A life to machine in : on the work of Elisabeth Diller & Ricardo Bofill

• In the Slow House in North Haven on Long Island, designed by Elisabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, everything revolves around the panorama. Not a 'magnificent' panorama, but a corrupted, tormented, twisted one. It is not their intention that an observer should be able to look out from the living room, which is reached via a tortu­ous and deliberately frustrating promenade architecturale, and casually enjoy the sight of the beautiful Noyack Bay. On the contrary, the point is that the visiter is made con­scious of the socio-historical conditions that have induced us to call such panoramas 'magnificent'; and of why that is no longer possible... The project is a manifesto of doubt about the dominant visual and cultural codes. It operates through a mechanism of postponed need-satisfying towards an experience of having pleasure in confusion. Simply enjoyment is kitsch. One must have pleasure at the correct intellectual level - the level at which uncertainties dance. The most striking means the architects have employed to this end is the video monitor mounted above the living room fireplace. Using a video camera (supplied), the inhabi­tants can 'correct' the real view of the ocean to that of any desired season, for example by replaying a recording from six months earlier. The absolute autonomy of both sea­sons and climate is thereby annulled in one blow. Alternatively they may prefer to play a videotape by artist Jan Dibbets, showing a crackling open fire for hours at a stretch. In this way not only would the panorama be ridiculed, but also the experience of the interior. First the concept of the vista and then the cliches of intimacy and security are reduced toa game of codes. The provocative approach to design taken by this New York duo of architect/artists who also make environments, installations and performances is heavily inspired by Marcel Duchamp. Since Duchamp all art has been conceptual. Diller and Scofidio set them­selves up as perpetuating the halting tradition that Duchamp inaugurated, namely the decoding and deflation of 'civilised' experience. The Slow House itself makes an indi­rect reference to Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel, the first ready-made in the history of art. This wheel, a utilitarian object from the street unexpectedly promoted to art object, acquired its new status through the very act of displacement. (This stratagem was, of course, meant to undermine the idea of artistic status itself.) Duchamp, meanwhile, setting the wheel spinning in his studio, thought he could see in it... a flickering fire. 'It was a pleasure for me to look at, just as I enjoyed looking at the dancing flames in the hearth.' This subtle interweaving of banality and the sublime, of refuse and spirituality, ushered in modern art with a vengeance.What the bicycle wheel was to Duchamp, the video is to Diller and Scofidio. On the one hand, the sublime experience of landscape is mocked in its own setting; and on the other hand, the sanctuary of the hearth and domesticated natural beauty are definitive­ly relocated to the T.V. screen. It is conceptualism at its apogee. Although our sensibili­ties appear to be challenged by the prescribed scenario of experience in this house, everything is in fact attuned to a strictly cerebral programme in which countless notions from literature, philosophy and art vie for our attention. It is not for nothing that this architectural work has been the subject of several solid, highly erudite critiques, each more hermetic than the other.

Subject headings

HUMANIORA  -- Konst -- Arkitektur (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Arts -- Architecture (hsv//eng)

Keyword

The Invisible in Architecture

Elsiabteh Diller

Ricardo Scofidio

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

kap (subject category)