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JAKOB + MACFARLANE

THE INVISIBLE DRAWINGS

School Gallery Paris

April 18th - June 7th, 2014

Published at Hyperallergic as The Lush Life of Virtual Architecture

http://hyperallergic.com/122097/the-lush-life-of-virtual-architecture/

Joseph Nechvatal

Having missed Greg Lynn at the LUMA Arles Foundation’s moving (literally) presentation of

Frank Gehry’s architectural models awhile back, I sprang at the occasion to look into “THE

INVISIBLE DRAWINGS” exhibition by JAKOB + MACFARLANE, a cutting-edge

architectural team in France. Dominique Jakob and Brendan Macfarlane have already done the

Restaurant Georges Pompidou Centre (2000), the reconstruction of the theater of Pont-Audemer

in Normandy (2001), the library Florence Loewy Books by Artists (2001), the Orange Cube and

RBC showroom in Lyon (2010), the FRAC Centre in Orléans (2013) and the wonderfully snakey

Cité de la mode et du design (2010) on the left bank of the river Seine.

While strictly speaking, what I saw was neither invisible (there they were, architectural drawings

from seven projects (2008-20014) that they had never shown in public before) nor drawings (they

showed limited edition digital prints made from their CAD drawings) the end aesthetic results

were elegant, thought provoking and compelling; engaging my imagination with both the

possibilities of actual architectural space and the immersive ideals of virtual reality.

Unable to sleep later that night, I mentally compared the virtual spatial conditions in the most

recent project “Pavillon Nomade I” (2014) (a collaboration with digital artist Miguel Chevalier)

with two of the architectural masterpieces I had experience in Europe: Le Corbusier’s “Chapelle

Notre Dame du Haut” in Ronchamp (1954) and Frank Gehry’s “Guggenheim Museum Bilbao”

(1997).

“Pavillon Nomade I” (2014)

“Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut” Ronchamp (1954)

“Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut” Ronchamp (1954) interior

“Chapelle Notre Dame du Haut” Ronchamp (1954) detail

“Guggenheim Museum Bilbao” (1997) detail

They held up very well, by comparison, all having a feminine fertility about them that is

absorbing. They all seem to share exquisite whipping forms that suggested to me a world of

transmutation. All three share a wonderful topological cognitive-vision that is lashing a

compound (but unified) field.

Installation shot from JAKOB + MACFARLANE’s “THE INVISIBLE DRAWINGS”

“PEX” (2013)

Another drawing, “PEX” (2013), I read as a labyrinth from above, and so a symbol of sensorial

immersion into architecture itself, as the entire point of a labyrinth lies in searching about - and

the (self)-discovery encountered through the search.

Staring at “PEX” (2013) I thought back to R&Sie(n)’s 2005 exhibition “I’ve heard about…©” at

the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris's temporary space at the Couvent des Cordeliers,

where they utilized generative heterogeneous mutations in the creation of proposed utopian city

space. In fact, they proposed the artificial growing (generative and robotic) of extruded urban

housing where new city blocks are constructed, via computer-robotic processes, by feeding off

the carcasses of derelict and abandoned buildings. Given the organic-looking, biomorphic

architectural forms JAKOB + MACFARLANE create, I could not avoid thinking again about

R&Sie(n) and also about the visionary city planning put forth by the Situationist International.

Certainly JAKOB + MACFARLANE’s drawings explore digital technology as growth, both as a

conceptual tool and as a means of production, using technology to create more flexible and

responsive environments. But the batches of whiplash lines and flowing voluptuous forms,

suggested more than that, they took me to that smooth space between physical embodiment and

virtuality, where we humans now teeter. They created mental caverns.


Of course this cavernous effect depends, to a large extent, on personal psychological adaptability

of the viewer in accord with the proposed spatial depth cues. But I found myself easily immersed

in a version of phenomenological liminality; that which, according to the anthropologist Arnold

van Gennep, is the condition of being on a threshold between spaces. There is a kind of

transcendental breathing going on in all their forms, a blending and bending, in and out, between

landscape and architecture.


Moreover, there is a definite tangled and intertwined approach to the vector that reminds me of

the dithyrambic visual hyper-logic which has manifested in all modes of decadent artistic periods.

The multiplicity of its interwoven-ness challenges the idea of simplicity, a modernist-minimalist

idea that has taken on the intensity of righteous injunction, in many cases.

“Pavillon Nomade II” (2014)

Importantly, their a-life-like rendered forms are embedded within the current synthetic connected

present. Yet looking closely at “Pavillon Nomade II” (2014), I imagined it made by a late 21st

century robot dandy, a hyper-dandy, as here are the Baudelairean/Duchampian dandy ideals of

nonchalance elegance and inscrutability along with the triumph of a radical derision for the

handmade. Certainly JAKOB + MACFARLANE’s invisible drawings conceptually extol such

dandy artificial transactions and knotted ambivalence, while staying open to the breath of the

voluptuous landscape.

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