The Brooklyn Rail

An important work of architecture opened at the SCI-Arc gallery in Los Angeles in October 2023. It’s titled A House-Bath Appearing Twice, Crudely by architect and educator David Eskenazi. The installation is composed of two pavilions that are each in a state of failure.

It's important to cover this work because it doesn't push boundaries in the way radical architecture is expected to. Instead of extending architecture’s medium further, it delves to its center. An alchemist of architecture’s ideological core, Eskenazi’s work here interrogates the contradictions to be found in architecture’s base concepts, such as scale, proportion, structure, and even waterproofing. These designed contradictions create conditions pushing architecture to its breaking point.

The work purports to be a “House-Bath” and it is a part of Eskanazi’s general research into the bath house as a fertile ground for architectural experimentation, queer space, and the problems of materials. The bath house typology is soaked on the inside and out, a double-sided sweaty architectural skin. The focus of his text is on the doppelgänger, twoness, and the reflection. It's clear for David Eskenazi that the contradictions are not to be resolved, but interrogated.

The first pavilion resembles a strangely haphazard field of brown paper and blue tape. It's a collapsed stack of reinforced rosin paper cubes. Each is assembled edge-to-edge with thick blue tape. When the exhibition began, the paper cubes were more articulated: today they have lost their structural integrity. This zone does not resemble an unfinished work of architecture or a work in progress, but a collapsed form. This distinction makes it notably different from historic architectural projects that placed architecture in a state of movement by using aesthetics from construction. Here instead we have architecture in a state of movements through the aesthetics of collapse.

The second pavilion is a floating hollow ziggurat with walls made of brown paper bladders stitched together with plum, neon orange, eggshell, and tan fabric bandages. These paper sleeves are literally bladders of water, with vinyl tubes feeding the paper bags. These capillaries are then connected to a hose that fills the bladders. Water stains that darken the paper are often visible at each bladder’s corner. The water fills the bags and inflates them as a liquid—weighted to the bottom—not like gas filling a balloon. The visual difference between a bladder and a balloon reinforces the notion that gravity is at stake here. Collapse is imminent. Naturally a mop-bucket is integrated into the work, permanently sited beneath the ziggurat.

At first glance the work echoes sculptures by Robert Rauschenberg or Franz Erhard Walther, but his work is so focused on architectural concepts that those comparisons feel unfulfilling. A worthy comparison might be Frank Gehry’s early work: focused on finding a language for architecture capturing the energy of a building under construction. This body of work often relied on construction-yard materials like cardboard, wood 2×4s, chain-link fence, and plywood; materials on their way to resolving into something more fixed. Architecture under construction became architecture in movement, suspended in time.

Gehry’s point of view was literal. North America was optimistically constructing a new world for itself in the postwar economy and Gehry sought to find a visual language that harnessed that process, which gave meaning and immediacy to the work.

A House-Bath Appearing Twice, Crudely is positioned from another point-of-view, that of collapse. There is a literal instability in this work that emphasizes the designer’s lack of control over the project. Gravity, time, and water are all co-designers. The pavilion critiques architecture’s reliance on strength as an implied symbol for progress. It’s a reminder that with strength often comes brittleness. David is capturing another set of forces in our world, a collapse of the systems that suspend meaning and make it legible. Here we see only the legibility of that failure: architecture born from paper and water—a pavilion that recognizes collapse as the only inevitable path forward. Neither the designer’s categories or the work’s exegesis can contain these processes, only the work itself can.

The definition of any medium is complex, but when arbitrarily split and pushed to extremes, eventually the category collapses. This work has another charm: it does not confront you with intensity, because the dualities of Eskenazi’s pavilions are presented as symmetrical, and symmetry is a tempering mechanism. Water and paper, stability and collapse, architecture and not-architecture. A doppelgänger is always tempered by its pair: despite all the visual or conceptual intensity that is present in the entity, even catastrophic failure and collapse, it harmonizes across an axis of symmetry.