Oasis in an oasis

   
Peter Zumthor's Serpentine pavilion this year proves once again the architectural axiom of "You have to be there and feel it." Upon arrival, you only see an ordinary black box. It looks much more permanent and severe than most of the previous pavilions at the Serpentine. Following a curved gentle slope, you enter a narrow and dark corridor that circulates the perimeter of the box. Through another door, voilà! You are in a hidden inner space, a calm and wonderful wild garden designed by Dutch planting designer Piet Oudolf. Away from the noise and traffic and the smells of the busy city outside, here is a sanctuary with the full powers of nature.

Peter Zumthor sketch

Piet Oudolf sketch

Material is always key to Zumthor's architecture. This time, he uses a lightweight timber framed structure covered in gauze and painted over with a black Idenden coating. It gives a heavy and intense impression when seen from afar, almost like stone or concrete. But up close, you will see the softness of the scrim and its irregular texture. A slightly blue wooden bench surrounds the covered inner wall to provide seating.

Obviously, the garden is the heart and focus, and the architecture is just a frame, or a stage for the flowers and light. The sloping roof also draws attention to the sky and the trees beyond the walls. After staying for a while, I found myself starting watching other people, observing their behavior and interactions. People participate, but not in a party way. This is a place to relax, to contemplate, or to enjoy a slow lunch; a place for kids, young moms, senior friends and alike to hang out and chat.

There is no loud gesture, no big statement. In the era of icons and spectacles, Zumthor has delivered serene and almost spiritual atmosphere. If Hyde Park is an oasis in London, the Serpentine pavilion by Zumthor is another oasis within it.
 

11.11.11.11.11.11

   

Today we had 11:11:11 on 11/11/11. What people make from this rare number combination varies in different cultures and disciplines. To name a few:

Geeks: We all know it's rare because 11/11/11 only comes once a century. But as a "binary day" (a date that consists of only 1s and 0s in xx/xx/xx format), this is also the last before almost a century. There are only 36 such days in a century, and for the next one we will have to wait until January 1, 2100 (01/01/00).

China: In the recent years, 11/11 has been celebrated by young singles as the "Bachelor's Day" due to all the 1s. This year in particular, it has become the "Super Bachelor's Day."

US: People see it as 11s (not just 1s). 1 and 1 make 2. So people are rushing to Vegas. "We're surrounded by hundreds of couples who want to get married on 11/11/11," said the Rev. Charlotte Richards, owner of Little White Wedding Chapel on the Las Vegas Strip.

Egypt: The pyramid of Khufu is closed to visitors for "necessary maintenance." Local media report that unidentified groups are rumored to hold "Jewish" or "Masonic" rites on the site to take advantage of mysterious powers coming from the pyramid on this rare date.
   

Surrealism revisited

     
The Fondation Beyeler has put on a new show on Surrealism in Paris. It brings together over 200 fascinating works by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Joan Miró, and other Surrealist artists. In addition to the well-known paintings and sculptures, there are also objects, photographs, manuscripts, jewelry, and films. It's like traveling back in time to experience the development of this important movement in art history.

Formation
The first room begins with works by Giorgio de Chirico - sets of familiar classical buildings forming unfamiliar or even mysterious stages for riddles and dreams. His haunting "metaphysical" visual style opened new horizons in art and had formative influence on the Surrealist movement. In fact, many surrealist artists including Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and René Magritte acknowledged de Chirico's influence.

Giorgio de Chirico, The Delights of the Poet, 1912

In the second room are manuscripts, letters, and publications of André Breton's two manifestos of Surrealism (1924 and 1929) and several Surrealist journals. As the leader and chief theoretician of the movement, Breton defined the basic narratives of the group. First, he linked creative action to dreams and the unconscious, in a very Freudian way. Dreams and reality together form absolute reality, a sort of surreality, which reflects the internal reality of the psyche. Second, he emphasized that Surrealism was foremost a philosophical and cultural movement, less about style or school to make art but more a comprehensive radical new lifestyle.

The first issue of La révolution surréaliste, 1924

René Magritte, The Interpretation of Dreams, 1930

Automatic Writing
Surrealists believed in the unconscious mind, and automatism was thus developed as a way of expressing it. It involves "spontaneous creativity that excludes intellectual self-censorship." Praised by Breton as "the most surrealist of us all,” Miró often started out his paintings as automatic drawings. Arguably, the process cannot be entirely automatic, but at least it is free from rigorous pre-conception and judgments. Another pioneer of "automatic drawing" was André Masson, who was also a frequent contributor to La révolution surréaliste.

Joan Miró, Painting: The Fratellini Brothers, 1927

André Masson, Birth of Birds, c. 1925

This "automatic" method leaves room for unexpected incidents. The key Surrealist techniques - grattage (scraping) and frottage (rubbing) - are good examples. Developed by Max Ernst, these techniques relinquished control over the work to a certain extent, allowing surprising unplanned shapes and textures to appear on the canvas.

Max Ernst, The Entire City, 1935-36

Before the skinny figures, Alberto Giacometti was quite involved in the Surrealist movement. He became a member of the group in 1928, but in 1935 he was expelled, due to his "reawaken interest in nature studies." The group saw this tendency as "reactionary" (i.e. not automatic). Giacometti experienced intense creative crisis after that but fortunately he overcame the trauma with a novel unique style.

Alberto Giacometti, Reclining Woman, 1929

Another artist who wanted "not to lose sight of nature" was Picasso. For him, it is impossible to materialize something not inherent in the subject matter. He refused the Surrealists' basic idea of automatic writing, and still believed in the importance of conscious composition. He was never a real part of the movement. It's odd to even see him in the show. OK Beyeler, I know you have Picasso.

Pablo Picasso, Figure (Seated Woman), 1930

Desire
If we talk about Freud, desire would inevitably become a key word. The show's poster image - Dalí's Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around a Pomegranate, one Second before Awakening - is a good example. Here, the main subject is Dalí's wife Gala. Next to the naked body, there are two suspended droplets of water and a pomegranate, a Christian symbol of fertility and resurrection. A bee, an insect that traditionally symbolizes the Virgin, is flying above the pomegranate. It is repeated symbolically in the upper part of the painting with a fish, two tigers, and a bayonet.

Salvador Dalí, Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee around
a Pomegranate, one Second before Awakening, 1944

Dalí defined surrealist objects as "absolutely useless from the practical and rational point of view, created wholly for the purpose of materializing in a fetishistic way with the maximum of tangible reality, ideas and fantasies that have a delirious character." The first of such objects that comes to my mind is Meret Oppenheim's Fur Cup (1936). It is not in this exhibition, but they do have Fur Bracelet (1935), reportedly the trigger of the cup. Another object by her, My Nurse is a pair of white lady's shoes that take the shape of a chicken dish. The high heels here represent not only gender and domesticity, but also fleshly lust, almost to the point of cannibalism.

Meret Oppenheim, Fur Bracelet, 1935

Meret Oppenheim, My Nurse, 1936

Mythology
Max Ernst's Capricorne in the foyer is like a family of hybrid creatures. The father has horns like a goat, the mother has a fish tail, and so does the little child. In fact, Capriconrnus is a part goat part fish creature in Greek mythology. This is typical Surrealistic. The artists did not really invent scary-looking things out of the blue, but they were happy to adopt grotesque beasts from ancient myths.

Max Ernst, Capricorne, 1948

Another example is Paul Delvaux's The Break of Day, where the metamorphosis of the body into a tree is likely a reference to Roman mythology.

Paul Delvaux, The Break of Day, 1937

Dalí staged the classical myth of Narcissus in a dramatically illuminated landscape. The transformation is represented by the juxtaposition of a crouching body on the left and a hand on the right holding an egg with a narcissus sprout.

Salvador Dalí, Metamorphosis of Narcissus, 1937

Less known artists
One interesting thing about this exhibition is that it also brings in works by less known Surrealist artists, including the Romanian Victor Brauner, the Austrian Wolfgang Paalen, and the Swiss Kurt Seligmann. A native of Basel, Seligmann presents in his Carnival a dream-like atmosphere of Basler Fasnacht.

Kurt Seligmann, Carnival, 1950

In the welcoming remarks, curator Philippe Büttner says, "We hope you explore the exhibition with your eyes wide open... and keep an open mind. You don't have to find everything appealing - even we don't like everything." I found this statement rather strange and conservative. After more than half a century, are we still not ready for this? You know what? I actually like everything. As one of the most important movements in the early 20th century, Surrealism influenced many later groups and events, including Situationist International, Postmodernism, and indirectly May 1968.
   

Shell, space, and content

   
10 years after the project started, the HdM-designed Museum of Cultures (Museum der Kulturen) in Basel finally opened its doors last month. The design reorganized the the entrance, the existing building facade, and added a cute little new roof with hanging plants. The formerly closed Schürhof courtyard was turned into a public space directly accessible from the Münsterplatz.

At the heart of historic Basel, it's a rule that no new construction should be seen from public streets. The geometry of the extension was thus carefully calculated according to various view angles. Only visible from above or from the inner courtyards, the ceramic-tiled folded form exists in harmony with its neighboring roofscape.

HdM provides neutral gallery spaces for the Museum's 300,000+ ethnographic artifacts, representing cultures in all continents. But the exhibition design is horrible - weird curved walls and folded table surfaces here and there, unrelated objects putting on the same table in a very loose manner. Underneath the folded roof is a large column-free gallery space, but the exhibition designers put in walls winding throughout the hall, blocking any possible perception of the grand space! Probably the only thing I found interesting was the the paper Chinese dragon in a red double-height room.

This reminds me of another recently-opened museum, the Cité de l'Océan et du Surf in Biarritz by Steven Holl. It has a rather curious shape, vaguely resembling waves and the boulders along the Atlantic coastline in Biarritz. The building is pressed half underground beneath a curved roof that forms a public plaza with theatrical sequence of topographic changes. A gentle stairway leads up to the plaza level from the street front of the building. Both sides of the plaza curve up, flanking the ocean view towards the horizon in the distance. On one side, the plaza rises to a terrace. On the other side, the plaza slopes down onto the ground, leading to a grassed park onward to the vast ocean. On the plaza, people run, climb, and jump, as if the “monkey side” of Homo sapiens were released by this dramatic form. At the southwest corner there is a skate pool for the surfers’ experiments. The cloud shape indentation also forms a strangely compressed portico to the auditorium.

Under the high corner of the curve on the roadside is the entry lobby to the exhibitions. The steep sloping ceiling intensifies the spatial indication of diving down to the semi-underground exhibition space.

As I descended the stairs, I almost cried out loud OMG! "Am I in Disneyland?" The exhibition designers had ruined the poetic space with their amusement-park-like "edutainment" installations. A splash of water that looks like a whale as "the cradle of evolution"? Rocks with colorful videos inside? Grotesque machine arms for projection? Oh boy...

It seems nobody has learned a lesson from the disastrous interior of the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The chaotic exhibition arrangement completely destroys the architectural space by LIbeskind. Zigzag? Warped Star of David? Gedenkbuch? I don't see any of those from the inside!

It's quite disheartening that architecture and exhibition design seldom go hand in hand with each other in contemporary museums. The limited influence of the profession has forced many architects to either ignore the content or just go for the generic white box. We should wake up and start to break the line between architecture and exhibition, and advocate for a more holistic design for the shell, the space, and its contents.