 |
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
 Petra Blaisse makes curtains and gardens to temper the Koolhaas chill. April 2001
"She really thinks of herself as a gardener," says Terence Riley, chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. "But for Petra," Riley explains, "a garden isn't a place where you grow things. Just like a curtain isn't to keep the sun out. Both are enormously emotive." Blaisse is reinvigorating two things that are traditionally considered women's domains--curtains and gardens--by infusing them with unexpected materials and a poet's sense of metaphor and sensuality. She unabashedly calls the work "a softening of the edges, an inviting in, a creating of shelter." In Blaisse's world interiors and exteriors more than playfully coexist--they blur and clash, then recombine to form something new. "They are totally different professions, yet they are completely connected through the roles they have," Blaisse says. "Open the window and the garden comes in, the curtain comes out." The Storefront gallery is shaped something like a sliver of pie. Portions of the walls pivot open out to the street, limiting the already narrow display area. It's not an easy space for an artist to work with, so Blaisse has turned it inside out. Sheets of mirrored Mylar adorn the walls, inviting sunlight inside; pillows sprouting grass like giant Chia Pets lie on the sidewalk outside. Samples of her stage curtains for theaters and concert halls hang in the threshold. Stereo speakers fill the room with the rhythmic sounds of curtains opening and closing--an accoustical element that evokes the sea. And obscuring the entire southwest facade from rooftop to sidewalk is a red-and-orange drape of Christo proportions sewn from scaffolding nets. The Storefront show centers almost exclusively on curtains. For the most part they have long, elegant lines and whimsical flourishes. So does their creator: Blaisse is a tall woman with high cheekbones, wide-set hazel eyes, and a squarish jaw. She is pretty, naturally so, and an inventive dresser, pairing long skirts with sneakers or loudly patterned polyester shirts with delicate earrings. She is opinionated and shy, and speaks a nuanced English that is spare and often poetic. During the time I spent watching her install the show, she compared a building to a peeled apple, fabric to icing, and curtains to evening gowns. Though she may acknowledge these similes with only a gentle smile, her subversiveness is not lost on anyone. In the architect's arena beauty is often dismissed as mere adornment, but Blaisse doesn't shy away from connotations of femininity--she emphasizes them. Power and domesticity are two words that are seldom paired, yet they are often used to describe her work. Although Blaisse has run her own studio, Inside/Outside, in Amsterdam, since 1991 and maintains a diverse and burgeoning clientele--including architects Michael Maltzan, Richard Gluckman, Tim Ronalds, and the Museum of Modern Art--she is best known as a longtime collaborator of Koolhaas and his Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA). She has created opulent gardens and immense curtains (soft walls, really, that move and breathe) for OMA's high-profile private residences such as the Villa Floirac, in Bordeaux, and the Villa dall'Ava, in Paris, and for many of the firm's cultural halls throughout Europe. She has also been in a relationship with Koolhaas for 16 years (despite his marriage to Madelon Vriesendorp), further complicating the inside/outside thing. Their relationship also complicates writing about Blaisse. My initial aim of extricating her from the shadow of Koolhaas's celebrity quickly faded. It would have involved the impossible task of deciphering where professional passion ends and personal passion begins. So I observed and listened, and found that the conversation always gravitated to Koolhaas whether I was talking to curators and critics or to Blaisse's 71-year-old mother, Riny, a painter. "He's a genius--and a genius is a genius," she wryly told me, quickly adding, "They are very good for each other because they give each other enormous inspiration. It's not one-way traffic!" Moreover, Blaisse herself constantly evoked him, often referring to him as "the architect" (as if that were going to fool anyone). Shared passion yields strong work, and it seems to be a key component of Blaisse's development as an artist. To ignore that would be to dismiss a very powerful, very productive force. Though Dutch by nationality, Blaisse was born in London in 1955 and spent most of her childhood living in Lisbon, Paris, Vienna, and Stockholm. Her father worked for Lever Brothers Corporation, and the family moved periodically, enrolling her in French schools. After studying art, she worked at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for eight years, rising from assistant in the Applied Arts department to exhibition designer. It was there that Blaisse first collaborated with Koolhaas. She did not know it then, but when she installed OMA's first museum show, her life was about to take a twist. OMA soon hired her to design all of its exhibits, a venture that would take her around the world. Though it was an uncharted and financially tenuous time, there is a tangible excitement in Blaisse's voice when she recounts those early years. "We were always presented as a package to the museums," she says. "We were a team." Prior to 1984 all of the firm's buildings were on paper only; Koolhaas's reputation as an iconoclast was based largely on his 1978 book Delirious New York. But OMA was finally starting to build, and it was an exciting, expansive arena for a designer to find herself in. Blaisse had her debut as a curtain designer in 1987, when OMA landed a commission to build the Netherlands Dance Theater, in The Hague. She was brought in to give an interior consultation focusing on light, space, and color, but something more specific sprang to mind. "You should make it a black, colorless box with one luxurious element," she told them, "and that should be the curtain." Her original plans called for a metal curtain, but it would have been too heavy to construct. The curtain would have to be (gasp!) velvet. "The architects, being modern architects, said it seemed old-fashioned and stuffy," Blaisse says. "So my search was to take that old-fashioned whatever--it's always red--and turn it into something unexpected." Working with a chemist, she developed a glue that could be silk-screened onto tough woolen velvet and then pressed with gold foil. The result is a vertical expanse of gold disks that when spotlit radiates like the sun. Herbert Muschamp of the New York Times recently called the curtain "the logo for the building." The project launched her career as an artist. For it wasn't just a curtain to Blaisse and Koolhaas, but "an evolution we went through together," she says, explaining that from then on Koolhaas began "taking the curtain seriously as an architectural element." According to Blaisse, he's slowly coming around to gardens, too. At a party after the Storefront show preview Blaisse encouraged me to ask Koolhaas to comment on her work, something she said he had never been asked to do. She was curious. In a quiet stairwell I asked Koolhaas to discuss the exhibit and what his buildings would be like without Blaisse's contributions. "What is interesting about the show is that an entity that is always treated like an afterthought--or as a decoration, or as a form of weakness--can be almost overpowering in its effect," he told me. He paused to collect his thoughts and then said definitively, "I can make the buildings harsher--more pure--because there is this counterpart." I shared Koolhaas's remarks with Blaisse a few days later on a sunny Sunday morning in Gramercy Park, a private garden that she had access to as a guest at a nearby hotel. She responded in kind: "To work with someone who will share power--or who will confront his work with another force--is creative or, in a sense, daring." She pointed to the sunlit shrubs around her and continued, "Rem looks at the whole, the big lines, but if you are a gardener you look at the little effects. If you put it together, it adds up to a bigger whole." At first glance Blaisse's sensuous approach may seem at odds with the hard-edged buildings her work is often associated with. For the Grand Palais in Lille--a vast conference hall and an important OMA commission--Blaisse designed three stage curtains, one studded with grommets arranged as constellations in a night sky. "Rem's and mine are hidden in there," she says. "Those are little jokes in there. It's kind of a starry sky." When the curtain is lit from behind in the dark theater, the cosmos appears and the hall evokes a planetarium. One wall, designed to absorb sound, is made from oversize pillows upholstered in faux blue leather with buttons "the size of dessert plates," as she puts it. Each of her projects uses materials inventively, whether it's acoustic curtain-walls for the Mick Jagger Centre, in London, or a spiral-pattern carpet of crushed seashells for a prison yard near Utrecht. "The way she uses materials is not normal," says her mother, referring to a gossamer black curtain Blaisse studded with floor-polishing wheels. Because Blaisse is involved with a project from its inception, rather than providing accessories to the finished product, there is ample room for experimentation. These ventures are often subtle studies in surfaces and boundaries. The tracks for her Sound Curtain, for the Rotterdam Kunsthal, were poured in place with the cement ceiling, physically becoming part of the architecture. Small speakers are incorporated into the reversible fabric, which is silver when wrapped around a cement column and black when it unfurls along the curved tracks to define a round space. For an upcoming project at an underground parking garage in Almere, Holland, Blaisse will plant a "swamp garden." Her plans for landscaping the new Seattle Public Library (a current OMA project) were recently approved. A "library" of indigenous trees and plants will line the walkways that connect the sidewalk to the building. "What OMA has done--specifically Rem with Petra--is allow her to inhabit this space and install another project within it," Riley explains. "Petra has turned these domestic arts into public events in a spectacular way."
Melissa Milgrom is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. |
