| NEXT ISSUE  |  BACK ISSUES  |  CONTENTS |

Writing in 1995, Lynn declared that ‘in the last three decades, if one word could be identified as having a primary effect on architecture and design, that word would be complexity’. A new group exhibition, guest curated by the architect and on show at the ICA, Philadelphia, this spring, is the latest in a series of experiments through which he seeks to demonstrate this.





Given Lynn’s dedication to the digital – FORM, his LA-based architecture practice, is a paperless operation – one might simply conclude that everyone in this show has to have a computer. But Lynn is fond of nothing if not complexity. He describes his exhibition, titled Intricacy, as a dialogue between painting, sculpture and architecture. To his usual following of wired-up digerati it might seem to have the bewildering smack of the old arts, but Lynn is quick to defend his approach. ‘I think that when architecture has been strong as a field it has always had a close link with the some of the fine arts,’ he says. ‘In fact, I think it is the obligation of architecture to be in discussion with other arts.’

In terms of his own practice, Lynn last fulfilled this obligation a year ago with an installation created for Ohio’s Wexner Center, inspired by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s film Predator. (Although it might seem an unlikely source of inspiration, there is something appropriate about Lynn responding to a film that is an evolved version of The Blob.) Lynn’s Predator was his second collaboration with the painter Fabian Maraccio, who, given that The New York Times’s Roberta Smith once described his work as having all the ‘pumped-up subtlety of a Sylvester Stallone movie’, was probably an ideal partner. For the Wexner Predator, Maraccio’s paintings were printed onto transparent plastic and then vacuum-formed to create the surface of Lynn’s computer-produced tubular structure. The effect was like walking inside a painting while exploring the abandoned skin of some futuristic alien organism. Predator reflects the curious combination of science, aesthetics and B-movie showmanship (albeit with blockbuster effects) that characterises much of Lynn’s work. And though it might seem to be fuelled by precisely the diet (of science-fiction movies and computers) that defines the archetype of nerdishness, Lynn’s success has been to make this kind of work seem cool. For him it is an expression of the animism and animalism that architecture needs. Naturally, you could also argue that his success merely proves just how uncool a lot of architecture really is.

There is a lot of this architecture-art crossover stuff going around at the moment. Over in New York’s Whitney museum, architects Diller + Scofidio are exhibiting work which makes use of multi-media presentations and an emphasis on the spectacular to blur the boundary between the disciplines [see Zoë Ryan’s feature in this issue]. Having left New York a couple of years ago, the work of Mies van der Rohe, whose collages, models and photomontages do much to suggest that he might be the godfather of this kind of multi-media, brand-ready architecture, continues its tour of art galleries around the world. And the sculpture-like buildings of Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind and their numerous imitators have been popping up everywhere. Lynn, however, is very clear about where his boundaries lie. ‘I like architects participating with artists,’ he says, ‘but always as architects.’

Bucking another trend, he is also keen to emphasise that Intricacy represents a moment not a movement. ‘To do this show, I had to really take the decision that I was curating objects not careers. If I was an art curator and I did a group show, my responsibility would be more to predicting the relationships of people in the group in the future. At least, as I understand it, that’s what most group shows in the art world are curated for: who’s talking to who and what’s the next trend.’ Think Sensation. Think Apocalypse. Packaging art can be like packaging pop groups – perhaps there has been a show in which everyone had to have a moustache.

Of course, Lynn’s comments serve partially to obscure the fact that the management of the ICA presumably invited him to curate this exhibition because they, like many others, recognise that he is the next trend. But perhaps it is also to Lynn’s credit that he has decided to produce a show that explores his design philosophy rather than a spectacular splattering of trendy computer art. Writing about blobs, a subject which, more than his moustache, has become his trademark, Lynn declares that ‘the primary characteristic unique to complexity is a divisional unification of disparate components without totality or wholes’. It is something that Lynn has explored in works such as his Embryological House project, in which the house is a curvilinear surface that adapts its form to suit its particular environment, thus creating a series of uniquely varied dwellings derived from a standard DNA-like unit. The houses are essentially the same but never identical, each a moment extracted from an ever-evolving whole. This interest in mass customisation is explored on a more material level in Lynn’s coffee set for Alessi, which he describes as the most sophisticated thing his office has been working on. It will be produced in an edition of 99 unique sets and launched at this year’s Milan Furniture Fair.

Back at the ICA, the components on show include artworks by Maraccio, Bonnie Collura, Tom Friedman, Adam Fuss, Roxy Paine, David Reed, and James Rosenquist, accompanied by architecture displays by Eisenman Architects, Foreign Office Architects, Preston Scott Cohen, Reiser + Umemoto, Coop Himmel(b)lau and Office d’A. As Lynn admits, many of the architects are ones that you would associate with a kind of digital clique, but the show as a whole throws up some interesting combinations. ‘I had a sneaking suspicion that some of the people involved wouldn’t really get along in terms of their artistic direction, even though the work does,’ he confesses.

The manual, labour-driven approach of Tom Friedman, for example (‘it’s even a little bit part of a folk tradition,’ suggests Lynn), provides a contrast with the cold, functional, digitised approach of Foreign Office Architects. In the past, Friedman has contemplated complexity via a one-pound box of spaghetti (at the ICA he’s using peanuts), cooked, allowed to curl and then painstakingly attached end-to-end in a continuous tangled loop. Foreign Office has contemplated the same via the construction of a high-profile, $200-million port terminal in Yokohama. ‘I think that their trajectories are going in totally different directions,’ notes Lynn, ‘but right now there is something in the work that allows us to draw parallels.’

Lynn suggests that this something is a sensibility rather than a style, characterised by the way the participants rigorously process large quantities of information to create their work. Although they differ in scale, both Friedman’s spaghetti ball and Foreign Office’s port terminal are the product of a similar number of steps, or moves, that lead to the final object. And they reflect a comparable spatial language of layering and folding. In the case of Foreign Office, the construction at Yokohama essentially operates on the premise that numbers and statistics, when processed through the constraints of a well-defined architectural brief, will reveal an inherent shape. Friedman, working according to an equally rigorous set of rules about how his materials are to be treated, derives an inherent shape from the hundreds of strands in a box of spaghetti. ‘Everyone in the show is rigorous,’ claims Lynn. ‘There is a mathematical and geometric rigour that is the starting point for the work, and then there is an expressiveness that comes out of that.’ And the reason that the work of someone like Frank Gehry, which, as Lynn admits, would fit neatly with the style of many of the exhibitors, is not included is because he works in a way that ‘is a little bit the reverse’. ‘He starts with an expression,’ says Lynn, ‘and then figures out a way to reverse-engineer the rigour into it.’

With a few exceptions, architecture exhibitions tend not to be the most exciting events. In many cases they rely on an understanding of design processes that will only appeal to a trained architectural audience. One of the reasons why many of today’s most successful architects hide their architecture behind a façade of art is because it is an easier way of getting attention in a society that relies on rapid image hit and a one-line slogan. And despite how things may appear as Lynn begins to talk about geometric rigour, to describe how Coop Himmel(b)lau’s lattice structure was the only fully realised example he could find, or how you couldn’t come across a finer specimen of a fretwork and space-frame than Eisenman’s, he remains acutely aware of this. ‘I really wanted to avoid any work where you had to index how it was made to understand it,’ he says. ‘I really wanted the objects to be in dialogue with each other.’ You cannot help but be aware of the differences between exhibits such as Eisenman’s model of his Quai Branly project and Rosenquist’s Hours Flowers painting, but when you see them together you get a sense of some overall whole. An understanding of the artworks benefits from architecture’s inherent focus on process and construction, while the architecture gains from art’s more easily graspable and fully realised visual hit (a number of the architecture projects are unbuilt). Whether the overall effect will be as memorable as Village People’s moustaches is another matter. But Lynn’s strength has always been that when you start to explore his work, you quickly stop worrying about his moustache.


Intricacy is at the ICA, Philadelphia, until 6 April 2003.
www.icaphila.org

Mark Rappolt is the Architecture Editor for contemporary

 | NEXT ISSUE  |  BACK ISSUES  |  CONTENTS |