A house of parts: admiration for the resourcefulness shown by the beleaguered populations of overcrowded communities shapes Marjetica Potrc's major new work and the traveling exhibition that showcases it

Art in America, May, 2004 by Eleanor Heartney

The problems of cities--sprawl, crime, congestion and insufficient services being among them--have inspired numerous solutions over the last century. Some of these, like Robert Moses's grandiose plans for New York and Lucio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer's deeply flawed Brasilia, were realized on an ambitious scale and predicated on a vision of the metropolis as a well-oiled machine. Others stressed a suburban ideal as an alternative to overdevelopment. That lineage runs from Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt "Broadacre City" to commercial utopias like Reston, Va., and Disney's Celebration, Fla. (currently on the auction block), planned communities that promised to reinstate 19th-century virtues of intimacy and neighborliness. A related but more socially ambiguous impulse lies behind the late 20th-century explosion of gated communities, which both protect and isolate inhabitants from the vagaries of the world outside.

Underlying all such models of community life is an ideal of spatial and social order. Nothing could be further from the urban chaos celebrated by the Slovenian artist Marjetica Potrc, the winner of the 2000 Hugo Boss Prize. Potrc's vision of the city has been honed by close observation of such phenomena as the barrios of Caracas, the townships of South Africa, gypsy settlements in Belfast and refugee housing in Ljubljana. In her view, these urban environments have been shaped by a series of invasions in a battle for territory waged against the inhabitants of the "formal city" (those beneficiaries of laws, zoning and official planning) by the denizens of the "informal city," who, being without property and protections, must take what they need. In a loose parallel with evolutionary theory, informal cities emerge as a result of selective adaptation, as competing organisms struggle for survival.

"Urgent Architecture," an exhibition of Potrc's work at the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art (PBICA), brought together drawings, photographs of earlier projects and prototypes of ingenious tools designed to solve specific urban needs. These served to frame the piece de resistance: a monumental architectural structure commissioned by the PBICA that incorporates building elements from three informal city situations. Hybrid House: Caracas, West Bank, West Palm Beach (2003) dominated the two-story gallery. Visible here more or less as a whole from a second-floor balcony, it is designed to slowly unfold for the visitor who walks around it at ground level.

Viewed from one angle, the first story of Hybrid House consists of a stacked cinder-block structure painted bright pink. This building type, reflecting the houses that spring up in the barrios of Caracas, has simple windows and a door fitted with protective bars made of turned wooden dowels painted a contrasting white. Perched on top and misaligned is a quotation of an Israeli West Bank settlement house. Its building blocks are black plastic milk crates, and it is topped with a sheet of corrugated red metal. Again, windows are barred, this time with a tight metal grid. A water tank sits on the flat roof. The Israeli house is seen to loom over another structure set on the floor of the gallery that becomes visible as one circles around the Caracas home. This mimes a Palestinian house in the occupied West Bank. It is austere, fabricated of unpainted concrete blocks with a blue door and small windows that perforate the upper quarter of the building. Its roof supports a satellite dish, signifying an effort to reach out that contrasts with the fortresslike quality of the facade.

As the viewer continues, the corner of a metal-sided mobile home with lime green awnings comes into view. This is the Palm Beach house--a nod to the trailer parks that have sprung up at the edges of that prosperous community. Finally, coming nearly full circle, one happens upon the last component--a white walk-in box containing a "dry" toilet, a reference to an experimental project Potrc is collaborating on in Caracas.

Despite the appearance of a number of doors and small alleyways between elements, there is no physical entry save for that into the outhouse. Instead, the composite building seems to guard its secrets, the barred apertures underscoring its function as a defensive structure. Near the outhouse, a tangle of wires snakes out of the roofs and is attached to a utility pole, enacting the informal city's appropriation of official energy sources. Hybrid House has the dynamic presence of a huge Cubist sculpture, threatening to shatter into its constituents. Nevertheless, each part shares an essential principle summarized by a statement scrawled on the gallery wall: "All that is temporary desires permanence."

In this and her other works, some for galleries, some outdoors in places like Caracas, Munster and Berlin, Potrc calls for an understanding of urban space as a place of conflict and negotiation. In both interviews and statements written on the walls as part of her exhibitions, as was the case here, she turns to militaristic rhetoric to describe the situation. "Future wars will be fought over water and they will be fought in cities," says a text near the dry toilet. Nearby another statement maintains, "the divided city breeds invasions."