ON-LGGATIGN-

A FORM OF
RECOLLFCTIO
The Architectural
Interiors ot Luisa Lambri
BY SUSAN MORGAN

Since 1996 Luisa Lambri has been producing exquisite images

of unoccupied interiors: an empty hallway flanked by an ominous
battalion of half-opened doors: ribbons of unremitting sunlight
seeping through a tightly shuttered window; an unadorned plaster
wall glowing, shadowy and radiant as a full moon.
Lambri was born in Como, Italy, and studied philosophy and
literature at Milan's Universit degli Studi, An inveterate traveler
by nature, she began to take photographs in order to create a
record of where she had been. Disregarding the familiar views of
well-documented edifices and celebrated landscapes, she chose
instead to picture the smaller spacesprivate homes and hotel
roomswhere she had actually lingered. Like an absentee diarist
or an off-screen narrator, she was able to conjure up the presence
and particularities of a remembered place and the inevitable
absence of a transient observer.
In 1999 Lambri decided to make a 16-millimeter film, Untitled
(Solitrac), a 3-minute-40-second loop of a camera's eye roaming
the corridors of two Mussolini-era buildings in Como, masterworks
by Rationalist architect Giuseppe Terragni: the Sant'Elia nursery

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 school (1937), Lambri's kindergarten alma mater; and the Casa
del Fascio (1932-36), an elegant International Style palazzo
originally created to house Fascist party offices and host political
rallies. Although Lambri filmed each Terragni building in what
she has described as "a straightforward documentary style," her
editing merged the two buildings into a single frame, blurring the
distinctions between the sites and delivering a newly contrived
image, a visual rendition of an invented space. In Lambri's film
loop, a clearly defined but virtually nonexistent place appears, as
palpable and unreliable as a memory.
Lambri works in a boundlessly international tradition; a kind of
urbane itinerancy that is common among many of today's artists.
Although she is based primarily in Milan, her ongoing project,
photographing details of architecturally significant spaces, is
both far-flung and narrowly focused. She has been awarded
artist residencies in the United States, Brazil, England, Finland,
Italy, Japan, and Sweden. A quick sampling of her photographic
subjectsincluding R. M. Schindler's Kings Road house (Los
Angeles, 1922), Lina Bo Bardi's Casa de Vidro (Sao Paulo, 1951),
Pierre Koenig's Case Study House no. 22 (Los Angeles, 1960),
and the House in Plum Grove (Tokyo, 2003, by the firm SANAA,
recent Pritzker Prize laureates)could rival Galinsky, the informed
online guide to the world's great modern buildings. When architect
Kazuyo Sejima, SANAA partner and director of the 2010 Venice
Architecture Biennale, commissioned Lambri to participate in the
exhibition People Meet in Architecture, she presented a selection
of photographs focused on the varying shades of natural green
that frame, surround, and spring up around well-known buildings.
In an interview with architect Stefano Mirti for the Italian design
magazine Abitare, Lambri confessed that she has always "used
architecture to talk about something else." She and Mirti first met
in 1996 when he organized a tour of Turin for her. "It was a proper
architecture course," she recalled, "a whole series of afternoons
spent visiting some pretty strange places; derelict factories, the
basements of the Molinette hospital. Villa Gualino, the DuParc."
The built environment that Mirti clearly understood as architecture,
Lambri said, is what she had previously called simply "place";
quotidian environments, rather than highly premeditated habitats.
Lambri often refers to her photographs as "self-portraits"
although they are not, in any traditional senseand her pursuit
of modern domestic architecture provides her with an ideal
framework. Her photographs of spaces deliver an experiential
record, an account of individual perception occurring in a rigorously
intentioned setting, a glimpse into the sensations of place and
the passage of time. Self-portraiture is, of course, a pliable
and enormously broad subject for an artist, suggesting untold
interpretations ranging from ruthless pencil drawings to hyperbolic
performances.
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Gina Pane, Cindy Sherman, and Francesca Woodman are
artists that Lambri generally cites as influences on her own
work. Beginning in the late 1970s, these artists finessed the
realm of self-portraiture into a staging ground for questions and
attitudes about feminism, psychoanalysis, the body, and cultural
stereotypes. Many of the scenes they portrayed occurred within
the confines of a domestic setting. In Sherman's series of Untitled
Film Stills (which she began in 1977), a single woman variously
peers out through draperies, sits poised in an open tenement
window, or leans dejectedly against a spattered kitchen door.
Woodman photographed herself disappearing into windows and
mirrors, pressed against old mottled walls and concealed beneath
sheets of decrepit wallpaper. Pane's 1968 film Solitrac provided
the inspiration (and subtitle) for Lambri's later film; in Pane's piece,
a woman, alone in an apartment, constantly opens and closes
doors, but is never able to get out. These constructed images,
the forceful and disquieting rooms, hint at Sigmund Freud's
Interpretation of Dreams: in the dream imagination, the house is
a symbol of identity and the human body, and a room is a woman.
As Lambri began to photograph interiors, she examined how
you might find yourself within a space and what it is that you feel
once you are there. Space, the writer Esther McCoy observed, is
actually one of architecture's essential building materials. When
McCoy's landmark book. Five California Architects, was published
in 1960, her approach to architectural writing was met with
skepticism; academic architectural historians had long focused
their discussions on building faades and exterior construction.
McCoy, a literary writer and non-academic, looked by contrast at
floor plans and how people move through interior spacesand
through these actions and elements she recognized the compelling
plot of modern architecture. This viewpoint is replicated in Lambri's
photographs, where the faades of buildings never appear. Her
camera's eye is deliberately subjective, taking in odd angles,
junctures, thresholds, the subtle but revelatory shifts of daylight,
how spaces flow between indoors and out, and where nature might
collide with architecture.
By focusing entirely on the view from within, Lambri's work falls
far outside the established category of architectural photography.
Even the most iconic structures of twentieth-century architecture
Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye in Poissy, France; Gerrit Rietveld's
Schrder House in Utrecht, Netherlandsappear unrecognizable
and abstract in her photographs. She looks at inhabited spaces,
the private lives of houses, and seeks out details, overlooked
or evocative elements and unanticipated situations. At Richard
Neutra's Strathmore Apartments (Los Angeles, 1937), she
photographed bands of light seeping through the Venetian blinds,
echoing the rhythm of Neutra's design; alternating between solids
and air and always insistently horizontal. At Philip Johnson's Menil
House (Houston, 1950), a low-slung brick building that presents a
windowless faade to the street, Lambri documented an interior
courtyard as a thunderstorm approached. A door is slightly ajar
and the glass walls are clouded white with humidity. The courtyard
garden is tropical, damp as a terrarium and overgrown with ferns,
palms, and banana trees. The garden appears otherworldly, a lost
planet drifting toward the interior of cool steel and gleaming black
tile floors.
Lambri's photographs are unstaged; she doesn't move furniture
or add objects. She shoots hundreds of large-format photographs
onsite and then scrupulously edits her selection. During that
process, however, she digitally manipulates the images, adjusting
the light and contrast In order to create a truer feeling, her own
poetic truth, of the place being portrayed.
Being There, Lambri's 2010 exhibition at the Hammer Museum
of the University of California at Los Angeles, featured a series of
photographs taken at John Lautner's Sheats Goldstein residence
(Los Angeles, 1963). Built into a steep hillside, Lautner's house
is cavernous and imposing, an angular concrete-and-steel shelter
with low timbered ceilings and vast glass walls that survey a nearly
endless prospect. After studying the interior, Lambri turned her
back to the spectacular view. Looking up through the house's
small skylights, she photographed a more specific and intimate
vista: a patch of sky, sunlight, shadows, and a tracery of leafy
branches. In an essay written to accompany that exhibition, curator
Alma Ruiz compares Lambri's interest in the phenomenal aspects
of a site to the work of artists such as Larry Bell and Robert
Irwinproponents of the Light and Space movement that started
in California in the late 1960s, espousing a reductivist approach
to art-making, challenging viewers' perceptual experience and
questioning the artist's need to produce material objects. Lambri's
work and her experiential approach certainly evoke questions
about visual perception and physical sensation, but her decision
to make photographs seems to run a zigzag course leading much
further back into art history and the origins of photography.

Through her photographs, Lambri aims to capture light, shadows,

imminent storms, and ephemeral experience. Looking up through a
modernist skylight, she photographs a lacy sunlit pattern of leaves
and branches floating in an illuminated and unreadable space. It is
an image that recalls nineteenth-century cyanotypessuch as the
stark and wondrously luminous algae studies produced by Anna
Atkins in the 1840s. Light, Lambri's work reminds us, has always
been photography's subject.

PAGES 32-33: Untltled (Menil House, #01), 2002. THIS PAGE, FROM
TOP: Untitled (Strathmore Apartments, #054); Untitled (Strathmore
Apartments, #46); Untitled (Strathmore Apartments, #47); Untitled
(Strathmore Apartments, #44), all 2002.
 TOP: Untitled (Barragan House #06);
BOTTOM: Untitled (Barragan House #11), both 2005.

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 TOP: Untitled (Barragan House 009);
BOTTOM: Untitled (Barragan House #12), both 2005.

no. 2( 2 apcfttirc / ,5-

 THIS PAGE: Untitled (Schindler House, Wl}, 2007;
OPPOSITE: Untitied (Sheats Goldstein House, #15), 2007.
All photographs courtesy Lutiring Augustine, New York/Thomas Dane, London/Marc Foxx. Los Angeles;
Barragan House images Barragan Foundation. Switzerland
no. 2( 2 apcrtiirc /
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