Architectures non standard
10 December 2003 – 1 March 2004
www.cnac-gp.fr
Named after the revolutionary 1966 work of the German mathematician Abraham Robinson, this exhibition collates the recent explorations of 12 small architectural practices of varying repute, nationality and influence, under the banner of an emerging, process-driven, computer-derived architecture. Curated by Frédéric Migayrou, the show condenses the increasingly familiar attendees he has gathered annually since 2001 at the Archilab conferences in Orléans. Though their methods and manifestos vary greatly, these architects share an overriding interest in form, a word employed in both practice name and book title by their most prominent practising theoretician, the Blob-father, Greg Lynn.
Like so many rhetorical questions of
architecture, the question Migayrou asked in his introductory Archilab 2001
catalogue essay ('Does architecture still have a cultural, political and
social function?') remains unelucidated by this exhibition. If grateful for
the gathering of such sumptuous and important work in one room, the visitor
is left with nothing but superficial impressions of what may appear to be
superficial sculptural exercises. The link to mathematics is explicitly
absent, merely caricatured by the math-mesh floor graphic that distorts the
Pompidou's rationalist 3x3 grid into an archipelago of 12 blobby island
displays. The displays oscillate between slow, semi-functional plasma-screen
animations and a superabundance of models, tagged by the usual indigestible
architectural text. The emphasis on model-making throughout the exhibition
supports the curatorial contention that this is latent construction rather
than the illustrational utopias of a generation ago, though it also exposes
a common preference for uninhabited sculptural objects over the politics of
experience. Between the works winds a hanging foamboard wave bearing
illustrations of a twentieth-century panorama of influences, which situate
the works in a continuum of historical radical exploration. Centring on work
from the late 1950s and early '60s, these images bear intense scrutiny and
occasionally threaten to overwhelm their descendants.
Most of the exhibitors teach (notably, once upon a time, at Columbia
University), their work highlighting the central role of universities in
sustaining ongoing research into the production as well as theorisation of
architecture. If academia's isolation from the constructive realm infects
certain projects with a sophomoric amateurishness, it is heartening to find
myriad examples of work both built and on site. The American heavyweights
prove less successful in this regard than the dependable Dutch, restricted
to the materiality of CNC milling machines or fibreglass moulds.
Breaking with the ineffable thinness of digital surfaces and the dull sparkle of ubiquitous ray-traces, NOX hang large photographs of Maison-Folie's constructional progress, alongside the intimate minutiae of their surreal and scrappy process models. Their projects appear more beautiful and absurd the more explicit their genesis in analogue form-finding becomes, though the serendipity of this enterprise threatens to be undermined by some of their cruder proposals for mediatised environments. Oosterhuis.nl's lively submarinesque inflatable, if indebted to David Greene's Living Pod, rocks sinisterly and gloriously back and forth in the foyer like a whale with Turette's on speed, though the neighbouring Alessi teapot commissions, whose glossy drawings had looked so promising, seem curiously redundant (how would one hold or pour from an object without handle or spout?). dECOI's discreet plasma monitor display steals the show with its glimpses of the ongoing 'Aegis Hypo-Surface' project, a vast fluttering wall surface composed of triangulated panels activated by 10,000 pistons, themselves responding to myriad sonic, atmospheric and environmental inputs. Above all others, this project explores the possibilities of incredibly complex results arising from severely limited parameters, and humbles the more random procedural complications embedded by a few adjacent projects.
Yet again, the Pompidou shames the world in its early embrace and popularisation of progressive architecture. If Rogers' and Piano's architectural envelope resembles its exhibition contents in its playfulness and brightly-coloured exuberance, the Pompidou's prefabricated, standardised modularity offers a distinct, ironic counterpoint to the show; a robust challenge to the intentions of this brave new world of architects, and proof that aesthetic and tectonic earthquakes can erupt even within the wider urban mausoleum of Paris.
Alex Haw