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What is it with architects? They all think they're specialists in the future. There may be no professionals—outside of absolute dictators—so prone to the commanding vision or the impulse to usher daily life into new arrangements. Ambitious architects are always reimagining whole cities along utopian lines, but the road to utopia has a way of becoming the path to hell. Think of Le Corbusier's Radiant City. His prescription for the ideal urban plan, isolated towers on wide plazas, turned out to be a blueprint for the deadliest kind of downtown and the worst sort of housing project.
So the history of architecture is filled with visions and then revisions. As each generation of architects corrects the utopias of the one before them, razor-edged towers are followed by biomorphic houses and sky-platform cities give way to clustered yurts. There are lots of these heady innovations in "Archilab: New Experiments in Architecture, Art and the City," the highly entertaining exhibition now at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, where it runs through March 13. Organized jointly by the Mori and the FRAC Centre Collection in Orléans, France, it brings together more than a half-century of attempts to utterly rethink what a building or even a city might look like.
The backdrop for much of what appears in "Archilab" is the mid-20th century triumph of consumer capitalism and what was then its house style, classic Modernism. By the late 1950s the iconic Modernist building—an unadorned box, made of glass and concrete or steel, typically perched upon an empty plaza—was springing up in every part of the developed world. It was a style that could produce individual works of great beauty, but in the aggregate could transform whole city centers into visual and spiritual dead zones.
By the 1960s a thoroughgoing critique of Modernist architecture, often joined to a deep suspicion of capitalist culture generally, was under way among younger architects. They wanted to imagine a cityscape that was not merely sane and rational but that acknowledged and accommodated human desires, even if imagine was all they could do. So "Archilab" opens with a section called "The Pulsating City," full of models and drawings based on organic forms or made from flexible materials, like David Greene's witty Living Pod. The point of such work was to unlock the imprisoning grids of Modernism, to make the soap bubble as plausible a standard for construction as the cube. For their 1967 Villa Rosa project, the Viennese architects who call themselves Coop Himmelb(l)au proposed a dwelling made of attachable spherical modules. In the same era the British architect Graham Stevens produced the first inflatable structures, things so cool they found their way into early James Bond films.
Not all of the works in that vein were fantasies on paper or sets for Sean Connery. Some got built. Ricardo Porro is a Cuban architect who for a while enthusiastically served Fidel Castro but eventually emigrated to Paris. The Mori show includes a slide presentation of his two most important works: a pair of art schools constructed of brick and terra-cotta outside Havana in the early '60s, sensual structures based on repeated Catalan arches. But before they could be completed, Porro fell under suspicion for his bourgeois background and his Expressionist style. Funding was withdrawn and the projects left uncompleted. In the name of socialism, the revolution turned its back on these quintessentially humane and lyrical buildings.
A return to human scale wasn't always on the minds of architectural visionaries—sometimes just the opposite. The second segment of the Mori exhibition is given over partly to proposals by such architects as Japan's Kenzo Tange and Arata Isozaki for spectacular megastructures that are cities in themselves, endless systems of fabrication in which the built world is everything and nature is just that green fluff that Wordsworth used to go on about. These are dystopian imaginings, the last word in alienation, though it isn't always clear whether the architects who conceived them were much troubled by that. Either way, they are a fair representation of the impulse within some design circles to face the future with very dry eyes.
In its third section the Mori show focuses on artists and architects who took buildings apart as a means of arriving at new ways to put them together. In the early 1970s the architect-artist Gordon Matta-Clark would buzz-saw transverse slices out of entire wood and plaster structures, giant incisions that would turn the buildings into a fascinating kind of site-specific sculpture. His work shook up the very idea of a building, a practice carried further by the generation of Deconstructivist architects like Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind, who came to prominence in the '80s with work that radically rearranged building space and form.
The career arc of the Deconstructivists is instructive. When their drawings and early projects first appeared in the late '70s and the '80s, angular, skewed, irregular in every way, they seemed the purest fantasy. But in the space of a generation, cutting-edge methodology became the standard operating procedure. Koolhaas, Libeskind and others like them have tied the old architectural forms in knots, yet they build around the world. You're reminded of that again in the show's final galleries, which are devoted to recent work—some built, some merely theoretical—by contemporary visionaries like Shigeru Ban and Jun Aoki, young Japanese architects who are making aggressive use of new structural systems, materials or computer design software.
There are some puzzling omissions in this exhibition. Where is Buckminster Fuller? Or the modular housing of Moshe Safdie? But there are plenty of high points, including the Monty Pythonesque drawings by Archigram, a group of British design theorists from the '60s and '70s whose fantasies on paper, such as The Walking City, have long since worked their way into the collective psyche of architecture students. An actual building with a plain debt to The Walking City was even completed last year in Toronto: Will Alsop's Ontario College of Art and Design is a massive tabletop of classrooms and offices, all elevated on angled steel columns to look like a structure heading out for a stroll.
The Archigram drawings and watercolors were musings about what the postindustrial city had become, a compact node of entertainments and spectacles in a society of people in motion. That's the spirit of Peter Cook's Instant City in a Field Long Elevation from 1969, a deadpan fantasia of a city with all its diversions that could be lowered from the air by balloon. The philosopher Francis Bacon once wrote that "the monuments of wit survive the monuments of power." If that's true, then these whimsical flights of fancy will still be around long after some of the uglier skylines have crumbled. Let's hope so.
- Richard Lacayo | Tokyo
- A quirky exhibition in Tokyo tracks utopian efforts to re-imagine how buildings and cities could look