Hans Ulrich Obrist. Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects. London, 2015. Part Three

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Hans Ulrich Obrist
Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects
London, Allen Lane, 2015, 544 pages

(review by Francesco Mazzaferro)

Part Three: The Interaction Between Art and Architecture

[Original version: January-February 2016 - New version: April 2019]

Fig. 3) The Penguin Books edition of Hans Ulrich Obrist's Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, published in 2016

Go back to Part One

At the end of the fifties, the Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright opened the great season of contemporary art museums designed and built by the 'archistars': since then, the museum has become the privileged meeting point between the two disciplines. And yet, the Guggenheim Museum in New York does not meet the approval of some of Obrist’s interlocutors, and is even seen by them as the antithesis of a true dialogue between art and architecture.

The British painter Richard Hamilton (1922-2011) – who yet states that “it is one of the few buildings I do admire" - defines it as the “most criticized from the point of view of its dominance over the art it houses.” [43] The Canadian architect Frank Gehry (1929-), a master of deconstruction, says it in clearer terms: "When Frank Lloyd built the Guggenheim in New York, he did not care about contemporary art. He did not care. He was only thinking of Japanese screens in tokonomas [alcoves] and so he made the little niches for the screens and the light came in and was beautiful. But it was terrible for art. And yet for twenty-five years Diane Waldman, the curator of the Guggenheim, because that was the only building she had, made exhibitions in that space that are very memorable, that took the terrible space for art and used it well. She used it perfectly for some shows, and for others it didn’t work. It didn’t work with Rothko. When they put the Rothkos in, they felt uncomfortable in that space. Flavin: fantastic. Calder: fantastic. (...) And there were a lot of other painting shows that were great. (...) So [editor's note: in this case] there’s an adversity that the architecture proposes and it is like the grit in the clam, the irritant that makes the beautiful pearl. Over the years, it was possible to make the beautiful pearl in the Guggenheim. So it shows you that a building, even though in principle it could be a disaster, could be used well."[44]

The museum as a place of complicity between art and architecture

Gehry thinks that the relationship between architecture and art should be instead one of full complicity. In fact, art and architecture are the same thing: "First of all, there’s the discussion that goes on all the time about whether one is an architect or an artist, or whether you’re both at the same time. It’s a stupid question because obviously in the history there are people who are both, like Borromini and Michelangelo."[45] Gehry is an educated man: he speaks of Giorgio Morandi and his still lives as a source of its architecture [46]. He discusses Leonardo's drawings, whose originals he could examine [47]. However, "in the contemporary world, the press and artists, everybody, they’ve divided this thing [art] into two systems: one has plumbing and the other is pure." [48] Since this principle of specialization was established, only the dialogue between the client, the artist and the architect - according to Gehry - can re-establish the original unity. "It's interesting to work with the artist, because, mostly, they really don’t know how to show their work. They need an editor. That’s why we need curators! But it was interesting playing in the space between the curator and the artist and the building. (...) What I always tried to do was establish the character of the artist. And I try to do it with buildings. I try to make the work part of the person commissioning it. (...) The client is very important. It always makes it better. Working with Tom Krens in Bilbao [editor's note: the director of the Guggenheim Foundation] was extraordinary."[49]

Also for Ms Kazuyo Sejima (1959-) and her colleague Mr Ryue Nishizawa (1966-), both Japanese architects (they have a studio which is known worldwide as SANAA), art and architecture are part of a unique entity. Ryue Nishizawa states it emphatically: "In the history of architecture, when one looks back at the collaboration between architecture and the fine arts, it seems to me this was something that was unified right from the beginning. For example, when one looks at ancient Japanese buildings like Hōryū-ji, a single pillar, it’s already a work of art. It can serve as a container for a statue of Buddha, but at the same time there are extremely precise decorations on the building. In other words, art and architecture cannot be separated. And when one looks at European architecture, it’s the same. In this respect, the human being, in a subconscious way, establishes a very close proximity between architecture and the fine arts."[50]

As for the museum, Ryue Nishizawa believes that the key issue is the "relationship between content and form. What’s understood by content is the 'programme': how people are going to make use of the museum. So, there’s the form and the way it’s used by human beings: there’s necessarily a relationship. For example, there are some very large rooms, others that are very small and, in each case, the character of the artworks changes. There’s this relationship between the content and the form that I think is one of the interesting themes of architecture. Interesting content generates an interesting architecture and vice versa. There’s an interaction; each gives a meaning to the other. This phenomenon can be observed in both houses as well as museums."[51]

And it is once again Gehry to think about the role of architecture in enhancing the work of art: "I think you can make anything work. You can put anything anywhere if you really want to and make it work. The painting holds its own. But context does change the feeling of a work. My own experience, a long time ago, was the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, when I saw four Brueghel paintings in the traditional room with the wainscot and the blue fabric walls and the skylight and the wood floors and they looked incredible to me. I will never forget that. And then, a couple of years later, I went back and they were remodelling the museum so they had the four Brueghels in a small room with a nine-foot-high ceiling and I walked in and the Brueghels seemed this big. (…) Not that big. In fact, they’re not this big and they’re not that big, they’re this big. [Editor's note: the original dimensions are about 115 cm x 150 cm]. So, the different perception of different places does impact. Years ago, I saw a tiny Paul Klee painting in Korea in a gallery that Samsung had with twenty-foot-high [six meters] ceilings, and the little painting was incredible. It could hold the room, steal the space. And we just renovated the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto where we have small paintings. Circumstantially, we have rooms that are forty-five feet [13 meters] high, because we couldn’t put another floor in - I wanted to have a skylight. There are small Canadian paintings in there and it works like a dream. The issue is, if you make these sterilized boxes, if they get too sanitized, they also conflict with the art. Arte Povera [Poor Art], for example, cannot stand some of these spaces."[52]

The search for expressiveness, the rejection of the traditional rooms with regular geometry, and the overcoming of the museum as a pure 'box' also characterize Ms Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi architect who is well known in Italy for her MAXXI in Rome. She theorizes the idea of an articulated, non-linear architecture, as a direct result of the complexity of urban planning of our cities, now inhabited by a very heterogeneous population by activity, ethnicity, gender, etc. and therefore not linked anymore to uniform social models. Instead, the museum as a 'white box' belongs to the past, when towns were socially more uniform.

"The discussion [editor's note: on social complexity] confronts the idea of ​​the museum as a 'white box', and whether the white box gives you the most flexibility. These days, you’ve got variety – the variety of space – because curators make so many interpretations of space when designing exhibitions. In museums, it’s not only a question of how you exhibit the art, but also about how, through complexity, curators can interpret different leads and different connections."[53]. Museums must therefore be designed to get the most of the variety of the interior, with the only limit of spatial constraints, such as the Centre for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati: "The intention was – because the site is so small – to make room ‘vertically’. And because it’s a vertical space, it means the circulation inside the museum is very important. The many different staircases are essential because they interlock with each other. So you can have an endless variety of spaces within this kind of cluster: from very small rooms used solely for projections, to very large spaces, which are for bigger exhibitions."[54]

There is also a very tight relationship between art and architecture in the case of the two already mentioned Japanese architects of SANAA. Ryue Nishizawa explains: "When I work on museum projects I often have the feeling that this is a very architectural space designed by an architect, but I also have a different feeling that it's an artistic atmosphere. Artists install their projects in the room, but actually I feel that their project already starts before people enter the room. The experience of the museum, its architecture, gives a lot to the audience. The case of the Teshima Art Museum is very special because there is only one room and there is only one artist, Rei Naito. She was asked to do just one single piece [ed: Matrix]. People come from far away in Tokyo to the nature of the island and they walk to the museum. So that experience is already a part of her project. Of course, this is also part of my project. It’s impossible to divide. It’s all a mixture of our experience. That’s why I decided to do a kind of collaboration, to talk with her, to decide on every single detail happening in the architecture or outside the architecture, in the landscape."[55]

Ms Kazuyo Sejima adds: "Exhibition spaces are especially difficult. What I mean by that is that the architecture shouldn’t be too visible. At the same time it’s also not enough if it is only a backdrop. It’s necessary to consider the relationship between the display and the exhibited objects properly. It’s not a straightforward task. But one of the experiences that we drew from Kanazawa, from one of the galleries that we designed to be used by artists, is that the space itself assumes a different dimension depending on the art inside. For example, if one installs a very small object in a very large room, one feels that object is perceived more strongly. Or sometimes the space can seem packed. Of course, nothing changes at the level of architecture, the dimensions remain fixed, but a new space is born each time. The possibility of having an optimal collaboration with an artist is a unique experience."[56] Therefore, if for Gehry it was the work of art (i.e. the paintings by Brueghel) which assumes different connotations depending on the space, here is the space to be defined differently starting from the artwork.

Time, art and architecture

There is an architect whom Obrist referred to in the course of its volume six times, identifying him as a model of dialogue between art and architecture, while not including an interview with him in the volume. It is the English Cedric Price (1934-2003), whose conversations with Obrist are published as number 21 of the "Conversation Series", published in 2009. In the 1960s Price worked on a project that was never built, the Fun Palace, an extraordinarily innovative entertainment building: "A flexible structure in a large mechanistic shipyard on which, depending on changing situations, many structures could be built from above." [57] The designs for the Fun Palace contributed to the renewal of architecture and inspired a new generation of architects, serving among others as a reference point for the construction of the Centre Pompidou in Paris in the 1970s. Obrist talks with the French artist Philippe Parreno (1964-) on it: "His focus on time-based buildings that would disappear after a limited lifespan, rather than on finished buildings, made him legendary"[58]. In the preface to the volume of interviews with Price, Obrist writes: "His major themes are those of time and movement. Central to his thinking and his work is his opposition to permanence and his discussion of change. Price’s projects continually push against the traditional physical limits of architectural space and map out the trajectories of time. His conviction that buildings should be flexible enough to allow the users to adapt them to serve the needs of the moment reflects his belief that time – alongside breadth, length and height - is the fourth dimension of design."[59] According to Obrist, the time dimension, which makes its break into temporary exhibitions of artworks, thus becomes - in parallel - also one of the constitutive features of architecture. 

And indeed, for the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, architecture provides even the possibility of an acceleration of reality that is not offered to visual arts. "I do not believe art is a meta-field of knowledge that stands above all else. There’s something self-indulgent about the art world that I want to escape. That's why the title of the park in Kassel is Plan d'évasion, i.e. A Plan for Escape. Wanting to escape situations that are too slow, too repetitive or too dead-end is very human. It’s what drives transformation - I do not want to say evolution" but Ms Gonzalez-Foerster, in particular, is convinced that "galleries, museums and exhibitions are not the only types of spaces" [61] around which artists and architects should work together.

The French artist theorizes, therefore, the creation of ephemeral hybrids, which offer visual artist more execution freedom than within an exhibition. It seems a paradox, since the architecture should give the impression of eternity and figurative art of the ephemeral, but the view of the artist is just the opposite: "In an architecture project, changing a door takes two hours, but in a museum it can take a week or even a month. Or when they build a stage for a concert in one day, they’ve accomplished more in terms of activity than they do in a gallery over the space of one year. Once you’ve experienced the terrible preciousness and slowness that accompany even the smallest changes in the world of art, you lose some of your patience. Of course, it’s normal that each system would have its own speed, but once you’re become accustomed to working at a different pace, it's really hard to return to a situation where painting even a small wall is a problem. Walls in museums are treated as if they were a white canvas, so every little gesture becomes monumentally important. I'm really tired of that."[62]

It would seem a heresy, but also the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas (1944-) confirms that time has become one of the main factors which the architect must take account of, even though his conclusions are different. Certainly, on the one hand there are two accelerating factors: city planners are trying to react to the continuous hastening of history by requiring that projects are completed in a shorter and shorter time frame; and the life of the constructed buildings just does not go beyond twenty-five years. On the other hand, the physicality of architecture makes of it the last line of resistance against a frantic and neurotic world. The tension between slowness and speed becomes the most interesting element of architecture.

"There is absolutely no certainty that you can count on. And the interesting thing is that the clients are trying to outwit this situation by increasingly accelerating the whole pace of architecture. The buildings we once had to build in two years we now have to build in one year. (...) But I could never have imagined (...) when I discovered that some buildings in Shenzhen were produced in two afternoons on a home computer, that two or three years later we would be in the same situation. But we are. And even so, we realize that we are not quick enough or that architecture can never be quick enough." "Does this affect the lifespan of buildings?" asks Obrist. "This is really interesting, actually. There is this planning project that we completed for 'La Défense Paris' we did, where we considered everything more than twenty-five years old theoretically obsolete, ready to be taken down, so that you could build a new city on the site of the old. At the time, it was considered totally visionary and an outrage. I recently had to give a presentation for the station in Rotterdam, where there will be a super-fast TGV train, and again I launched the suggestion that after twenty-five years you could simply declare buildings redundant because they are so mediocre, and this time there was only a sort of barely suppressed nervously laughter."[63] (...) "What is the relationship between slowness and speed?” “It remains a very strong tension” responds Koolhaas. “In that sense, it is a very fascinating thing to see this medium - architecture – that is now so popular but has a sort of inherent resistance to completely following the current tendency, which is towards acceleration. It may be that that is a real conundrum for architecture, that it can accelerate, but that it also has some kind of intimate resistance, maybe more than television, film or music, and maybe that is why it is so interesting today." [64]

Koolhaas tries to solve the contradiction exactly where art and architecture meet: museums. It presents projects for the Tate Gallery in London, MoMA in New York and the Seattle Library where he conceives two types of visits, a faster tour and a more thorough one, organising a different flow of the public, according to two parallel channels. Koolhaas speaks to Obrist: "You often refer to the beautiful era of MoMa, the 'laboratory years ', and it was a beautiful era, but I don’t think that you can have a laboratory visited by two million people a year. And that is why both our libraries and our museums are trying to organize the coexistence of urban-noise experiences and experiences that enable focus and slowness. This is, for me, the most exciting way of thinking today: the incredible surrender to frivolity and how it could also be compatible with a seduction of focus and stillness."[65]

Against the dissolution of art and architecture

Obrist does not forget the voices of those who advocate monumentality for art and architecture. To the great Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907-2012) - one of the centenarians interviewed by Obrist - functionality (i.e. the ability of the museum to give value to art works) is not enough. When he declares "I want to do architecture that explores the rapport between the different arts" [66], for him the decisive aspect of that relationship is aesthetic. "A museum has to have the air of being a museum. (...) Instead there are a lot of museums, even in New York, that you can walk right past and unless they’ve got ‘museum’ written across them you won’t understand what they are. Ah, no - a museum has to give the idea it really is a museum." [67] The architecture is art: "Architecture is invention. We can obtain the right result from a project, but to invent something is a different thing. Architecture cannot just be about designing a building that works well; it can also be beautiful, it can be different, it can be surprising, can’t it? In fact, surprise is the main element in a work of art." [68] Sir Forman Foster, who took part in the three-way conversation with Obrist, adds: "Walking the ramps [note of the editor: of the Contemporary Art Museum at Niterói] today was a great experience. So, before you get into the building there’s that wonderful ceremony ... And the ramps are almost like a dance in space, which enable you to see the building from different viewpoints before you actually enter it. And that, I find magic. Absolutely magic."[69]

The German painter Gerhard Richter (1932-) sets up a true manifesto against the 'dissolution of architecture' and in favour of a more concrete and even political interpretation of it. The conversation with him makes us understand his passion for architecture and his desire for a return to classic and traditional forms, both in terms of style and in terms of lifestyle, after the years of experimentation. He first becomes interested in painting houses as testimony of different social and political situations and then designs the project for his own house.

"When social changes happen, I am immediately gripped by a passion for building, and I think that in this way I can anticipate or accelerate the transformation of life, at least in the form of sketch. The house where I live was such an anticipatory work - first build and then change your life. (...) Yes, first came the house and then the family and the house was filled. (...) Yes, with this house I anticipated my vague wish for new social conditions. And the house was oriented in a very naïve, polemical way against the dissolution of the architecture. It was very conservative: symmetrical, surveyable, stable."[70] And if, as we have seen, Frank Gehry did not like the Guggenheim in New York, Gerhard Richter did not like Gehry's Guggenheim, although he admits that the building caused him to reflect: "And then when I saw there, I was indeed not thrilled, but fascinated nonetheless, and pensive." [71].

The proof of how classic the spatial concept of Richter can be is his glass window for the Cologne Cathedral, with which he decided to produce architecture in the classic sense.

"The dome window is about something very concrete, actual, and about a very particular place, which is pregnant with history and great significance, as few others are. All of that is so powerful that each addition of modern art frequently appears muffled, false, ridiculous or kitschy. In order to circumvent this danger, I approached the space in a very pragmatic manner: how does the dome look and how is it used? In this way I avoided wanting anything in particular, neither a depiction of the saints, nor a divine communication, nor in a way even art. It was only to be a beaming, beautiful window, as excellent and beautiful and full of meaning as is possible for me here today. "[72]

The secular equivalent is Black, Red, Yellow: these are the colours of the German flag. Obrist asks Richter whether he can imagine this artwork in any other place, and the answer is: "The flag is of much too extreme proportions to fit anywhere else. The Reichstag is the appropriate place."[73] And thus, it is not a mere decoration, but it becomes a monumental element of architecture.

End of Part Three
Go to Part Four 

NOTES

[43] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, 2015, Allen Lane. Quotation at p. 433

[44] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 132-133.

[45] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 135.

[46] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 136.

[47] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 142.

[48] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 135.

[49] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 131.

[50] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 452.

[51] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 450.

[52] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 133-134.

[53] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 505

[54] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 506

[55] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 468-469

[56] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 452

[57] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 360.

[58] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 360.

[59] Obrist, Hans Ulrich – Cedric Price, The Conversation Series 21, Cologne, Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2009, p. 170. Quotation at page 9.

[60] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 58-59

[61] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 57.

[62] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 57-58.

[63] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 413.

[64] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 414.

[65] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 415.

[66] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 344.

[67] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, pp. 345-346.

[68] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 334

[69] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 338

[70] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 171

[71] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 172

[72] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 178

[73] Obrist, Hans Ulrich - Lives of the Artists, quoted, p. 176