Imaginary transports: using architectural elements that seem to refer to history, Ned Smyth's public sculpture evokes a golden age that never was - On Site

Much has been made of Smyth's family background, for he is the son of Renaissance art historian Craig Hugh Smyth and was brought up in Italy. Yet his columns would appear entirely unorthodox to the eye of an architectural historian; one could never mistake his forms for erudite reconstructions of the historical past. They are, rather, ersatz versions, derived from a mythical past that is as much Walt Disney as Sir Bannister Fletcher. Perceptive critics have long noted the role played in his work by the false or the imitative; one writer located the precedents for his arcades and freestanding columns in "Long Island and California beach house decorations, whose sculpture, in turn, was based on a borrowed and bastardized version of Moorish and Spanish culture." (3) But Smyth's embrace of a second- or even third-hand version of architectural fact is hardly singular. As architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable has recently written, "the rejection of reality, or unwillingness to come to grips with it in favor of something easier and pleasanter, is not a new American phenomenon"; in fact, she continues, "much of this country has been created out of wishful thinking and whole cloth." (4) Those glass-tiled columns sprouting from the ground at Montclair State University are more closely related to the 20th-century confections of Addison Mizner's Hispano-Moorish resorts than to medieval Islamic mosques or ancient Egyptian temples.

But this ersatz quality is not some accidental by-product or unintentional residue of Smyth's working methods. His sculpture is explicitly theatrical; it is a stage set for an urban public desperate for reassuring images of a past that never was. World Park (Orders and Perspectives), created in 1995 for the Marriott Hotel in downtown Philadelphia, is an ideal example and perhaps Smyth's most elegant sculptural ensemble. On a slate-paved square, a rectangle is delimited by two ranges of tall columns, spaced closely enough to create a feeling of enclosure, and two rows of dumbbell-shaped casts of identical height, which are rather more open and inviting to the passerby than the columns. Cubical seating is provided between these shapes, and the corners of the square are marked with small perfect spheres. Inside this open-air room rest two enigmatic objects that invite contemplation: an inverted cone covered in gold glass mosaic, and a massive globe whose land masses are indicated in granular stone.

Smyth seems to be providing his visitors with, in critic Douglas Blau's fitting words, "an occasion for metahistorical musings and a stage for a traveler's wanderings and drifts." Those palm arcades and mosaic-covered forms compose "a collage of cross-references, a medley of allusions to the architecture of older courtly societies." For a brief moment, the visitor is transported outside the everyday world, with its banal architectural realities and corporate hotels to experience a very different space, one in which "we picture contexts for leisured speculation, backdrops for meditation and impassioned play." (5) In this realm of abstract geometrical forms and nonfunctional architecture, we are invited to sit and pause, eat our lunch during fine weather and, in so doing, join an ennobled landscape that proposes grand thoughts for a modest plaza.