Rumble In the Jumble

Rumble In the JumbleAuthor(s): Thomas WeaverSource: Log, No. 6 (Fall 2005), pp. 10-17Published by: Anyone CorporationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41765052 .

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Thomas Weaver Rumble

In the Jumble

. . . may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist ? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left nowadays . - Sir Robert Chiltern, in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband , Act I

It is a truth universally acknowledged, or at least in the Greater New York area, that among the world's gaggle of star architects, Rem Koolhaas seems to reign supreme (only the Guggenheim's Thomas Krens and readers of Architec- tural Digest in dental hygienists' offices would argue that Frank Gehry still has anything interesting to offer). Prada - clad and yet kind of priestly, Koolhaas is consistently pre- sented through the cult of his own personality, and has

enjoyed an ascendancy that has been registered beyond the usual architectural journals in continuing profiles in The New Yorker and the New York Times . A late 1990s Times piece by Herbert Muschamp even went so far as to offer a fawning apologia for the architect's seeming bigamy, with the claim that Koolhaas is a plug that simply needs two sockets. In his

professional life too, Koolhaas is an architect who has

plugged different holes. Beyond the simple imperative for an architect to build buildings, the products of Koolhaas's architectural energies seem to be largely literary, but with S, M, L, XL and his Harvard Design School Project on the

City volumes, his literature's largeness is measured not in words per page but pages per book. And it is through this

growing publishing empire that Koolhaas continues to rein- force a distinctly North American view of architects as

providers of an imagined, hypothetical future rather than a real one. But in these imaginings, Koolhaas truly excels. The first architect since Le Corbusier who can really write, it is not so much Le Corbusier's marauding Towards a New Architecture as the more elegiac When the Cathedrals Were White that has set the tone for Koolhaas's writing. Troubled

by being both repelled and attracted by the cities around him, his signature style is at turns florid and spare. Knowing, droll, funny, and yet somehow resigned, Koolhaas has taken an architectural pessimism to new heights, to the extent that he seems disinterested in architecture, and yet it is this that makes him so interesting. 11



A view of "Herzog & de Meuron: An Exhibition," Tate Modern, London. June i, - August 29, 2005. Photo: © Tate Photography, 2005.

In Europe, however, far from Storefront, from Urban Center Books, or the cafeteria at Columbia's Avery Hall, there is a different order of things. Top of the list is not Jean Nouvel, Renzo Piano, or Zaha Hadid (at least not yet), and

certainly not Norman Foster (who has only ever designed two interesting buildings, and one of those was a table); the

ruling architects of Europe are Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. Operating out of the small Swiss city of Basel, with a staff of 200 or so and no website, Herzog & de Meuron have never disrupted or subverted the image of the architect as a creator of built form. Just as the novelist Don DeLillo was celebrated at his peak as a writer of sentences, Herzog & de Meuron have constructed their renown around the most fundamental architectural product: their buildings. Rein-

forcing a fundamentally European take on the exercises of architecture, for Herzog & de Meuron, practice is exactly what they preach.

As testament to the preeminence of these Swiss architects, in the vast interior space of the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall - the world's biggest and most-visited art museum -

Herzog & de Meuron have just become the subject of the Tate's first major architecture exhibition. Featuring over 1,000 objects, including 250 models, together with a series of 1:1 scale mock-ups and video projections, the extent of the show is illustrated by the fact that on the ground level you need a map to negotiate your way around. On the mezzanine level above there is even a descriptive panel to help onlookers locate certain models and objects as they gaze down upon them. Like the touristic panoramas of Paris outside Sacré- Coeur, or of the Manhattan skyline from Brooklyn Heights, the show is so big that it almost becomes landscape.

The issue of bigness is something that the Tate Modern now repeatedly forces its exhibitors to address. Ever since

Herzog & de Meuron first completed their renovation of the

building, artists invited to occupy its seven-story Turbine Hall have alternated between filling its vastness with their own creations (Louise Bourgeois's monumental spiders, or Anish Kapoor's stretched-fabric Marsjas) and choosing to leave it void (Olafur Eliasson's Weather Project or Bruce Nauman's recent sound installation). What is interesting about Herzog & de Meuron is that they have now managed to do both. They won the commission for the museum, as Tate director Nicholas Serota has testified, by committing themselves to preserving the massive emptiness of the cen- tral hall. But now, in stuffing this interior with their own architectural works, the architects seem to have succeeded in

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the ultimate demonstration of having their cake and eating it.

Beyond its size, however, as Jacques Herzog would have it, this is no ordinary architectural show: "We are not out to fill the exhibition space in the usual manner and to adorn it with records of our architectural work. Exhibitions of that kind just bore us, since their didactic value would be convey- ing false information regarding our architecture." Ignoring for the moment the implied and tired idea of architects, once

again, as the noble defenders of some artistic sense of truth, what Herzog's curatorial instincts have wrought is a show that eschews pristine models, drawings, and photographs in favor of what he terms the "detritus of the design process." Accordingly, across the exhibition's 35 tabletops are scattered an assemblage of models and studies in a wild array of materials, including gray card, blue foam, clear plexiglass, wood, fiberglass, gauze, metal, felt, and resin, collectively repre- senting a marketplace of architectural ideas.

Within this "jumble sale" are studies from nearly every one of Herzog & de Meuron's architectural works, from the 1979 Blue House to the 2005 Beijing Film Academy. And

although laid out on tables like some Darwinian evolution-

ary diagram, what distinguishes each of the projects is not so much the entomology of their forms as the mutations of their surfaces. A number of critics have increasingly been drawn to these facades as holding the key to the architects'

deeper meaning - an analysis typified by Luis Fernandez - Galiano's comment that for Herzog & de Meuron, "the real

depth is in the skin" - but only when you can see all of the

study models and doodles behind a project do you actually realize quite how preoccupied Herzog & de Meuron are with the articulation of their buildings' skins. Repeated in

project after project, the template for a Herzog & de Meuron

building is of a vernacular, and somewhat nuanced, block structure enveloped by a facade that is at turns playful and referential. These facades reveal themselves through a huge number of the exhibited projects, and feature a seemingly endless range of materials: from the fabric brise -soleils of the Roche Parma Building to the organic, vegetative shadings of the Ricola Headquarters, the concertina steel screens of the Rue des Suisses apartment block, the molded plastic pods of the Swiss and German football stadia, the rusted COR-TEN

overhangs of the new de Young Museum, the perforated concrete facades of the Walker Art Center (embellished with a florid pattern taken from a cowboy boot), and the blasted concrete panels of the Eberswalde Technical Library, pock- marked with the pixels from a series of photographic images

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Jacques Herzoo, blown-glass LIGHT FIXTURES FOR WALKER ART Center. Photo: © Tate Photo- graphy, 2005. General installation photos: Thomas Weaver.

selected by the German artist Thomas Ruff.

Advertising this surface architecture with the Spanish Ciudad del Flamenco project at the entranceway to the show, Herzog provides a further set of references for these studies: "Surfaces consist of poured, perforated and artificially processed concrete; they follow the lines, shapes and patterns of gypsy tradition and Arab ornamentation. We encounter them in everyday culture, in punk and rock music, in tat- toos, symbols and emblems." At both the core and surface of the exhibition, in this way, there is a shattering of estab- lished illusions - architecturally, in terms of the true focus for artistic invention, and socially, not only that two Swiss architects would be interested in a counterculture, but that Switzerland today has a counterculture at all.

Fueled by its own irreverence, this architecture as trace, as social embroidery, continues even more powerfully in the

practice's more recent work in China. Tucked behind a full- scale blue foam model of one of the Beijing Olympic Stadium's structural braces, a project for the Jindong Development Area is overlaid (and underpinned) by a series of investigations into Chinese symbols. The resulting architecture is one that resonates with real character - but character in the calligraphic sense, as some kind of ideogram, with the form of the project's architectural figures, like let- ters, carrying within them the allegorical story of their own creation. The irony of this approach, in terms of a rivalry between architects of the El Croquis generation, is that

although Koolhaas was the first contemporary architect to

really insist on the essential relationship between architect and graphic designer (first with Bruce Mau and more recently with New York-based firm 2x4), it is Herzog & de Meuron who have ultimately gone one step further in reduc- ing architecture to the level of the font.

In this reductivism, Herzog & de Meuron seem to enjoy an increasing lack of architectural inhibition. Nowhere in the show does there appear to be any kind of slaving dedica- tion to an a priori architectural process, but simply a willing free fall into a plurality of forms, materials, and ideas.

Fundamentally optimistic, the compelling and generous way in which they embrace and nurture all these ideas, both

high- and lowbrow, induces in the viewer an essentially reassured sense that by sticking with Herzog & de Meuron

everything is going to be okay with architecture. More cynically, however, there is also room within all

this pluralism and methodological abandonment for some of their displays to threaten their own artfulness - not least of

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which is a perfume project, recycled from an earlier exhibition in Rotterdam and tucked to one side of the Tate show.

Inspired by a wish to analyze the more intangible aspects of their own creations, the project offers a set of test tubes cap- turing various distinctive scents. Rhine water, dog, hashish, algae, vin chaud , wood tar, fur, and tangerine are all offered

up as possible sources, from which Herzog & de Meuron created their own scent, somewhat prosaically named "Rotterdam." The perfume smells like a watchstrap on a summer's day - kind of leathery and sweaty - and although the project as a whole initially seduces with all the sweet-

smelling charm and innocence of a student architectural

project, it ultimately registers as the foul and odorous stink of commercialism. Available in the museum shop, glass vials of this perfume, "designed" by two Swiss architects, can be

bought for £25 (although, like some exotic tribal deity, these jars are prohibited from being photographed for fear their souls will be stolen).

The pattern of the perfume also repeats itself with the

gradual realization of some of the architectural projects. Somewhere along the line, as various buildings take shape, the patinated quirks and tics and innovative eccentricities of the first surface studies for the Kramlich Residence, for

example, or San Francisco's new de Young Museum have lost their charm. A display of multicolored candy flint tools made from Ricola throat lozenges similarly crosses the line between the repeating forms of an architectural study and the affected multiples of limited-edition art, while the hand- blown glass light fixtures - designed by Jacques Herzog for the Walker Art Center - although exquisite in their own way, are drowned out by the rustle of interest around them and the nagging wonderment as to where one can be purchased.

In all of its commercial artfulness, the Tate show itself is a continuation of a strand of Herzog & de Meuron's work that is purely about exhibition. Like their architectural works, their exhibitions are numbered, and are regarded by the office as laboratories of design rather than refined exercises in public relations. And just as their designs have devel-

oped and changed over the last 15 years, so too have their exhibitions. For example, a show in 1988 at the Architek- turmuseum in Basel displayed only screen-printed images against the windows of the gallery, while in 1991, at the Kunstverein in Munich, they first showed the processes of their work. A year later, at the Venice Biennale, they repre- sented Switzerland using only photography especially com- missioned from artists and photographers, and in 1995 at the

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Above the jumble with a guide to the show. Photo: Thomas Weaver.

Centre Pompidou in Paris (famously the worst-attended show in the Pompidou's history) they offered clinically laid out drawings and photographs (celebrated in Andreas

Gursky's massive and massively dull photograph of the exhibit).

It was in reaction against this show at the Pompidou that Herzog & de Meuron first came up with the idea of

exhibiting not complete drawings and photographs but

working models and scraps. Developed in tandem with the curator Philip Ursprung, this revised approach to their own architectural display really announced itself in 2002 with the "Archaeology of the Mind" exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Couched as some kind of revisionist Wunderkammer , Ursprung defined his role as working "like an archaeologist from the future who has uncovered the architects' studio and found hundreds of curious models without really knowing what they mean. We label them, and

display them much like a natural history museum might treat dinosaur bones." More than an archaeologist of the future, however, Ursprung in reality revealed himself as a

museologist of the 19th century, transposing the model of the 19th-century natural history museum and its sliding wooden drawers of endless beetles and bones onto the dis-

play of contemporary architecture. From Montreal and the galleries of the CCA, this

archaeological show was then recycled through subsequent 16



A FORMER EDITOR OF ANY, THOMAS Weaver is currently writing MEMORIES FOR NORMAN FOSTER AND WONDERING WHAT TO DO NEXT.

galleries and museums, including the "Beauty and Waste in the Architecture of Herzog & de Meuron" exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam, and imme-

diately prior to the installation at the Tate Modern, at the

Schaulager in Basel as "Herzog & de Meuron No. 250. An Exhibition." Given this museological lineage, there are obvious remnants of Ursprung' s initial conceit still visible at the Tate, not least in the acreage of its model tables and the

overriding conception that meaning in architecture resides not in the singular image or artifact but in the evolutionary collective. But equally, in being distilled through so many different locations, certain objects and associations have been lost. Most obvious among these are the original artistic refer- ents for the architectural works. So at the Tate you get felt surfaces without any allusion to Joseph Beuys, pop imagery without Andy Warhol, cartoonish figures without Michael

Craig-Martin, more painterly landscape configurations without Gerhard Richter, and found photographic imagery without Thomas Ruff. More prosaically, you also get a large architectural retrospective in a huge art museum extending over three summer months without a catalogue - the Tate

shop simply piles up the available architectural magazines and monographs on Herzog & de Meuron together with the book that accompanied the CCA show, Ursprung' s Herzog & de Meuron: Natural History. (This, in itself, also suggests an

interesting counterpoint to Koolhaas's S, My L , XL, which has always seemed a little homeless - not a show without a

catalogue, but a catalogue for a show that never existed.) Beyond its study of forms, therefore, beyond its surfaces and countercultural aspirations, the exhibition comments as much on the recycling and distilling of traveling exhibitions and the way galleries and museums operate as it does on the work itself. Ostensibly a show about found objects, the ultimate found object is the show itself.

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Rumble In the Jumble

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