Installation and Contestation

Installation and Contestation

To start a research into the history of installed architecture seems to be a more difficult exercise than one would think at a first notion of the subject. What is ‘installed architecture’? To be clear, it is best to start this research by pointing out that ‘installed architecture’ does not necessarily apply to the installations made by architects nor to the field of architecture known as the ephemeral. Assuredly it can be, however it is not a necessity. For example Installed Architecture does not necessarily have to be temporary. No, rather the focus of this research would be the relationship between the installation as an art form and installation as a technique or aesthetic in the architectural field. Ever since a nucleus of avant-garde artists started exploring installation and its aesthetic the medium has become a means to counterreaction and contestation. The eventual visual appropriation in architecture is still visible in architecture today and keeps, on a more functional level, challenging the architectural contemporary condition.

Installation Art’s Formative Period in the 60s and 70s

As with many techniques, vogues and trends in architecture it is not a bad idea to look at the world of the liberal arts when researching their history. Therefore I start this research by looking at installation art and its origins. This seems especially interesting when we see that the term ‘installation art’ is a relatively new one. 1 In her book From Center to Margin: The spaces of installation art, Julie Reiss points to American artist Alan Kaprow and his peers as the point of origin for what we now call ‘Installation art’. In the 60s, The New York artist showed the world for the first time his so-called ‘Environments’. He used this term to describe 1 Reiss, The Spaces of Installation Art, p. XI.

1.Kurt Schwitters - Merzbau 1919 El Lissitzky - Proun Room 1919-1927

his ‘room-sized, multimedia works’ 2 The term caught on and was used for several more years to describe works that were not even remotely related to Kaprow’s original ‘Environments’, as these were a very particular series of works by a particular group of artists that used them as a counterreaction towards an ever more institutionalized art scene. It was not until the late 70’s that the term ‘installation’ actually came in use. This after, according to Marga Van Mechelen, the artistic output of the De Appel foundation in Amsterdam, with Marina Abramovic being one of the first to label her own work as an installation with Installation One in 1979. 3

But what are the artistic qualities of these ‘installations’? Reiss starts by naming the obvious: site specificity, institutional critique, temporality, ephemerality, spatial intervention… Through these, one can see the genesis of the artform in works even earlier that Kaprow’s environments. In 1919, German artist Kurt Schwitters built his Merzbau, one of the first ‘installed artworks’ in his own house in Hannover. He reproduced the spatial assemblage, two more times in his later career. Other examples of early ‘Installed artworks’ that Reiss mentions are the painted environments by De Stijl or El Lissitzky’s Proun Room. Of course, the influence of the Dada movement cannot not be omitted and is, apparently, an inspiration cited by Kaprow himself. 4 A certain aesthetic binds them together. An aesthetical choice to work spatially with materials. But all of these miss in a certain way one or more of the previously mentioned elements and most importantly: participation. Reiss states that what Kaprow’s environments really made a turning point in the history of installed art was the reciprocal relationship between the work, the space and the audience. The audience is integral to the completion. 5 It is interesting to note that in this view, the installation works of artists like Kaprow can also be seen as the genesis for another contemporary practice in architecture: the participatory design.

2 Reiss, The Spaces of Installation Art, p. XI.

3 Van Mechelen, De Appel, p.3.

4 Reiss, Environments, p.7.

5 Reiss, The Spaces of installation, p.XIII.

Claes Oldenburg - The Store

1961

Alan Kaprow - Words 1962

Let us consider one example in The Store by an artist who operated in the same scene and often together with Kaprow: Claes Oldenburgh. The work straddles, as well as any example from this period, graciously the gap between art, performance and architecture. The installation (or rather Environment, as it was known at the time) consisted of an assemblage of works made by the artist himself in a setting made up out of junk materials and objets trouvés, through which the visitor could browse the wares and even purchase works by the artist, who doubled as a shopkeeper. This way the work continuously erases the boundary between art and life, artist and audience.

As later discussed, functionally, a resemblance emerges between these early installation artworks and the contemporary architecture practice, in which the user is more and more included in the design process and the architect at times is even actively involved in the function of the designed building (see paragraph 3). But also physically we can discern among these works an aesthetic attitude which will become a recurring theme in installed architecture. Julie Reiss calls this the ‘Junk-aesthetic’, which gives the works their ‘spontaneous and expressionistic’ quality. 6 And while the use of these everyday materials certainly served to find a connection with the city and its inhabitants in the New York streets, it also served a grander purpose. “It also communicated the message that this was a radically new art, non-traditional and non-precious. In an era that celebrated American prosperity and consumerism, there was a critique implicit in the use of the throwaway remains and excesses of that culture.” 7

Once we start comparing both the architecture and art-installation field it becomes clear that there is an inherent power in the use of this very well recognizable aesthetic that seems to keep communicating a sense of rebelliousness. In the 1970s this rebellion could be seen as a revolt against unbridled city expanse and the de-humanization of mankind’s new preferred habitat for the new age: the urban landscape. While in the contemporary, it becomes a flagship aesthetic for a quicker, more adaptive, participatory way of designing spatial interventions as a

6 Reiss, Environments, p.21.

7 Reiss, Environments, p.22.

counterreaction against the slow institutionalized machine of bureaucracy.

Translation into Architecture

Simultaneously a similar movement started taking hold of the avantgarde architectural movements. Around the 1960s and 1970s, experimental groups and individuals started to appropriating the language of early installation art to voice their new ideas about urbanism. As Peter Cook states in his book Experimental Architecture, this new wave of experimentalism was greatly pushed by students (as he himself started Archigram together with co-students), placing their work in an extraarchitectural context. 8 These designers could ‘explode the constraints of professionalism’ and in doing so adhere to a more socio-political ground. 9 Cook also states that the most obvious area of work naturally became that of the new Urbanism.

Certainly one of the first to discover the aesthetic of the installed and see what it could mean for the architecture of the contemporary was French Hungarian architect Yona Friedman, acknowledged by Cook as the father of the megastructure movement and a leader of the experimental urbanists in the 1960s and 1970s. 10 Perhaps not the inventor, but definitely an initiator of the megastructure movement, he was a pioneer in the theorization of design concepts such as mobility, adaptability and improvisation and participatory design. He published his first manifesto Mobile Architecture in 1956.

The manifesto, which was presented at the CIAM X congress, proposed a new kind of city: la Ville Spatiale, in which the architect was in a sense secondary to the inhabitant in the creation of the city. The architect would provide a supporting structure, a network of frames suspended

8 Cook, Experimental Architecture, p. 14.

9 Cook, Experimental Architecture, p. 15.

10 Cook, Experimental Architecture, p. 104.

Yona Friedman - La Ville Spatiale, Paris, 1959

Le Corbusier - l’Empereur, Algiers,1931

on top of an existing city, thus reducing the horizontal expansion of the urban fabric. This structure would be supported by narrow columns, assuring a minimal impact on the ground floor and making the city seem to float, an evolution which would later become even more apparent in Archigram’s ‘Instant City’. Within this frame, inhabitants were free to design their own personalized units. Thus enhancing the freedom of choice for the individual and the flexible use of city space. 11

Now while a certain participatory spirit can be seen as an aspect taken from installation art, the more striking resemblance lies in the proposed materialization of the project. Let us consider some of the drawings Friedman made to illustrate his Ville Spatiale. In those drawings the suspended city was not, like contemporaries, shown as a city built by futuristic techniques or made-up materials. No, rather the city is presented as a framework built by recognizable scaffolding materials and cheap plastic plating. Inside, the units built by its inhabitants are shown as a plausible representation of known building styles and typologies. By using these simple and readily available materials Friedman sought to underline the feasibility of his propositions. 12

With this in mind it is not a difficult task to descry Friedmans influence on later and perhaps better known architects such as Cedric Price, Luc Deleu, Archigram and the new Italian radical movement with Superstudio and Archizoom.

This aforementioned group of architects was also the focus of architecture critic Reyner Banham when he tried to chronicle the architectural history of what he called the ‘megastructure’. For a decade the megastructure dominated the architectural and avant-garde conversation around the city of the future. Banham places this debate simultaneous with the decade of the 1960s, as it comprises both the rise and fall of the megastructure. Interestingly, Banham also places the genesis of the idea three decades earlier; as he names Le Corbusier’s

11 “Principles of Mobile Architecture”, Yona Friedman, last modified January 11, 2012, http://www.yonafriedman.nl/?page_id=333.

12 “Principles of Mobile Architecture”, Yona Friedman, last modified January 11, 2012, http://www.yonafriedman.nl/?page_id=333.

Richard Rogers, Renzo Piano -Centre Pompidou

Paris,1977

L’Empereur project in Algiers the most general ancestor of the megastructure movement. 13

Now the reason why the megastructure can be an interesting addition to this research into installed architecture is an aspect of the movement that can already be discerned in Le Corbusier’s L’Empereur.

“The massive sub-structure of an elevated super-highway, built like a giant bookcase on the shelves of which the inhabitants have built twostorey houses to suit their own tastes, not necessarily in le style Corbu.” 14

This opposition of the vastly different design methods, on the one hand the super-designed megastructure as a frame and on the other the vernacular infill by the actual inhabitants of the megastructure was also included in two previous definitions of the megastructure: Fumihiko Maki’s Investigations in collective form 15 and Ralph Wilcox’ Megastructure bibliography 16 .

Now while by the end of the 1960s the idea of the megastructure eventually imploded in itself as the avant-garde deserted the idea (the general consensus being that it had become just a mere method by the establishment to maximize the returns from urban development), the idea of the spontaneous housing, a city built by its inhabitants, remained. 17 Even in the contemporary, vernacular architecture, participatory design and the installed aesthetic remains the language of the critical avant-garde. It is striking that this aesthetic was transmitted through later generations of architects, as most of the works paradigmatic for the 1960s movement remained on paper and were never built. One could argue that the only building ever built truly embodying the aesthetic vision of the megastructure was built a decade later when in Paris the Centre Pompidou was completed.

13 Banham, Megastructure, p.7.

14 Banham, Megastructure, p.8.

15 Maki, Investigations in Collective Form, p.8.

16 Wilcox, Council of planning librarians Exchange Bibliography, p.2.

17 Banham, Megastructure, p.10.

The installed and the contemporary

Recently, modern practices have adopted the installed aesthetic and design method as a way to voice a solution to modern day problems that face the architecture practice. Maybe in those we can even make a distinction between those who ably adopt the installed aesthetic as a method to voice a deeper meaning or architectural statement and those who next to the aesthetic also adopt a certain attitude and in doing so try to recapture the participatory aspects of early installation art.

The German collective raumlabor was formed in 1999 as an interdisciplinary team of both architects and cityplanners and since then claims to ‘question the urban phenomenon’ and to ‘develop prototypes for the urban renewal’. 18

To understand the implications of raumlabor’s projects, one needs to understand how the practice operates. For their 2009 project ‘Eichbaumoper’, the collective transformed a vandalised metro station into a temporary opera house. The physical intervention itself could be seen as fairly minimal: a scaffolded stand and stage, a pavilion made out of containers to house a bar, art gallery and meeting space. The public space had fallen victim to governmental neglect and a permanent renovation of the traffic junction was gated behind permits. The solution was found in a temporary intervention, driven and activated by both the architect and the participant, invoking aspects of early installation artworks as well. In the course of their career the use of metal framing, cheap, accessible materials and inflatables became raumlabor’s trademark. The material used thus being a symbol of the immediacy which created the interventions in the first place, a certain spontaneity which has always been part of installations as well. Similarly a striking resemblance can be drawn between raumlabor and some of the earliest public installations by Haus Rucker-Co. In the 1970s, their inflatable installations were designed to challenge the notion of public intimacy with works such as Balloon für Zwei, Oasis no. 7 and Gelbes Herz. 19 In the

Flores & Prats - Sala Beckett, Barcelona, 2017

contemporary, projects like Kitchen Monument, use the inflatable as a material for flexibility, mobility and a tool to create temporary communities. 20

However the ‘installed’ does not exclusively manifest itself in the contemporary in a material way. Methodologically the installed seems to be an ever more used technique to create a connection between a building, its history and its urban context.

Let us review as an example Flores & Prats’s 2017 recovery of the Sala Beckett theatre in Barcelona. At first sight, aesthetically the interior reconversion looks nothing like the steel-frame structures of raumlabor. Actually it resembles more an assemblage or spatial collage of random elements. In fact, before the recovery, the building was in a decrepit state, leaving the architects to wonder how to facilitate a reconversion. For the final design, every salvageable object, decoration or structural element was saved to use in the reassembly of the interior, giving the building an expressionistic feeling. This reminds us of installation artists going back to the earliest examples in the 1960s where throwaway and found materials were not only used as an expression of spontaneity but also to ground the installation in its direct context. 21 Site-specificity is also being mentioned by Julie Reiss as one of the key characteristics of installation art. 22 Thus, Flores & Prats create a seemingly installed assemblage of fragments from an era that no longer exists. In this viewpoint the design clearly also concerns a certain romantic idea. An idea which becomes all the more clear when we consider the drawings made by the duo in preparation of the project. In total more than 80 hand-drawn drawings were made of the recovered elements, all in a characteristically style, referencing a time before digital drawings became the norm. 23 In a way this project can learn us that the installed does not necessarily deal with the fast, the spontaneous or the removable but can in effect also be a carefully orchestrated statement, celebrating architecture as an artform,

20 Seonwook et al., Mobile Architecture, p. 559.

21 Gomez-Moriana, Flores & Prats’ Sala Beckett theatre in Barcelona

22 Reiss, The Spaces of Installation, p.XIII.

23 Gomez-Moriana, Flores & Prats’ Sala Beckett theatre in Barcelona

Flores & Prats - Sala Beckett, Drawing, 2017

baukunst, and critiquing the seemingly serial production of buildings by big international offices.

We can state that today the installed, both as an aesthetic and a technique, is as relevant as ever as a tool to facilitate an architectural response to new urbanism, site-specificity and participatory design, while in the same time continuing to learn and adopt from extra-architectural fields. However, maybe ‘installed’ has become more than just an aesthetic and in effect has become a design philosophy. While, as seen in contemporary examples, still referencing its aesthetical and symbolic roots, installing as a process keeps evolving as a methodology to respond to the problems and challenges of the contemporary architectural condition.

Bibliography Books

1. Banham, Reyner. Architettura della Seconda Età della Macchina. Ed. Marco Biraghi. Milano: Mondadori Electa Publishing, 2004.

2. Banham, Reyner, Megastructure, Urban Futures of the Recent Past. London: Thames & Hudson, 1976.

3. Bonnemaison, Sarah. Installations by Architects: experiments in Building and Design. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2009.

4. Cook, Peter, Experimental Architecture. London: Studio Vista Limited, 1970.

5. Maki, Fumihiko, Investigations in Collective Form. Washington: Washington University School of Architecture, 1964.

6. Raumlabor, “raumlaborberlin”, in Mobile Architecture, ed. Kim Seonwook and Pyo Miyoung. Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2012.

7. Reiss, Julie H. From Margin to Center: The spaces of installation art. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1999.

8. Seonwook Kim and Miyoung Kim (ed.), Mobile Architecture. Berlin: DOM Publishers 2012.

9. Van Mechelen, Marga, De Appel: Performances, Installations, Video, Projects , 1975-1983. Amsterdam : De Appel, 2006.

Articles

1. Gomez-Moriana, Rafael. “Circle of Life: Flores & Prats’ Sala Beckett theatre in Barcelona.” Architectural Review (December 2019/January 2020): https://www.architecturalreview.com/awards/new-into-old/circle-of-life-flores-pratssala-beckett-theatre-in-barcelona.

2. Marija Zečević. “Installation: Between the artistic and architectural project.” Am Journal of Art and Media Studies 12 (2017): 55-70. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i12.167.

Online sources

1. “Principles of Mobile Architecture”, Yona Friedman, last modified January 11, 2012, http://www.yonafriedman.nl/?page_id=333.