Architectural Porosity: Encountering the Outsider in a Heterotopic Museum by Jie Zhang (M.Arch, MIT)

Architectural Porosity: encountering the outsider in a heterotopic museum

Against A Defensive Architecture 4 Museum of Outsider Art 14 Site of Engineered Comfort 26 Strategies 32 Summer Work Plan 38 Bibliography 39

A Thesis Proposal by Jie Zhang Thesis Committee: Advisor: Arindam Dutta Reader: Gediminas Urbonas Meejin Yoon (?) Emmanuel Petit 2

Thesis Statement With the rapid growth of traditional towns into metropolises in the 19th century, man’s fear for the dangerous and sublime wilderness found a new host in the city itself, now infested with epidemics, crime, congestion, pollution and social differences. Urban designs of the late 18th century guided by a medical metaphor performed Haussmannian, surgical operations on the city; The modernist desire to counteract urban threats drove an open and free-flowing architecture in the Miesian fluidity of transparent space or Le Corbusian Plan Libre. However, with the failure of modernism, Architecture retreats from a celebration of hopes through design to the physical manifestation of fears. Gated residential communities, controlled corporate atria, enclosed public institutions and megastructures reject the unruly city in favor of an insular architectonic hierarchy, exacerbating, rather than eradicating the sources of our insecurity. An architecture predicted on the necessity of protection signals not only the end of public space, but also architecture’s domination by capitalist and political powers, along with its fall into political neutrality. Will contemporary events of global terrorism and environmental hazards further erase the relevance of the city, or demand a new relationship and a new boundary condition between architecture and the city? This thesis posits that, against the tactic of defense and retreat, architecture’s engagement with the inevitably disquieting urban realities could stimulate a better understanding of spatial politics, and the staging of our anxieties a means of affecting introspection and action. Less interested in a noble “revitalization” of the public space, the thesis investigates an architecture as public art that disrupts rather than secures, the transgression and redefinition of physical and psychological boundaries to allow for social porosity and cultural multi-layering.

KEEP 4

OUT Against A Defensible Architecture 5

“Behind the disciplinary mechanisms, can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions,’ of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder.” - Michel Foucault, “Discipline and Punish” 6

“(Social) space is a (social) product [...] the space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action [...] in addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power.” - Henri Lefebvre, “The Production of Space” 7

“‘Defensible space’ is a surrogate term for the range of mechanisms real and symbolic barriers, strongly defined areas of influence, and improved opportunities for surveillance - that combine to bring an environment under the control of its residents.” -- Oscar Newman, “Defensible Space” 8

“Air-conditioning has launched the endless building...Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space.” - Rem Koolhaas, “Junkspace” 9

“‘Outside’, even as the spaces of exile, asylum, confinement, and quarantine of the early modern period were continuously spilling over into the ‘normal’ space of the city, so the ‘pathological’ spaces of today menace the clearly marketd ouot limits of the social order. In every case ‘light space’ is invaded by the figure of ‘dark space’, on the level of the body in the form of epidemic and uncontrollable disease, and on the level of the city in the person of the homeless.” - Anthony Vidler, “The Architectural Uncanny” 10

When open space is subjugated to the need for protective space, the celebration of our hopes through design gives way to the physical manifestation of our fears.” - Kevin Sites, “Mirrors” 11

BUFFERS AGAINST DISCOMFORT

DISTANCE

location & setback

ACCESS

admission & the security check

ENVIRONMENT

envelope & mechanical maintenance

ARCHITECTUAL EASE

handrails, flat floors, privacy, whiteness, the list goes on

THE COMFORT ZONE

In Manhattan Atmosphere, architectural historian David Gissen observed in the city of New York a shift from public urban works that addressed light, air, water, sanitation, transportation and park networks till the mid-20th century to the rise of late-modern architectural interiors (residential towers, museums, airports, corporate atria etc) as an realm of physical and material maintenance of comfort when the public sphere of the city was represented to be on the verge of crumbling into utter, desolate ruin. While everyday instances of physical and social discomfort exist as inevitable productions of human activities and an inherent aspect of urbanity, far from a removal, they are displaced, camouflaged and ultimately avoided by an insular, defensive architecture. The technologically sophisticated architectural comfort zones represent a new form of “well-tempered environment”, termed by Reyner Banham, under mechanical control (heating, ventilation, cooling, lighting and acoustical improvements) in strong contrast to and denial of the uncomfortable and uncontrollable exteriors of the city. Their enclosedness, fabrication of comfort, expulsion of the degraded aspects of urbanity are further entangled with institutional authority and power in segregating those who are allowed access and those who are not - what Michel Foucault called “bio-power” as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species”, in this case, a desire for physical comfort, “became the object of a political strategy”. In commenting on the pervasive, conditioned environment that moves through what he calls “Junkspace”, Rem Koolhaas made it quite clear: “air-conditioning has launched the endless building...Because it costs money, is no longer free, conditioned space inevitably becomes conditional space”. The retreat into interiors triggered by the failure of the city only further exacerbates it. Politicized architectural comfort zones, evoking perhaps a post-urbanist reality, are an inadequate response to the new extra-urban crisis of today, ie global warming, air pollution, terrorism, etc. Architecture of relevance has an urgent obligation to evolve beyond the functionalism of protection, and through conflict as the condition of true public space.

Museum of Outsider Art “The museum is the colossal mirror in which man contemplates himself finally in all his faces, finds himself literally admirable, and abandons himself to the ecstasies expressed in all the art journals.” -- Georges Bataille, “Musee” 14

The museum as an architectural typology epitomizes the dual identities of Architecture as a functional social service and a form of art, while exposing their heightened conflict. Intentions and programs of public outreach are juxtaposed with a territorializing urban form, for example the “nearly an acre of sophisticated, temperature and humidity-controlled glass cases” for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public disputes around plans of MOMA’s expansion reveal inevitable spatial and political negotiations between an architecture and its surrounding context. Inside, the white box by its pristine neutrality welcomes Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain but excludes smell, murky air, heat and the body of the homeless. A case in point where buildings under the authority of bourgeois comfort jeopardize both social and artistic ambitions, the architecture of the museum needs to be rethought, as a model with a license for disruption for a wider array of building typologies. In particular, how can the museum by revealing an unsanitized urban history engage with the reality of the public realm? And provide introspection and inspiration by exposing the pathologies of the contemporary psyche?

Adolf Wölfli , a Swiss artist who had been orphaned as a child and spent most of his adult life in an insane asylum

Henry Darger, the premier American outsider artist who lived a recursive life as a custodian in Chicago

The Phenomenon of Outside Art Art Brut, Raw Art, Rough Art Naive Art the Art of the Untrained Self-Taught Art Visionary Art Intuitive Art Art from Margins Unofficial Art ... Outside Art 16

Justo Gallego Martinze, a former monk who has been erecting “the Cathedral” outside of Madrid, Spain

Nek Chand Saini, a roads inspector in Chandigarh, India built the 18-acre Rock Garden of Chandigarh

“Despite this cluster of interrelated terms, I have to say that I think Dubuffet, originator of the art brut label, had the conceptual emphasis right: outsider art is best defined as art produced by those, who if not officially classed as ‘insane’ or institutionalised, are in some way mentally or socially estranged from, well … the rest of us.” - Terry Castle, “Do I like it?” 17

1912 First and only publication of the group Der Blaue Reiter in Germany reflecting a first interest in the art of the mentally ill, along with that of children 1922 Dr. Hans Prinzhorn published the book Artistry of the Mentally Ill, a first formal study of psychiatric works by his patient Adolf Wölfli

mid-1940 Jean Dubuffet termed“Art Brut”, french term for raw art, unaffected by fashion and standards, first championed by the Surrealists

1989 John Maizels found “Raw Vision”, a british magazine devoted to outsider art

1979 “Outsider’s” Show by Cardinal at the Hayward Gallery, London

976 Inauguration of Collection de L’Art Brut in Lausanne, Switzerland 1972 Roger Cardinal termed “Outsider Art”

1993 Initiation of the Outsider Art Fair in New York

1991 Establishment of Intuit: The Center for Intuitive and Outsider Art as the only nonprofit organization dedicated to presenting outsider art in the US

1995 Opening of La Halle SaintPierre, staging temporary exhibitions on primitive art and Art Brut

1996 First ever Russian Museum of Outsider Art opened to host a collection since 1989

Exercise Dance Sensory Deprivat Extreme sports: e

GLOBAL OUTPOSTS

Royal Ontario Museum 2007 Daniel Libeksind $300 million 1.6m visitors

British Museum Extension 2000 Norman Foster $168.8 million 5m visitors

Guggenheim Bilbao 1997 Frank Ghery $182 million

Louvre Abu Dhabi 2015 Jean Nouvel $550 million 10m visitors

Museum n 2012 Rogers million tors

SFMOMA 2016 Snohetta $480 million

Tate Modern 2016 Herzog & de Meuron $328.6 million 5 milllion visitors/year

Guggenheim Abu Dhabi 2017 Frank Ghery $200 million

Whitney Museum of American Art 2016 Renzo Piano $760 million

The Expansion of the Conventional Museum 20

Brit Ext Rich $22 6.5m

The Temporary Exhibition of Outside Art 21

Museum as Heterotopia 22

EXHIBIT TEACH TREAT 23

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A Chronology of Aesthetic Expressions of Angst, Fear, Alienation, etc 24

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Site of Engineered Comforty 26

Battery Park City, NYC

1800: a vibrant port area 1950s: dilapidated shipping piers 1962: masterplan of revitalizing downtown with apartment buildings and office towers 1966: masterplan by Wallace K. Harrison for a “comprehensive community” consisting of mixed-income, interracial housing, social infrastructure and light industry 1969: first official masterplan as a seven-story mall containing urban functions and amenities running the length of Battery Park City to which all the buildings were plugged in 1972 - 1977: land reclamation 1975: masterplan of defensible, and discrete residential clusters with one guarded entrance as a suburb in the city 1979: masterplan by Cooper-Eckstut as an extension of the existing New York City street grid including conventional building forms, commercial space and 30% open space 2001: displacement of residents due to 9/11 attack, active looting and toxic smoke 2010s: further development and reintroduction of 9000 residents today: a high-end residential neighborhood, one-mile stretch with parks, public art and museums; managed by Battery Park City Authority, whose excess revenue from market rate rentals goes to low-income projects in the Bronx and Harlem; still seen as a community of planned security in an unruly city, best accessible across a major roadway by an enclosed pedestrian skywalks from the WTC 29

water

infrastructure & access

Layers of Barriers 30

landscape

height/architectural envelope

Layers of Barriers 31

Strategies 32

Permeate Conditions of the Outside In the 1969 Manifesto of Maintenance Art, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles alludes to confrontation with physical discomfort in search for a productive relationship between culture, architecture and the city: “Everyday, containers of the following kinds of refuse will be delivered to the Museum: -the contents of one sanitation truck; -a container of polluted air; -a container of polluted Hudson River; -a container of ravaged land. Once at the exhibition, each container will be serviced: purified, de-polluted, rehabilitated, recycled, and conserved by various technical (and / or pseudo-technical) procedures either by myself or scientists. These servicing procedures are repeated throughout the duration of the exhibition.” 33

Preserve a non-discriminatory Anonymity of the Inside 34

Relationship with Existing Boundaries STRATEGY 1: Parasitic Intrusion: erosion of old boundaries into the architectural interior 35

Relationship with Existing Boundaries STRATEGY 2: Punctured Permeability: spatial appropriation of existing space in a porous manner 36

Summer Research Body Wittgenstein House, Vienna* Gasometer, Coop Himmelblau, Vienna* Rooftop Remodeling Falkestrasse, Coop Himmelblau, Vienna* Holocaust Memorial Judenplatz, Rachel Whiteread, Vienna* Mosquito Bottleneck, Trinidad, R&Sie (unbuilt) The Light Pavilion, Lebbeus Woods, Chengdu (visit in June) Holocaust Memorial, Peter Eisenman, Berlin (visited) Building Steinhof Sanatorium, Otto Wagner, Vienna* - intentionally built for comfort as counter example Villa Moller, Adolf Loos, Vienna* - separation of the interior from exterior as counter example Schullin Jewellery shop, Hans Hollein, Vienna * Haus U R series, Gregor Schneider, Mönchengladbach-Rheydt, Germany New Century Global Center, Chengdu (visit in June) - largest stand-alone building in the world Urban Venice Biennale, Venice* Sewer System, Vienna* Beichuan Earthquake Memorial, Chengdu (visit in June) Washington Bridge Towers, Brown & Guenther, New York - residential towers on top of a highway Dusty Relief, Bangkok, R&Sie (unbuilt) Paris Sewer Museum, Paris (visited) 37

Bibliography Diller, Elizabeth and Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh : architectural probe (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994) Deutsche, Rosalyn, Evictions (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996) Ellin Nan eds, Architecture of Fear (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1997) Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish : the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995) Gissen, David, Manhattan atmospheres: architecture, the interior environment, and urban crisis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 1991) Pezeu-Massabuau, Jacques, Philosophy of Discomfort (Reaktion Books, 2012) Vidler, Anthony, The Architectural Uncanny : Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992) Vidler, Anthony, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000)