LIGA 33: Amunátegui Valdés (Chl). Compendium
Photography: Arturo Arrieta
If [architects] were looking at [buildings], they would not see
anything. . . [Architects] start seeing something once they stop
looking at [buildings] and look exclusively and obsessively at prints
and flat inscriptions.
After Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” 1986.
In the essay, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” Bruno Latour recalls the story of the French naval officer, La Pérouse, who follows Louis XVI’s orders and travels to the far east to determine whether Sakhalin is an island or a peninsula. This voyage, of course, is arduous, but as it turns out, the task can be easily completed, thanks to the work of a man who is native to the land, who answers his questions accurately by tracing the shape of the coastline in the sand. But this missing piece of evidence, necessary to complete the royal map and thus gain influence in global trade and power, cannot be brought back to Versailles in its fleeting form. The drawing must be logged in a notebook, scaled to standard measurements, and disciplined by Mercator’s projections. To perform its function, the sketch must first be turned into what Latour calls, an immutable mobile, a stable piece of technical information that can be encoded by mathematical rules. In its new portable form, this drawing can then be shared, compared, and presented with other similarly coded drawings to build a bigger picture, contributing to a sort of “compendium” of the world.
In the context of the current exhibit at LIGA, Space for Architecture in Mexico City, Compendium: On a Way of Articulating Realities, the two collaborators—Cristóbal Amunátegui and Alejandro Valdés of the architecture office Amunátegui Valdés (Santiago de Chile and Los Angeles, California)—seem to have taken up a colossal task similar to that of La Pérouse. They have traveled far and wide and returned with images that constitute over a hundred different sorts of things: tables, built-ins, machines, boudoirs, pissoirs, round interiors, stairs, alcoves, niches, theaters, sails, circus tents, skirts, light bulbs, and door handles. They traversed journals, photographs, patents, drawings, interiors, details, and encyclopedic entries, and they brought the things together in a visual and textual compendium for the exhibition.
“Compendium” is a word that signifies an abridged version, a portable summary of a lengthy and otherwise unwieldy treatise. And on display, each found image stands in for a low-res attachment, captioned with Author, Title, and Year, referencing some original out there in the world. These are the “flat inscriptions” that have defined the intellectual and visual culture of this North and South American split office’s long-distance communications. One can only imagine the email exchanges, text messages, WhatsApp calls, dropbox folders, and zoom meetings between two friends and their clients, filled with zipped attachments to historic precedents, or a link to an image of a sort-of “readymade” for the project at hand. Sources of inspiration and interpretation, they formulate a landscape of forms from which new buildings can be drawn.
One of these images is a photograph of an original readymade, a door built by a carpenter for Marcel Duchamp in his Paris apartment at 11, rue Larrey (1927). Curiously, this door, located in the corner of one room, swings between two openings, one framed out and the other simply cut to fit its profile. It is both a philosophical and a material object, which opens one room while enclosing another. For architects, this door offers many formal possibilities at different scales, therefore, providing a visual stand-in for dealing with the formal articulation of corners, defying conventional distinctions of private and public. Similarly, these architects have turned a slew of images into Duchamp-style readymades for their compendium of forms. Taken out of their original contexts, voided of their functions, and brought together in one unifying format, the objects can now emerge as architectural building blocks.
The unifying format is a significant alternation to the objects collected by Amunátegui Valdés: after all, the sources are all quite varied. In addition to these flattened references, the exhibit features over fifty models on display. Each based on an image, but sometimes difficult to discern which one precisely. They are three-dimensional and diminutive: plastic, printed on a couple of 3D printers, probably over a period of several hundred hours. They measure between 8 cm and 25 cm, and they are unpainted. They are not beautiful, but they all have utilitarian quality that allows them to jump scales and emerge as a house, a city block, a courtyard, or a pyramid. There are piles of them. Although they appear generic, they are distinct in geometric precision. As a collection of prints, they defy an origin story or precious identity: somehow their publication had already rid them of any recourse to size, location, function, tectonic, material, or date; the models make them even further interchangeable and comparable. They all share the same lack of detail, the same attention to form. A lamp shade could be mistaken for a skirt frame, which in turn could be taken for a dome.
It is a surrealist exercise perhaps, to bring unlike things together in one space, and to begin to play the game of dissection and assembly. We may be reminded of that famous description by the Comte de Lautréamont of a youth who was as “beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting-table of a sewing-machine and an umbrella,”( Les Chants de Maldoror, 1868). The surrealists brought this phrase into circulation to unite objects based not on their function but on their familiarity. Even though the Anatomical Theater of Leiden (1594) is represented in the collection, dissection in its gory but expert practice is no longer needed for the digital experiment to take place. Instead, the vast space contained within a rhino file is linked to polylactic acid filament to give the drawings their three-dimensional form, stripping them bare of qualities. The file merely locates the drawings in gridded space, where specific images turn into generic forms, and where they can mix their new genetic material into a plastic monolith. Is this what Latour may have referred to as a “strategy of deflation”? And is rhino the deflating medium par excellence?
Not included in the show but described by Amunátegui Valdés in their exhibition essay, is a painting by Arduino Cantáfora, titled La Città banale (1980). It also presents a deflated vision of a conglomerate of buildings, car tunnels, billboards, radiators and windowsills. These too are brought together by a unifying device. The view out of the window depicts an unrolled panorama of a road vanishing toward its two points of infinity. The distinctly American billboard in the center of the frame, seen twice in drive-by, from both the front and the back, provides a point of symmetry in the scene, and the origin for the two perspectives. It is this painting that allows the architects to dwell on the importance of reality and on the value of banal, everyday objects and buildings. Amunátegui Valdés offer us more than mere “optical consistency.” Although the show is optically consistent in its technical outputs, it certainly is not in its historical inputs. They rewrite the notion of what a precedent can be – not only architectural, not always elevated, not merely authored, not necessarily canonical. And they carry on forward, with an image of history, in their rearview mirror.
