The Brooklyn Rail

The recent exhibition Four Five Six at a83 in SoHo is a sharply focused presentation of architecture through the lens of OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen (hereafter OFFICE), or more accurately, through the photographers and artists they have chosen to frame their practice. The stated purpose is to exhibit the references and photographic research that shape their process. For this iteration, which coincides with the release of their new monograph of the same name, OFFICE assembles screenprinted photographs, printed in a83’s on-site printshop, alongside a scattering of related sculptural and architectural objects. Altogether, the setting offers deep insight into one of the most influential architectural practices of their generation.

The exhibition is articulated through three distinct types of work. On the walls, ninety-six photographic prints run along a single datum, creating a horizon of images that encircle the objects in the space. These photographs—by Bas Princen, Stefano Graziani, and Giovanna Silva—frame the architectural models by OFFICE, which are placed throughout the space in dialogue with sculptures by Rita McBride. The third work is the lighting itself, a grid of low-hanging LED strips custom designed for the show, which can be considered a quiet installation that references other architectural work. Together, these three components produce an exhibition that is rich in detail and expansive in its historical framework. OFFICE and the gallery together have realized an exquisite show that is at once ambitious, open, and unexpectedly, accessible to collect.

As David Bowie said: “That gray space in the middle is what the twenty-first century is going to be about.” In their three-volume monograph, OFFICE interrupts the sequence of projects with gray pages printed only with photographs. This “gray space,” purposely elusive in the absence of explanatory text, opens a conceptual interval between otherwise straightforward project documentation. It is a space where images take hold and give perspective to what lies beneath their work. OFFICE is a practice whose representative efforts are legion. Their early collages, for example, influenced a generation of students eager to move beyond the digital homogeneity at the time. What is more salient in this resulting exhibition is an obvious shift towards photography as the dominant means of representing this “gray space.”

In the hands of a83, a gallery and printing workshop run by the inexhaustible duo Clara Syme and Owen Nichols, the gray space takes on a new possibility. Expertly constrained by the screenprinting process, the colors are coordinated in sets of four and vary between analogous and complimentary hues across a loosely controlled palette. The result is striking in its cohesion but nuanced in every detail, allowing for each photographer to be read discretely. Here, a83’s craft reminds us of the lost enchantments of the silkscreen medium.

Digging a little deeper reveals a generational story that strengthens the show’s resonance. If the ninety-six screenprints are reminiscent of the 102 “Shadows” by Andy Warhol, it is not incidental. Warhol’s “Shadows” were printed just around the corner at the studio of Rupert Jasen Smith, the influential printer for Andy Warhol’s most ambitious projects. A young architect once worked for Smith on that very series before founding John Nichols Printmakers & Publishers at 83 Grand Street. Today, that same space is now a83, operated by his son, Owen Nichols, with partner Clara Syme, as a space for experimental architecture, art and design. If you ever wonder how a gallery like this endures in SoHo—gallivanting in the playground of luxury retail—it is through a generational persistence.

Looking out the gallery windows onto SoHo’s façades—capitalism’s fever dream clad in the memory of artists’ lofts—another idea emerges. It has to do with photography’s ability to capture the large-scale conditions that shape architecture and how, under certain circumstances, the architectural photographer is the right instrument for the job.

Consider Bas Princen’s images of a ruined brick wall in Dendera next to one of Petra. One is reminded of how contemporary these images of eroded antiquity have become today. Their material nuance—the earth suspended in decay—frames an architectural moment that feels new. It is ancestral and geological knowledge at once, and offers insight for how traditional vernacular architecture resists modernism’s claims for expansion. The resonance with Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects is unmistakable: a reminder of how climate-responsive, place-specific architectures might speak back to the universalizing ambitions of the modern international style. It doesn’t seem like a stretch to make this connection when their exhibition text claims that “these gray pages give us a portrait of OFFICE without OFFICE.”

Now about that lighting grid. Twenty-four lights hang to form an eight-by-three grid of linear LED strips. Since everything in the show is referential, or at least deliberate, it would seem that the lighting would activate a gray space. Its clearest precedent is SHOWROOM in Los Angeles—one of OFFICE’s first projects, whose continuous grid is unmistakably echoed here. Yet, as Owen Nichols notes, the lighting is also a nod to the Italian Radical architects, Archizoom Associati and Superstudio, whose insistence on grids is read as a critique of late twentieth-century capitalism. For them, the supermarket was both the emblem and the battleground of consumer society: the very space that appears to entrap the working class might, paradoxically, become the site of its liberation. The antidote is in the poison, so to speak.

Nichols and Syme recounted that in planning the exhibition, OFFICE’s only request was that the “big idea” come through—however their collaborators chose to interpret it. Here the show reveals their skill in the art of orchestration, bringing people together to accomplish an idea without micro-managing—a skill architects often claim but rarely master. One of the greatest pleasures of the show is recognizing the presence of their big idea without being told what it might be, exactly. Ultimately, the exhibition reveals the photograph as both witness and accomplice: a medium that registers architecture’s ambitions while also exposing its vulnerabilities. In a83’s screenprinted field of images, the passing of generational knowledge becomes legible as a quiet form of resistance—a way of working within mass culture while refusing to be consumed by it. In this sense, Four Five Six captures a paradox that has long animated OFFICE’s work: architecture as both the framework of the problem and the possibility of an answer.