ReActor is part of the 2016-17 Architecture Omi exhibitionWOOD: From Structure to Enclosure
1405 County Route 22
Ghent, New York, artomi.org

Atop a grassy hill, a typical Modernist slab house is hoisted aloft by a slender concrete pillar. Visitors to Architecture Omi in rural Columbia County, New York are struck by this magical, topsy-turvy vision as they emerge from the woods at the foot of a large open field. As they climb through mown grass toward the apparition, it becomes clear that the pillar is highway-overpass grade, and that the house is fully habitable, complete with plumbing and cooking systems neatly diagrammed in primary colors visible through transparent walls. This impressive engineering feat is ReActor, the fifth collaboration of artist Ward Shelley and architect Alex Schweder. All their joint projects have involved physically occupying, or as they put it “performing,” their deviant architectural inventions. ReActor is the least demanding so far in terms of performance, and the most ambitious structurally and aesthetically. It is also the first to directly address architectural genre, with the legacy of the high Modernist glass house placed onto a figurative, no less than literal, pedestal.

In my first visit to ReActor, under baking August sun, the sculpture was unoccupied. As I was trying to decipher how the weight of the house and its contents was secured to the cylindrical pillar, a welcome breeze began to spin and tip the house with the sluggish, machined majesty of a George Rickey kinetic sculpture. The structure, rather than being solidly attached, was simply resting the transverse beam of its roof –– a very Mies van der Rohe beam –– on a swivel point on the pillar, thrust through its interior.

My second visit took place on a dramatically overcast October afternoon, with the artists in residence (as they periodically will be during the two year installation). Their weight, as well as a gusty wind, made for far more spinning and tipping than before, although they took it in stride like veteran sailors. The house’s symmetry is rigorous, with dual balconies at the ends, dual beds and desks (lamps, chairs and personal items may be akimbo), and a central core of bathroom and kitchen, exposed like the HVAC systems of the Centre Pompidou. There is a theatrics of quarantine in the performances of Shelley and Schweder. As in an ocean crossing or space travel, all food and water must be cached in advance, five days for the performance I saw. Cooking and dining elements can be assembled when needed; stowed, they make a witty, De Stijl-style grid of primary colors, a detente between Rietveldt and Ikea. Closer in one notices a delightful detail that recalls the decorative survivalism of Andrea Zittel: two ready-to-use place settings made from colored boards hung sideways on the kitchen wall, each with magnetized cup, plate and silverware stuck in place.

The artists’ fourth collaboration, In Orbit (2014), was an immense mill wheel of bolted plywood built into The Boiler, Pierogi’s cavernous Brooklyn project space. It could be rotated freely on a sewer pipe rigged from the ceiling. For 11 days within the five week run of the show, Shelley lived perilously on the outer, upper slope, some 30 feet above the concrete floor, while Schweder occupied the lower, inner edge. Reciprocal furniture, kitchens and chemical toilets were distributed around the wheel, and the artists, walking in lock step, oppositely, could spin the required sector, hamster-like, to vertical. Every mood and whim of hygiene was thus a gravely serious comedy of negotiation. If Shelley and Schweder performed the architecture, it performed them, too.

Unlike the forced cooperation of In Orbit, however, ReActor’s architectural script allows for Shelley and Schweder to wander freely about their own wings, or to congregate in the middle. A rough reciprocity is observed, nevertheless, as eccentric distribution causes some tipping. (Joining one another for a drink on either’s balcony is out of the question.) Still, ReActor is neither perilous nor claustrophobic compared to In Orbit, or to Shelley’s other occupied sculptures (in collaboration with Schweder or otherwise), which include tunnels, elevated platforms, flattened ant-farm colonies, and secret mouse-like quarters inside a gallery’s walls. ReActor, by contrast, is a bucolic retreat. Even Shelley’s usual drama of endurance was deemed superfluous here, the artists only sporadically taking up residence. And fair enough: uninhabited, ReActor’s bold structure and setting strike the iconic, coffee-table-book pose of a Modernist masterpiece all the more –– without humans, that is, to mess up the architecture.

There has always been a respectful kinship between Modernist architecture and abstract art — whether geometric or biomorphic — since their mutual origins in the post-World War I European avant-garde. The relationship still thrives, though a sidelong critique began to hit “home” with Richard Hamilton’s interiors, along with Roy Lichtenstein’s better behaved ones. A bit later, Richard Artschwager’s textured paintings and flattened furniture and David Hockney’s cliffside L.A pools, among other projects, widened the ambiguous Pop embrace. And recently, Modernist architecture, in all its daring glamor, totalitarian hubris, and trickle down banality, has been gathering momentum as a subject, per se, of contemporary art practice. Across a broad spectrum, from the contemptuous to the fondly nostalgic, even perhaps to the credulous, Günther Förg, Enoc Perez, R.H. Quaytman, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Amie Siegel, Thomas Ruff, Marsha Cottrell, Jorge Pardo, Mike Kelley, Jeremy Blake, Matthew Barney and numerous others have addressed their work to the legacy, direct or indirect, of Modernist masters.

And it is surely a mixed legacy. Ruskin, some fifty years in advance of Mies’ defining less-is-more dictum, defended fertile Gothic inventiveness from Renaissance symmetry with a prophecy: “No architecture is so haughty as that which is simple.” The haughtiness, as much as the simplicity, seems to be just what interests many contemporary artists about modernism. In any case, despite the utopian ideals of the Bauhaus, its invocation of Medieval brotherhoods and democratic transparency, a dark side inheres in the corporate accommodations of Gropius and Mies in the new world, and generally to the International Style as it came to be cluelessly and expediently practiced in America: not only numberless crass glass towers, including a certain orange pustule on Fifth Avenue, but bland suburban high schools, like the ghostly one modeled in Kelly’s Educational Complex. Worst of all is the legacy of so-called urban renewal, symbolized by the failure of mass housing projects such as the imploded Pruitt-Igoe, which was inescapably, if clumsily, derived from Le Corbusier’s Vichy-commissioned studies in urban planning. If ReActor’s concrete piloti reminds us of the rigor of the Villa Savoye, it also beckons to Léon Krier’s observation that Corbu’s later, highly expressive innovations in concrete were inspired by Albert Speer’s Atlantic Wall defense bunkers. And speaking of opportunistic fascist sympathizers, Philip Johnson’s baronially sited Glass House in nearby Connecticut may be ReActor’s most immediate paradigm.

Part of what makes the legacy of Mies and Corbu, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd Wright, Richard Neutra and Rudolph Schindler, et al. such compelling subject matter for contempoary art may be that the dark side of Modernism was subliminally reinforced by Hollywood. In Thom Anderson’s brilliant documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, we learn how Modernist trophy houses, perched on cliffs above the city, came to be the default mise-en-scène for evil foreigners, insinuating perverts, drug lords, and corrupt politicians by an accident of convenience. Over a location shot from L.A. Confidential, a 1997 throwback to classic noir, in which Richard Neutra’s seminal 1929 Lovell House plays the airy, cantilevered home of a murdered pornographer, Anderson’s narrator sums it up: “The movies have shown these pure modern machines for better living are dens of vice.” Anderson’s film also examines the numerous roles played by Jack Lautner’s1960 Chemosphere house, a hexagonal flying saucer that, not unlike ReActor, is perched atop a slender concrete pole. Cast as “the bachelor pad of a lunatic driller killer” in Brian De Palma’s Hitchcock homage, Body Double, Lautner’s structural audacity, influenced by a long mentorship with Wright, went down as camp.

 There is a touch of camp, actually, in the “body double” jump suits, one orange, the other red, worn by Shelley and Schweder as they go about their roughly symmetrical business. Suggesting both maximum security prisoners and operators of heavy machinery, the costumes function most of all to diagram the architectural narrative through ReActor’s transparent walls, the bright colors drawing the eye as in an Oskar Schlemmer dance-lecture at the Bauhaus. Diagramming narrative is, of course, Shelley’s artistic obsession. Aside from sculpture, he draws and paints intricate timelines of untold histories, including avant-garde art scenes and movements, television shows, car stylistics, and intimate autobiography. The shape of time, in his deeply opinionated, visually inventive telling, is a spaghetti of interweaving plots. Shelley’s intestinal timelines have been getting richer and more encrusted, with illustrational content now punctuating the flow, and the whole scheme often assuming punning outlines in the infographics tradition of gnarly “trees” of life –– or, in Shelley’s case, a “giant squid” of science fiction. To a conference of data visualization professionals, no less, he has spoken of how a map or data spread is merely informational, until a line is plotted across the data, connecting the dots. The line narrates, it interprets. It turns information into explanation.

Similarly, Shelley has sought to draw a human line through architectural data. With Schweder and his other collaborators, he has explored how the constraints of buildings and enclosures imply narrative, which his social-sculptural performances elicit. International Style architecture as a subject for contemporary art has become so fashionable that it now verges on cliché. But Shelley and Schweder invert the cliché, rebuilding Modernist architecture from the ground up –– or rather, from the sky down ––reclaiming something of its visionary purity in the process, and adding an all-American, can-do spirit. Despite the ambitious engineering of ReActor, the narrative here –– with sheeting standing in for glass, Home Depot for Knoll, and MDF for black steel –– is not so much nostalgia for Modernism’s sheen of perfection, as it is the contrarian, DIY spirit of “doing a dumb thing in a difficult way,” Shelley’s motto since the late 1990s. Floating above the trees, tilting ingeniously and absurdly in the wind, the artists have invented their own machine for living. It is a raft drifting between the Catskills and the Taconics as truantly as Huck Finn wending his way down the Mississipi.

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Dominque Lévy has opened a jewel of a show of Alexander Calder in her Madison Avenue gallery. But careful when you say that. Calder’s protean inventiveness did in fact extend beyond his pioneering mobiles and stabiles to include bodily adornments. This isn’t a show of his jewelry, however, but of small sculptures, albeit that some are no bigger than a brooch.

Besides gathering over three-dozen works varying from the staggeringly minute to around a foot high, Ms. Lévy’s coup de grace has been to orchestrate a posthumous pas de deux between the legendary sculptor, who died in 1976, and living architects Santiago Calatrava and his son Gabriel Calatrava (counted as one for balletic purposes!) who have installed the exhibition with exquisite taste and commensurate verve.

The design has all the characteristic fusion of the voluptuous and the streamlined of a classic Calatrava bridge or pavilion while managing to showcase, and even subtly offset, the delicate robustness of Calder. Calatrava’s pristine curves and trademark whiteness offer the perfect foil for the rough-at-the-edges handmadeness of Calder’s sculptural forms in wire and plate in black and the primaries, forms lent further texture by splintery charred wooden elements, found pebbles and glass, and even, in one instance, a spoon retrieved from a dump. While the tinier stabiles are housed in gorgeously realized steel and glass vitrines along outer walls, larger pieces are supported in the middle of the rooms on small circular tables of varying height. These include the few suspended mobiles which each have their own committed table, a nice touch as it adds clarity and consistency to the display. The tables rest on amoeba-shaped steps, a detail that’s both very Calatrava and evocative of a midcentury moderne that in turn is perfectly attuned to Calder’s aesthetic.

Miraculous placement ensures that while there are conversations going on around the room, each piece occupies its own space, is free to generate its own internal scale. Frank O’Hara once said of early collages by Alex Katz that “the size is intimate but the scale is vast,” an apposite phrase for these smaller Calders. (Multum in parvo, the show’s title, borrowed from print connoisseur Carl Zigrosser, kind of says the same thing in Latin.) As Jed Perl, who is authoring a biography of Calder, astutely describes in his essay for the forthcoming catalogue of this show, Calder had varying reasons to work small. Some pieces were maquettes for architectural proposals; some, from the mid-1940s, took their dimensions and indeed mode of construction from the size restrictions of newly introduced air mail used to send works to his Paris dealer, Louis Carré. But some of the smallest pieces might actually have had philosophical purpose behind their diminutive scale:

For the inventor of the mobile, who was fascinated by the way objects move through space, the miniature was another way of playing with space, of dramatically shrinking space, of taking what might be vast and rendering it nearly microscopic.

The Calatravas’ duet with Calder bring to mind the audacious, sometimes provocative yet ultimately complementary gallery designs of the legendary Friedrich Kiesler, except that whiteness ensures that their position towards the art is the more modest. There is actually something mildly retro about Santiago Calatrava’s aesthetic, a yesteryear sense of what the future might hold. Although maybe that is just a way of saying that both Calatrava and Calder deviate from harsher, brutalist aesthetics with their soft and fluent curves, in that Calatrava is in the tradition of Alvar Aalto, not to mention Gaudí, more than Mies or le Corbusier, while Calder’s playful modernism stands in contrast to the sterner stuff of David Smith, another welder coming out of Surrealism, which evidently obliged Smith’s formalist champions to denigrate Calder at any opportunity. The pairing of Calatrava and Calder might subtly reference their mutual affinity, their soft modernism. Calder, meanwhile, is no stranger to the antics of forceful architects: in his own life he teamed up several times with Jose Luis Sert (the Loyalist Pavilion where his Mercury Fountain kept Guernica company for instance) while quite recently Frank Gehry did a striking good job of installing a retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Calatravas are joining an illustrious line.

There is one Calatrava decision, however, that touches on intrusiveness: each vitrine and gueridon sports a mirror top, an effect that lends charm and luxury to the installation, for sure, but tends to coerce inverted readings of Calder’s sculptural forms. Sometimes the mirrors provide insight, allowing us to savor the engineering of Calder’s welded pieces, but there is already such a lexicon of formal possibilities in the way a Calder wobbles and bobs along that this mirror stage seems regressive. Also, doubling up each sculpture (the hanging mobiles are freed of this) with its mirror form denies the strong figural quality that pervades so many works. Not only are we policed into an abstract reading of these personages, the mirroring also denies the radically asymmetrical quality of Calder by saddling each completed gestalt with a Siamese twin. (Calatrava, Paul Goldberger observes in another catalogue essay, is a confirmed fan of symmetry.) But looking slightly askance or crouching to the level of the table eliminates this problem, if a problem it is.

I wonder if Calder would have minded this: he seemed to delight in creative misreadings of his inventions. He was happy to leave the naming of his new forms to his friend Marcel Duchamp who coined the terms mobile and stabile. Another friend, Herbert Matter, photographed his hanging mobiles with a long exposure such that the strobe effect traces their swinging action. The clean, almost clinical aesthetic with which the Calatravas package his works pluck Calder from his yankee Connecticut barn into an almost futuristic environment, but that’s fine: Calder belongs to both.

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These are images that have been seen many times before. Many, seeing them again, will still feel their muscles tense, as the events of that day live again in eternal playback: the weaponized 767 roars through the sky of pure video blue and into the World Trade Center’s south tower. Always to be shown in succession, we see it once more, and now a new angle from another channel. The plane is engulfed in steel rectilinearity, fiery reds and oranges blooming out of 24,000 gallons of fuel. Three minutes after nine, before even the New York Stock Exchange’s opening bell, the catastrophe was well underway.

The aftereffects September 11th continue to ripple outward, in ways few might have foreseen. A calamity of this scale had never been televised; the destruction of the World Trade Center was an unprecedented media event that cut a deep scar across Lower Manhattan. Within hours, myths were both built up and torn asunder, as a formerly impervious beacon of capitalism was annihilated, nearly bringing the financial capital of the world to its knees. An array of unanticipated events happened that day, and just as quickly as blame could be assigned, unexplored intelligence was found, with so many cascading failures leading to colossal disaster. The global military, political, and legal campaigns initiated in the aftermath proved to be an unexpectedly violent beginning for the 21st century, all leading from the heart of a complex once triumphantly declared by its architect to be a shining monument to world peace.

The original towers by Minoru Yamasaki were forced icons of urban renewal, built to specification in a complex that never truly encouraged the public to venture into the unwelcoming plaza that lay at its heart. While undoubtedly a fine place to work, the massive project was, at the core, another attempt to create an airless, high-Modernist utopia for commerce. The new tower is a fortress; those who work there will enter through the securitized and blast-resistant lobby, or one day, through Santiago Calatrava’s nearby skeletal PATH station, years delayed and billions of dollars over budget. The everlasting loss of the site is illustrated in the competition-winning design of architect Michael Arad; his memorial of two yawning cubic pits, which replicate the towers’ immense foundations, are dazzling feats of engineering. Their synthetic waterfalls flow with precise technical choreography, and are sure to be the primary stop on the pilgrimages undertaken by those still unsure that the events of that day did, in fact, occur. This plaza is rigidly patrolled, and codes of conduct are enforced, with the expectation that public grief is to be measured while here.While the luminous One World Trade Center is now present, built to a soaringly patriotic 1,776 feet, it is Arad’s monuments and the adjacent, subterranean 9/11 Memorial Museum that have been tasked with the active remembrance of the events of September 11, 2001. The museum promises more than answers, or even simply the means to navigate a dark and terrible day — in these exhibition spaces, one is promised a direction in which one can focus their grief and sorrow. Now, with its solemn grand opening, the space is finally coalescing into its idealized form. With the surging crowds of summer, it is immediately evident that many of the complaints made against the master plan of the original World Trade Center could be made of this iteration.

The museum offers an involving narrative to follow, to lose oneself in. What awaits each visitor is a thoroughly controlled experience, activated through architecture upon entering the airy aboveground glass and steel pavilion, which seems to collapse in upon itself. On the descent down to the exhibition spaces, lighter woods give way to darker ones. Although the museum is new construction, it is sited in the excavated chasm between the foundations of the twin towers. The path down is revealed to be a ramp, an allusion to the larger one that was formed in the clean up of ground zero and slowly evolved into an emblem of the painstaking rebirth underway. At its terminus, the ramp transforms into a mezzanine, perched above the enormous “Foundation Hall,” which is flanked by the vast original slurry-retaining wall built to contain the Hudson. The wall is now left exposed in what is perhaps the museum’s most dramatic example of loss. The profusion of artifacts begins on the final escalator ride. Throughout, the hall is traversed overhead by the long mezzanine, twisted through the s-curve of the foundations in alignment with the acutely buckled structural columns left standing after the buildings’ monumental collapse. Installed in the center of the vast hall is the museum’s sole commissioned artwork. Spencer Finch’s Trying to Remember the Color on That September Morning (2014) consists of 2,983 attempts to replicate in watercolor the shade of blue of the sky on September 11th, one sheet of paper per life lost.

The first gallery contains a slideshow of lives violently ended. The display, called “In Memorium,” consists of a black box theater surrounded by identifying photographs, revealing the analog age that September 11th belongs to. For some of the dead, no images exist, and in their place a memorial oak leaf is displayed, mirroring trees planted on the surface above. Inside the theater, more images and brief biographies of those who died are projected, each name painstakingly read out in metronymic regularity. While the cavalcade of loss and grief extends throughout the museum, in this space it is allowed to pause, one of the few breaks permitted along the planned route.

“September 11th, 2001,” the central exhibition, offers horrors of a kind that one is more accustomed to viewing through the lens of institutionalized history. It is rare that contemporary events are seen under the particular glare that is offered here, as this recent history is still very much with us, it allows a visceral recall not possible with the distant past. As this museum is no doubt expected to serve as a shrine for many, it is appropriate that it contains endless individual altars. Mutilated ID cards, singed cash, tattered snapshots, and illegible memoranda are all cataloged and displayed under vitrines. While the appearance of these items here seems an invasive exposure of private lives, as representatives of the compacted contents of a thousand desk drawers, the inventory has its intended effect, turning the mundane and personal into heroic relics. Tissue dispensers are discreetly placed throughout the galleries of this detailed chronicle of the attacks and their aftermath. Images assault at every turn, staggered, staged, spread across the walls — each gallery offers a salon-style rendering of destruction. We see the horrified faces of onlookers, the firefighter’s climbing the boundless flights of stairs to their death, and the ashen survivors staggering away from the remains of the World Trade Center. The event has been claimed as the most photographed in human history. These images depict the scenes that made the day as dark as it was, but seen in such profusion, they form less detail with each new surface, eventually reducing tragedy to texture. While the pictures may be well known, the audio presented is not. In addition to the sounds of visitors, the galleries are inundated with the looping playback of final desperate voicemails and emergency service dispatchers, some requiring handsets to hear, while others crackle over invisible speakers, often still audible after one has moved along to another gallery. The audiovisual density is confounding — multilayered to a degree that eventually little can truly register. It is this extraordinary bombardment of things that forms the core of the experience.

In a gallery near the exhibition’s end, an original architectural model of the World Trade Center complex is displayed. It is a space dedicated to the era before the buildings’ destruction, filled with postcards and stills from iconic films, the famous skyline seeming oddly historical to eyes now accustomed to seeing its new alignment. The maquette appears the embodiment of breezy period-contemporaneity, with intricately etched sheet metal scaled to the massive planned heights, while models of 1960s vintage cars encircle the plaza, ants next to the towering behemoths of Western capitalism they swarm by. The wistful quotes on the walls from those involved with the project’s conception hearken to a future we have left behind, a mid-century sense of revitalization that most governments have now neither the will nor the finances to implement. As constructed, the museum resembles an eerie simulacrum of the commercial space it memorializes, but in this form it appears to be history for the sake of history, with little attention paid to the context of the original.

We no longer live in the world that existed when the World Trade Center’s master plan was unveiled, where a nation’s aspirations could be shored up in cascading tensile steel. The glittering monumentality of the towers is still present at this site, now re-purposed and rendered through a screen of security measures, the sense of progress once attached to them now long gone. There is scant opportunity to contemplate this, in these spaces, with all attention held captive by the finely structured sea of grief. While the reasons behind the attacks are carefully explained in text and video, they are secondary to the canonization of suffering presented. In every gallery there is a desperate search for an elusive significance to the day’s events, which, of course, often cannot be definitively located. A great deal was lost at the site of this museum, most likely more than we care to acknowledge, and certainly more than any monument could be expected to attest to. The resolutely tasteful gift shop proves to be a surprisingly effective commemoration. The space provides a tactile transport back to a now-lost Before, replete in gleaming warm white lights, a world conjured once more through souvenirs emblazoned with the twin towers’ stark profile. It is a sleight of hand not lost on visitors: a chance to buy the past, a token from what now seems a halcyon age of assurance that, however illusory, is sorely missed.

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October 1 – November 20, 2010
The Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street, 2nd Floor

The legacy of Paul Rudolph (1918-1997) is a mixed one.  Universally considered one of the most important and original American architects, his signature “brutalist” buildings, which were controversial from the start, are in large part neglected and under threat of demolition.  In truth his built works, while dynamic in broad outline, often fatally lack the sensibility of detail that would allow them to rise to the level of his magnificent drawings.  In a small, focused show at Cooper Union under auspices of The Drawing Center, we can revisit Rudolph’s talent in his greatest set of rendered dreams, a 1967-72 study funded by the Ford Foundation for a Y-shaped Lower Manhattan infrastructural expressway.  It would have trenched between two bridges and a tunnel while knitting housing, parking, and other civic functions above in richly organic clusters of hanging gardens of concrete.

One gasps at the proposal’s sacrificial swath through Soho, Chinatown and the Lower East Side (at the time, the word would have been “renewal”), but the brilliant intensity of Rudolph’s vision, at least as drawings, may be sufficiently redeeming.  No originals are on view in this orphaned exhibition, alas, and the full-size reproductions are far from the best attainable.  Works in color are misguidedly displayed in freestanding glass sandwiches, apparently to provide translucent backlighting.  The Drawing Center has much to answer for; it presumably would not provide its own premises, and the Library of Congress, which holds Rudolph’s archives, would not lend to Cooper’s non-standard gallery.  However, the curators, Ed Rawlings and Jim Walrod, have produced a smart, thoughtful booklet and supervised a comprehensive model (inferred from stills from a lost promotional film as well as the drawings) that rewards a visit.

From the standpoint of big thinking versus small, there is much to talk about here.  Isn’t Rudolph’s top-down planning, however open-ended and humane, inescapably Moloch?  With its priority to traffic flow and parking, isn’t it anti-urban?  Still, compared to Robert Moses’ earlier proposals for a LoMEx, Rudolph’s is the rare, nuanced vision; what if New York had embraced it to secure a more ambitious architectural future?  Consider today’s Delancey St. corridor, which the plan would have utterly transformed.  Rudolph would design away automobile snarl and the blight of cheap flimflam, but what happens to the fertile democracy of the grid, what Rem Koolhaas has called “Manhattanism?”  Would the plan have thrown the baby out with the bathwater?

These are vital questions now as then, but it is worth putting them aside to appreciate the power of Rudolph’s graphic approach.  In a text for a book of his drawings, he admitted that his famous corduroyed concrete was an attempt to reproduce materially the rhythmic parallel textures of his renderings; that he didn’t use brick because he disliked drawing it; and that he could fool himself with his own dramatic manipulations of scale.  He was well aware that building must take precedence over drawing, so his frankness is admirable: his renderings might be too good.  In the purely theoretical LoMEx studies, no such compunctions restrain Rudolph’s graphic electricity.  Closer in spirit to the pop fantasias of Archigram or the gorgeous mega-Babels of Paolo Soleri than to conventional architectural renderings, Rudolph’s elaborate diagonal rhythms and emphatic textures project a mind-blowing alternate cityscape.

The exhibition contains many fascinating sketches that demonstrate the fecundity of Rudolph’s ideas about interlocking, stepped spaces, but it’s his finished perspective renderings (delegated to some extent and intended for reproduction, but smaller and crisper than here) that command attention.  The style was an early invention from which he barely wavered.  It borrows from the suavity of engraving in its highly deliberate accumulations of straight black lines to convey light and shade  – the quality of line never getting vague to evoke atmosphere, just more exacting in its proportion.  Receding surfaces in shadow are scored with sure crosshatches that moiré against converging perspective rays, while black sectioned solids project plushly forward.  The complexity of Rudolph’s interiors has sometimes been called Piranesian (praise to some ears, though not necessarily meant as such), but the great printmaker’s indefatigably assertive linear rhythm seems to have impressed itself on Rudolph as much as hanging catwalks and monumental staircases to nowhere.

Two drawings in particular from the LoMEx project transcend their intended purpose, and can be said to have entered the collective reservoir of unforgettable images.  One is a perspective of the approach to the Williamsburg Bridge banked by zigzagging housing towers.  Done in red graphite substantially freehand, it is meticulously worked up but lighter in touch than usual.  The other is a rock-solid section through A-frame structures over the expressway trench.  Zones of color pop the drafted black linework forward, and Rudolph exploits the forcing, multiple horizons common to baroque theater and Yellow Submarine to bury the eye in the receding streetscape  –  naked manipulations that betray the architect’s visionary temperament.

The most inventive contemporary architects seem all in agreement that the organic principle, lost in modernism, can be restored to buildings by the abhorrence of repetition, by continuous shift and surprise.  Rudolph’s Bauhaus training came direct from Gropius, however, and held whimsicality to a stricter standard.  His work at its best, built and unbuilt, reminds us that deep architectural thrill depends on theme and variation.  In talented hands, modular composition and sculptural logic need not be static.  They can be musical.

If there are lessons for today’s urban planners and architects in Rudolph’s work, artists should pay heed as well.  The history of painting and drawing is full of envy for the illusionism of architectural drafting, which is ever magnetic.  On top of that, a certain architectural fetishism is by now overly familiar in contemporary art, for example in the work of Guillermo Kuitca or Julie Mehretu.  So, what happens if we take architects’ renderings on equal terms?  A properly done show of Rudolph’s drawings would be a good place to start.  The issue in play, I would suggest, is that architecture is about solving problems, while art is about asking questions.  The practices are oppositely charged.  But in certain microcosmic, visionary, solipsistic moments, architectural drawings may arrogate the prerogative of art.  When that happens, their clear, purposeful execution is a force to be reckoned with.

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Born in Buenos Aires in 1977 and transported to London soon thereafter, Pablo Bronstein the artist, as opposed to Pablo Bronstein the little boy, thoroughly missed the Postmodern boat. By the time he emerged as a mature artist around 2000 AD, the hardcore Postmodern classicism of, for example, the Sainsbury Wing in London’s National Gallery had become the standing jest of the cultural world, a status it retains ten years on. Even its most blow-hard supporters, critics like Charles Jencks, have largely disowned the movement and would prefer not to talk about it. Only Bronstein, it seems, is willing to make a public stand in support of this much-maligned ism, as is abundantly evident in a charming exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum.

This diminutive show consists of 7 drawings or groups of drawings, as well as a series of ink-jet prints and another series of etchings. All of these works were completed in 2009 and the majority of them have to do in some fanciful way with the architecture of the Metropolitan Museum itself. Indeed, this focus is in keeping with most of this artist’s work to date, which consists of archaizing drawings of architecture and interiors. To this critic, there is a distinctly dreamlike element to Bronstein’s art: he depicts the Met, that neo-classical temple, much as it is today, and yet strangely altered. In the largest image in the show, the Met appears as an 18th Century construction site seen from “4th Avenue,” as if nothing had ever been built in between. Dotted with palm-trees and pre-modern cranes, it is a labor of Pharaonic immensity. Meanwhile, another drawing depicts the Met as a massive quadrangle, as indeed McKim, Meade and White had intended it to be in their promptly discarded master plan.

The formal vocabulary of Bronstein’s images is, in his depictions of architecture, a mixture of the Memphis style from the mid-Eighties and the fastidiously classical idiom of Vanvitelli and Juvarra. As for his interiors, they look fondly back upon Louis Quinze and the neo-classical Adam style. Superimposed upon these formal convictions is a mood or attitude that shifts from the archness of Hockney to the pseudo-sublimity of Piranesi.

One is naturally inclined to ask what Bronstein could possibly be up to. The Met’s press release dependably communicates the party line: “[Bronstein] highlights the complicit power structures that are required to accomplish great works, in turn inviting viewers to consider the mechanisms that delineate private and public space.”

Well, there’s that: but I would suggest another reading. At his best, the artist is a really first-rate draughtsman, whole passages of whose drawings could pass for respectable exercises in 18th century architectural studies. Contemporary culture allows artists to do anything at all, anything—except the one thing that Bronstein appears to want to do, namely to design and draw classical buildings as though he were at work in a perpetual ancien regime. But because the age will not reward an artist for a forthright indulgence of this “passéism,” an ironic subtext, having to do with power structures and the art world, had to be found and has been found.

But the real reason behind these works, or so I believe, is the artist’s abiding love of old architectural drawings, a dying art that Bronstein has somehow learned to practice with impressive mastery.

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