The Brooklyn Rail

On one half of a chasm you have a “design plateau.” In a week of reportage no new form feels meaningful. The design arms race is officially in its cold war era. R/D dominates (not design) and every new material (for instance recycled aluminum) becomes a temptation for new form (a lamp maybe). Sized sums of money are acquiring artists, factories, supply chains. Consolidation, a tradition in industry, feels palpable. Each palazzo and villa in Milan is temporarily owned by a toilet or wall oven. Impossible to discern what design is today.

The other half of the chasm is a group of charged intellectuals burying their speculations in dense aesthetic terms. Black, gray, red dominate and overlay on moving images or sharp high resolution photographic renderings. There is an indiscernible line between criticality of contemporary issues and the total absorption of these issues. My shaved head fits in perfectly, my sense of humor feels completely out-of-sync. The theme is decay and its allusions are failed mechanization and military technology. Agnes Martin says negative art is a protest against a lack of beauty in the world. Here we have a growing bank of negative art.

A release of the new Flash Art Volumes, a design magazine guest edited by Luigi Alberto Cippini, of Armature Globale, was the pretense for a gathering at Flash Art HQ. The magazine, titled Anti-Composition, (which my office ANY contributed a piece in) is a tour of buildings through the lens of different writers. Anti is the default position here, and a collage of hyper-mono-fixation is the proposed solution. Focus purports to be a non-compositional order. Form generating seems limitless in this world. There is a hedonism in adopting authorship over order. Here we have unguarded freedom in sculptural form. Invisibility and illegibility are tools for these authors. This brings me relief as I recognize the form-generating potential of our moment. Meaning in form may still have a future, only if it's intensely authored. In the contemporary landscape there are many tracks of an anti-form “realist” crowd that claims the moral and political high ground by directly addressing problems and ignoring architectural form. Direct action can betray architecture longue durée. It’s an even bleaker narrative often equating cheapness of material with political satisfaction. The Form crowd plans buildings with a rationale of secrets and confidence. This anti-form crowd clutches their pearls.

As far as the city’s urban fabric goes I am convinced there are 10 percent too many streets. Milano Porta Garibaldi is a train station with giant cantilevering steel—intensely antigravitational. Scaleless urban proportions like the thesis students of Myron Goldsmith. Massive steel beams cantilever out on both sides, the different zones each have a roof sitting on top of the steel. This kind of US modernism is my favorite, though it’s rarely executed, even in the US. SANAA’s Bocconi University has always been of interest to me. A campus with total uniformity like a Beaux Arts design. A total emptiness of plan. Repetitive stacking. Concrete donuts with monolithic facades. These facades are all anodized aluminum expanded metal mesh that provides extreme blankness to the reading, but they read as surfaces not objects. With no tectonics, their blank elevations and lack of corners give a missing part-to-whole reading that would allow an image to form a whole. But this means the dominant qualities are the horizontal interiors and public center. The blankness of forms and facades allow for a continuous ground to be legible. A campus plan where each building is a hollow silo but they are levitating over a continuous park. A separate nearby campus for Bocconi by Grafton Architects provides a totally alternate experience of campus life. A single object of continuous architectural space. I would never ever design this, a deconstructivist space without its decomposing tectonic aesthetic style. Rectangular prisms floating to create massive voids above and below the street level cut through the building. Massive vertical spaces drop below you and hang above you. Pure architectural character, makes all public space part of the same system. These two competing visions of a twenty-first century campus offer insight into today’s campus political movements. In Grafton’s campus the agency of the architect consolidates activity within a single body. Three-dimensional hierarchies are established distributing public spaces throughout the singular object. In SANAA’s campus the ground plane is prioritized almost to a fault. Horizontality dominates and the buildings take on forms but do not prescribe public spaces in the same way. In the tunnels of the infrastructurally located Dropcity there was a show curated by BB with stripped back presentations of contemporary architecture offices. Christian Kerez’s office appears in-situ, a “director’s cut” of his recent a+u is a thickened edit of his recent issue of the magazine. It offers not so much an alternative take, but more like the extended edition. The design materials for a memorial by sub Architecture for those murdered at Babyn Yar in Kyiv is in a freezer or cell in the back of the tunnel. No writing, it is stripped to form only, a QR code takes you to a site which has the presentation sheets. The affect of their proposal dominates, a roof camouflaged as a burial mound covers a reconstruction of the original terrain from 1941. This intense design reflects the lessons learned by sub working in the fashion world. Experiential design, emotional impact, scenographic narration. 555 years since it was made, Augustinian Polyptych by Piero della Francesca was reassembled at the Poldi Pezzeli museum. Shimmering light seems to still be passing through the pigments. An office and apartment building by Luciano Canella from the sixties is a bundle of round cylinders edged in a concrete frame. The walls are infilled with flame brick emerging into black like Auguste Perret's Rue Franklin. Also like Franklin, its verticality dominates and its structure reinforces it. Villa Necchi is a spatially lifeless building impossible to call architecture.