UP-DATE : Expansion of the Musée National des Beaux du Québec

Agrandissement du MNBAQ International Architecture Competition, Quebec

We have been shorlisted for a design competition for a new pavilion for the National Beaux Arts Museum in Quebec City (MNBAQ) against OMA, Nieto Sobejano, Allied Works, and David Chipperfield, from a list of 108 firms. Phase 1 of the design by our joint-venture team, BarkowLeibinger Architecken + Imrey Culbert Architects, bested Kengo Kuma, Big, Adjaye Associates and Gigon Guyer among others to move on to Phase 2 of the design, which was recently submitted to the jury. The museum will make their final decision between the five finalists by the end of March. We are in good standing.

Though we cannot share the design proposal yet, we believe this on-going competition is another successful example of our approach to creating collaborative teams for international competitions (We similarly invited Sanaa to join us, as well as Tod Williams Billie Tsien on two other successful RFP shortlists in France).

Here’s an outline on how we approached the MNBAQ:
We believe our project reinforces a keen program directive of the museum committee for this competition: to create a coherent additive pavilion to a complex site of buildings and historical landmarks - from the small scale of the Wolfe fountain, to wide views of the Plaines d'Abraham; from the vertical height of the St. Dominique church, to the over-shadowing presence of the rehabilitated Prison - so that the new Pavilion neither dominates nor recedes in their presence.

The typological form of the building – a two-storey mat-building - acknowledges the very dichotomy of the design challenge: by creating a mineral form, above a light base it acknowledges that the pavilion is to be both additive and visible - the new face of the MNBAQ - while at times able to recede and fuse with its site. Designed equally from interior to exterior, it is everything but overpowering. The visible, open, public spaces at ground level are there to support the temporarily of art production or art display on the vast floor above. Temporality and Permanence meet. The two vocations of the art museum merge: presenting art (over defined periods) and conserving art (for future generations).

Our joint design is straightforward and keenly economical to build. It uses natural daylight saw-tooth roofs through-out, which defines the formal quality of the building. The sculptural effects of the facades - a solidified and facetted form - will allow the building to come to the fore, the transparency and reflectivity of the ground level, reflecting and connecting visitors approaching the building, the surrounding landscape, and responding to the unpredictable lighting conditions by week or time of day. In this way, then, the building operates on a very functional level, intended like a Dan Graham pavilion in a park, to instigate these encounters and frame a context - here, in Quebec, both historical and new.

Art commissioned works, will be challenged with this building and in the process the new or repeat visitor, will be made that much more aware of the art, their place in its viewing, how spectatorship is created and questioned, or just to rethink how one "does" art. This is a more immediate encounter with art: a jestering for attention.

Given the competition's ambitions - and to paraphrase Andreas Ruby - not to create a generic space for the experience of art, the potential here is for a project that aims to create different modes of relationship between art and the viewer than the encyclopedic museum or other art spaces do. Named a "pavilion", rather then an addition or a wing, as commonly done, the museum committee has taken a delightful risk: that the budget-conscious project is to be seen primarily as one of transitory experience. If we are not mistaken, says Ruby, the etymological origin of Pavilion, is the word papillon, French for butterfly, who's short life is so transitory. The reference is more than metaphor: in our design the pavilion literally takes flight above its base, taking the visitor with it. There is now an interior encounter to instigate, to curate and that is where the director and her curators come into play.

Internal to the pavilion, is the former Cloister, recreated as a triple height multi-faceted, user-directed, "auditorium". There is no "cloistering" of programming here, but one of multi-tasking experience by the visitor. This is the transitory, non-curated encounters that the museum as a whole – four interconnected pavilions from various periods - desperately needs. But why?: for the risk-averse, it is harder to make our case. For those keen on expecting non-prescribed uses and needs for a museum-come performance/lecture/production space in the future - then this is indeed where it will happen, how the pavilion will remain competitive and relevant.

We will have to wait and see if the Jury – chaired by Xaveer de Geyter (Bruxelles) and Nasrine Seraji (Paris) – agree. The project was designed with the excellent support of Buro Happold, ArupLighting, CSA Agency among others. Imrey Culbert initiated the RFP and established the complete project team.

Artist Andreas Ruby’s reference above is from a moderated talk by Daniel Birnbaum on the Thyssen-Bornesmisza Art Pavilion by Olafur Elisasson and David Adjaye.©TBA21.org

Viewer and the viewed: Defining visual and social encounters in the museum.

The Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, Bangkok (second of two posts)

“My projects are born in the course of encounters. This fits with the principle that the museum or exhibition is a specific site for encounters. Each day, I imagine the organisation of potential encounters, in museums, in different countries, in political or religious institutions, at historical sites, etc. I sometimes reorganise their spaces, imagine what might be done to encourage people to look and make thamoment individual. It is also a matter of scale and means, you can’t approach encounters with individuals and vast audiences in the same way. I enjoy being challenged on different scales.”©

A major focus of ours for the Museum of Textiles in Bangkok, which defined much of our internal design debates, was centered around the very nature of the costumes on display in the permanent galleries – ceremonial, formal and Royal – that would establish a strong hierarchical relationship of the viewer and the viewed. Embodied in the costumes themselves, is this very relationship, an inter-subjective experience, one that should not pose any challenges or uneasiness in the viewer. To produce an equal amount of respect and deference, in the viewer as confronted by an image of the Queen herself (or her rare but possible physical presence), necessarily requires a display approach that will activate these emotions.

Perhaps, in paraphrasing the artist/curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, if the viewer initially perceives the costumes as objects on display – when they first declare themselves to be on show - we then need time to recognize them as subjects ©. The viewer as a subject to the Queen may require ample time or space for him/her to see the artifacts as other then embodiments of HRH. This dynamic works in reverse as well, where a visitor or group of visitors, first recognizes the “on show” presence of costumes as the Queen herself, requiring time – or some form of constituent elements of the exhibit design - to recognize them as artifacts, unique, fastidious products of specialized weaving and design. With this in mind, we were aware that the display would necessary have to confront this dichotomy (This will not necessarily be the case in the temporary or thematic galleries showing tribal costumes).

At the early stage we tested these thoughts focusing primarily on the central Queen’s Gallery, where her formal wear, most designed by Pierre Balmain in the 70’s to 80’s using traditional Thai textiles, are to be displayed. The design of a central vitrine in this space, accordingly an object of unusual scale and form, allowed us to define multiple views of HRH costumes on mannequins, while reinforcing a frontal relation to them. Never is the visitor allowed to be fully “behind” the costume – in deference to the hierarchical construct – while simultaneous allowing for framed or reflected “rear-views” of these same costumes, when visually or aesthetically valid.

The vitrine acts in this way as a highly functional structure framing various angles, reflections and positions (both of the objects on display and the viewer themselves) while simultaneously asserting social hierarchy. The scale of the vitrine, the curvature of singular panels of glass, while others facetted in non-reflective glass, the internal lighting, the tinted dual-vision mirror glass partially behind the costumes, assures the visual complexity and functionality of the display. One creates visual movement in this way, with “frozen” works of art.

However, from a design perspective, certain details of the vitrine will define a more ambiguous role of the enclosure – is it to protect, reflect, secure or separate us from the artifacts? Place them on a stage? The vitrine’s panels of glass, as we conceived one version, may not form a sealed corner, leaving a separation – not unlike a Dan Graham glass pavilion – reversing an expectation of complete protective enclosure of the objects (the museum building and gallery should perform this duty).

Staged this way, one compels the visitor, to be aware of what they are seeing and their movement (and of their own image, of being on show themselves). The Queen, physically absent, is present in maintaining the visitor’s distance and position as subject.. The visitor’s gaze is egalitarian, while the display maintains the necessary social hierarchy at work. The “choreographic tension” is there, and each viewer, in one instant of time, whether individual or in large groups, will feel this to some degree – to what degree will establish the effectiveness of our design – and then be free to move on to other galleries.

© The quote and term choreographic tension is from Olivier Bardin’s interview with Hughes & Obrist, 2008-12-07 Liverpool Univesity Press, as is his discussion of exhibitions as a specific site of encounters. Reference to the pavilions of Dan Graham courtesy of Hauser & Wirth Zürich.

Weaving Inside Out: A design process for a museum of textiles

The Queen Sirikit Museum of Textiles, Bangkok. First of 2 postings

“Exhibition is, for me, the opportunity to create a physical encounter between myself and a spectator, and between spectators. In a context where experience dominates, it is left for me to construct the scene. What I create, the formal element which can be transmitted and reactivated, is the set-up itself. The system is fixed, it is an architecture. I don’t tell how it should be occupied, but the visitor is immediately subjected to its influence.”©

We defined the working strategy for this new museum project in Bangkok – a museum dedicated solely to Thai Textiles - from two opposing directions allowing a healthy tension in our design process.

We write tension in the best sense we can imagine – taught, not static, balanced as a creative device.

So this was our approach: to design from inside to out, and, conversely, outside to in. Conceptually we looked at an artifact to be displayed and proceeded backwards to consider the museum-goer outside in the public realm; and naturally we considered a standard route - another visitor, standing at the new museum foyer, proceeding from the exterior, inside to an encounter with an artifact in a defined gallery condition.

One of these two approaches helped us define the gallery architecture, lighting and ceiling designs, derived for example, from geometries found in classic Thai textiles. The other obliged us to consider very closely, multiple and potential viewer experiences in the galleries and to factor in the wide range of potential museum-goers and what their (pre)understanding of the artifacts might be.

Designing the project in this way, taking queues from opposing directions of influence, set the stage for both physical and conceptual encounters – between the architecture and gallery design, between viewer and object; between various spectators – young Thai school children or visiting tourists; between informal or highly constructed installations; between free movement in the gallery to the static positions of objects (finely dressed mannequins) separated and enclosed in glass volumes; and between singular and multiple viewing pleasures.

What we began to create from this approach, in the visitor’s future experience of the museum or the gallery is a direct response to these formal oppositions. The constructed spaces, gallery sequence, proportions, the ability to move freely or in a defined way (e.g. chronological movement), the scale of the vitrines and the materials in the space, became the “constituent elements” of the display environment and the tools we were to work with. Combined in the design and drawing process, they activated the design tension we hoped for. Combined physically in the galleries, they will activate the visitor experience, and in the process bring him/her into a greater awareness of her surroundings and of the visual narrative on display.

This is not an artifice of process, but a means to explore the duality in inherent in the museum – in any museum - weaving together very different expectations of the visitor, inside and outside the building and in the exhibition itself.

The quote above is by Olivier Bardin, Interview by Pierre Huyghe and Hans-Ulrich Obrist in The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking. Image by Thomas Struth and the Queen Sirikit Support Foundation

Bilbao Redux: The ground breaking of the Louvre-Lens Museum

In typical year-end ritual, we are seeing internet postings and mainstream press announce the worst dressed buildings to date: apparently Libeskind's ROM has been nominated twice as the "ugliest"1 of the decade. We can forgive him; the responsibility lies more with the generous philanthropist who made it possible, and for any museum professional, or elected officials that gave even an ounce of support for such a flawed building.

The ROM is hopefully one of the last museum expansions planned under the banner of the Biblao Effect, relying on form giving to lure a public into Escheresque spaces, where art plays second place to architecture. Gehry's phenomenal Guggenheim deserves to have generated far better progeny then we have seen, from Qatar to Queens, Manchester to Manhattan.

Our design for the new Louvre satellite in Lens, falls into the same predicament, in that the local elected folks have used the tired Bilbao term to effectively win over their local constituents, to bank a large portion of the $115 million new museum (The mayor of the Metz-based Pompidou Center by Shigeru Ban, which opens this May, has unabashedly referred to the project as their very own Bilbao).

Hopefully we will succeed where ROM and other similar projects have failed. As the winning design and the outcome of an international competition in 2005, our design for the Louvre-Lens is an exercise in restraint and visual simplicity, besting a few noted formalist of this last decade Hadid, Holl, Ricciotti among others;.

How did we succeed, with our two counterparts - Sejima and Nishizawa - who had never set foot in the Louvre Museum prior to our winning the commission? Perhaps by using that very handicap to maximum effect: without any "patrimony baggage" we withheld any reservations about creating huge empty spaces with no hierarchy, on one level, (nicely dovetailing with the featureless, flat character of the landscape, a former mining site) and using to certain affect a feigned ignorance of the art that the galleries could hold.

As in many competitions, the Bilbao Refrain remains alive, largely because the winning scheme is frequently based on a political wish-list for local revitalization - thus the star power of the architecture- to the detriment of real programmatic solutions. Of the 5 invited museum competitions we have participated in lately, only one gave a program for the art collection and museographic intentions of the new wing or expansion (an archeological museum in Nantes, France, which we won last month in a competition with DPA, was a rare exception).

The Louvre-Lens competition was no different in this respect. And perhaps wisely so: who, after all, had not visited the museum or was intimately familiar with the Louvre's collection from Taichen publications to framed posters in Tokyo sake bars.

Well, actually, our two Japanese partners hadn't. This gave us some advantage over Hadid and Riccotti, already earmarked to design the Islamic galleries in the Sully Wing, with Holl maintaining his stance as the sole practicing architect who considers art first (he is married to an artist and claims this podium frequently in his conferences). Ourselves, having lived more then a decade across the Seine from the Louvre prior to the Pei Pyramid, we held an original claim as frequent visitors - not so by any of the other 6 competing architectural firms (the two firms from France in the line-up were based in Bordeaux and Marseille).

Thus Sejima and Nishizawa's most effective contribution to the team, was one of actual and partially affected ignorance of the museum's western art. A rare species that required special handling - a task fallen to us - to shield this potential embarrassment from the Louvre as well as from the paying regional counterparts (the museum is being built with funds from the EC and the Regional Government and none from the Louvre itself or the State). It was up to us, then, to give this weakness some place in the scheme we designed together and more importantly to articulate the project design in a oral jury to the French Senate (Sanaa never made it to France to be present at this last ditch effort to win the commission; it was at this oral that we firmly bested Hadid for first place).

It had also been our role to define the building volumes and how an untypical visitor, expecting to visit the Louvre 2 in a familiar classical vein, would navigate such a straight forward building, linked so perfectly at corners where long immense spaces, entirely skylight, would be joined. It was our firm, then, that gave the Louvre-Lens its future and defining aspect: non-hierarchical spaces as a counterpoint to the frustrating and stilted connections of the Louvre's Palatial wings (Sanaa would give it its materiality, or absence of it, with an almost joint less facade of polished aluminum).

To this, we added, finally, in reversal of the Paris Palais where the myth of hidden treasures in the basement is a constant refrain (there are almost none - all or most of the Louvre's collection is on display, and eventually on loan to Abu Dhabi or Dallas, both great windfalls for Henri Loyrette, the Louvre President, keen on financing investments that have little to do with bettering art and content display, contrary to what his two predecessors had done for two decades) - a large visitable study-storage, viewable from the generous entrance pavilion. In this way, the core responsibility of the museum - to preserve and conserve art for future generations - would be given a new visible priority at the center of the building.

This is now a process that is 4 years in the making - in design work, in design battles over money and political opportunism - that only this last month of the decade has seen the first symbolic shovel of dirt scattered at the construction site. This is good news indeed, despite the delay, as we can now be certain that the project will be built.

Last month's site ceremony was widely covered in the French local press, in part due to the attendance of Jack Lang and current Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand, the nephew of the former President who originated the agenda of decentralizing art and culture from the overreaching centrality of Paris, for which this project is a direct beneficiary.

At the December ground-breaking under gray Nord Pas-de-Calais skies, despite having invited Sanaa in a joint RFP, shepard the project from team creation to final jury presentations, from concept design to construction documents, our firm remained conspicuously absent from any credit lines, press announcements or articles on the event. Our time would have been better spent at the Serpentine Gallery, also clad in polished aluminum.

Sanaa's rise to stardom over the last decade and the opportunism of the Louvre's director, were forces to compete with that we had underestimated (as was the press's new found interest in the Louvre 3, planned for Abu Dhabi and designed by Jean Nouvel). Our focus on the design vision and dialog with museum conservators, had left us less than vigilant on the politics of architecture and public commissions.

The project, at the start of construction, will now take on its own life. With an aimed completion for 2012 - three years late - and the depressed industrial region preparing for the influx of visitors from neighboring Belgium, it will be hard not to expect the Louvre-Lens to be seen as another example of the Bilbao Effect.

The writer is a co-designer of the Louvre-Lens Satellite Museum now in construction. The opinions above, do not reflect those of his firm Imrey Culbert LP/Architectes SARL.

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Pressed into a green mold: a LEED example

On a recent incursion to the Gulf of Mexico,we turned up unannounced to the opening of the new office headquarters of a local contractor. It was being billed as the first LEED Gold facility in the state built by and for a construction management firm. The credentials of the certification had not yet come in, but we were told they expected to exceed the points needed by a large margin. What had happened that we would get here, with the Green (LEED) stamp of approval, with the resulting building as innocuous and uninspiring as any building type in any suburban sprawl - whether in Florida or in "Kogai" (the suburban "newtowns" in Japan) ?

Guided tours of the facility were given by staff members with breast pins that read “Ask me about LEED”, sharing euphemistic metaphors, with visible enthusiasm, hitched to what was once a truly sustainable, environmentally sensitive design script.

The discourse offered was reinforced by by figures that would mean most to the lay person - the amount of water saved; the amount of energy bills reduced; the general good moral of the staff seen in longer hours worked, free from any VOC's in their new cubicles. Yet despite all the good intentions - and at no fault of their own in implementing them - the project was a tepid and stale example of what LEED brings us in terms of current building.

Institutionalized directives as LEED, BREEAM, HQE, tend to stifle the proactive and creative strategies that should be part of all design or built projects today. They should be the minimum to expect from any new or conversion project – the standard practice of the design field and the notably the reluctant building industry and not an expensive benchmark brand. With the inescapable proof of the hugely negative impact of new building on the world’s eco-system, not to mention the overused term global warming, the current format of green directives are not in an impetus for intuitive or proactive problem-solving.

It is deeply counterintuitive that our field has espoused so readily the point system/benchmark system, like formulas to design to, when in the most skillful hands the specific results are often mediocre.

What concerns us is when building performance is taken as a telic and fixed result, rather then an atelic process, on-going both in design and in the building’s assumed life-span (as in C2C, or Cradle-to-Cradle design, as theorized by Swiss architect William Stahela, a far more ambitious vision championed by William McDonough and the Swiss engineer Michael Braungart). The science and chemistry behind life-cycle and carbon neutral approaches are frequently factored into the best parametric design practices - Arup, Elioth, Transplan, B&G - using more tools for more ingenious results: CFD (computative fluid dynamics) or ASK (Artificial Sky visualization, radiance/illuminance and optimized natural daylighting studies) or more simply, Canadian Wells (Geo-thermal heat exchange) to name just a few.

The gulf coast headquarters is a telltale example of a meager ambition that coops the benchmark script of many green building today. Despite the very best of intentions, LEED and its equivalent, validate small steps (and miserable architectural results) or worse, stand-in for product placement. From the outside the industry, it would appear as if they are colluding with marketing strategies rather then fostering improved visionary design. Profit will be made by those least implicated in the end results.

Instead of efficient "Canadian Wells", here on the Gulf of Mexico, we get a building with no operable windows; no natural air dynamics of a stacked interior volume in a hot climate; interior, rather exterior sunshading; and slightly narrower asphalt parking with modicum of gray-water irrigated shrubbery; not to mention the absence of a coherent autonomous energy source (sun, wind, earth). The flashpoint, is that these credit failings are countered by creating a bike room; and this in a corporate industrial park on former marshlands, where it is commonly 90 degrees, reached on four lane highways where few would dare bike. The project still reaches gold.

The hopeful wish is that the current benchmark formats and their offshoots will evolve and eventually become obsolete and the next generation of engineers and architects will realize we have been looking in the wrong place to do good for global climate change.

This generation will have to tap a new mindset, not at the service of abstruse point equations, to bring about real carbon neutral environments in unforeseeable ways. Despite peer pressure to state the contrary, we are still far from creating such built projects, whether in the deserts of the Emirates by Foster, Snohetta or OMA - as widely and erroneously billed today - to soft infill projects here at home. The place to start is not only in the physical and engineering fields - or in nature itself - but in the arts, in social theory, from Archigram to Acconci, from Botanski to Badiou, from Rodney Graham to Grcic; Buckminster's late interviews and Olafur Eliasson's work may spark a sensitive architect to look in new directions. As may the more robust imagery of Archigram or SuperStudio. The confines of the current green rating system and the resulting design is ours to break. For the sake of the planet.

1979-2009: From Group Material to Material Connexion (sic)

Since 1979 at the founding of Group Material - the artist collaborative based in New York - we have seen the practice of art installations as a medium of the artist slowly dissipate as a valid practice. At times chaotic, exhilarating or alternatively subversive, the "activist installations" as they were known have been forfeited for a deliberate gentrification of the gallery and museum space. As a consequence the art we see more and more of, at arms length from Felix Gonzales Torres early political art and what now fills this installation void today, is a combination of art as "personal disclosure"1 and art as "full disclosure" (as in narrative-based exhibits and retrospectives). History has shown us that the material of art can't be legislated into such limited boundaries. And yet the practice we see today seems to say otherwise. Fortunately there are refreshingly new(dis)courses being taken - and gallery formats - that fall outside this common dichotomy of private and public practice (from Magasin 3 in Stocklom to e-flux on the Lower East Side).

Material Connexion (sic)2 is a noted resource library for designers of all fields that display thousands of physical samples of innovative materials. The PhD-trained staff serve to jury a selective review of new materials to enter the library (few make it) and provide those interested with the background on a material's performance and sustainable attributes. The downside to this is that access to the resource library is highly controlled and on invitation only for a rather expensive individual or corporate membership. This format of grouping new and technologically advanced materials for the perusal of a very narrow segment of the community is a far cry from Group Materials' mandate for collective education and open social exchanges in their practice. This should come as no surprise: the late 70's utopia having since been sidelined for more practical agendas.

As designers, it is a slippery slope to raise issues of societal ethics with a client (how accessible their resources might be), so we used the design to address these as best we could. The offices opened earlier this spring in conjunction with ICFF. The working staff are more then contented with their new spaces, a wholly different organizational layout then they had anticipated. One example is the conference room at center of their 12,000sq.ft office, resolutely unplayful, which acts both as a closed space and a circulation link between the public and fee paying sectors. This was not asked for in the Material Connexion brief, but with our creative - and oppositional streak - we provided them with a less then neutral space where they least expected it.

Gonzales Torres art, once he left the confines of Group Material, forged an aesthetic that uniquely merged the personal discourse with social content. It is as if the apparent neutrality in his later art were an attempt to re-create the political commentary that was never able to effectively transcend the early installation work themselves. This was Gonzales Torres' predominant mode of artistic practice - and his best work - where the environment of the gallery embodied a a wide political statement veiled in the neutrality of the white-walled gallery.
The design for Material Connexion, and not the least importantly the client's final choices in the build-out, never met that ambition. We will have to try better next time.

1 On Felix Gonzales Torres, see Nancy Spector's fine piece in the Guggenheim Museum Catalog, 2007 and Lewis Kochur on Displaying the Marvelous, MIT Press, 2000. 2 Material Connexion, founded by George Belaryian, has branches in Seoul, Milan, Cologne and Bangkok.

Transactional Space - or En - in a house for artist Doug Starn

The Guggenheim Museum's current exhibit Third Mind covers all art forms except architecture - even dance and written music are included, a rarefied experience in any exhibit. More exceptional, is not this absence, but the inclusion of such a wide range of artists, a feat of curatorial stamina but also of pure effort matching in costs what the curator Alexandra Munroe has brought in ideas.
Noted for her exhibits that looks at the "cross-currents" between Asian art - or reverse-influences as opposed to the standard text-book art chronologies - Munroe does much the same here at the Guggenheim demonstrating the importance of the East in an impressive culling of American Artists.

It would have well served this enterprise to touch on design - but perhaps the installation of the show within Frank Lloyd Wright's building was enough, taking up all 6 floors and the adjacent galleries to much effect.

What link might one find in Munroe's show and Wright beyond this short term exhibit, where architecture is all but absent? Not much and this is not the reason for this extended text. Yet I should mention our role in the design of 12 Japanese art exhibitions for Munroe during her tenure as director of the Japan Society (her projects included Zen Buddhist Art to Yoko Ono; Photography by Daido Moriyama to Takashi Murakami) and notably an exhibit that focused solely on Wright's work and his relationship with Japan (which included tampering and selling old scroll paintings). Munroe had also called upon us to be her critic in laying out The Third Mind exhibit, working along side her team to locate groupings of art reproductions on vintage models of Wright's spiraling galleries. To suggest including architecture, for whatever it is worth, would have overstepped our modest role on this show and added nothing. But more to the point, for this posting, what might Munroe, Wright and my small practice, have to do with the artist Doug Starn (of the twin brother duo, Mike & Doug Starn), who was considered for The Third Mind exhibit, but who's work falls largely after the cut-off year, of the exhibit's time-line (1890 to 1989), who is in the title of my text?

The linkage is this one: All of them share an affinity with the concept of "En" (in Japanese) - or Transactional Space - in much of their work, in our work for them, and/or the influences they have had on us.

Gunter Nitschke defines "En" as three distinct actions in Buddhist and Karmic traditions: a bridge between cause and effect; a bond between different individuals; and in architecture, the transition from inside to outside, or building to nature.

The Starns' work, seem to me to use the first definition of "En" as a device in the early and later stages of their projects, where the focus on highly specialized and intuitive process is key to their art: a bridge between two forms of art production; for Munroe, it would be safe to say, there are few people as predisposed as her to be fill the second denotation of "En": in social situations the effort to bond different individuals (e.g. en-musubi); for Wright (and for myself) it is the rather self-evident use of transitions in architecture - transactional space - from inside to outside, from private to public, or "En-gawa". It important to be clear, here, as Nitschke was: these definitions are not either/or conditions, but simultaneous and interdependent actions or experiences.

This is what makes the Starn's work visually elusive: there is the impression of ambivalence as to how the works are to be seen or experienced - as in their recent Bambu project at the Talix Factory in Beacon in the photo above; what makes Munroe's curatorial project's aesthetically and theoretically complex: sharing and opposing artistic practices rather then synthesizing them under one banner; what makes Wright's houses still worth visiting (as the few remaining projects by Antonin Raymond, one of this associates who later set-up a modernist practice in post-war Japan) and so approachable to the general public while remaining a right-of-passage to many architects: to me it is the consistent use of the en-gawa design approach in defining a buildings siting and relationship to it's ground. His structures are "neither simply independent of nor dependent upon, but are interdependent among each other, i.e. part of each other. GN". Wright, as Raymond, and as in the Starn's modest house expansion which we just completed, all share a feature a transactional space. This might be the layering effect of the exterior edges of a dwelling, functionally creating a "grey-zone" between inside and out. The "En" in architecture, is nothing more then an architectural device, sometimes as little as 60 centimeters deep that function as either a shield or frame to the outside, with various degrees of permeability. Able to reinforce spatial qualities of a building, depending on lighting and time of day, "En-gawa" is a key feature in most residential architecture in Japan, from the Machiya merchant housse of Kyoto, to the Sukiya Temples of the Edo Period; it is more an exception today, from Tadao Ando's early houses, to the modest Asama house by Atelier Bow-Wow.

The Starn house in Connecticut - a gut renovation and expansion of an existing Tudor styled clubhouse from the early 1900's - modestly resurrects the "En-gawa" approach, wrapping the main body of the building with a circumferential veranda with its own roof, and creating an ambiguity of "spatial belonging": the inside is pulled in, and not solely framed; the extended balcony lowered from view and the overhanging roof, draws one out visually into the garden. "It is as if you are floating on top of the ground".

The rest of the design, shares spatial layouts, materials and details with Japanese Sukiya buildings and our interpretation of them in a contemporary way, in this house as well as in a much early project we did for........ Alexandra Munroe. She was our first private client 10 years ago, and the Starn's our most recent.

Credit to the research and writings of Gunter Nitschke; the quotes are from his work, From Shinto to Ando, Academy Editions, 1993.