Crystal Land
| Professor Donald Kunze Penn State University |
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| Architecture as inquiry is as old as architecture itself, where the primitive templum was also a speculation about the quadrilateral division of the universe. In the wealth of “architecture without architects,” we have evidence of plans and experiments, exchanges between myth and masonry, music and mud. In more recent times, the speculation has been carried out on paper as well. Piranesi’s Carceri engravings proposed a fantastic endless prison, a parody of the space created by Enlightenment facticity. LeCleu’s buildings shaped like animals and other figures inserted architecture between the lines of a text.Architecture has survived as a form of inquiry because it has always managed to live within the shadows of architecture-as-style. For such a visual art, architecture is dominated by the way it looks at first glance. Once “a look” is identified with a cultural ideal, the representational function dominates. If Neoplatonism engenders a century of white symmetry, Christianity in its turn ushers in gothic points and dark tracery. History tends to forget the utopian goal and remembers instead the temple-front or gothic cottage.It is not so much that the symmetry, points, and tracery then become signs rather than part of buildings, but that their composite nature - as a sign and signified, ideal and fact, reality and dream - is obscured. It is this composite nature that is reasserted by architecture-as-inquiry. It would be a mistake, in this process, to retreat from style itself, to counter style’s “look” with anonymity or cacophony. Architecture as inquiry need only reassert the law of history: style follows inquiry and, by following, shows where it has been. | |
| Melancholy | |
| In today’s medical opinion, melancholy is little more than an emotional disability with established links to chemical imbalances in the brain. In the longer memory of art, melancholy is the key to the nature of poetic genius. As early an authority as Aristotle puzzled why darkness should be coupled with intellectual brilliance, and as prominent an artist as Dürer documented its attributes visually and literally. All along, artists, musicians, authors, and architects have exploited melancholy’s dark but rich resources.It is interesting to talk of Taransky’s work in terms of melancholy. This is not to use melancholy as a characterization, not that this would be out of place given his themes of solitude, reflection, and the poetics of impasse. Taransky travels the painful landscape of suicide, genocide, isolation, physical handicap, and environmental degradation, using stage-set houses overflowing with narrative. This melancholia is not an expression of personal psychology but, rather, the statement of an important architectural problem: architecture’s relation to time. For example, the word tempo, in Italian, refers to both the weather and chronological time. This ambidexterity is present in the English use of “times” or “days” to speak of a period of time as an “age” with stable, enduring qualities. “In those days, life was simpler.” Philosophers as well as poets have noted that the eternity of bliss attributed to past ages is a drug of our own invention; that human life is conditioned by chronology, by history, by the constant loss of the present as well as the ever-looming specter of future death. That these two qualities, eternity and ephemerality, can be linked in a word is a sign that they are a part of the human mental molecule: our essence.Language can play out this antimony through theory or consolation. Architecture has a different resource at hand. It can pose the impossible by creating charged spaces that speak through emptiness and silence. With Taransky, such spaces are implicitly narrative. He poses his economical questions in a language of excavations, improbable apertures, dramatically posed figures, and paired elements, as if buildings and furniture were chess-pieces on a board. A landscape goes from woods to a bare paved lot; a family goes from a full to an empty nest; survivors escape from nightmare to self-built prisons. The narratives pose their own systems of opposition: a high and a low window; a full space and an empty one; functional walls and walls left bare.The architectural term “storey” evolved from the use of levels within cathedrals to tell the “stories” of the Old and New Testaments. It is just this kind of exchange between narrative content and the exigencies of practical delivery that drive Taransky’s work. Narrative resides in his work not so much as a program ordering individual elements as a wedge dividing each detail of form into a diploid of object materiality and sublime spirituality. “Story” becomes “storey,” “storey becomes “story.” Eternity becomes chronology and chronology eternal. The riddle of time is bundled with shadows and light.Drawing plays a profound role in Taransky’s work. The drawing condenses the question of time in art into a matter of projection. This is not simply the geometric projection of solid bodies onto two-dimensional surfaces, but the projection of the “future” of a building, as Marco Frascari has put it. In architecture as well as art, the future is a special form of the subjunctive tense. It is an “isn’t” that acquires a momentary glimmer of life that, within art’s prism, becomes more real than the dismembered past and fleeting present. Within projection the miracle of clarity becomes possible. One of the best descriptions of this in geometric terms can be found in Nabokov’s “poem” that forms the basis of his famous novel, Pale Fire. | |
| I was the shadow of the waxwing slain By the false azure in the windowpane; I was the smudge of ashen fluff - and I Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky. And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate: Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass Hang all the furniture above the grass, And how delightful when a fall of snow Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so As to make chair and bed exactly stand Upon that snow, out in that crystal land! |
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| When Nabokov says “exactly stand,” we have a map of what happens when the imagination ventures beyond the bounds of normality’s imposed ideas of time and space. Nothing stands “exactly” in reality, but in the projection of art, which can join the false azure, the slain bird, the bit of fluff on the windowpane; which can join the dead waxwing with the poetic subspecies, who made it across and lived the broader life of the reflected sky; we are at last fully human, exactly human. | |
| Poché | |
| Architects have several choices for what materials might approximate Nabokov’s “false azure.” Taransky uses his skies judiciously, narrowing their promise to bands held at the horizon, accessible through several of his impossible apertures, crone-like bridges, catwalks, and diving-board tables. These moves are antinomous connections between inside and outside, and the clues may found in numerous “section” drawings, which make the viewer feel as if he/she were above and looking down, rather than even and looking horizontally. Interiors open to the outside only under certain conditions, which, like the symbolic assignments given to the openings of the body in every religion, cannot be transgressed without a prayer.Poché - concealed material interiors or the shadowed space always beyond the reach of perception or ordinary experience - is the dwelling-place of melancholia. Access to it is normally impossible and usually undesirable. But, the same forces that produce fear can induce desire and imagination. In the branch of esthetics known as the grotesque, forbidden spaces are the foci of desire. When Taransky’s high-placed openings lead out to the “other houses” that frequently tag along, we are invited to see architecture with the eyes of a zombie. This is meant to recall not The Night of the Living Dead but, rather, Calvino’s moving essay, “On Learning to be Dead,” where we find art within the perfect poise of indifference that we mortals can imagine only as death.Two related examples of poché come to mind. The first is John Cheever’s story, “The Enormous Radio.” A lonely housewife in New York of the 1950s is comforted by her husband’s gift of a large radio with the unusual ability to tune into other apartments in her building. Drawn increasingly to exploit this naughty 4th-dimensional feature, she is gradually devastated by the hidden tragedies of her neighbors.The second poché example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. The hero is a New York photographer immobilized by a broken leg and voyeurized by a pair of high-powered binoculars and a telephoto lens. When the neighbor across his urban interior courtyard turns murderous, the space in between the two apartments becomes a mechanism for the voyeur’s own murder. Whether the conscious nosiness of Hitchcock’s invalid or the innocent curiosity of Cheever’s housewife, these stories suggest that our culture prefers to take in closets, back passageways, and other shadowed spaces in the same mental breath. The poché upon which Nabokov’s furniture might “exactly stand” is a place of death but also a place of the miraculous life of art.Bernard Tschumi once said that the only perfect architecture is the spectacle of fireworks. Within their festal glow, we see an order that is so much of chronology - the celebration of an event - and so little of duration that we see the identity between the two, stillness in movement. Like the gods of the Greeks, thrown into the sky as points of light, the architecture of fireworks both is and isn’t. This fact, which places architecture’s existence in extreme jeopardy, is at the same time a guarantee of divinity. Architecture, like the ancient gods, lives by finding a space and time between being and nothingness. | |
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| [This essay is adopted from “Crystal Lands,” included in the catalog, 38th Annual American Contemporary Art Exhibition; Philadelphia Architects: Larry Mitnick, Wesley Wei, Richard Taransky; Drawings and Models (Bethlehem, Pennylvania: Lehigh University, 1994).] |
