works that are direct and simple. Kok-Meng Tan graduated with a B. Arch from the National University of Singapore and a Masters from Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, where he studied under

the late Ignasi de Solà Morales and Xavier Costa.

Satoko Saeki went on to complete her M. Arch at University of Pennsylvania after graduating from Meiji University in Tokyo.

Daniel Sherer teaches architectural history and theory at Columbia University GSAPP and the Yale School of Architecture. He received his PhD from the Harvard Department of the History of Art and Architecture in 2000. In addition to translating Manfredo Tafuri, Interpreting the Renaissance: Princes, Cities, Architects (New Haven/Cambridge MA, 2006), which won the Sir Nikolaus Pevsner Book Award from the RIBA in that year, he has published extensively on architectural and artistic topics from the Renaissance to the present in American and European journals including Assemblage, Perspecta, Journal of Architecture, Zodiac, Art Journal, PIN-UP, and Design Book Review.

Yehuda E. Safran studied at Saint Mar-

tin’s School of Art, the Royal College of Art and University College, London. He has taught at the Architectural Association, Goldsmith’s College, London University, and the Lan van Eyck Academy. He was a fellow of the Chicago Institute of Architecture and Urbanism and Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture, University of Illinois as well as at RISD. He has published in Domus, Sight and Sound, Lotus, A+U, AA Files, Springer, Artpress, Proto-typo, Metalocus and Abitare. With Steven Holl and others he was editor of 32 Bejing/New York, and is the author of Mies van der Rohe. He curated inter alia the Arts Council of Great Britain touring exhibition ‘The Architecture of Adolf Loos’ and the ‘Frederick Kiesler’ show at the Architectural Association.

He was a trustee of the 9H Gallery, a Founding member of the Architecture Foundation in London and a member of the College International de Philosophie, Paris. Currently he lives and works in New York, where he directs the Potlatch Lab for Art and Architecture and teaches at Columbia University GSAPP. 83

Potlatch

A Journal of the Potlatch Lab at GSAPP Columbia University 1172 Amsterdam Ave. 409 Avery Hall New York, NY 10027