Co-founder in 1975 of the Rotterdam-based firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), Rem Koolhaas is known not only for producing designs and masterplans of radical innovation, but also for radically innovating contemporary architectural practice through his numerous publications and exhibitions. Koolhaas first achieved broad international recognition through his book Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (1978). In this and subsequent publications such as S, M, L, XL (1995), which brought together two decades' worth of diary entries, essays and architectural plans, he has established himself as a protean thinker and lucid, entertaining writer. Dedicated to further developing the intellectual life of architecture, in 1998 Koolhaas established as a subsidiary of OMA the think-tank AMO, through which he has continued to carry out research, publishing and exhibition projects.

And while trends in both contemporary art and architecture exhibitions continue to converge on the one-off, large-scale installation, Koolhaas's approach to exhibition making is fully integrated with all other phases of his practice. Often filled with oversized collages combining lurid imagery and polemical, yet pithy texts, exhibitions such as "Content" (Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2003 / Kunsthal Rotterdam, 2004), "The Image of Europe" (premiered in Brussels, 2004 / toured Europe) and "OMA in Beijing" (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2006) function equally as artistic statements and blistering analyses of the contradictions of sense, behavior and structure that inform the everyday environment. What both publications and exhibitions make clear is that, rather than attempting to impose an order upon these contradictions, Koolhaas sees them as a terrain for generating new forms of architecture.

The impact of this approach has been particularly evident in Japan, despite the fact that OMA has only one built project here, the Nexus World Housing (1991) in Fukuoka, part of a superblock of residences overseen by Arata Isozaki. Japanese architects across several generations cite Koolhaas as a critical inspiration. Speaking with ART iT, Ryue Nishizawa said, "Rem influenced me right when I was trying to decide whether to commit to architecture. It was the end of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, and his architectural works, books and exhibitions all energized us students." Referring to a visit to the 1995 survey of OMA's projects at the private exhibition space TN Probe, "OMA in Tokyo: Rem Koolhaas and the Place of Public Architecture," emerging architect Junya Ishigami told ART iT, "A Koolhaas exhibition is always distinct from those of other architects, communicating a powerful sense of vividness and immediacy. That experience profoundly affected me at the time."

Nishizawa's and Ishigami's sentiments have been underscored by the honoring of Koolhaas at this year's 12th Venice Architecture Biennale with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement, on the proposal of artistic director Kazuyo Sejima. Surprisingly, Koolhaas did not exhibit at Venice until 2005, when he was included in the Art Biennale, but since then he has been a frequent participant, presenting projects four times in the past five years. In recognition of his Golden Lion, ART iT has compiled an archival presentation of Koolhaas's projects for Venice, in collaboration with OMA*AMO.

*Unless otherwise noted, all images © and courtesy OMA.




TIMELINE:

2005
2006
2008
2010

2005
EXPANSION/NEGLECT
51st Venice Art Biennale







Does every museum in the world need to be modernized?
Do all museums have to adhere to the same technical conditions?
Do all museums have to be extended and updated?

Or can a certain amount of inaction - a certain resistance to change - actually be instrumental in maintaining a degree of the authenticity so frequently erased by modernization?

Can the architect, a person usually hired to change the conditions he finds, perform more like an archaeologist, scrupulously examining the current conditions, and proposing new forms of organization that allow each element to enjoy renewed value?

The Hermitage project cannot be understood in strictly architectural terms; in fact, it cannot be understood along any of the classical definitions of a project. The "Hermitage Project" is not a project: it is a concentration of different issues that can only be resolved successfully by taking a more comprehensive approach - curatorial or intellectual. Rather than a confident imposition of the new, the task at hand is to find those changes that will allow the Hermitage, without being too manifest, to function better.

During the last three years, AMO/OMA has worked as a consultant for the Guggenheim-Hermitage Foundation on scenarios for the museum's future. The central issue at stake is how to modernize the Hermitage Museum while accepting one of Russia's great legacies on its own terms. The Hermitage is examined as a whole: its functioning as a museum, its future position, its integral participation in the city of St Petersburg...









Captions for All Panels

1. (Dow Jones vs Museum expansions)
Largely because of economic circumstances, the Hermitage did not participate in the late 20th-century museum boom. Immune to fluctuations in the world economy, the Hermitage avoided turning itself into a commercial enterprise.

2. (Most space, most art, most exhibitions, least visitors)
Of all the great museums, the Hermitage sustains the largest collection, the largest number of exhibitions, and the most space with the least amount of visitors.

3. (Museums revenue and support)
In comparison to other great museums, the Hermitage's commercial activities are reduced to a minimum. This provides an opportunity to establish the Hermitage's global identity by distinguishing it from other world-class museums.

4. (Increase of Hermitage m2, Tsarism, Communism, Free Market)
Historical changes guaranteed the Hermitage's existence as an exclusive enclave, set apart from contemporary events and devoted to preservation of the past. Free market capitalism, coupled with the museum's largest expansion ever, raises the question of whether to modernize the museum or retain its original character.

5. (View out of window onto palace square)
So far, modernization has passed the Hermitage by. The buildings' relative neglect has helped to create a unique condition: enabling a confrontation with art more direct and more authentic than in more "modern" museums.

6. (Malevich between curtains, insert: Malevich with woman)
Black Square by Kazimir Malevich - exhibited in a highly decorated room under fluorescent lighting - is one of the most valuable statements of the 20th-century and emblematic of a new relationship between modernity and the past.

7. (Palace square with all Hermitage's buildings)
Palace Square will become the center of the museum complex. The historic events that have happened here make the Hermitage not only a museum of art, but also an institution embodying Russian history.

8. (1200+800 rooms)
Continuing the Hermitage tradition of discovery through reinvention, the General Staff Building will add a vast number of spaces never intended for the display of art.

9. (Rooms in section)
The reservoir of rooms in the combined Hermitage presents an endless variety of spatial typology and quality. Some interiors are protected, others practically derelict.

10. (RK in neglected room)
To avoid the rupture between the past and the present, ruined sections of the building can be tactfully maintained.

11. (Rooms vs collection)
3,500,000 pieces of art and artifacts and 2,000 rooms...this condition can generate a vast repertoire of installation and curatorial concepts.

12. (Table with applied art)
A scrupulous investigation of the museum properties could determine how to limit change and how to mobilize the Hermitage properties. The Hermitage: a prototype, not of the ideal museum, but of an endless collection of pertinent conditions.

13. (Art in neglected room with Wallpaper)
By putting some of the most valuable works in some of the most distressed areas, unexpected conditions can encourage accidents and experiments in how to display art.

14. (Spiral table below chandelier)
Sterile conditions of "modern" museums prevent viewers from considering art in other ways. Scholarship and recreation boundaries could be blurred to go beyond dominant ways of display.

15. (Impressionist's portraits wunderkammer, insert: Malevich wunderkammer)
The Hermitage can reinvent Modernity, not in terms of style, but in terms of finding an intelligent use for existing spaces.

16. (Electronic devices closed doors)
The project could define a way to navigate through the building's rooms without resorting to traditional forms of architectural hierarchy. New, invisible technologies can provide innovative museum-wide strategies.

17. (cut floor collage)
The Hermitage must consider whether there is the necessity of adding more building to the building. The careful study of the possibility of carving in the existing building could reveal new spatial potentials for displaying art in the General Staff Building.

18. (Foster's British Museum)
The British Museum: the typical preservation project. Although its goal was to enhance the existing building, the gulf between preservation and modern architecture resulted in an addition which reduces the qualities of the old.

19. (Atriums for everything)
This is only one particle of an expanding universe of "respectfully" treated historical buildings. The decision to cover courtyards is now a banal and overly used device for modernization. The State Hermitage Museum is too exceptional to settle for the expected.

20. (2 courts vs 4 courts)
Intervening in two, instead of five, courtyards will reduce: the amount of demolition; the air-controlled volume; and development costs. Limiting architectural intervention also increases the potential for preservation.

21. (Big room view in blue foam)
The Museum's need for bigger spaces - where the crowds will be largest or the art the grandest - could be achieved in a more compact and environmentally sustainable manner.

22. (Aerial view of implant)
A new structure, independent from the existing building, will allow all modernization to take place locally and will allow modern technical standards to be met within a new building;...

23. (Phased effect of implant)
...it will also reduce pressure on the existing building to conform to current technical standards, allowing a gradual upgrading of the existing building over time as development finances become available.

24. (white interior of implant)
The interior of the new big room is completely sealed from the outside, providing a complete artificiality of conditions. The room can adopt almost any identity: the prototypical 20th-century-white-room-modern-art-gallery...

25. (Wunderkammer)
...but also a 21st-century version of the Wunderkammer.

26. (Piotrovsky letter)
Directive from above...Less extras, more exhibition, please!

27. (Carving model with negative as insert)
With the program now substantially smaller than the existing building, to add more area to the building becomes questionable. Could the adaptation of the General Staff Building be a matter of subtraction?

28. (Diderot)
A resource manual could guide intervening in the General Staff Building. A set of simple ideas could trigger new and more efficient ways of experiencing art in the Hermitage as a whole.

29. (Carving)
Implementation and mixing of these resources could generate countless options...

30. (Carving)
...that would radiate through the entire experience of the building.



Credits
Partners: Rem Koolhaas and Reinier de Graaf
Team: Alexander Reichert, Holger Pausch, Emilie Gomart, Joao Leal Bravo da Costa, Mendel Robbers, Samir Bantal, Felix Madrazo, Brendan McGetrick, Jens Hommert and Todd Reisz

2006
THE GULF: HEDGE FUND STUDY
10th Venice Architecture Biennale







A coastal analysis reveals a new regional and global order of effort, conceptualization and rivalry that needs to be acknowledged.

THE GULF is the current frontline of rampant modernization: a feverish production of urban substance on sites where nomads roamed unmolested only half-a-century ago.

THE GULF - its initial development triggered by the discovery of oil - is undergoing hyper-development to ready for oil's imminent depletion.

GULF CITIES are in construction now. This means they are, inevitably, based on the repertoire of current urban prototypes - community (themed & gated), hotel (themed), skyscraper (tallest), shopping center (largest), airport (doubled) - cemented together by Public Space, extended soon with boutique, museum franchise and masterpiece.

In its current state, THE GULF is a landscape of vast means and ambition translated with gargantuan effort in ambiguous and sometimes disappointing results, a kind of farewell performance of an "Urban" that has become dysfunctional through sheer age and lack of invention.

But for that very reason - call it historical inevitability or sheer coincidence of timing - THE GULF will also be the terrain where the current architectural repertoire are so blatant, comprehensive and destructive that it has become unthinkable to rely on them as a toolbox.

Eventually, THE GULF will reinvent the public and the private: the potential of infrastructure to promote the whole rather than favor fragmentation; the use and abuse of landscape - golf or the environment? - the coexistence of many cultures in a new authenticity rather than a Western Modernist default; experiences instead of Experience™ – city or resort?
*
The world is running out of places where it can start over.
We live in an era of completions, not new beginnings.
Sand and sea along the Persian Gulf, like an untainted canvas provide the final tabula rasa on which new identities can be inscribed: palms, world maps, cultural capitals and financial centers.

The West suffers from a double neglect towards this land of opportunity: a refusal to take seriously something actually originating in the West and, subsequently, an inability to detect a rising global phenomenon.

Recent Gulf developments, much like Singapore and China in the 1980s and '90s, have been met with derision: "Las Vegas in Arabia"(1), "Lawrence of suburbia"(2), "a bubble built on debt" (3), "skyline on crack" (4) and – most damning – "Walt Disney meets Albert Speer" (5), echoing the condemnation 15 years ago of Singapore as "Disneyland with the death penalty" (6). The recycling of the Disney fatwa says more about a stagnation of the Western critical imagination than it does about GULF CITIES.

To be a critic today is to regret the exportation of ideas that you have failed to confront on your own beat, from your own backyard. Ironically, the vast majority of developments these critics deplore have originated and become the norm in their own countries.

Is it possible to view THE GULF's ongoing transformation on its own terms?

As an extraordinary attempt to change the fate of an entire region?

THE GULF is not just reconfiguring itself; it's reconfiguring the world. Each of these GULF CITIES has been synthesizing versions of the 21st-century metropolis and now exports its own versions on an equally colossal scale to parts of the world modernity has not reached so far - from Morocco to Thailand.

This burgeoning campaign to export a new kind of urbanism - to places immune to or ignored by previous missions of modernism - may be the final opportunity to chart a new blueprint for urbanism. Will architecture grasp the last chance?







Credits
Curators: Rem Koolhaas, Reinier de Graaf, William Todd Reisz, Kayoko Ota
Collaborators: Hausatu Abdul-Karim, Ademide Adelusi-Adeluyi, Natalie Al Shami*, Jason Atkins, Samir Bantal, Tomek Bartczak, Anne-Sophie Bernard, Andrea Bertassi, Katrin Betschinger, Ezra Block, Fernando Donís, Talia Dorsey, Martin Gallovsky, Maisa Jarjous*, Lily Jencks, Ravi Kamisetti, Sara Kasa*, George Katodrytis*, Julie Kaufman, Jan Knikker, Barend Koolhaas, Daniel Klos, Sara Martin, Miho Mazereeuw, Cristina Murphy, Banah Mustafa*, Charles-Antoine Perreault, Daniel Rabin, Marieke Rietbergen, Guillaume Yersin
*American University of Sharjah

Sponsors: The Architecture Fund (HGIS Program from the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of Education, Culture and Science, the Netherlands), Van Oord nv, Rakeen Development / RAK Promotion Board and Fondazione Prada

Satellite photo: MDA Federal Inc.

2008
LA DÉFENSE AND SANT'ELIA MASTERPLANS
11th Venice Architecture Biennale



A Heart for La Défense





The business district, while struggling to maintain and expand its position on the international scene, needs a focal point, capable of bringing it together as well as distributing it. A pump. A heart.

La Défense embodies the space to make that new heart possible. Below the deck lies a hidden and unsuspected world that has long been ignored and underutilised. That underworld is possibly La Défense's most valuable asset today.

The deck, a volume rather than a mere surface, becomes a linking body that cements everything together, like an airport terminal. It continues to contain the transportation tracks and platforms, including our proposed internal shuttle that extends to Les Groues, the neighboring district.

Above all, the deck's underworld becomes a lively and welcoming space, filled with daylight, where shops and lobbies converge towards the new central stop. An improved signage makes it more convenient for the user to find their way. The awakening of the deck's unconscious provides a heart for La Défense.

This long needed nodal point allows La Défense to focus on becoming again what it was created to be in the first place: a compact, attractive, efficient and sustainable business center.

The new towers planned on the site leave no doubt that the district possesses the architectural resources to renew itself. For the renewal to be successful it needs to address the transportation and infrastructure issues and improve the (internal) accessibility of the district. When comparing La Défense to other business districts, the transit stops are too far apart, especially given the importance of the pedestrian. We propose to create a new central stop, right in the middle of the district.

Les Groues, which in our proposal is well connected to La Défense, can function very much in the same way as La Défense once served Paris. It can accommodate all functions for which there is no space within La Défense's perimeter. Programs such as the station, nightlife, a park and the university, as well as functions that need a much looser development framework than La Défense can offer, such as smaller, more mixed-use, and more individual, developments. This benefits both Nanterre and La Défense.

The search for mixed-use programs throughout the years hasn't proved fruitful. It has created a suboptimal environment with a relatively low density, security issues and unattractive pedestrian connections. Mixed-use architecture shouldn't be any longer pursued within the very limits of La Défense. Like the defragmenting of a hard disk, the functions are to be reorganized in a cleaning process, freeing space for an optimized functioning of the entire system. The office towers are concentrated and intensified inside the Boulevard Circulaire, where housing is only maintained on the southwest triangle.

La Défense, a symbol of French modernity, maintains an ambiguous relation to history. L'idolâtrie de l'Axe historique has caused the district to shut itself off from its environment. The historical axis is multiplied to turn the business center into a new pivotal node of a larger urban network, that of Grand Paris.



Re-qualification of the Sant’Elia neighbourhood in Cagliari, Italy





The ambition of the masterplan is not only regeneration of an under-valued area and community, but also to exploit the full potential of this spectacular waterfront site for the benefit of the entire region, while improving social and environmental conditions of the current inhabitants and local nature.

The re-qualification of the neighborhood of Sant'Elia aims at the re-qualification of its bad image connotation "within" the city of Cagliari.

The solution to the problem is in creating jobs, empowering the population, formalizing informal activities and retaining the static energy of the locality. The solution should be found in the understanding of the present social discomfort and using it as a possible instrument for further design studies.

The majority of the residents want to stay in the Sant’ Elia neighborhood, land of unlimited freedom and creativity, as opposed to the formal city. The residents are continuously engaged in changing and adapting their environment to their very special needs. This is made possible by the absence of regulation and administrative presence on the site.

Our scope as designers is to keep this energy flow moving and introduce spaces and opportunities allowing the legalized continuity of such mansion. Encouraging and slightly modifying elements that do work on site seems to be an appropriate system for reintegration.

The often-exaggerated negative images of Sant’Elia, partially responsible for the residents’ hostility towards the city, could be switched into a positive image by bringing new interest to the area. Increasing the residents' sense of belonging and responsibility needs to be implemented in the spatial materialization for a new masterplan.

The OMA project focuses on accommodating the edges of the site by eliminating distances and isolation and creating new proximities and confrontations with the ultimate ambition of offering a new, fresh, animated piece of Cagliari to the Cagliaritani.



Credits: La Défense

OMA – Office for Metropolitan Architecture
Partners-in-Charge: Rem Koolhaas and Reiner De Graaf
Associate: Clement Blanchet
Team: James Leng, Tudor Vlasceanu, Peter Stec, Sebastien Berthier, Pierre de Brun, Maurizio Mucciola, Caroline Martin, Konrad Krupinsky, Sandra Bsat, Joris De Baes, Billy Guidoni

ONE ARCHITECTURE
Principal: Matthijs Bouw
Project Architect: Selma Maaroufi
Team: Joana Bastos, Max Cohen de Lara, Tjeerd Haccou, Maxim Hourani

IRMA BOOM
Irma Boom
Julia Juriga-Lamut

SETEC PARTENAIRE DEVELOPPEMENT
Director Jean Paul Lebas
Martin Schoeller

CVA
Dominique Boudet

CRITIC
Francoise Fromonot


Credits: Sant'Elia

Partners: Rem Koolhaas, Floris Alkemade
Team: Andrea Bertassi, Philippe Braun, Andrea Massa, Cristina Murphy, Frederik Spilt
With: Ania Brault, Abigail Karcher, Rob Daurio

2010
CRONOCAOS
12th Venice Architecture Biennale

References

1. Brown Journal of World Affairs, Fall/Summer, 2005
   
   
2. Forbes, October 31, 2005
   
   
3. Time, March 13, 2005
   
   
4. Vanity Fair, June 2006
   
   
5. Mike Davis, www.tomdispatch.com
   
   
6. William Clinton, Wired, Sept/Oct 1993; Bidoun, Fall 2006

2010
CRONOCAOS
12th Venice Architecture Biennale





Both: Photo Yasuhiro Takagi for ART iT.


The exhibition occupies a suite of two rooms, each with a distinct character and function. The first room is a vestibule featuring a range of OMA projects engaging with preservation, often liberating what has been preserved from a frozen condition. Projects ranging from the Dutch Parliament to the China National Museum to the Libyan desert to the Hermitage in St Petersburg will be displayed through photographs, historical documents and even relics - including chairs and doorknobs from Munich's Haus der Kunst (an OMA preservation project in 2008).

The second room is a manifesto in space featuring critical preservation stories of the 20th and 21st centuries. These are organized in five thematic "bands" that form various trajectories through the room: the increasing territorial claims of preservation; the arbitrary morality of what is preserved and what is not; nostalgia vs memory; the preservation of the future: the shift from retroactive to prescriptive preservation; and finally, the "black hole" of preservation.

The "black hole," occupying the central band and a screen on a wall, is the core of our argument. While our sense of duty towards history (and our nostalgia) grows exponentially -increasingly, "everything" must be preserved - actual knowledge and the depth of our memory diminishes. As a result, many crucial but politically unpopular or impractical buildings of the second half of the 20th century remain subject to erasure or neglect.

Our second key argument concerns the notion of thinning: as more and more territory falls under the protection of preservation - about four percent of the earth's surface now cannot be touched - and the time lag between construction and preservation becomes ever smaller, the intensity of our use of land and our ability to inhabit architecture declines. In cities and in the countryside, thinning is one of the most urgent phenomena related to preservation.

The final display, at the back of the second room, is a timeline of OMA projects, spanning the 35 years of its practice, which have given new definitions to the idea preservation, sometimes even as a retroactive realization. Each project comes on a postcard that visitors can peel off the wall and take home. By the end of the Biennale, preservation and depletion will be evident in the exhibition itself.



Photo ART iT.






An Excerpted OMA History of Preservation



1.





2.





3.





4.





5.





6.









*Above elements from CRONOCAOS reproduced with permission of OMA, © OMA.

Credits
Rem Koolhaas, Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Kayoko Ota, Carolina Cantante, Farshid Gazor, Andrew Linn, Amelia McPhee, Simon Pennec, Stephan Petermann, Becky Quintal, Miriam Roure Parera, Sasha Smolin, Lawrence Siu, James Westcott.

Special thanks: Haus der Kunst, Munich; exhibition made possible through the generous support of HyundaiCard, with additional support from the Netherlands Architecture Fund and Benetton.





CRONOCAOS remains on view at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, "People Meet in Architecture," through November 21

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By Oscar Tuazon




Photo Oscar Tuazon.


Our apartment building caught fire this summer. The kid below us had a fight with his dad, a fireman, so he set his bed on fire and went to school. We came home to a hallway littered with broken glass, charred clothes, a sack of rotting food hanging on a tree branch. His ceiling - our floor - is a black mess, carbonized joists with a flakey crust of sheetrock; we had to move. Don't feel sorry for me. My wife grew up in Paris, and our three-bedroom apartment was furnished with a commode haute, an oak breakfront chest, a cheval mirroire, a chiffonier. The mirror is cracked, but the rest is okay, more or less, water-stained but intact. We're moving into one bedroom, smaller than any of the three we had, and we're four: my wife and I, two girls. I don't know where the furniture came from - family heirlooms I guess - but they won’t fit in the new place so I’m cutting them up. If we had a fireplace we could burn them but we don't, so we'll live in them.

The rule of thumb when rebuilding anything is to take the cost of building it new and double that, at least. The first thing you'll need for this kind of work is a healthy sense of humor and a heavy duty rip hammer with the waffle face buffed off. I started with the commode: tipped it down to look at the crown pediment, sat on it, spit on it, squinted at it. You'll be hard pressed to destroy a good mortise and tenon joint in white oak, but it can be done, and it's fun. The joinery is done in the old style, hand-cut tenons dry-fit long and set with hide glue and a blind pin, brittle and strong. Tap in a chisel and spread the joint till you spot the spline, keep tapping till you blow out the pin, then lean on it. Now it doesn't matter, put your back into it, snap it. I just sit on it, ease a bit of weight on the seam till it splits, back off of it and wrack it. Now it isn't a piece of furniture anymore, it's just two sides with a split crown; a vertical divider with eight dadoes and hand-chiseled demi-lune drawer slides, steel post pins with hook hangers; 16 oak-front curve-cut dowel joined shelves; 18 bull-nose case-framed drop doors with domed brass pulls; and a faux base shoe foot, bleached along the skirt, chipped and blown out around the mitered mortise. That was some asshole's idea of a good week of work, a shop boss' display frame, someone's painstaking demonstration of le gout de detail, gleaming and oiled, polished, wet looking. It's just a stack of old checked wood now. Leave it there.

There's something wrong with my finger, like to the left of the tip it's numb or tingly. It's fine, but I'm sure that at some point I must have sliced it off at the nail - on the fly probably - framing up under a sink. It's healed now, just some mild remedial nerve damage. I'm not sure why I'm even bringing it up. Why does a man have to do the best he can? I worked for an architect; then I worked for a contractor remodeling houses, threw out my back. I don't know where the money went. I allow that the government got more than their share. Oh well, who cares. I ain't asking nobody for nothing if I can't get it on my own. Now I've got my own shop, I do custom work, exhibitions mostly. It pays better, and I set my own hours. What's an exhibition space? Usually it's a useless space, a waste of space, an unfurnished shed without much in the way of facilities. Maybe not a complete tear-down, but at the minimum it usually calls for a gut remodel, a bit of structural work on the floors maybe, a good hard look at the wiring. The first thing you have to ask yourself is: what are you willing to put up with?

I'm gluing that damn commode back together backwards, broke-back and inverted. I splayed it out flat, stacked the boards any which way, marked it, cut it, joined it, done it. I got in it, crawled in it, twisted and tried to stand up in it, flexed it till I bent it. I scribed and cut it, spun a wheel around it and ground down on it, got down on the ground on it, spun it around, rolled around on it. I got a point under a lifted edge, pried back and knifed it, pulled and peeled it, just wet it and peeled it till I spread it. My genitals are more or less part of my legs, they're connected to the top of my legs with a piece of skin. I got down on my knees in front of it, leaned under it, into it, put a shoulder under it to hold it while I drilled it, dropped it back and filled it, bored it out with a spade and laid a blade in it, burned a cut through the wood, smoked it, stood and dropped it, came back on it, cracked and opened it.

I lost a bet on it. I got shit on it, I got cut and bled on it, I split my head on it trying to get ahead of it, I got head on it. I lost my head on it. I lost my head on it and I put my hand on it, punched my hand all the way through it, splintered it and put my fist through it, cracked a rib on it, lost it. Poked a finger in it, pinched a finger in it, broke a bone in it. I didn't wait for it, I couldn’t wait for it, I made a slit in it, made a space in it, I lost some face on it. I oiled it, let the oil soak into it and took a coke, came back and wiped it off with a cloth, rubbed on it till it was wet, slid on it, actually slipped on it, drifted in and out of the cut, bore down till it broke. A man was in it, more like half in it, trying to open a door with a 10-pound sledge, trying to speak at it, trying to get a good look at it and speak to it. I fit myself under it, fit my body into it like if it was a bed, mirrored, cold and adult, a rigid plank, pearly and dank.

Oscar Tuazon is an artist, writer and curator based in Paris, and co-founder of the artist-run collective and gallery castillo/corales. This year he has held exhibitions at the Centre international d'art et du paysage - Vassivere island, Kunsthalle Bern, Parc Saint Léger - Centre d'art contemporain (Pougues-les-eaux), Institute of Contemporary Art (London), and Maccarone (New York).

Lift to the Scaffold
By Judy Annear




Lift (2005), C-Print/Diasec, 190 x 150 cm. © Thomas Demand, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn /
APG-JAA, Tokyo. All images: Courtesy Sprueth Magers Berlin London.


In 1958 Louis Malle directed his first feature film, Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows), starring Jeanne Moreau and featuring a mesmerizing soundtrack by jazz composer and musician Miles Davis. Moreau's lover, played by Maurice Ronet, is trapped in an elevator after committing what might have been the perfect crime. This classic film noir has impressed artists from Bernd and Hilla Becher, who made mention of seeing it in 1979, to Thomas Struth, who singled it out in an interview in 1988, and Shinro Ohtake, who included it in his "cinema index" for the August 2010 issue of ART iT. (1) In the film, the suspense unfolds layer after layer, rather as another artist, Thomas Demand, operates. Demand looks at our mediatized world, where everything is recorded, and attempts to strip that world back to find the essential triggers of our memories and imaginations.

Demand takes already existing images, whether those found in news photos or post cards or other ephemera, and painstakingly reconstructs their contents at life-scale out of paper before photographing his reconstructions. Given the plethora of images already available and their daily exponential increase, Demand seemingly attempts to identify the essence of what is communicated in this maelstrom of visual information, not only through building the physical structures but also through metaphorically sparking the construction of a scaffolding for the viewer's own imagination. The viewer sees not just the image presented on the surface of the final work but also the structure of that image and, sometimes, its history as well.

Demand is constantly tearing down and building up. Once he photographs his reconstructions, all of which have been assembled by hand, he destroys them. His sources are often from the history of Modernism and its overlaps with 20th-century politics, although sometimes they come from the natural world. Usually Demand photographs the structures he makes in close detail, enticing the viewer to observe the resulting images in greater depth. But what is there to observe? Demand begins with what would seemingly be a perfect vehicle for ideas, paper, but in his case the paper is, and remains, blank. In his reconstructions he removes all numbers, letters and decoration from the source images, and identity as well; people do not exist in the artist's paper-thin and fragile imaginary. While he retains an element of color, there is nothing to distract the imagination from responding only to the structure of his completed photograph. Demand constructs an environment based on a found image that has caught his attention, but the environment he produces is life size, unlike the originating image. In catching Demand's attention, that image acts as a trigger for his memory and imaginative interpretation, so that the process he embarks upon is one of giving the viewer a representation of his perception of a mediatized reflection of an event or object.






Above: Installation view, Fondation Cartier, Paris, 2000-01. © Nik Tenwiggenhorn. Below: Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, 2006.



This layering is augmented by the way in which Demand has exhibited his work over the last 10 years. In 2000, Demand showed at the Fondation Cartier in Paris where he worked with, rather than against, architect Jean Nouvel's 1994 glass structure design for the exhibition space. The English architects Caruso St John devised a system of screens covered with bright Le Corbusier wallpapers that preserved the building's transparency and relation to its exterior garden, even while making possible an exhibition of photography in a building suffused with light. The parallel colored screens on which Demand's works were hung were cut through so that the large, frameless luminescent photographs operated as views to another visual and imaginative plane.

In 2006, Demand exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in London, where he created an extraordinary backdrop for his work by covering the walls with of four different colors of ivy wallpaper of his own design. In consideration of the location of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens and the venue's history as a 1930s teahouse, this wallpapered environment allowed for a highly evocative transparency. In the same exhibition, thought and memory, inside and outside, the structure and relationships between things, light and dark, were given yet another dimension by the addition of sound in Demand’s 35mm-film loop Recorder. The stop-motion animation of the old-fashioned tape deck made out of paper, spinning in perpetuity, was accompanied by an endless, echoing version of the Beach Boys' instrumental, Bicycle Rider.




Installation view, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, 2009. © Nik Tenwiggenhorn.


And in late 2009, Demand reunited with Caruso St John for his major exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. The collaborators transformed Mies van der Rohe's 1968 glass box in the city center through the addition of floor-to-ceiling, heavy woolen curtains in a muted palette. As with Fondation Cartier, even as he recognized the glorious Modernism of Mies' building, Demand used his work to provide another layer to the potent history surrounding the building and the city.

Architectural historian Beatriz Colomina has pointed out that architecture and the media now feed off each other to the extent that Modern architecture has become a form of media. (Colomina notes that the Modernist architect Adolf Loos criticized his colleagues for designing buildings that would look good in photographs.) Through the media, architecture, once the domain of the specialist, circulates just as everything else in the world now does. However, Colomina writes that Demand sees media as architecture, in a reversal of how most architects might function, and quotes him as saying that media is "a vast landscape, a virtual domain with its cities of scandals, its towers of superstars and its marsh of murders." (2)

Demand's works suggest the scene of a crime, their very emptiness operating like a vacuum. While many are in fact based on crime scenes, others are "empty" from the beginning, in the sense of being no more than what they seem, as is apparent in Demand's representations of the natural world, or of a simple kitchen sink (Sink, 1997). In 2005 Demand made a work entitled Lift in which the point of view is oriented toward a corner of an elevator where two walls meet the floor. To the right of the composition, the viewer can see that the elevator doors are open, but no light enters from the outside. The elevator buttons are blank - no way up and no way down. In his 1985 novel of parallel narratives, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, writer Haruki Murakami similarly envisions his protagonist in an elevator with no buttons at all. (3) Today, architecture is seemingly of our own imagining: it is the scaffolding for whatever we want, think we need or believe might have occurred in the world. Demand, in his pictures, supplies what he describes as "the diffuse shadow realm such events inhabit in our collective memory." (4)


Thomas Demand's work is currently on view in the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale, "People Meet in Architecture," through November 21.






Judy Annear is Senior Curator of Photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

1. See Shinro Ohtake, "An Indexical Survey of Tokyo in the Age of Cinema," ART iT, August 2010 http://www.art-it.asia/u/admin_ed_columns_e/SFp7HuoKl2Vh6tUsT9fM/ accessed 8/2/10.
   
2. See Beatriz Colomina, "Media as modern architecture," in Thomas Demand, Serpentine Gallery, London/Schirmer Mosel, Munich, 2006, p 19.
   
3. See http://www.newsstore.fairfax.com.au/apps/viewDocument.ac?page=1&sy=nstore&kw=murakami&pb=smh&dt=selectRange&dr=week&so=relevance&sf=text&sf=headline&rc=10&rm=200&sp=nrm&clsPage=1&docID=SMH100807ND4T23CDHKJ for an interesting discussion on Murakami, the recently released movie Inception and elevators.
   
4. "A conversation between Alexander Kluge and Thomas Demand," in Thomas Demand, op. cit p 86.