High Renaissance to high rise - two exhibitions of architectural art, various artists, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy

Art in America, Sept, 1994 by Marcia E. Vetrocq

Two European exhibitions use a wide range of materials to trace the tangled history of architecture and its representations from the 15th century to the verge of the 21st.

Architectural exhibitions, runs a familiar complaint, are vexed by certain difficulties intrinsic to their material, chiefly that public display is rarely the anticipated destiny of the objects in question. The majority of architectural drawings and models, it is said, arise as a means to an end, and that end--whether building, facade, or public space--necessarily withholds its climatic presence from the show. The fundamental misapprehension behind these truisms is the assumption that the chief value of a drawing or model inheres in its ability to serve as evidence of a design achieved.

On the contrary, an exhibition of "architecture" is always an exhibition of representations, a display of ideas and desires, which is no more incomplete or unfulfilled than exhibitions of other kinds of representations. A show of 19th-century French landscape painting is hardly diminished by the absence of the Gulf of Marseilles or the suburbs of Paris from the museum's space. The relationship between the projected and the realized--in essence one of resemblance--only superficially touches upon what architectural representations are about. To limit them to being previews-in-miniature of the final work is to overlook their role as markers in the process of invention, tools in the art of persuasion, and visualizations of reflection, argument, rhetoric and action.

The purposes of architectural representations, and the interpretive effect of the exhibitions which frame them, were the issues raised by ambitious efforts this year at two of Europe's major exhibition sites. From February to May, Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou presented "La Ville: art et architecture en Europe 1870-1993" (The City: Art and Architecture in Europe 1870-1993); the show is currently in Barcelona. In order to accommodate the exhibition's double theme, the Pompidou's fifth-floor Grande Galerie was bisected lengthwise, segregating the architects from the visual artists. One part, "La ville des architectes," organized by Alain Guiheux, presented some 700 drawings and assorted plans, competition entries, collages and photographs for more than 250 urban projects. Seven passageways connected this show to "La ville des artistes," organized by Jean Dethier, which offered about 600 images of the modern city by painters, sculptors and photographers. A sizable curatorial team supported Guiheux and Dethier. Ancillary events included a film series, conferences and four smaller shows, among them a maudlin exhibition enshrining Walter Benjamin as the exemplary cosmopolitan spirit of the mid-20th century.

In April, Venice's Palazzo Grassi inaugurated a seven-month presentation of the exhibition "Rinascimento, da Brunelleschi a Michelangelo: La Rappresentazione dell'Architettura" (The Renaissance from Brunelleschi to Michelangelo: The Representation of Architecture), organized by Henry A. Millon and Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani with contributions by scholars well-established in the field of Renaissance architectural studies. Billed as "the most complete exhibition ever realized on Renaissance architecture" (a boast which will be evaluated presently), the show's most impressive feat was to assemble 31 wooden architectural models from the 15th and 16th centuries, nearly all that are extant, including the renowned model--restored for the occasion--for New Saint Peter's. About 250 drawings, paintings, sculptures, medals, manuscripts and intarsia panels completed the exhibition. The show closed for a month in mid-summer to allow the most light-sensitive objects to be replaced by "equivalent" examples for the rest of the run.

The most amusing characteristics shared by the Paris and Venice exhibitions was the perfect triadic harmony which united theme, installation and building in both cases. Indeed, it was impossible not to consider the eloquent commentary offered by the physical contexts of the two shows. After its restoration eight years ago, the 18th-century Palazzo Grassi is a ripely aristocratic stage for the majestic vision of Millon and Lampugnani. By means of a linear itinerary plotted through sequentially numbered rooms, the exhibition solemnly rehearses conventional themes of Renaissance studies: the triumph of humanism, the renewed authority of antiquity, and the supreme importance of theory and treatises. Each object is decorously spaced from its neighbor and sharply spotlighted against the charcoal-gray wall, creating an imperious ambiance which at times seems to be inviting outright veneration, as in the case of the solitary presentation of an ideal city in a panel painting from Urbino. By contrast, the Centre Pompidou, not yet 20 and already nearing a restoration of its own, is a shabby, post-industrial wreck in which unraveled a sprawling tale of the modern city. The chaotic installation was as rambling and undisciplined as the Palazzo Grassi's is polished to a fine point. Hung shoulder-to-shoulder and climbing to well above the viewer's head, the architectural material papered over the gallery walls to form a dense and frequently illegible mosaic that gave new and annoying significance to the term "salon-style hanging." Where the Venice show culminates with a suite of Olympian projects for New St. Peter's and the architecture of Michelangelo, the Paris show ended nervously, equivocally, in the here and now. The visitor shuttled between the likes of Alexandra Boulat's photograph of Sarajevo in ruins, Daniel Liebeskind's maquette of an urban project for the site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and Rem Koolhaas's proposal for Euralille, the potential center of a technologically-united Europe. In short, there was neither climax nor consensus.