2004, "The Architectural Model: Pierre Huyghe and Tom Sachs," Eye Level


I. The Past
With minimal ornamentation, modern architecture decorated the urban and suburban landscape of the 20th century. What redemption is possible for this over-production of structuralist social space? Final liberation from modernism or re-consideration of the widespread and unfinished project still in progress?

The term "modern" first appeared in the 16th century to describe non-classical linguistics but it became more synonymous with the 20th century structuralist aesthetic of a minimal approach to form and function. Modernity was a utopian ideal for architects like Le Corbusier and it became a functional reality applied to cinderblock constructions like shopping malls. As the style became vernacular, progressive designs were termed late or post-modern, leaving the utopian origins of modernity to architectural history. Two recent exhibitions in New York, Pierre Huyghe at the Guggenheim, and Tom Sachs at the Bohen Foundation, reconsider modernism and its continued implications for this century. These two artists have simultaneously chosen the uncommon medium of an architectural model to be a vehicle for their attitudes.

The architectural model is a fascinating transitional object. The model simply represents; it is a symbol of a design, of an idea in progress, of a future construction. It is a working art object that can be altered and transformed within a controlled studio environment. Architects like the Italian group Superstudio, regard the model with such esteem that their projects are often permanently suspended at the model stage, never reaching real world completion. Models can have a tenuous relationship to their real world counterparts. Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio for example, promoted their innovative cloudlike building Blur, at the model stage. But when the metal skeleton and vapor structure was actually produced last summer in Switzerland, the vapor was almost entirely blown away by the wind. The model can allow an idea to exist, but exist as a speculative object, a material fantasy that may or may not develop into reality. And with more accurate, prospective architectural technology for the planning stages of construction, the model is disappearing.

II. Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe, the 2002 Hugo Boss Prize recipient, created his film Les Grands Ensembles (1994-2001), using two architectural models of modern design. His models represent structures designed and built by the French government during the 1970's. Huyghe takes already built structures and returns them to their model forms, reversing the model's preliminary function and creating an homage to modernity. His film uses dim lighting, fog and minimal sound to create a romanticized scene. In reality, these buildings are low-income housing that have been neglected to the point Huyghe terms a "social failure." His models represent the original potential of modern design, which contrasts the outcome; an outcome Huyghe calls a "corruption of Le Corbusier's social and architectural modernist theory."

Huyghe's models are symbols of the original idealism of modernism, led only in part by Le Corbusier, and yet the models also suggest how modernism played out during the last century, how like most styles, it went from ideal to standard. Instead, Huyghe chose to represent not the designs of Le Corbusier but instead the lowest form of modern architecture: low-income housing produced with base materials by an anonymous architect working for the state. While in Eastern Europe, superior modern architects and materials were often chosen for government structures, in Western Europe and in the U.S., governments frequently used standard designs and cheap materials. Huyghe points to the hopes of modernism and its decline through widespread application. The romanticized modernism Huyghe presents in his film, is the clean and simple model world, a fantasy that looks more like ideals of modernism. The silent model world is not like life on a planet where populations, weather, technology, politics and ideologies transform physical structures. Even if the best architect and materials are selected for structures they are still subject to the inevitable passage of time along with the surroundings and occupants, which in this case is a low-income situation with poor maintenance. Huyghe's model modernism exists only in film until society itself is transformed. But the work does prompt a consideration of just such a possibility, the possibility proposed by Le Corbusier, to change the world through living conditions.

Le Corbusier's grand utopian project was unfinished. While he created proposals and models for the entire city of Paris, and took on the possibility of redesigning the entire world, he only supervised a limited number of actual structures. The resulting modernity has been much more extensive and diverse than even he envisioned.

So then, if the visionary designs by architects like Le Corbusier have been applied to basic structures like drive thru restaurants, is this a mis-use or a super-use of modernism? When architect Robert Venturi reviewed the mid-century architecture in Las Vegas, he found numerous vernacular variations of modernism: Miami Moroccan, Niemeyer Mooorish; Hollywood Orgasmic; International Jet Set Style; Bauhaus Hawaiian, and others. Modernism is not only the perfected white box of an architect's studio but it is also the basis for the purely functional and often varied buildings of everyday life. These everyday buildings are not necessarily post-modern but in many ways they are a direct continuation of the original democratic basis and ease of production offered by modernity.

III. Tom Sachs
Artist Tom Sachs also recently exhibited work about modern architecture at the newly established Bohen Foundation. Sachs presented a 4,000 square foot installation with architectural models of Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye and Unite d'Habitation. The models were created in 1:25 scale with white foam core and glue and are the largest and most detailed ever built. They are positioned within a small-scale network of roads, also of foam core, that connect to a model foam core McDonald's, a 10,000-watt stereo system, video monitors, and plywood recreations of Mies van der Rohe furnishings. The installation is titled "Nutsy's."

Like Huyghe, Sachs' work revolves around the architectural model. But while Huyghe presents models on film to romanticize a specific ideal of modernism, Sachs make a garish, varied display that demystifies modernism and suggests Le Corbusier's work was only a partial contribution to the modernity of contemporary life. Sachs takes on Le Corbusier's unfinished utopian project linking it, via roads, to structural brethren, a cinderblock McDonalds. A miniature racecar can leave the stilted modern dream house and go to a fast food restaurant with music and video along the way. The roadways, themselves modernist sculptures, connect architecture to the other disparate non-architectural elements, the electronic music, video technology, automobiles and fast food services. Sachs implies that modernity touches every part of lifestyle. He shows us the sprawl and the extension of modernity beyond Le Corbusier's vision.

It is important that both Huyghe and Sachs address Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier has become a signifier of modernism, a symbol of modernity's great hopes for world transformation. He also however, represents the older, metanarrative attitude about a monumental, singular approach to the world, something put aside by revisionists. Huyghe and Sachs take on Le Corbusier, after he has already been cast aside. Huyghe suggests that Le Corbusier's attitude was one of eternal potential, of a progressive and improved future. When Le Corbusier's modernity was revised, the hope for utopian progress was also somewhat dismissed. The great promise of a forever improved tomorrow became an attitude of the past. Huyghe attempts to recall this beginning of modernism when such a hope was possible, a hope signified in the form of a model. Sachs, by contrast, brings Le Corbusier into dialog with less authoritarian, equally modern elements. He shows that modernism has surpassed Le Corbusier's hopes and uses the model as a tool to make the otherwise monumental project of modernity more visible at one moment. What is too large to be brought into consideration is made available for new review via use of small-scale models that makes authoritarian modernism equal to standardized modernism. In some ways, Sachs suggests we now live in the modern world Le Corbusier dreamed of.

In a text accompanying Sachs' exhibition, it reads that the installation "represents the culmination of the artist's studio activity over the past two years." A video in Sachs' installation shows him having traveled to the actual Villa Savoye, measuring the side of the building to get the exact dimensions for his model. Displayed near Sachs' models are signs indicating the time that it took to make each segment, typically only minutes. Sachs' models are not slick. They have choppy edges and dripped glue. There seems to be an intentional discrepancy between Sachs' models and what models are supposed to be. Models represent ideals in an artificial controlled laboratory kind of way. Sachs represents the kind of careless construction often closer to reality. The messy models are like many quickly built modern constructions made of mass-produced pre-fabricated parts. Sachs' entire installation in fact is a combination of great effort and planning with a simultaneous lack of consideration, an unusual combination that compares to modernity as a loaded ideology that in its reductivism is all too instantly applied.

IV. The Future
It could be proposed that Huyghe and Sachs are both critiquing the late state of modernism, that modernism has fallen or become a sprawling mess. But why now? Why critique something a century old and already revised? The model is typically the promise of the future, of a construction yet to be built, but the structures these artists represent have already been built. At the start of this century, Huyghe and Sachs put the buildings of the last century back into the preliminary form. By bringing the modern model back into the studio, both Huyghe and Sachs allow modernity to be re-born. In the studio, and inherent to the artist's practice, reconsideration of function and aesthetic allow for continual re-creation and are essential to the ongoing process of art. The use of models implies that these artists are calling for re-consideration, not annihilation.

For Huyghe, the modern model represents eternal possibility for utopian transformation. For Sachs, his model installation is like modernity, an expansive and haphazard world put together with various intentions. But if these models are also like most models - diagrams for the future - they seem to represent two plans in regard to the global situation of modernity, a return to idealism and a better understanding of how far modernism has actually come.