CONCRETE DREAMS
How does one exhibit architecture in a museum? Drawings and models engage, but they cannot take the place of the thing itself, the building. The architecture show at MoMA, A Japanese Constellation: Toyo Ito, SANAA, and Beyond, falls into this trap. It’s a supremely elegant installation. Each one of six small second floor galleries is given over to one of the six brilliant architects celebrated here: Toyo Ito, Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa, Sou Fujimoto, Akihisa Hirata, and Junya Ishigami. Models and prototypes are set out on small white stands, and drawings and quotes are pinned to pale grey walls. Photos and renderings, about the size of 11x8 sheets, are projected onto floor-length white linen scrims. The overall effect is low-fi and dreamy, as much of the work here is.
The exhibit designers might have decided to project photographs to avoid visible monitors, to emphasize the handicraft in the work. But the images are small and the linen blurs them so much that they’re practically illegible. We never see what these buildings are meant to look like or what they actually look like, and this is a tremendous disservice, because almost all of them have been built. The ideas and geometries given expression in the drawings are models are astounding: at once simple, obtuse, lucid, startling and lyrical. But having ideas about a building is dreaming, not architecture. Since visitors don’t see the renderings and photos clearly, the work remains paper architecture.
Fujimoto conceived a small house in Tokyo, House NA, by splitting each of its rooms, halls, closets, and stair runs into a separate volume, building each one from glass, and stacking them in a shifting, ramshackle pile. The wood and board model of the building at MoMA is lovely, like a spirited doll house, but photographs of the house itself – that show clearly its modest scale, its precarious foothold along the sidewalk, its bamboo-thin metal frame, its unapologetic transparency – are surreal. As astonishing as the concept of the house is, it’s more astounding that it’s been executed skillfully, with each of its quietly radical propositions (about space, about structure, about domesticity) intact. That might be true for all the projects included in this show. We understand the ideas, now show us the buildings.