The architect's work sure looks cool, but are we being taken for a ride?
By Philip Nobel


When are pretty pictures not enough? A look at Gyroscopic Horizons, the long-awaited first monograph by Neil Denari, offers one answer. Denari, director of SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, is best known as an apostle of seductive, end-times imagery. His 1983 research project for a New York City mona-stery, which mixed Corbusian massing and Blade Runner futurism in equal parts, hit a nerve with a generation of students craving fantasy with their forms. The monastery's shipwrecked space-tug vibe launched a thousand studio projects that, like the original, were coated stem to stern in rusty-brown Krylon. Later, when Denari began to design in the zero-g play space of the computer, his work became a popular reference for others seeking to exploit the possibilities of electronica for architectural form and representation.

Gyroscopic Horizons is a gorgeous, hefty thing, and early reports from the field suggest that it is flying off the shelves. Richard Massey's design of the book is suitably tight, matching the rigor of Denari's images while still wisely offering enough white space to offset their exhausting density. The allure of the packaging is reinforced by Denari's own superbly fanatic graphic stylings. Every proj-ect has some slippery form floating on a glorious black ground, light glancing through a thicket of inclined posts, or a monocoque shell bathing decadently in its own ray-traced reflection.

It may be too late for those already smitten, but students coming to Denari for the first time should be warned about the effects of his work. Your eyes will caress every folded plate and angled, shadow-casting rail in each of the book's 20-odd projects; your hands may begin to copy them automatically; but your brain should pause to ask a simple question: Why? Why does Denari do what he does? Why is it relevant to anyone else? In Gyroscopic Horizons' 224 wordy pages we do not get any good answers, not in the essays up front--which are mostly elaborate disclaimers for the designs within (written in what I gather is some private code)--nor in the lengthy descriptions of Denari's various projects, which are collectively labeled "Archi-tecture / Scenarios / Models / Atmospherics."

It is an apt choice of words, for Denari's architecture begins and ends with atmosphere. Be-yond a general sense that he is excited by the kind of apocalyptic, zoning-free zones that the world now offers in such abundance, there is little to discover in his work after the smoke clears and the mirrors are trundled off. His designs are often evocative. The Massey Residence, an unbuilt project from 1994 that was included in the Museum of Modern Art's recent "Un-Private House" ex-hibition, captures well the desperation in the tract-house banality that surrounds its intended site. Denari's forms--the folding, vaguely gabled roof; the tweaked, ranch house proportions; the ample, rugged corrugation--ably present one man's darkly romantic view of our conflicted suburbs. But lessons in evocation are not very much to give his impressionable admirers.

While the forms succeed on their own in conjuring a provocative image of the wired expanses at the edge of town, Denari doesn't trust them; the drawings are also internally captioned. One image has a silly little ticker running over it: "Air Conditioning...Weed Eaters...Market Research... Nintendo...The Valley...Police Helicopters...LAX... Gasoline Stains"--another dubious flourish copied endlessly by Denari's followers. Although the de-sign's captions leave the impression that Denari is offering a critique of his native sprawl, he is merely reflecting its ambiance. To be sure, architecture should look beyond the mundane to make a larger point about life and living; it's one way for art to trump business in this hideously bifurcated profession. But for all of Denari's formal and graphic effects, he achieves only hollow snapshots. Yes, the raw vastness of a city shaped by the car can be thrilling. Yes, to paraphrase the jock in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, we've got, like, computers.

The Massey Residence, if it is ever built, might be a wonderful cockpit from which to contemplate the cultural and physical collisions it celebrates. But as a project, what does it teach the architect about how to build the house next door? In Denari's world there is a plague of sleek surfaces, a hyped-up cybernalia that already seems passé, and ingenious structures that one suspects would not survive a close vetting by the force of gravity.

Most of the work in Gyroscopic Horizons is speculative eye candy. The projects are so viscerally engaging and surrealistically rendered (this is a man who knows and loves his 3-D modeling applications) that it comes as a shock when one finds, 156 pages in, a photograph. It is only then that the reader might realize that Neil Denari--seasoned teacher, lecture-circuit staple, and hero in design studios on both coasts--has compiled a monograph with only one built project: a modest interior, installed in a Tokyo art gallery in 1996. In a somewhat deceptive use of the standard architect's notation for tracking the flow of commissions through an office, we learn that it is Project 9601, "Interrupted Projections: Another Global Surface."

There is, of course, nothing wrong with not building; architecture needs its unshackled muses more than it needs another built compromise. But one hopes that those designers with the luxury not to build--the academics and self-supporting visionaries about whom we all make the most fuss--would use their time not merely to titillate, but to inspire something of substance. Or, better, to blaze a trail that others might actually follow. Shouldn't a self-styled "avant-garde" architect act in some way for the greater good of the grand army he ostensibly serves? For whom, otherwise, is he scouting over that next hill?

Visionary architects, with buildings in their heads and skeptics surrounding them, should use every means available to convey their reveries. But when the balance tips and you find yourself buoyed through the work on the power of slick images alone, something is wrong. Ideas should carry the day; layers of fluttering verbiage amid a clutter of poseur forms will feed the ranks of image-hungry initiates, but they will not go far toward answering the boring questions that dog architects in the real world--beginning with the client's query, "What can you do for me?" Denari's seamless imagery is the graphic equivalent of hiding behind jargon. It is just as cowardly and just as unnecessary--except, perhaps, as a means to alienate the people one is trying to impress: those shortsighted brutes who stand between architects and their commissions.

Like other form-first architects, Denari cloaks his work in skeins of strangely affecting but otherwise empty language. Early on we are told that "The book begins with the idea that there is no place to start. With no origin, it is not a monograph but a multigraph: a merger of textforms, onirosigns, and architecture." Denari's writing is mostly straight archispeak, that voguish shelter for half-formed thoughts, but it occasionally hints at the existence of a strangled poet within. The paragraph above continues: "This is a book that begins midway. It presumes that other books have been written but not published, proj-ects designed but not exposed. It is written by a single person passing through many plenums, engaging with others in the world, conspiring with the legions of people whose energy and ideas make the world--a world where Godard speaks to Zapruder and the mechanical and the fluid are engaged in a lovers' discourse."

The mechanical and the fluid come together most frequently in Denari's signature formal offering: the "worldsheet," a continuous folded plane that can become a roof, a wall, or a floor as it winds through his designs. These elegantly contorted surfaces appear in many projects, including the Interrupted Projections installation (9601), the Vertical Smoothouse (9704), the Multi-section Office Block (9803), and the Technology Research Park (9802), but not, tellingly, in the Museum of Art in Arlington, Texas (9605), an ongoing project that might one day be built. It is a case of the tool driving the hand. The worldsheet is the sort of form that can be efficiently created with good modeling software--extrude it, fold it, pop it on--but that would be a bitch to draw and model without digital intervention. As a result, architects like Denari who have imagination to burn and a passion for shapes, seem to be drawn to these novelties for their own sake. Nowhere is it clear, in words or images, what the worldsheet means to Denari, what it should mean to us, or why it merits such a swank neologism and the strident monomania of its repetition. A public defense of his fixation, found afloat at the bottom of yet another eye-flattering but brain-draining page, underlines the manner in which Denari's work cleaves to solipsism at the expense of delivering something that more quotidian toilers might actually use: "Question from the audience: Why is there an obsession for the continuous, single surface? ND: Because it's a conceptual economy of means. Audience: What?"

Reviewer: What now?

As in any effort to control substance abuse, after attacking the point of supply, it is useful to understand the motivations of the addict. What moves architects to crave this particular fix, and what compels Denari to provide it in such maddening array? One source of the problem lies in the structural split in the profession. The term "architect" refers not to one job but to many, of which the two most prominent are the practitioner and the artist. The institutions that support one--schools, organizations, and publications--are rarely of use to the other, and the two factions, rather than working in harmony as one might expect in a healthy profession, are sharply antagonistic.

For starry-eyed architects and students, the artist's model appears to offer the most direct route to success, via publication, speaking engagements, teaching, and the glamorous commissions to which these things sometimes lead when they intersect momentarily with reality. It is this group that will find Gyroscopic Horizons irresistible, as a source of lavish images, and as a record of Denari's own success in establishing himself as a pivotal figure.

For practitioners who are builders first and, perhaps, thinkers second, the allure of architecture-as-an-art--the potential for expression that presumably drew them into the field--is offset by its practical shortcomings. Denari and others with the imagination and the time to explore it might introduce these architects to a new shape, but not to something that could help them change building practice at a more profound and ultimately more subversive level.

Imagine, for a moment, what might be accomplished were Denari's talents and energies directed at reexamining the humble but ubiquitous fixtures of construction--c-studs, wallboard, dropped ceilings--rather than at inventing phantom worldsheets and the rhetoric that insulates them from real-world scrutiny. But for an artistic architect like Denari, it is publish or perish; lacking sound commissions, he churns out a supply of ever more compelling images, of which Gyroscopic Horizons is merely the latest installment. These images--and in the end that is all they are--will first cycle through the schools and boutique practices, inspiring another generation of young architects to make cool shapes and explain them obliquely. In time, they will filter into the productive but creatively bankrupt offices, where designers in the trenches will rightly dismiss them as folly. The products of this rift will be all around us: business as usual.

Main Category: architecture
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Keywords: Neil Denari, Gyroscopic Horizons

The visionary, destructive art of Gordon Matta-Clark
By Alissa Quart

As a child, I was among the many unwitting admirers of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark. Every Thurs-day, I went with my parents to Food, a health-food restaurant in Soho that he founded with a group of artists in 1971. Over tuna-fish sandwiches, we would gaze at the high, white ceilings and check out the waiters' tattoos. It wasn't until much later that I learned that the restaurant I loved was a uniquely constructive work by an artist whose name was otherwise synonymous with destruction. After all, Matta-Clark's best-known piece was his 1974 Splitting, in which he fissured a house with a chainsaw.

To make Splitting, which he called a "non-ument," Matta-Clark asked his dealers Holly and Horace Solo-mon for a spare house to destroy. As it happened, Horace Solomon owned such a house in the suburbs of New Jersey. The artist soon "unbuilt" the dwelling by cleaving it in two. And this wasn't unusual for him: Matta-Clark had a penchant for laying waste to buildings he didn't like--and calling it art.

Twenty-five years later, the creator of Splitting continues to hold a cult-like fascination. Matta-Clark, who died at 35 of pancreatic cancer, is the subject of a lively albeit turgid new study, Object to Be Destroyed, by Pamela Lee.

Like most of Matta-Clark's admirers, Lee, a Stanford art historian, is in love with him. The artist, she says, "had the most exuberant of temperaments, a character whose boundless sense of engagement threatened to outstrip any singular persona." She perceives in Matta-Clark's work the qualities that a post-structuralist professor like herself would find most alluring--its ability to contain both sides of an opposition, to be one thing and that thing's antithesis ("timeliness and untimeliness," "worklessness" and "materialism"). One suspects that Lee also likes Matta-Clark for more prosaic reasons. Like the daredevil conceptual artist Chris Burden, he was the art world's equivalent of a swashbuckler: brash, violent, idealistic, and physically fearless.

As Lee underscores, Matta-Clark was a quintessentially New York artist. He was born in the West Village in 1942, to Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta and his American wife, Anne Clark. Matta-Clark attended private schools and wandered through the streets of the Village in the age of the Beats, developing a connec-tion to downtown New York that would heighten his awareness of its transformation in the coming decades.

In 1962, Matta-Clark enrolled in Cornell's School of Architec-ture, where he stayed for six years. He wasn't much of a student: He got three "Ds" in four semesters of Structural Principles. But he managed to strike up important friendships with emerging artists like Robert Smithson and Dennis Oppenheim, both of whom were featured in Cornell's groundbreaking earth art show in 1969.

Presented in fields and jetties rather than in galleries, the earth art of Smithson, Oppenheim, Don-ald Judd, and Dan Graham was a radical extension of site-specific art into the wild. Inspired by the idea that art could and should exist in everyday life, Matta-Clark offered his services to Oppenheim, who was then working on his Beebe Lake Ice Cut, in which he pierced a frozen lake in Ithaca.

But Matta-Clark was an iconoclast, even in this group. Whereas most of his peers used rocks and earth and other natural materials, Matta-Clark utilized built environments and man-made products--the "readymades" that Marcel Duchamp had introduced into Modern art. Only, unlike Duchamp, Matta-Clark did not leave these readymade structures intact; he tore them apart.

Faced with works like Splitting, one cannot help but wonder whether Matta-Clark hated architecture. There is no doubt that he shared his father's hatred of architectural convention. (Roberto Matta had worked as Le Corbusier's assistant in the Thirties before becoming a fierce critic of his mentor's rationalist approach to design.) He attacked his Cornell schooling for its "surface formalism" and lambasted the International Style as socially exclusionary. In "undoing a building," he said, "there are many aspects of the social conditions against which I'm gesturing. There's so much in our society that purposely intends denial: deny entry, deny passage, deny participation."

In 1973, Matta-Clark helped found Anarchitecture (an amalgam of anarchy and architecture), a group of guerrilla artists who schemed against conventional buildings and design. The group's objective was, in his words, to provide a "response to cosmetic design/completion through removal/completion through collapse/completion through emptiness."

And Matta-Clark responded in deeds as well as words. He launched his most daring assault on the architectural establishment in 1976, when he shot out the windows of Peter Eisenman's Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York. It was a gutsy performance, since his work was to be part of a show opening there the next day. As he fired at the windows, he reportedly shouted: "They were my teachers [at Cornell]. I hate what they stand for." A livid Eisenman likened Matta-Clark's act to Kristallnacht.

A deeply political artist, Matta-Clark was shaken by the manic urban restructuring of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when middle-class neighborhoods were rapidly developed and poor neigh-borhoods were left to wither and die. With the creation of the Department of Housing and Ur-ban Development in 1965, "de-concentrating" American cities became the objective of the federal government.

On a local level, New York mayor John Lindsay had his own "renewal" plans. In 1973, the Westway highway project, which was intended to cut through the Lower West Side--Matta-Clark's stomping ground as a teenager--was announced.

Matta-Clark's work was a spirited, somewhat doomed protest against the destruction by developers of the New York he knew. In his 1973 piece, Fake Estates, for example, Matta-Clark bought slivers of land at city auctions for $35 apiece and framed the deeds and photos of these tiny parcels of gutters and crabgrass, throwing into relief the leftover spaces created by urban renewal. He became an elegist of a vanishing New York, a place where gracious old buildings--Penn Station, most notably--were cavalierly erased from the urban landscape. As New York Times architecture writer Christopher Gray has noted, there was enough demolition in the 1960s and 1970s to keep the city's architectural critics busy eulogizing buildings.

But Matta-Clark was more than a nostalgist for an elite lost New York. He was also a radical critic of urban renewal who assailed the devastation visited upon the "New York ring," as the South Bronx, Harlem, Central Brooklyn, and the Lower East Side were called. The Bronx was in flames throughout the Seventies, and Matta-Clark was one of the few artists whose work addressed its destruction. In 1972, he created an installation called Bronx Floors, which consisted of chunks of South Bronx floors--rugs and all--that served as concrete reminders of a local tragedy that most New Yorkers preferred to ignore.

At the same time, Matta-Clark was also experimenting with "unbuilding" suburban buildings. He reviled the antiseptic privacy of suburban homes, and in works like Splitting he literally punched holes in it. The cuts in the house's floors and walls resembled peepholes, but they opened onto a void, suggesting the fragility of the life within.

Although Matta-Clark's art was striking, it did not lack for company, particularly in the world of architecture. As the architecture critic Martin Filler recently observed in the New York Review of Books, Frank Gehry's famous Santa Monica house, completed in 1978, the year of Matta-Clark's death, seemed to borrow a page from the artist's work. Gehry attached corrugated steel and a chain-link fence to a 1920s bungalow, creating a transcendent platypus of a dwelling out of industrial detritus--a new life for old parts.

Lee, ever insistent on her subject's originality, has a horror of such comparisons. "Names ranging from Frank Gehry to SITE are routinely invoked in the same breath as Matta-Clark," she sneers, adding that "a gross pseudomorphism takes place when Matta-Clark and these figures are leveled to the same visual field." In fact, the industrial walls in Gehry's Santa Monica house do bring to mind the walls of a house that Clark "unbuilt" a few years earlier.

But Lee has a point: The resemblances between Matta-Clark's "non-uments" and Gehry's structures are ultimately superficial. Unlike Gehry, Matta-Clark embraced destruction for its own sake. He collapsed standing structures and dissected buildings, but created nothing inhabitable in their stead; his carved and opened buildings have all gone the way of the wrecking ball. Matta-Clark would likely have regarded Gehry's house--built for shelter, as most houses are--as a betrayal of his vision.

In the last years of his short life, Matta-Clark began to consider putting his utopian impulses to practical use. He collaborated on a plan to turn a discarded building in the Lower East Side into a youth community center; he died before this project came to fruition. He also had a few "alternative housing" schemes, though his notion of alternative housing was typically whimsical: He called for housing in air balloons.

The nihilism and ephemerality of Matta-Clark's work, which exists today only in photos and detritus, have only enhanced the artist's aura. The first theoretical survey of his art, Object to Be Destroyed will further help to canonize him. Meanwhile, his predilection for dilapidated buildings remains fashionable among contemporary artists. You can see the afterimage of his "non-uments" in the British sculptor Rachel Whiteread's plaster cast of a row house interior or her famous transparent Manhattan water tower. And on the streets of a city in the throes of a mad real estate boom, Matta-Clark's vilification of realtors continues to appreciate in value. His wry installation of gutterspace deeds in Fake Estates is less playful fiction than looming possibility. It won't be long before an eager developer tries cramming a studio apartment into one of those small slivers.

Alissa Quart is a columnist for The Independent.