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Seven
Days, February 14, 2003
Donald Maurice Kreis
Jacques
Herzog and Pierre de Meuron do big boxes.
The
Basel, Switzerland design duo won the Pritzker Prize in 2001, which
makes them the architectural equivalent of Nobel laureates. American
Pritzker winners include Frank Gehry, whose signature buildings
twist and shout, and I.M. Pei, famous for the boldly angular East
Wing of the National Gallery in Washington.
Herzog
& de Meuron, by contrast, are a more refined and subtle pleasure.
Two of their most celebrated projects – the Eberswalde Technical
School Library (1999) in Germany and the Dominus winery building
(1998) in California – are as rectangular as a K-Mart. Discovering
why these buildings are, nevertheless, occasions for architectural
celebration is just one good reason to visit the Herzog & de
Meuron exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
Another
good reason relates to the nature of museum exhibitions itself.
If this had been a typical museum show about a famous architectural
firm, there would have been lots of models and photographs showing
how the Eberswalde building is enlivened by a façade consisting
entirely of oddly juxtaposed photos from old newspapers—e.g., a
boy looking wondrously at a toy train and East Germans in the early
days of the Berlin Wall trying to escape to the west through the
open windows of a building. The photos are ingeniously engrafted
onto alternating bands of concrete and glass.
Instead,
curator Philip Ursprung has opted out of the standard show and tell.
Yes, there’s a model of the Dominus project (although consigned
to a corner of the exhibition) where one can plainly grasp that
the long, low, dark building lacks outside walls in the conventional
sense, with an outer surface formed instead by loose stones held
in place by chicken wire. But that’s just because the model was
among the things Ursprung came across when he scoured the firm’s
headquarters for any and all objects that might relate somehow to
what Herzog & de Meuron think and do.
Hence
the subtitle title of the exhibition -- Archaeology of the Mind
– and hence the show’s unapologetic challenge to museumgoers used
to curatorial strategies calculated to spoon-feed insight about
art and culture to a consumer-oriented culture. Instead, according
to Ursprung, his purpose was to “act as if we were archaeologists
from the future who have uncovered the architects’ studio.”
“Our
models and experiments with materials are not works of art but
rather a k ind of accumulated waste,” explains a written statement
attributed to Herzog and de Meuron themselves. “We have opened
our archives li ke a chamber of wonders and transferred them
to the museum. Since architecture itself cannot be exhibited, we
are compelled to find such substitutes for it.”
Much
of what is on display is best described as experiments – a particular
material, way of working with a material, or building shape, assembled
for the purpose of testing and study, juxtaposed against various
images and objects that have inspired and informed the designers.
There are copper sheets with holes punched in them, a self-portrait
of Andy Warhol, pieces of glass embedded in concrete. A house
is built of railroad ties. Paper cut-outs resemble Japanese lanterns
but, in fact, relate to the architects’ design for an addition to
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Archaeology
in the studios of lesser architects would not prove as interesting.
But Herzog & de Meuron have placed themselves at the junction
of art, science, culture and commercialism. Sample panels illustrate
the experimental process (similar to the method for silk-screening
t-shirts) by which they superimposed photographs onto concrete at
the Eberswalde library. Nearby, one learns that the intriguing
photographs reproduced in this manner were selected by artist Thomas
Ruff, a frequent collaborator. The Warhol image testifies to the
fact that an antecedent use of photography in architecture was the
mug shots of ‘most-wanted’ fugitives that Warhol initially placed
on the outside of a pavilion at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair
(which were quickly painted over to avoid lawsuits).
The
commercialism is central if not crucial. Tod Williams and Billie
Tsien, New York architects with similarly refined artistic and experimental
sensibilities, unabashedly refuse to do commercial projects, sticking
to museums, libraries and the like. By contrast, some of Herzog
& de Meuron’s most pleasing projects arise in the industrial
and retail sectors.
For
example, rising in Tokyo is Herzog & DeMeuron’s Prada store.
Prada’s top-of-the-line brand identity is somewhat bound up with
Pritzker-level architecture, as in the undulating floors of the
store Rem Koolhaas of the Netherlands designed for Prada in New
York. The Herzog & de Meuron Prada is all diamonds – on the
surface, in the shape of the structural elements, in the geometry
of the building itself. A plethora of models in various materials
shows how the architects played with this idea through dozens of
iterations.
Even
more compelling is the exhibition’s video evidence of what Herzog
& de Meuron have done at the Auf dem Wolf rail yard in their
home city of Basel. Architects love to talk about site-specific
design, but that usually means creating a building in resonance
with a woodland or a seashore or a grand city boulevard. Video
screens at the CCA reveal an equally satisfying and more difficultly
wrought resonance in a rail yard – locomotives pound their way into
and out of the tough-looking barn the architects built for them;
workers tightly wind a copper strip around the Herzog & de Meuron
signal tower that is designed to evoke the bulky metal signaling
devices employed before everything went digital.
A
certain skepticism about the Herzog & de Meuron show is probably
justified, given the state of the profession at the world-class
level. Many celebrity architects –Koolhaas, the American Peter
Eisenman, Germany’s Daniel Liebeskind come to mind – have followed
a well-trod path to fame and fortune not by winning actual commissions
but by exhibiting their ideas and wares for year after year in
the museum hall and in the classroom, usually at an Ivy League school
with a graduate architecture program. Wealthy institutional clients
then come calling, and the resulting buildings are only sometimes
great.
Herzog
& de Meuron are not playing this game, even if they seem to
be using a museum show to advance lofty notions about art and culture.
The world will little note, nor long remember, all the blob-like
Gehry models on display last year at the Guggenheim Museum in New
York, which is now in serious financial trouble and just cancelled
big plans to build such a blob on the East River as another Guggenheim
annex. Far more likely to endure is the compelling image of the
Dominus winery, on display at the CCA, that photographer Jeff Wall
captured for the museum.
Wall
is an artist; he doesn’t photograph on demand. He only agreed
to visit the Napa Valley if the CCA would pay him and risk his return
with nothing he was willing to show. The risk paid off: Wall’s
huge photo shows the low, dark building as a distant element in
a landscape of hills and trees. In the foreground is the vineyard
itself, in its dormant season, with the individual vines resembling
nothing so much as a perfect grid of Christs on the cross. Like
any such geometrical arrangement, this stark checkerboard of bare
flora creates diagonal pathways, one of which leads to a rectangular
entrance that slashes all the way through the winery building.
Perfectly communicated in Wall’s photo is the manner in which the
stone-covered building bridges the spiritual gap between the natural
setting of the winery and the extensive human intervention required
to turn grapes into wine.
Receiving
and processing that communication, along with all of the others
intended by Ursprung in connection with his archaeological approach
to these important architects, requires some work. Making demands
of that sort on museumgoers is fully in keeping with the CCA’s overall
stance. There are reasons this institution calls itself a “centre”
rather than a museum, a method to the apparent madness of eschewing
a museum store with flashy merchandise in favor of a serious bookshop,
a logic to the way in which the CCA is set back like a quiet fortress
on the unassuming rue Baile.
It
is the stance, the method and the logic of integrity -- a triumph
of substance over marketing. There’s room in this world for the
CCA’s U.S. counterpart, the National Building Museum in Washington,
which favors Frank Lloyd Wright scarves in its store and pleasingly
accessible exhibitions like the current “Do It Yourself: Home
Improvement in 20 th Century America.” The ornate Great Hall of
the National Building Museum is 15 stories tall and 116 years old
– an incomparable space that is the work of a restless architectural
dreamer named Montgomery Meigs. There are similarly restless dreamers
at work today; the work of two of them is on display on rue Baile
in Montreal.
* * * *
The museum’s
address is 1920 rue Baile in Montreal. The phone number is (514)
939-7026. The museum recommends using the Guy Concordia metro
stop (thought I use the Georges-Vanier stop, which requires a walk
through a spooky tunnel under an expressway to get to the museum).
The Hours are Tuesday
to Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm and Thursday,
11 am to 9 pm. Adults $6, seniors
(65 and over)$4, students $3; no charge for Friends of the CCA,
persons with limited mobility, and children aged 12 and under. Free
admission on Thursdays after 5:30 pm (all day for students). The
Herzog & de Meuron show is continuing until April 6.
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