Laurakennedy

Impressions Essay: Philip Fallacaro Goldsworthy Beauty of Creation

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Washed Away Gregory Euclide

WINTER’S HAZE Robin Mellway Captures Canada

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the warmth of the sun in winter

Writer Robin Mellway

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Impressions Essay by Philip Fallacaro on the impressions of art and nature.

Winter's Haze Photography displaying Robin travels through Canada.

Goldsworthy Andy Goldsworthy enviormental art and it's relation to time.

Low Tide Beach artist, Andres Amedor, creates intricste artworks in the sand only for them to be washed away with the next high tide.

Visual Souvenirs Tin Nguyen's captures his travels through Iceland.

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G R E GO RY E U C L I D E Writer Emma Reynolds

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Minnesota based artist Gregory Euclide creates amazing impermanent artworks in just 25 minutes, during the lunch breaks at the high-school where he teaches. As unbelievable as this might sound, Gregory Euclide actually washes away the whiteboard masterpieces he draws every day, to make room for new ones. The art instructor says his unusual habit of drawing on whiteboards started as a way to release stress after teaching 38 students an hour, five hours a day, for 8 months. He was beginning to feel a little restless so he decided to give himself 25 minutes every day to finish sketches he enjoyed drawing. He

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would use sumi ink, brushes, spray bottles, erasers, paper towels and pretty much anything else he could get his hands on around his desk. There’s no question about the quality of Euclide’s works, so why would he just wash them all away after each school day? The artist says because he would dedicate just i was trying to con 25 minuted to each vey something about of them, they weren’t va l u e s o m e t h i n g incredibly precious to about impermanence him, as he just wantand maybe something ed to show his stuabout using time to dents what could be better oneself done in such a short to possibly interest period of time. When them many of them they came to school were interested in the following day and the process saw the ar tworks simply washed away, many of them couldn’t understand how someone could create something so special and just destroy it. But the Minnesota art instructor explains: “I was trying to convey something about value, something about impermanence and maybe something about using time to better oneself…to possibly interest them. They were interested in the process.” The artist associates his viewers’ shock at the pictures being erased with the experience of recognising the impact our actions have on nature.

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Z AR IA F O R M AN Zaria posing in front of one of her paintings Middle Greenland #54 2012, 40 x 60” Bottom Greenland # 56 2013, 40 x 60”

Her main focus is pictures of the ocean, with much of her art taking the form of pictures of sea spray on the shore, or water cascading over rocks or icebergs. Forman’s drawings that served as the set design for the classic ballet Giselle, and were used in the set design for House of Cards, a Netflix TV series directed by David Fincher and starring Kevin Spacey. The paintings are put on sale on her own personal site, ranging in price from $6,000 to $9,000.

Writer Luke Garrett

She has created a series of hyper realistic finger paintings which look just like choppy seas, and spectacular icy landscapes.

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An artist, whose works take up to a month to complete, she has created the landscapes to document the ever-changing beauty of regions affected by climate change. Forman, from Brooklyn in New York, U SA, led an Arctic expedition to the north west coast of Greenland purposely with the aim of creating art inspired by the dramatic geography. Her mother, Rena Bass Forman, originally came up with the idea but died before her daughter could see it through, and so she promised to carry out the journey in her name. After formal training at Skidmore college Forman now exhibits extensively in galleries and venues throughout the United States and overseas.

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c o l l a b o r at i o n

ov ergrow t h

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The images in this series are all uniquely designed and created by the artists from scratch on location, mostly in the Northwestern U.S., which is appropriate because both of the creators hail from Portland. In almost all of his photographic work, Fitzgerald prefers film over digital images because of its authenticity. His images, as well as Messina’s designs have been featured in several publications such as Kinfolk, Chalkboard, and Huge magazines, and the Overgrowth collection itself was unveiled in Japan 2013 .

Parker Fitzgerald zzz Riley Messina

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Writer Randi Reding

In this collaboration series between photographer Parker Fitzgerald and floral stylist Riley Messina, the Overgrowth photography series exudes a romantic tranquility by its use of landscape and floral elements through portraits. The message the artists wanted to convey through this work was, “an expression of the multifaceted relationship between humankind and nature,” rather than a critique on civilization bringing the environment into ruin, as is common among many of today’s commentaries. Through the breathtaking floral designs brought to you by Messina, Fitzgerald’s anonymous portraiture aims to depict the wild

Left Overgrowth 02 Above Overgrowth 06

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Overgrowth can be viewed by all audiences as a testament to the wonder of the world around us. ness and adaptability of nature.

Nature and mankind have had a messy relationship throughout the years, one of us is always mad at the other it seems. But these images put all the blunders of oil spills and hurricanes aside and focus on the harmony that the two elements possess when combined together. No matter what your take on global warming or if you drive a smart car of not, Overgrowth can be viewed by all audiences as a testament to the wonder of the world around us.

After all, if asked how many of us would look at Monet’s Water Lilies and accuse him of being a free-loving-tree-hugger?

Above Overgrowth 09 Left Overgrowth 01

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BO K E H

My BAckyard was basically this big giant, Wild Playground

Guillaume Kurkdjian interviews photographer Where are you right now?

I’m sitting on my couch in Missoula, Montana watching wind rip through the valley.

How can you describe your life?

That’s an interesting question…

My life is basically made up of transitions lately. I lead a very structured life while I’m in school: taking lots of classes, working for the Montana Wilderness Association, doing homework, etc. Then every chance I get I am on the road, living out of my car, driving up and down the length of the Rocky Mountains to climb and hike. Lately I’ve been traveling more and more and having to work harder and harder in school so it feels as if I am constantly transitioning from the structured school life to the freedom of the road and back again.

What’s your equipment?

I use a Canon Rebel 2000 that my grandpa gave to me years ago. I would always beg him to give it tome and he finally did. I normally use any film I can get my hands on, preferably Kodak slide film or just Fujifilm. Lately I have been trying to use my little digital camera as much as possible to help save me money. Life is expensive.

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J ocelyn cat t er s on

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What was your favorite activity when you were a child, and now?

Back where I grew up in Colorado, my backyard was basically this giant, wild playground. There was a pond, giant granite boulders, aspen trees, pine trees, and miles and miles of open space right out my back door.

So when I was a child my favorite thing in the world to do was to run around behind the house, play in the pond, crawl up in between all the boulders, etc. Nowadays, my favorite thing to do is travel around the country exploring all the wild land that I possibly can with friends. A lot of the time that involves hiking up mountains, climbing rocks, wading through rivers, exploring canyons, etc.

Not a lot has really changed since I was a kid. I love it all. Ha! I envy so much all your trips, you seem to move constantly trough magnificent places and your photos transmit a real feeling of freedom. Can you tell us more about these journeys?

Thank you so much! I am incredibly lucky to be able to travel as much as do. Every journey is pretty different. A good amount of the trips that I go on are actually school related because I am attending a college that really stresses the

importance of experiential education. During the school year I also end up going out on smaller trips over the weekends. But I suppose the bulk of my trips take place during the summer and around New Years when I have a lot of free time. I love to travel so I do it every chance I get. Without being able to travel I don't know what I would do with myself. I work my butt off in school and save up money and then disappear for months at a time to travel and live really simply. Living simply has been rewarding.

Back in high school these trips were centered around backpacking or hiking up mountains. Recently they have become more focused on climbing down in the desert and simply spending as much time on the road as possible.

Left 2009 Cody, WY

Opposite Top Self Portrait, 2012 Missoula, MT

Opposite Middle 2011 Jackson, WY

Opposite Bottom 2012 Missoula, MT

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BO K E H

Left 2012 Missoula, MT Right 2012 Missoula, MT

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Attending a college that really stresses the importance of experiential education. During the school year I also end up going out on smaller trips over the weekends.

But I suppose the bulk of my trips take place during the summer and around New Years when I have a lot of free time. I love to travel so I do it every chance I get. I work my butt off in school and save up money and then disappear for months at a time to travel and live really simply. Back in high school these trips were centered around backpacking or hiking up mountains. Recently they have become more focused on climbing down in the desert and simply spending as much time on the road as possible.

Do you have current projects or plans for the future?

Yes, I have so much to look for-

ward to in the next few months. In May/June I will be trekking through the Indian Himalaya with a school course. After that I will be down in the American Southwest conducting research for my senior thesis and climbing all of the Four Navajo Sacred Mountains. I love to travel so I do it every chance I get. I’ll probably spend some time visiting friends and family back in Montana and Colorado as well. During the school year I also end up going out on smaller trips over the weekends. But I suppose the bulk of my trips take place during the summer and around New Years when I have a lot of free time. I love to travel so I do it every chance I get.

What are you going to do just after having answered to this final question?

Finish my cup of coffee, go get pizza, and head over to the climbing gym.

Above 2011 Boulder, CO Bottom Left 2011 Boulder, CO

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When appreciating art, in whatever medium of expression, there is no prerequisite for a sophisticated knowledge and understanding of art itself.

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Since Art originates from Nature, our innate, natural sensitivity, perspicacity and open mindedness are all that is required to respond to art. However, human responses to a given subject of art may vary widely. The degree of art appreciation and affect may depend somewhat upon the capacities and experiences of the observer, relative to the artwork. Both the living and nonliving parts of our planet's biosphere provide very appealing examples.

In the last fifteen years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programs, and experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits.

Through time, Nature has revealed itself in many dimensions of energy and material form.

The patterns of physical-biologic designs, and the dynamics of their processes, display an intricacy of form and intelligence likened to an artistic drama -- Nature's evolution. Humans are an exceptional manifestation of Nature's art. Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture–Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively–the show presents twelve installations (four at each venue) that, according to its press materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materials, and making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical con-

But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right, they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and conditions of its display?

Across the three venues–the sculpture garden at the museum and the galleries of the Wexner–three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they might be called mimetic, interactive, and interventionist approaches, and the projects divide up neatly into four per category.

The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display. Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed the site, is a complete wooden cottage for two.

Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toilet, and rain-collection system; after the exhibition, it is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passageway-cum-porch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottles, and other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition ends later.

Given these architects’ interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the home.

H o w w e p e r s o n a l ly p e r c e i v e a n d s e n s e n at u r e , and how we may wish to express it, is the aesthetic rendering of whom we are

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tact; among the twelve projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pull, and gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive). Most also strive for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely.

The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich Architecture’s installation at the museum (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his aesthetic in condensed form, and brings an intimate architectural scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel.

The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces. With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner Center’s beams; these gigantic, limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anx ieties prevailed, and the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idio-

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Honey Locust Bryan Nash Gill relief print, 2010 24.5" x 23.75'' Photo by Ruxandra Mateiu

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Black & White # 2 Bryan Nash Gill relief print,2003 9.25" x 9.5''

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Rolling Burl Bryan Nash Gill relief print, 2011 50" x 20'"

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Sculpture Print Bryan Nash Gill relief print, 2010 44" x 43.5'"

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Honey Locust Bryan Nash Gill relief print, 2010 24.5" x 23.75"

Photo by

Laura Kennedy

plywood, lath, and wire. Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a display of common building materials.

Munkenbeck and Mar shall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies

The art work seen here are all works

by Bryan Nash Gill. The pieces seen here are a few of his relief prints printed on his handmade paper. His inspiration came from found objects in nature and his time working and living in rural New England.

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syncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture.

Two museum installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in his curatorial statement, rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”–the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systems, and so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes of spatial control. The Body in Action, by Hodgetts and Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubes, and other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop.

Both pieces subvert W expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests.

At museum, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chair, and look up to a lean, cantilevered glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscure, and its presentation so indirect, that you can’t tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined.

It is the four installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At museum, Office erected a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that it risks misreading as a none-toohandsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from 54th Street. Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side

introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. At the Wexner, Stanley Saitowitz intensified a rather bland space that has been used as an informal seating area and passageway with Virtual Reading Room, a lovely ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns, shelves, and horizontal planes suspended from cables. The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but also offers people the chance to sit and read–a rare accommodation in galleries.

With The Body in Repose, Kuth Ranieri replaced a perimeter wall at museum with a sexy new skin; its layers of industrial felt have been clamped, clipped, tatooed, and cut to make little invaginated nooks at the edge of the gallery where you can sit or lie down. From this wonderful position of interior exteriority–you are simultaneously inside and outside the gallery, suspended in a layer of interstitial space– other things become apparent: the messy innards of the building wall, the fact that people usually stand in museums, and the enormous potential of the gallery wall freed from the institutional imperatives of the smooth white plane.

To the extent that Fabrications can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a very significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The showis a broad range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us–even the novices among us–something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world.

Despite the uneven

There ALWAYS seems to be A mysterious associat i o n t h at t r a n s p i r e s between the object of beauty and the observer

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of the garden, Smith-Miller and Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glass, and then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors in.

Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play.

The other interventionist projects actually

results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design community to a broader, influential, and interested public. As a model for future events, then, Fabrications promises something great: a chance for contemporary architecture to reveal–and stretch–itself.

Photo by

Laura Kennedy

The art work seen here are all works by Fiona Watson. She finds her inspiration in the patterns and forms found in nature.

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Winged Victory Fiona Watson 2014

Opposite Top Burst Fiona Watson 2014

Opposite Middle The Next Moment Fiona Watson 2013

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Circle Life Fiona Watson 2012

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WINTER’S Haze R o b i n M e l lw ay C a p t u r e ’ s C a n a d a

P h o t o E s s ay

Excerpts from an interview with Yarrow Montagne.

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Your life I work as a postdoc studying plant biology at a university in Vancouver, Canada. I spend my free time taking film photographs hiking miles up a mountain, along a windswept beach, or through a dripping rain forest. I am compelled to go into wild places. I need to feel the elements, and see and experience the cycles of nature — the lengthening and shortening of days, the migration of birds, animals preparing for raising young or getting ready to hibernate for the winter, the rise and fall of the tide, life and death on different scales.

Your inspiration So many things. The awesomeness of nature. People who are truely artistic or intellectual geniuses or just make the world a better place through their positive actions.

Final words Be excellent to each other.

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H E m a k e s t h i n g s t h at b e c o m e a f o c u s f o r f ee l i n g s a n d e m o t i o n s s o m e p e r s o n a l , s o m e p u b l i c , s o m e i n t e n d e d , a n d s o m e n o t.

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Writer Sheri Binkly

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veryone loves an architecture show abouhouses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings.

But presented with the plan of a

house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations.

And architects’ models of houses spark, as dollhouses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space.

So, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for

he i n s p i r e s t h o u g h t s o f h o w w e i n t e r a c t w i t h t he e n v i r o n m e n t a n d h o w t i m e a f f e c t s e v e ry o n e a n d e v e ry t h i n g . H e u s e s t he s e s ee m i n g ly o r d i n a ry o b j e c t s , a n d c r e at e s m a g n i f i c e n t s c u l p t u r e s t h at, i n a n i n s ta n t, g r a b a n y o n e ’ s at t e n t i o n . I t i s a l l ab o ut an e m oti o nal r e s po n s e.

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architectural invention — “a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Emilio Ambasz’s Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the environment and interest in solar energy.

In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as convenient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends.

This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988 — all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to the museum, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost of intimacy and privacy. Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room” era, children are frequently banished to separate quarters, and clients are just as likely to live alone or in same-sex relationships as in traditional nuclear families. Terence Riley, who organized the show as chief curator of the museum’s department of architecture and design, poses the main question in his catalogue essay: “If the private house no longer has a domestic character, what sort of character will it have?”

The answers come from a diverse group of architects, some better known than others, representing Europe, South America, Japan, and the United States. One curious aspect of the exhibition design is the selection of the old-fashioned William Morris Larkspur pattern as the wallpaper backdrop for the show’s large-format photographs and drawings. The Arts and Crafts movement as defined by Morris took inspiration from a romanticized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, bookshelves, and other comfortable objects provided by the Furniture Co. that serve as

ready-made pedestals for the models and that give a workmanlike quality to the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an architect’s studio and home combined.

On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on view are anything but cozy. Rather, the architects are committed to design whose from a romanticized past — but perhaps the contrast is the point. The wallpaper does suit the heavy worktables, beds, bookshelves, and other comfortable objects provided by the Furniture Co. that serve as ready-made pedestals for the models and that give a workmanlike quality to the galleries, as if these rooms were part of an architect’s studio and home combined.

On the whole, the houses and loft apartments on view are anything but cozy. Rather, the architects are committed to design whose appeal lies in its response to and integration of advanced technologies and new materials.

Sleekness here runs more than skin deep. After years of the decorative pastiche associated with Post-Modernism, it came as both

a surprise and a relief that the reigning influence in this exhibition was Mies van der Rohe and, in particular, the Farnsworth House, which the architect designed some 50 years ago in Plano, Illinois, as a weekend retreat for his close friend, Dr. Edith Farnsworth.

A glass box with a flat roof and evenly spaced structural steel I-beams painted white, the house dematerializes at night (even with the draperies closed) into a cube of light. There have been many copies since, but the architects in the museum show are creating radical variations on the theme, skewing the form by selecting and developing only certain aspects

Above

The Big Freeze Dumfries, Scotland 7 January 2003

of Mies’s design to advance new ideas about the configuration of rooms and the requirements of the electronic age.

Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese architects are among the most exciting. On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House juts out on a corner like a billboard for Modernism. In

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reversing the fundamental order — by hanging glass inside and curtains outside — the architect explores the formal possibilities offered by the traditional Japanese shoji-screen house, where translucency is valued over transparency. The glass sits in sliding panels and retracts into corners of the house, and once drawn, the sailcloth curtain (besides making an obvious but witty allusion to bearing walls) provides shade during the day and privacy at night.

Two houses in Tokyo by Japanese architects are among the most exciting. On one of Tokyo’s eclectic and densely packed streets, Shigeru Ban’s Curtain Wall House juts out on a corner like a billboard for Modernism. In reversing the fundamental order — by hanging glass inside and curtains outside — the architect explores the formal possibilities of-

Above

Sand Holes Rockcliffe, Dumfriesshire 4 March 1997

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fered by the traditional Japanese shoji-screen house, where translucency is valued over transparency. The glass sits in sliding panels and retracts into corners of the house, and once drawn, the sailcloth curtain (besides making an obvious but witty allusion to bearing walls) provides shade during the day and privacy at night.

Now under construction in Napa Valley, California, the Kramlich Residence and Media Collection, designed by Herzog & de Meuron, features an angular, flat-roofed Miesian glass pavilion over a series of subterranean galleries, including one in an underground garage, for the couple’s collection of electronic art. Even the curved inner walls of the pavilion function as screens for video, films, and digital art, which compete with the view of nature beyond the structure’s glass walls. In the same vein, Diller + Scofidio’s halfcrescent-shaped Slow House, an unbuilt project for a site on Long Island, features a video camera that records the view through the house’s immense atelier-style picture window and allows for instant replay on a monitor inside. And the main walls of Hariri & Hariri’s project for a Digital House feature liquid-crystal displays that allow for videoconferencing with virtual guests in the living room and cooking lessons from a televised chef in the kitchen.

Two row houses on Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam by MV RDV, meanwhile, play with transparency and opacity on a large scale: one presents a glass facade to the street, behind which most of its rooms are boxed off by inner walls; the other hides behind a traditional masonry facade but reveals much of its interior through a glass wall running along one side. (The pattern of boxedoff and exposed rooms recalls the vertical grid of Gerrit Rietveld’s Schröder House in Utrecht, a

model of which is conveniently on view, along with one of Mies’s Tugendhat House, in the top-floor galleries.

Whether Riley has proved his theory about the loss of privacy is questionable. Despite the intrusions of the outside world through glass walls and electronic hookups, people still retain the option of turning off their computers or otherwise retreating — and many of the architects represented in the show have proven adept at helping them do just that. Perhaps it is the incursion of professional work spaces into private homes and the concomitant loss of the “study” as an arena for contemplation (Riley calls it a nineteenth-century room) that is more indicative of the loss of privacy. But even t h at i s w h y t he o f t e n i r r e s i s t i b l e some of the houses in the show offer this c h a r m o f h i s w o r k d o e s n o t d e r i v e f r o m kind of refuge: The T House by Simon t he f i n a l r e s u lt, b u t f r o m t he b e a u t y Ungers with Thomas Kinslow, for example, o f i t s c r e at i o n , t he d ee d t o w h i c h i t has a separate library tower of weather- o w e s i t s e x i s t e n c e a n d t h at r e m a i n s ing-steel plates that can fit 10,000 books v i s i b l e i n t he e n d p r o d u c t. as well as a reading area. And there is also Rem Koolhaas’s Maison à Bor-deaux, where the wheelchair-bound owner can sit at his desk on an open elevator platform while it moves along a three-story wall of bookshelves — an expanded notion of the study, perhaps, but still a solitary place to think and to dream.

Below

Carin La Vallee, France 5 February 1999

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