Thomas Demand: Portals

T H O M A S

D E M A N D P O RTA L S

THOMAS DEMAND P O R TA L S

P L AT E S

Notre-Dame de Reims In September 1914, two months after the start of World War I, the German army was laying siege to the city of Reims in northern France. Even though cathedrals and other cultural monuments were generally agreed to be safe from military bombardment, German bombs hit and set fire to the medieval Notre-Dame de Reims, the majestic Gothic cathedral where many of France’s monarchy had been crowned.

The attack inflamed public sentiment. French intellectuals had long admired the Germanic cultural tradition, but the destruction of this aesthetically, historically and spiritually invaluable monument was seen as unconscionable, and as evidence of the deep and inherent barbarism of the German people.

After the war, a heated debate began over how—or whether—to reconstruct the devastated cathedral. Some argued that it should remain a ruin, as a testament to the suffering of the city during the war (and, implicitly, to the depravity of the German attackers). Instead, the cathedral was rebuilt largely in the style of its previous incarnation, although its roof was controversially made from concrete rather than wood, and many stained-glass windows, shattered by explosions or heat, were replaced with clear glass. Pockmarks still cover the exterior of the building and, inside, many statues are missing limbs or faces.

The cathedral finally reopened to the public in 1938, its reconstruction intended as a symbol of reconciliation between France and Germany; ironically, it was only finished when the countries were on the verge of war once again. Like many German artists of his generation, Thomas Demand, born in Munich in 1964, has frequently touched on the fragile constructions of national identity through his work, and in particular his own country’s fraught relationship with its past.

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Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio In the early 1960s, the architect and designer Gio Ponti was invited by the archbishop of Taranto, a port city on the heel of Italy, to design a cathedral. He responded with a proposal that—in photographs, at least—still looks much like a pristine paper model, even half a century after it was built. Completed in 1970, the Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio, as it is known, is remarkable for its central tower and upper walls which are constructed in white concrete, perforated with rectangles and hexagons that are open to the sky.

Thomas Demand was drawn to the way the cathedral’s openwork walls resemble the snipped paper cutout of a child’s craft project, or the elaborate perforated tissue paper of Mexican papel picado banners. As is plainly visible, the shallow belfry in Ponti’s design contains no actual bells, and serves only as a symbolic model of a traditional cathedral belfry.

Today, Taranto’s economy is struggling, and the fabric of the Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio is neglected. The reflecting pools at the foot of its front steps are now dry, and residential development has encroached on the fields and olive groves that once surrounded it.

In recent years, however, the cathedral has been reanimated by immigrants and asylum seekers from across the Mediterranean who use the building as a safe haven and gathering place. Though unkempt and crowded, the cathedral is alive with the sound of spiritual song and the hum of community. Fittingly, Ponti’s interior bears certain African influences, with its colourful painted accents and white walls.

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Shepherd Ivory Franz Hall II Also known as the Psychology Tower at the University of California, Los Angeles, Shepherd Ivory Franz Hall II opened in 1967 and was designed by Paul Revere Williams.

From an architectural point of view, Franz Hall II is not primarily notable because of its design (a 100-foot square, concrete grid), or its scale (although when new it was the tallest building on campus) nor even its technical advancements (despite being a state-of-the-art facility) but by the fact of its architect’s race.

Williams, who died in 1980 at the age of 85, was the first Black member of the American Institute of Architects, and later its first Black fellow. Throughout his career he fought to transcend the prejudices of his predominantly white client base, and indeed was largely successful in doing so. He designed hundreds of buildings across Los Angeles, in a wide variety of styles, from middle-class homes to Beaux-Arts mansions, from Modernist civic structures— including parts of the Los Angeles airport—to the Ambassador and Beverly Hills hotels.

Williams nevertheless faced numerous challenges. The most frequently told story about Williams is that he learnt to draw upside down to avoid making his clients feel uncomfortable by sitting next to them during design meetings. In fact, in his own telling of the story, Williams mastered the skill in order to deflect attention from his race and direct it instead towards his impressive technical facility.

Thomas Demand was attracted to the rational, modular efficiency of Franz Hall II, which corresponds with his own technique of cutting repeating paper shapes for his models with a digital plotter. The thinness of his construction, too, here resonates with the identity of the building: a neutral façade that occludes not only the complexity of Williams’ biography but also the disfunction and pain that was studied and treated within.

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Border Wall Prototype In October 2017, on the Otay Mesa, a barren patch of land near San Diego, President Donald Trump unveiled eight prototype sections of freestanding wall. These were designed to be tested for use along the U.S.– Mexican border, the fortification of which was a central pillar of Trump’s election campaign.

While a border wall was widely seen as being an ineffective, purely symbolic solution to what conservatives consider to be the United States’ immigration problem, these prototypes were themselves symbolic of Trump’s determination to be seen to follow through on the promises that got him elected. Built at a cost of $3.3 million in federal funds, the competing prototypes, if commissioned, would have constituted a monumental contract for the winning company. On his inauguration in 2021, President Joe Biden terminated the border wall project, although in the years since, the political problem of the U.S. southern border has only become more urgent and divisive.

The particular prototype was produced by the Israeli-owned Elta North America, a defense manufacturer based in Maryland and owned by Israel Aerospace Industries. The flow of capital and military resources between the United States and Israel lends this prototype a further layer of symbolism—urging a loaded comparison with the defense of Israel’s borders against states which it perceives to threaten its very existence.

Trump—a real estate developer and a social climber—has built a fortune on the design and sale of aspirational structures. In October 2018, he described his intended wall as “artistically designed steel slats;” Demand observes that Elta’s design mirrors the Renaissance architectural convention of the piano nobile sitting above the humbler ground floor.

All the prototypes turned out to be far from impregnable, so in this case, as with many of Demand’s subjects, these models were impossible fantasies.

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One Stamford Forum The architect Victor Bisharat, born in Jerusalem in 1920, was responsible for many of the corporate buildings in Stamford, Connecticut, including the headquarters for G.T.E. (General Telephone and Electronics Corporation), completed in 1973. The building was the first owner-occupied corporate headquarters to be built in Stamford during a period in which the city experienced rapid growth in response to an influx of financial investment.

In 1999, the building was bought by the pharmaceutical company Purdue Pharma, which occupied it as its headquarters until it filed for bankruptcy in September 2019. Purdue Pharma, principally owned by the Sackler family, has been the focus of intense criticism and legal action over its aggressive marketing and sale of Oxycontin, a drug that is linked to the United States’ current opioid crisis. While the Sacklers were once best known for their philanthropy, as a result of their connection to opioids, most arts and educational institutions in the U.S. and Europe have severed ties with the family.

An inverted ziggurat, the design upends the conventional aesthetic and structural logic of buildings that diminish in scale as they ascend. Technological advances of the time meant that horizontal sections—each containing two stories—could cantilever over the section below, allowing more of the ground level to be given over to landscaped outdoor space. When it was built, the structure was clad in white concrete, and its lower level was surrounded by a perforated wall designed by the Austrian sculptor Erwin Hauer. Now the wall has been removed, and mirrored glass—symbolically refusing observation of the activities within— has been applied to the outside of the ziggurat.

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Diamond Princess On January 20, 2020, an 80-year old man from Hong Kong boarded the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Yokohama, Japan. Soon after he disembarked five days later, he was diagnosed with Coronavirus. By February 4, a screening by Japanese health officials revealed another 10 confirmed cases, and the ship was isolated for a mandatory period of 14 days. Aboard the ship there were a total of 2,666 guests and 1,045 crew members.

The quarantined Diamond Princess became an emblem for the escalating Coronavirus pandemic, its story a tragic model for the incompetence and prevarication seen across the world in authorities’ response to the virus—especially in the United States. It was not until February 16, 2020 when planes arrived in Yokohama to bring the US citizens on the ship back to American soil – only two days before the end of the quarantine. The passengers were further incensed by the additional two-week quarantine that they were obliged to observe on their return to home soil.

In Thomas Demand’s image, the Diamond Princess appears as a ghost ship. As with all of his work, the image is devoid of people, but the absence is all the more arresting in this work because in news photographs of the ship during its quarantine, its small balconies were filled with all manner of human activity: people drying wet clothes, airing their bedding, reading in the sunshine, and waving to observers on shore.

Diamond Princess was a test case, an early indicator of the trouble that lay ahead. Demand’s image memorializes the abandoned shell of a structure that once anticipated the future.

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Bobby Fischer’s House Relatively little is known about the movements of the chess Grandmaster Bobby Fischer after 1972, when he sensationally wrested the World Championship from the Russian Boris Spassky in Reykjavik. In the ensuing decades, Fischer’s grip on his sanity became fragile, his megalomania increased and his paranoia deepened. When he died, in 2008 at the age of 64, he was still the most famous American chess player ever to have lived, but his story was shrouded in ignominy and pathos.

This picture is a recreation of the façade of the modest Reykjavik apartment building, designed in 1973 by Ormar Þór Guðmundsson & Örnólfur Hall, where Fischer passed the last three years of his life. In the preceding years he had kept a low profile, moving between Los Angeles, Pasadena, Budapest, the Philippines, and possibly Switzerland. While he had walked away from the 1972 championship with a prize of $250,000— an astonishing sum of money in chess at that time—rumors had it that he was soon destitute, living in flophouses.

His rare public interviews usually devolved into antisemitic rants. Although Fischer’s mother was Jewish, he had long been fascinated by Nazism, and often claimed that the “Jewcontrolled United States” was in a conspiracy against him. In 1992, an unofficial re-match between Fischer and Spassky was organized in the former Yugoslavia, with a $5 million purse, despite the United States’ warning that it contravened its sanctions then in place against Yugoslavia. The defiant Spassky played anyway, and won; the rest of Fischer’s life was spent in exile. After he was arrested trying to enter Japan on a revoked U.S. passport, in 2004, the Icelandic government responded to pleas for assistance, and granted him citizenship, allowing him to return to the city of his most glorious victory.

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Mumbai Olympic Pool Founded by Jamsetji Tata in 1868, the Tata Group is today one of India’s biggest multinational conglomerates. Including such subsidiary companies as Tata Chemicals, Tata Communication, Tata Consultancy Group, Tata Consumer Products, Tata Motors, Tata Power and Tata Steel, the group’s combined market capitalization in 2024 was over $382 billion.

Tata is responsible for enormous amounts of philanthropy, both within India and worldwide.

Since its earliest days, one field in which it has been particularly active is that of sports, fostering talent from across the country and providing sports facilities and infrastructure, both for its own employees and for the general public.

To date, India has never hosted an Olympic Games. But in the Trombay district of Mumbai, there stands the magnificent Olympic Swimming Pool and Stadium, designed in 1985 for the Tata Electric Company by the architect Brinda Somaya as a facility for the company’s employees and their families. One of India’s foremost architects, Somaya began practicing in 1975, and has established a reputation for inflecting Western Modernism with Indian tradition. She has referred to herself as part of the “bridge generation”—those architects born after Indian independence in 1947, who observed the country’s transition into a globalized, Capitalist power under the growth of companies such as Tata.

Her father, K.M. Chinnappa, worked for Tata for three decades, helping to found India’s power grid and eventually becoming director of Tata Industries and managing director of the Tata Electric companies. Since her earliest years, Somaya has completed numerous commissions for the Tata group, including recent campuses for the Tata Consultancy Group in Indore and Mumbai. The Olympic Swimming Pool complex is remarkable for its gracefully curving façade, which resembles Brutalist rough cast concrete but is in fact made from Indian Dholpur sandstone, rough-cut and laid over concrete.

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Pondicherry We might think of façades as being opaque, defensive barriers or screens which hide what is inside a building by projecting an alternative narrative on the outside. But this is not necessarily so. The façades of the Golconde Dormitory, in Pondicherry on southeast India’s Bay of Bengal, are deliberately porous, protecting the ashram’s interior with only the most economical of means. On each of its three floors, three sets of three hinged cast cement louvers can be opened to freely connect the residents with the garden outside.

The Golconde Dormitory is said to be India’s first Modernist building, designed by the Czechborn, Tokyo-based architect Antonin Raymond, and completed in 1945. The dormitory houses members of the Sri Aurobindo Ashram, established in 1926 by the philosopher and guru Sri Aurobindo with the French artist and occultist Mirra Alfassa. It was Alfassa who commissioned Raymond to design the building, which was radical even beyond the relatively traditional context of Indian architecture at that time.

After he relocated from Japan to the USA, Raymond handed off much of the work on the project to his colleague, the American-born designer and woodworker George Nakashima. After spending time in Pondicherry, Nakashima became a member of the ashram and was renamed Sundarananda, which translates from Sanskrit as “the one who delights in beauty.” Nakashima had a huge impact on the finished building, designing and fabricating much of its interior and furniture. In order to create minimum disruption to the life of the ashram, Aurobindo decreed that the new building should be erected primarily by its members. Nakashima therefore found himself directing both skilled and unskilled workers, who even donated their own brass bowls and utensils to be melted down and cast as doorknobs and hinges.

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Haus der Kunst One of the main tenets of National Socialist architecture, as theorized by Albert Speer, was Ruinwert—ruin value, that is, the intended pleasing aesthetic effect of buildings once they had fallen into disrepair, just as the monuments of the Greek and Roman Empires now have. This aspiration is entwined with principles of structural soundness; solid stone and marble, not concrete, ensured these buildings’ longevity.

The architects of the Thousand Year Reich, today, have their wish fulfilled—although sooner, perhaps, than they would have hoped. In Munich, the imposing Haus der Kunst, built by the Nazis as a Neoclassical temple to German art, occupies a prominent position facing the large park ironically known as the Englischer Garten (English Garden). It is an awkward relic, a metaphor for the country’s history so huge and terrible that it cannot be avoided, still less demolished.

Art was such a central part of National Socialist ideology that this new exhibition hall was announced just weeks after Hitler seized power in 1933, and the Führer personally laid the foundation stone in October that year. Designed by the architect Paul Troost with input from Hitler himself, it was completed in 1937. As with many examples of Nazi architecture, its proportions were based on hyperbolic models, such as Albert Speer’s sprawling envisioning of Welthaupstadt Germania (World Capital Germania), and were therefore designed to an inhuman scale. It is an unrealistic idea made improbable reality.

When, in 2016, architect David Chipperfield revealed plans to restore and refurbish the Haus der Kunst, he drew particular outrage from local residents by proposing that a row of trees planted in front of the museum be cut down to allow for a clearer view of the building. The trees serve to soften the building’s authoritarian façade, even to hide it. But as the institution’s then-director, the late Okwui Enwezor, wrote: “it is clear that the row of trees serves no real concealing function, except, perhaps as placebo. The building, if hidden at all, is hiding in plain sight.”

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Intercontinental Bucharest When Nicolae Ceaușescu came to power in 1965 as General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party, he quickly gained popularity by orienting his country towards the West, and distancing Romania from the other countries of the Warsaw Pact. The late 1960s were the apogee of his popularity, before the latter years of his premiership when he enforced his rule through the feared Securitate, Romania’s vast secret police.

The Intercontinental Bucharest, the five-star hotel which entered construction in 1967, became a symbol of this new, westward-facing Romania. It was the brainchild of Canadian investor Cyrus Eaton Jr., whose company Tower International developed several such buildings in the Eastern Bloc in the 1960s and 70s, a time when the Cold War made trade between the East and West challenging in the extreme. The hotel was intended by the Ceaușescu regime to be a welcoming home away from home for Western investors while they did business in the newly accessible country. In time, it was also said to be a hive of surveillance, heavily bugged and monitored by Securitate informers, some posing as waiters and cleaning staff.

Eaton enlisted four Romanian architects—Dinu Hariton, Gheorghe Nădrag, Ion Moscu, and Romeo Belea—to design a building that would emulate the International Style of Modernism developed in Western Europe in the 1920s and 30s. Flat, unornamented surfaces alternated with large, steel-framed windows in modular patterns; proportions were scaled to the human form, repeated at mass scale. When it was completed in 1971, the 24-story Intercontinental hotel was the second tallest building in Bucharest.

The hotel is most famous for its concave frontage, along which rooms open onto balconies with panoramic views of the city. By the late 1980s, that view was dominated by the construction of the vast governmental palace named by Ceaușescu as “The People’s House.”

This absurdly oversized and ornate Neoclassical building (and the areas around it) entailed the systematic demolition of swathes of Bucharest—including whole neighborhoods—and the systematic production of tons of polished marble, crystal glass, gilded wood and silver brocade for its interiors.

By the time of Ceaușescu’s execution on Christmas Day, 1989, “The People’s House” was far from completed. (It was not finished until 1997, when it was renamed “The Palace of the Parliament.”) In December 1989, the Intercontinental Bucharest became a headquarters for members of the foreign press, who reported from its balconies as the Romanian army and the Securitate fired on protesters in University Square below.

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T H O M A S D E M A N D P O RTA L S

Notre-Dame de Reims, 2024 12-color lithograph with embossing ThD19-1680

Concattedrale Gran Madre di Dio, 2024 10-color lithograph with embossing ThD19-1681

Shepherd Ivory Franz Hall II, 2024 9-color lithograph with embossing ThD19-1682

Border Wall Prototype, 2024 10-color lithograph with embossing ThD19-1683

One Stamford Forum, 2024

9-color lithograph with embossing ThD19-1684

Diamond Princess, 2024

10-color lithograph with embossing ThD20-1685

Bobby Fischer’s House, 2024 11-color lithograph with embossing ThD20-1686

Mumbai Olympic Pool, 2024

8-color lithograph with embossing ThD20-1687

Pondicherry, 2024 9-color lithograph with embossing ThD20-1688

Haus der Kunst, 2024 9-color lithograph with embossing ThD22-1689

Intercontinental Bucharest, 2024

13-color lithograph with embossing ThD22-1690

Each: 32 ¾ x 28" (83.2 x 71.1 cm) Editions of 48

COLLABORATION , PROOFING AND EDITIONING BY :

Jill Lerner, Lithography Studio Manager Megan Anderson, Jack Cheng, Levi Atkinson, Sophia Mollard, Solita Montoya, Sarah Plummer, Stacy Smith

ESSAYS ON THE ARCHITECTURE : DESIGN :

John M. Coy

PHOTOGRAPHY : PRINTING :

POV

Colornet Press

Jonathan Griffin