Extended Paradigm of a House

Conceptualisation of architecture and relation to architectural form in contemporary art

Vjenceslav Richter, Synthurbanism, Heliopolis – the Four-dimensional City, 1968

An open notion of art, new artistic media and a glossary that includes engineering terms like
„installations“, as well as introducing art in public spaces (by equalling public and political space,
artistic installations in public spaces may be perceived as reminders of the fact that social space is
created and structured in various conflict processes) are often related to or aim at the
conceptualization of architecture as well as recreation of architectural space and mass. This is
frequently justified by using Wittgenstein's metaphor of „family resemblance“ (Familienähnlichkeiten).
For example, Peter Eisenman designed his houses (House II-VI) by means of conceptualizing
architecture according to syntactic rules. He divided the cube of a building into a regular grid which
can be defined in space with pillars or parallel walls, and this resulted in the necessity of installing a
glass slot in the centre of the bedroom in House VI, realized in 1975. Single beds were placed on each
side of the slot, in other words, a double bed was split in half. Such sequential linearity in the project is
called architectonics by the author. According to his strategy of post-functionalism, the starting point of
classical and modern architecture is the subject, while he suggests post-humanist disappearance of
the subject, the so-called „vanishing subject“.

Heliopolis by Vjenceslav Richter can be singled out as a good example of conceptual housing
architecture in modernism. For several years starting in 1964, he developed a concept of a synthetic
ideal city (or „synthurbanism“) called Heliopolis. In housing ziggurats, rotating very slowly but with
different velocities, residents of Heliopolis would wake up every morning on different sides of the world
and in different neighbourhoods. Since the rotation was programmed so as to avoid repetition, the city
is constantly new and different. Such an ambience is marked by the term “polient”, so far lacking a
complete definition and it depends on our abilities of reception, on the achievements of scientific
instruments, and on scientific and artistic thought, stresses the author. Parallel to synturbanist
projects, Richter created a so-called “simultaneous perspective” as an informative graphic system by
means of which it is possible to provide the complete technical information about a presented object in
terms of perspective. As each presented room contains its own vanishing point, the thickness and
structure of the walls, as well as both sides of the walls and fitted installations can be shown. In
opposition to the romanticism of the past that used to invite us to get lost in the nature, today we are
motivated to think about our relationship with nature, as H. H. Arnason says.

In the second case, contemporary art, in the medium of film, video or an expanded notion of a
sculpture (according to Rosalind Krauss who thematises passages in sculpture), often uses
architecture and its discursive space as a medium of communication with tradition (or breaking away
from it), a construct of identity and container of symbols. Interpenetration of space and time,
performative mises-en-scène, and perceptive patterns of the medium of photography and film, as well
as video, are themes of film creations by Ursula Mayer. They are imagined as cyclical image
structures that have architecture as their starting point and its fictional character. Often, women pass
through historical interiors in these films and touch objects and elements of architecture there,
questioning the identity of space, but also questioning their own identity through contemplation about
their personal history. They do so by posing questions of psychological construction of recollection,
multiplicity of memorized images evoked in memory by experiencing space of objects in this space.
The relationship between the subject and the object can be defined as “pleasure of observation” or
“pleasure of being observed”. In the work The Chrystal Gaze, there are three women in luxurious
rooms of the London Art Deco Eltham Palace, as a visual parallel to iconic elements of a Hollywood
film. The bodies of the protagonists become pictures, images, fragmented and reflected in the
metaphor of “clear view”. Therefore, they embody the unbearable seductiveness of an image into
which it is impossible to enter; nevertheless, it is also impossible to evade it. Interiors are sequential
scenes of an older and younger woman in the interior of a family house, the work of architect Erno
Goldfinger in Hampstead, a haunt of the artistic avant-guard in London in the1930s. Contrasting the
traditional and modern has been achieved by means of the model of a sculpture by Barbara Hepworth
which can be seen in some scenes. Imagined as a trilogy of video works (created as analogous films
and then digitalized). Portland Place 33 presents a Victorian house with large, almost empty rooms,
Keeling House deals with a housing building in London of the 1950s, and Villa Mairea has a house of
Alvaro Aalto as the protagonist of the narrative. The scenes, movement of the camera from one room
to another, and dream-like shots evoke the “mannerist” film language of Michelangelo Antonioni.
Giacometti dealt with perception of void and presentation of “negative space” in the medium of
sculpture. The manner in which an object fills space, the importance of empty space is an expression
of man’s inner emptiness and he is searching all his life to fill this emptiness.

Replacing architecture with sculpture in a work by Rachel Whiteread concerns the elementary, binary
problem: whether architecture is defined by function or is a system of ideas. A series of casts of
interiors or models of Victorian houses n real size transformed into an abstract form of non.-uterine
space, non-soft surroundings, House is negative “reversed” into positive, a three-dimensional exercise
in spatial dynamics and statics, having its starting point in the Dadaist perception of art as temporary
act. For her concrete cast of the entire interior of a Victorian terraced house. Whiteread won Britain’s
prestigious Turner Prize for contemporary art. The replica came into being by inserting liquid cement
into the empty skeleton of the building and then its exterior walls were removed; thus, “negative space”
was created, not inhabited by objects and people, like a monument to a lost household. Controversies
around the construction of the house (it was exhibited on the original location of this particular house,
which had been cleared earlier after a decision by local government) and its demolition (in 1994, the
same local government ordered the demolition of this architectural sculpture as well), made this
building a trigger for public debate on the role of contemporary art in Great Britain.

Since he was sixteen, or since 1985, Gregor Schneider has been dealing with transformation of the
interior of the house he inherited from his father. As a kind of work-in-progress, the space of the
suburban house has constantly been changing, new rooms have constantly been emerging, like a
room in a room, not visible to an observer, but slowly moving, hiding from sight thanks to machines
which push them or move the ceiling; existing rooms are partitioned, windows are closed, other fake
windows are added in their place- Some rooms are inaccessible, hidden behind walls or isolated by
concrete or lead partitions or materials that absorb sound. Cavities and in-between spaces are the real
form of this artistic installation. Lamps which are installed on the outside simulate different times of the
day in the interior. The result is a labyrinth-like structure called Haus u r (A House in Unterheydener
Street in the town of Rheydt) by the author. From time to time, visitors are invited to spend the night in
the house and to share private space with the artist. However, many feel intensely uncomfortable in
such a house. Schneider won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2001 when he exhibited the
entire house in the German Pavilion. The house was transported with all of its 24 rooms and weight of
150 tons and was exhibited in Venice as Totes Haus u r.

Space, in its diverse iterations and in contemporary culture, has been defined more and more as a
product of subjective projection and interjection instead of being perceived as a stable container of
objects and bodies. Pseudo-architectural models by Mike Kelley resulted from the theory of “repressed
memory syndrome” from the classic essay by Sigmund Freud of 1899 according to which memory is
considered a function of time and temporariness is a narrative that provides life and individual
biographies with meaningfulness. Nevertheless, while Freud was oriented towards memories and
events that happened in time, Kelley evokes memory of space and the ambience of “primary scenes”
in the classroom, corridors, entrances, memory of “forgotten places” (by means of a procedure called
“abjection”, which means the state of being discarded, degraded) of early events in life as “sublimed”
architecture of “über-architecture”.

An architectural model d large scale represents memories of space, different schools the artist
attended and spaces of homes he lived as a child in accordance with the tradition of special
interactions of art and architecture as well as in questioning the influence of space and institutions,
patterns of repression and mental reconstruction on formation of a man as subject. The model was
stopped in its elaboration on the boundary between the possible and impossible with which it eludes
the possibility to be defined as a work of architecture. “Memory loss” and implanted fictions have led to
the loss of space, remembrance of space. In the words of the author, some 80% of space which we
occupied and in which we have dwelled has been “forgotten”. For the artist, such forgotten spaces are
unhomely and he shaped them in the form of monolith blocks as symbols of blocked memory. Kelley
evokes memories of the surroundings and architectural “containers” of “primary scenes” in the
classroom, corridors, entrances, making difference between real experience of space (residing in
space or occupying it), memory of space, and reconstruction of primary experience.

Do-Ho-Suh explores the notion of a house as work-in-progress and questions the notion of dwelling in
the past, the present and the future. In his installation Staircase, the walls and floors of a rooms are
completely empty. The exterior section of a staircase of a Victorian house is suspended from the
ceiling made of red nylon. This house was the first architecture built as part of industrial serial
production, which we also find in the works of Rachel Whiteread. The artist visualizes the negative of
the space, the manner in which the floor above presents the continuation of the room in which we are.
Through the semi-transparent wall of the staircase, we can see the details like the light switch or
railing on the floor above. The installation at the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture, almost 13
metres long, has two sections: the first is a model of the artist’s actual New York dwelling on a 1:1
scale, constructed entirely of transparent nylon fabric, sewn by hand, which levitates above the
spectator on a wire grid. The second section is a piece of floor made of laminated panels, which
seems like a shadow of a floating building, but in reality has a composite image of the artist’s home in
South Korea, symbolizing childhood, the front of an actual house, a d a typical Venetian villa. It is
about interfusion of three typological patterns: the industrial brick of the front carries Gothic style
window with arches and decorative cross-bars and on the top there are roofing tiles typical of
traditional Korean house, the so-called hanok. “When you observe somebody, it is not only that you
see the person who stands in front of you – but also his or hers origin, parents or ancestors, an
invisible weaving of relations and data”, Do-Ho-Suh says. At the moment, he wants to connect his
actual New York home and his home from childhood by means of a trans-Atlantic bridge.

The national exhibition voted best at the 12th Biennale of Architecture in Venice in 2010 was that of the
Kingdom of Bahrain, a country that exhibited at the Biennale for the first time that year: we can see a
piece of the coast, three fishermen’s pile dwellings, objets trouvés, and we are invited inside to spend
some time there, to use their inventory related to Islamic tradition and the rituals of everyday life – the
theme of the exhibition was to present vernacular constructions which are disappearing due to rapid
climate changes of the coast, caused by the climate which is again changed by urban landscapes; in
other words, as a result of the receding sea new pieces of territory are formed and are swallowed by
bombastic architecture. The Golden Lion for the best project was won by Junya Ishigami for a fragile
and almost invisible structure which had transparency as its theme, an atectonic model or suggestion
of house as a 1:1 model of possible construction somewhere in Europe. It was reduced to a contour
line of 14 x 4 x 4 metres in dimensions, which had collapsed, in other words broken up, before the
opening of the exhibition: “The Biennale is an event where the most radical and most progressive
ideas in the field of architecture are presented. All radical thinking about architecture involves an
experiment whose parts are elements of unpredictability and risk, and possible damage to exhibits at
the Biennale do not represent a failure or the end of the project in disgrace, put part of the process,”
commented Ivana Franke for Večernji List newspaper. Ishigami’s work questions notions of visibility,
tectonics, materiality that surpasses the density and opacity of the structural components of a building.
By relativizing and dematerializing (building pillars made of thread-like carbon filaments) the boundary
between space and wall, as well as by providing insight into emptiness, a cavity within the exterior
walls of the house, this project tries to illustrate architecture as a cardinal element (air, emptiness or
space) in its essence, transcending concepts of lightness and heaviness (like Vitruvius’ firmitas) of
traditional architecture.

Context of Croatian art

Dubravka Vidović, Shikumen Wall, from a series of photographs made in autumn/winter 2010-
2011

In the context of Croatian art, Tanja Deman creates light boxes with collage photographs in her project
Fernweh in German, or Farsickness, or “an ache for distance”, a name that directly suggests a
passion for active exploration of unfathomable, unbreakable feelings of hope and enormous longing.
The theme is a modernist utopia of solitary collective residing and contemporary dystopia,
disintegration of the very concept of residing as well as chaotic morphological spatialisation of cities.
The photo collage presents a drill hole of diamond mines which appears to suck the modernist utopia
of collective housing into an abyss, while generic housing similar to Tetris “transrationally” inserted into
an empty canyon in the middle of savage mountains ironizes the contemporary density of construction
in unorganized urbanism, as well as modernist Van der Rohe’s postulate of the International Style –
that the Alps are the Alps, and a house is a house.

Recent photographs by Dubravka Vidović have the wall as a ruin as their motif, thus symbolizing the
colonial past of Shanghai which has been vanishing more and more quickly in an uncontrolled process
of making the city contemporary. Books inserted and stacked up within brick piles and eroded wall
structures are the memory of the demolished houses’ former residents of not so long ago (and these
books stayed behind like a burden) and of the fact of loss. The books symbolize the preservation of
words and a way of transferring knowledge to future generations, but in this case as they are left
behind and implanted into the unstable wall, they evoke the theme of censure and technological
replacement of voluminous, perhaps hard cover “code” with the new, virtual and, in the sense of
occupying space, non-existent e-literature. Shikumen (literally meaning “stone doors”) is an
architectural hybrid from the time of around 1860 which represents the cultural heritage of colonial
Shanghai, combining elements of the Western with traditional Chinese Yangtze architecture and is
characterized by courtyards separated from the street with a high wall. At the beginning of the Second
World War, 80% of Shanghai inhabitants lived in such houses, while at the present this number is
irrelevant (according to Isabelle de le Court), considering the accelerating elevation of the city’s skyline
and increased construction which promotes its new, non-place character.

Working with architecture as a defined space which choreographs movement also emphasizes the
very position of the body, no longer able to embrace its format (the architectural frame) with one view,
but with looking over it, moving, looking back… Even when he works within three-dimensional spaces,
within architecture or spaces that include the wider area, such as his installation Three Islands, Goran
Petercol has been dealing with issues of painting. Reflections is part of this, and here one of the
elementary cognitions represents a feeling for the closeness and unbreakable connection of elements.
Incessant flickering between neighbouring forms, for example the Baroque Dverce Palace and the
Romanesque Lotršćak Tower, is compared by the artist to “a simplest task for a painter when a
student is asked to draw a red apple placed on a white cloth. The motif of the fabric will be solved with
red, with reflection coming from the neighboring form.” At the Flashes exhibition in the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Zagreb in 2002, Petercol used flash to make photographs of objects in the
Museum and then he separated out the shadows on the shots and projected them, as individual
“forms of light” along other “forms of light” (the doors and windows on the front of the building). In his
project Blocks, Petercol, who used to be a seaman, imagined ships in such manner that he projected
the contour of a warehouse façade in Greenland onto a crane for masts in Copenhagen, and later on
onto the Gliptoteka building in Zagreb as Gobo, a notorious form of a house transferred onto the fronts
of buildings with much more complex structure. By connecting distant localities, one reality is
transferred into another, defined by light which makes the form visible.
Architecture – occupying, defining, and forming urban space – is one of key factors in the process of
creating new urban cultures, a generator of socially cohesive space. Today, architects and artists
break down space into elementary in order for a new form of the “vessel for life” to be created. In a
similar manner, symbolical and contemplative contents are questioned, as well as systems of
evaluation in architecture and contemporary art, in themselves inseparable visual practices in a
historical and cultural context.

Published in “Oris” magazine, XIV-78-2012, pages 176-187