LIGA at the Graham Foundation. Spaces without drama or surface is an illusion, but so is depth
Since architecture is continuously contaminated by other disciplines and external influences, collage have been a preferred medium to infuse the dry architectural drafting with colorful cut-out figures, landscapes and skies from magazines, postcards and books. From the sparing compositions by Mies van der Rohe, the dadaist mash-ups by Hans Hollein and the pop-collages by Archigram to the early digital collages by OMA, graphical assemblages constitute a substantial part of the history of architectural representation. Now, since the beginning of current century there is notably a renewed interest in ‘collage’ as a modus operandi to visualize architectural ideas. Contemporary online platforms, such as Koozarch, demonstrate the excitement around the technique, now heavily supported by digital tools such as Photoshop and Illustrator. Many of the images we see online have a poster-like quality; an aura that is more related to the two-dimensional world of graphic illustration and painting, then the spatial compositions of architecture. Indeed, instead of pursuing depths and spatial effects in their drawing, this younger generation of architects has chosen to look at Gauguin, Cézanne, Hopper and Hockney: painterly techniques in which mass and volume is reduced to abstract flat surfaces.
Just in the same way as the hard black on white outlines in Oswald Mathias Ungers ’60s axonometric drawings, superseded the tonally amplified and illusionistic embellished style of the mid century architecture, the digital collage allowed a new generation to distance themselves form the slickness and commercial character of digital rendering. This technique gave their work more of bold, edgy, rough and imprecise character. The use of found fragments, textures and images, allows designers as well to place their work within a historical continuum, establishing bridges and references to pre-existing work and predecessors. Instead of working within an abstract paper space employing anonymous building blocks from rendering libraries and CAD Catalogues, collages are constructed out of meaningful fragments and references, each one with its own memoir and narrative. The pragmatic build-up of these collages have furthermore completely changed the angles and viewpoints through which architecture is observed. Their main compositional elements are often two-dimensional elevations, pulled straight from the architect’s drawing board: a superposition of perspective-less graphics. The result is a controlled image, precisely framed and with a fixed relation between observer and object, an architectural imaginary that is more visual composition then spatial creation. Image rather than space.
A similar thing happens in contemporary architecture photography. Instead of the dramatic angles displayed by modernist Julius Shulman in the past or Iwan Baan nowadays, many contemporary photographers now show an interest in a sparse orthogonal registration. Influenced by artists like Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky and other disciples of the Becher Schule, they depict buildings frontally, placing the camera –when possible- orthogonal to the façade and centered to the central composition axis of the building: the result is an image which almost reduces the building to a precise elevation, an architectural drawing. The intriguing part is however not how projects and buildings are portrayed, but rather – the other way around- how this representational technique provokes a specific type of architectural composition. In the same way the walls and diamond shapes of Hejduk were inextricably related to the world of oblique drawing, collage has come hand in hand with its own serie of spatial typologies and solutions that operate comfortably within the boundaries of its graphic methodology. Box-like buildings, rooms in enfilade, modular plan layouts, grid compositions, specific surface treatments and specific axial arrangements can therefore be seen as direct by-products of those representational techniques. Creating architecture by means precisely framed compositions in which two dimensional surfaces are glued on top of the other, delivers buildings with a highly graphical and sequential quality. The Landmark Nieuw Bergen[1] by Dutch office Monadnock is a good example of a building that is at least is much an image as much as it is a building. Its decorative façade treatment, the 45 degree rotating volumes and its central position on the urban plaza, are there to create a precise urban scenography: a blown-up stage prop designed to attribute a picturesque quality to the otherwise dull environment. The Weekend House in Merchtem by Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen, or the interior living space of the Cien House[2] by the Chilean-Argentinian duo Pezo von Ellrichshaussen, show a continuity of spaces neatly separated by sets of parallel walls, establish a precisely orchestrated visual experience.
The use of these of repetitive parallel surfaces to control and direct the view of the spectator within an architectural interior, brings in mind the spatial layout of classical proscenium theaters[3] where continuous sets of legs (side curtains) and backdrops prevent the public to see into the backstage area. A combination of drapes and painted sceneries would be lifted up or down from complex rigging systems in the fly tower, to evoke different atmospheres and locations on stage. The 19th Century English Toy Theater or Paper Theater reflects this technical stage construction in a comprehensive miniature version. These wondrous mini stages were often sold as kits at the concession stand of an opera house, playhouse, or vaudeville theater and consisted of a set of graphic plates that had to be cut-out, painted and assembled into a wooden miniature theatre box.[4] By means of cutout figures the play could then be performed for family members and guests, sometimes even with live musical accompaniment. The complex history and evolution of this particular form of miniature theater is absolutely intriguing and remnants of its history can still be seen at Pollock’s Toy Museum in London. Just as in the world of the graphical collage, the small viewing boxes staged tridimensional environments by superposing different layers of flat figurative images. Although modern stage design, impelled by the revolutionary compositions of Adolph Appia and Craig Gordon, abandoned the idea of the pictorial flats in favor of a more spatial and volumetric stage composition, the traditional painted scenery always kept appealing to stage designers as a sort of uhr-form of their discipline. Davick Hockney’s mise-en-scene for the Magic Flute performed at the Glyndebourne Festival Opera in 1978, is a good example of how these flat surfaces allowed to establish connections between the world of the stage and his work as a painter. “Hockney, for all the inventiveness of his design, is essentially a traditionalist when it comes to setting the stage. He prefers the simple box set with wide wings to say, to an artfully angles interior. To that end he has made fresh use of the conventional stage flat. He delights in the obvious artificiality of this ancient stage device, placing one painted flat behind the other to suggest vast distance within Glyndebourne’s small viewing box.”[5]
In the same year that Hockney presented his stage set for the Magic Flute, the Italian architect Aldo Rossi also combined graphical imagery and spatial composition in a very particular theatrical device. He inserted painted backgrounds, very similar in perspectival composition and color intensity as the theatrical flats made by Hockney for his opera, into a small wooden and steel box, about the size of a those 19th Toy theaters we mentioned before. Somewhere between machine, theater and toy, his ‘Little Scientific Theater’ had a particular typological shape, based on the theaters one can find in the small villages of northern Italy. Rossi referred to it ‘as a machine for architectural experimentation’,[6] and called it scientific in reference to the scientific theater in Manta, the anatomical theater of Padova and similar Italian theaters from the eighteenth Century.[7] These specific theaters must have been a recurrent reference for a group of Italian architects, seen that Franco Purini had build a Scientific Theater as part of the ROMA ESTATE festival in the summer of 1976 in the outskirts of Rome. This temporary construction consisted of a 7.2 by 7.2 meter stage surrounded by an interior façade of white-washed wooden boards and scaffolding for the public to stand on. Rossi must absolutely have seen the powerful images those experimental performances generated.
It is unclear what Rossi’s actual reason was to build this ambiguous object: it does not seems to be commissioned by anyone or realized to take part in any particular exhibition or publication. Frank Godlewski, a young stagiair who worked at Rossi’s studio at the Via Maddalena in Milan during those years narrates how the object would just stand on his desk, or on a small table covered with a piece of textile and that Rossi would play around with it frequently: oil paintings and pencil drawing would be used as backdrops, compositional elements of different projects would be presented in it and even coffee pots and toy cars became part of the arranged scene. “Rossi’s daughter Vera loved it … and in order for her to like it, Rossi always asked us to use lots of bright and strong colors when we drew or modeled something for it.”[8] When he was satisfied with a certain composition, he would then ask one of his collaborators to take pictures of it.
Apart from some texts by Rossi himself, there is hardly any writing on the Little Scientific Theatre, which is surprising for an enigmatic production by such a well-known and published architect. For many years, a short article written by Rafael Moneo in 1979 was the only really engaging text on the subject. It is not until 2014, when Jorge Palinhos and Maria Helena Maia organize a congress enquiring the reciprocal relations between theater and architecture in Porto, that a new essay on the subject was added by Portuguese scholar Daniela Sá.[9] In her essay she reviews meticulously the different factors that might have provoked the birth of the particular device. Among many facts, she recalls that Rossi was married to the Swiss actress, Sonia Gessner, and that he might have attended frequently to rehearsals of her plays, explaining the many references to empty theatres and stages in his oeuvre. Rossi writes: “I particularly love empty theatres with few lights lit and, most of all, those partial rehearsals where the voices repeat the same bar, interrupt it, resume it, remaining in the potentiality of the action.”[10] The stage and scale model are similar in the way they are open ended and anticipate the narrative. The continuous rehearsals and tryouts on the theater stage and within the architectural scale model, procure that the personal drama of speculating and creating fictions takes place. As Moneo suggests in relation to Rossi ‘s puppet-sized playhouse, it is “only the fiction of theatre that allows us to understand reality”.[11]
In this exhibition called “Spaces Without Drama, or Surface is Illusion but so is Depth”, we have asked architects, artists and a dramaturge to work around this fascinating relation between architecture and theatrical scenery. Triggered by Rossi’s Little Scientific Theater and the 19th Century toy theaters, participants were asked to use the lens of traditional theatrical techniques to explore the complex interaction between pictorial representation and 3-dimensional space. Intertwining their own personal fascinations and obsessions with the curatorial enquery, some have presented their proposal in the form of miniature stage sets, while others play with specific context of the Madlener House or elaborated on time-based pieces. The 16 pieces that were produced ex-profeso for this exhibition, are placed within the exhibition next to contemporary and historical references that have guided this project. The space of the Graham Foundation is hereby used as a double stage: a staging of mise-en-scénes.
The double title of the exhibition refers to the lengthy title of a movie made David Hockney and Philip Haas in 1988: “Day on the Grand Canal with the Emperor of China or surface is illusion, but so is depth”. In the movie Hockney unveils the differences between two ancient Chinese scrolls and explains us how Western society has always been fixated on the idea of perspective and the position of the camera. As soon as the camera is locked into position, Hockney seems to suggest, the narrative ends. And that is maybe the genius of Rossi’s Little Scientific Theater. Although the perspective was always precisely framed, the stage set itself was in a continuous transformation and change, undergoing incessant additions and subtractions. As Rossi stated about the theatre: “Inside it, nothing can be accidental, yet nothing can be permanently resolved either.”[12]
Notes:
[1] Plot 31.
[2] PLOT especial Nº1 Sudamérica Doméstica, June, 2012.
[3] The frame or arch separating the stage from the auditorium, through which the action of a play is viewed.
[4] The complex history and evolution of this particular precursor of the television set, is absolutely fascinating and remnants of its history can still be seen at Pollock’s Toy Museum in London.
[5] Friedman, Martin, ‘Hockney Paints The Stage’, Walker Art Center – Abbeville Press NYC, 1983, p. 119.
[6] ‘Aldo Rossi, 21 Works’, A+U (Extra Edition), Tokyo, 1982, p. 104.
[7] We must note as well, that Franco Purini had build a Scientific Theater in the summer of 1976 in the outskirts of Rome as part of the ROMA ESTATE festival. This temporary construction consisted of a small stage surrounded by an interior façade of white-washed wooden boards and scaffolding for the public to stand on. Rossi must absolutely have seen the powerful images those experimental performances generated. See: Franco Purini e collaboratori, ‘Effimero romano. Quattro progetti / Roman Transience. Four Projects’ in LOTUS 25, 1979.
[8] Interview with Frank Godlewski on January 9, 2017.
[9] Daniela Sá, ‘Drama and Project, The Little Scientific Theatre of Aldo Rossi’ (unpublished), presented at the International Congress ‘Dramatic Architectures, Places of Drama-Drama for Places’, organized by Jorge Palinhos and Maria Helena Maia, Porto, 2014.
[10] Rossi, Aldo, A Scientific Autobiography. MIT Press – Opposition Books, New York, 1981, p. 20.
[11] Moneo, Rafael, ‘La obra reciente de Aldo Rossi.’ Dos Reflexiones. 2C – Construcción de la Ciudad, No. 14, 1979, p. 38.
[12] Rossi, Aldo, A Scientific Autobiography. MIT Press – Opposition Books, New York, 1981, p. 43.
