Elemental logic: Daniel Herman on Yves Klein's air architecture

ArtForum, May, 2004 by Daniel Herman

YVES KLEIN'S ARCHITECTURE is ignored in most discussions of his work, which tend to dwell on his deep blue monochromes and his daredevil photomontage Leap into the Void, 1960. But a broader view shows that, before his life was cut short at the age of thirty-four in 1962, Klein was increasingly drawn to larger-scale visions. In 1957 he began to generate schemes for buildings and cities--indeed, entire civilizations--in a long-term project he called "air architecture." The project took many forms--paintings, drawings, plans, construction details, installations, films, lectures, performances, even patent applications--and many of Klein's enduring interests coalesced in it, particularly his appreciation of the primacy of nature, such as the sky and the earth, and of its forces, such as gravity and fire. In Klein's architecture, there are no walls or roofs required: The desultory quality of weather is instead neutralized by the technologically advanced, and largely invisible, deployment of air-conditioning devices. And so the artist's relatively unknown investigations have a renewed currency in today's architectural climate, in which an increasingly sophisticated understanding of environmental conditions--and the ability to control them, at the scale of the individual building, the city, and, indeed, the planet--has sparked a reevaluation of how buildings and their environments interact.

Klein's prescient work on this topic is finally given an extensive treatment in the exhibition "Yves Klein: Air Architecture" at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in West Hollywood from May 13 to August 29 and in the accompanying catalogue of the same name, published by Hatje Cantz. The show and book, put together by architect Francois Perrin, perform a thorough reexamination of this little-known material. The book, well researched and well designed (by Axel Prichard-Schmitzberger), gathers original texts by Klein, new interviews with some of Klein's collaborators, ample reproductions, and several new analyses, including Sylvere Lotringer's outstanding account of Klein's evolution from a painter to a maker of voids (an "eraser"?). The show collects twenty-five Klein pieces, while Perrin's exhibition design is itself a contemporary version of "air architecture," creating Klein-type environments in the service of presenting the material.

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In the catalogue, a previously unpublished manuscript titled "Air Architecture and Air Conditioning of Space," one of seven texts newly translated for the book, describes in depth Klein's paradoxical vision of a return to a state of nature through technology:

   For the past ten years I have been dreaming, as much a waking dream
   as possible, of a sort of return to Eden!
      Eden: This biblical myth is no longer a myth for me. I have always
   wanted to think of it in a positive, constructive, cold, and
   realistic was.... The world of science fiction was smiling at me in
   its stupid, foolish way with solutions such as solar mirrors, for
   example, or heating rivers in winter, creating artificial gulf
   streams that cross seas and oceans, changing the direction of great
   winds from hot countries, directing them toward cold countries and
   vice versa.... Of course, with all the progress made by science,
   this is no longer a utopia today. Technique, however, could in fact
   realize such things!... To find nature and live once again on the
   surface of the whole of the earth without needing a roof or a wall.
   To live in nature with a great and permanent comfort.

Air, fire, water: These are the building materials in Klein's eternal springtime of leisure. In spite of the dreaminess of such a Bachelard-influenced description, Klein took the constructability of his vision very seriously. Indeed, it is perhaps this aspect that distinguishes air architecture from other '60s utopian projects, such as Constant's New Babylon, Archigram's Walking City, and Buckminster Fuller's glass dome over Manhattan. From his very first architectural exercises--a collaboration with the architect Werner Ruhnau for a series of murals at the Gelsenkirchen opera house (1958-59)--Klein began not with sketches and models but rather by performing a series of laboratory experiments with curtains of air and plumes of fire, the very technologies that would be required to realize the vision. In the short film Air Roof Test from 1961 (shown as a loop in the MAK show), Klein aims a spigot releasing compressed air at a faucet of running water, pushing the water sideways. After a few moments regarding the water's apparent defiance of gravity, he turns to the camera with a look of satisfaction, as if to say, "It can be done." The experiment demonstrates that a horizontal air curtain can be effectively used as a roof. It mustn't rain in Eden.

MAK's LA gallery has for ten years inhabited the house that architect Rudolf M. Schindler designed for himself in 1921. Schindler took the modernist preoccupation with blurring interior and exterior to a new level: Some of the main rooms of the house are outside. The bedrooms are open-air "sleeping baskets" on the roof. The living rooms are rectangles of lawn with fireplaces. Like Klein, Schindler devised a hedonistic mode of living in connection with nature. Moreover, where Klein imagined a world populated by naked nymphs and palm trees--a rethinking of civilized society, to say the least--Schindler's house posited a revised social organization of its own. Designed for himself, his wife, and another couple, the house has four rooms, one per person. The organizing principle of the home wasn't the nuclear family but rather a coterie of like-minded adults.