José Oubrerie, "The Chapel of the Mosquitoes"

The Chapel
of the
Mosquitoes
José Oubrerie
architecture and
paintings
July 11 - August 23, 2015
:
José Oubrerie, The Chapel of the Mosquitoes
watercolor, 2014, courtesy of the architect
:
This exhibition presents
three paintings and
three architectural projects.
The Chapel of the Mosquitoes
Dutchess County, New York, 2015
The French Cultural Center
Damascus, Syria, 1972
The Miller House
Lexington, Kentucky, 1991
Damascus
project
The Damascus project is conceived of
as a continuous interior surface.
Its enclosed, continuous interiority
relates in part to the formal complexity
of Le Corbusier’s Villa La Roche, and
in part, to a new architectural topology,
a “Moebiusian” one.
Above:
José Oubrerie, French Cultural Center
3D rendering, 2015, baltic birch
2’ 2” x 1’ 8” x 3’ 1”
courtesy of the architect
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Right:
José Oubrerie, Miller House
3D rendering, 2015
ABS plastic
1’ 8” x 1’ 8” x 1’ 2”
courtesy of the architect
Miller
House
While the Miller House deals with
the “explosion of the cube,” (i.e. with
fragmentation), its spatial structure is
reminiscent of Theo van Doesburg’s
diagrams. Every one of its fragments
is a building by itself, autonomous,
yet interrelated to the others.
Above:
José Oubrerie, The Chapel of the Mosquitoes
Plan, 2015, courtesy of the architect
Damascus and Miller House constitute two
opposite spatial investigations whose formal
conflicting approaches are synthetized in the
Chapel of the Mosquitoes. The Chapel becomes
a contraction of these two projects, and at the
The Chapel
of the
Mosquitoes
same time, possesses attributes of both.
In the Chapel, the light-water diagonal
conduit that pierces the roof and floor is a
contemporary interpretation of a ladder in a kiva
- a traditional round Pueblo Indian form - in which
the ladder joins the sky and earth. There is no real
sipapu, the round hole in the kiva’s floor through
which the spirits of the ancients can exude.
However, in the Chapel, the ground is visible and
the floor sometimes retracts; it practically enters
inside, or reciprocally, the floor extends and
reaches the outside.
Its presence reminds us, together with
the light and the rainwater descending from the
sky, of being humans on earth, and that for us,
there is only ONE EARTH.
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José Oubrerie,
Jeff K R’lquin Iteration # 2
06-01-2015, 48” x 60”
acrylic on canvas
“…The Pearl is the
Oyster’s Autobiography
… or so Federico Fellini with such charming
effect concludes his assertion that
“All art is autobiographical….”
B
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ut as always the cunning director never quite says what he means. After all,
if implicit in the notion of an autobiography is some commitment to honest selfrepresentation, the oyster does a damn poor job! Its pearl resembles more a portrait
of the hapless creature’s ego ideal, the notorious painting to its true Dorian Grey. And
senza dubbio the film director knew this: throughout his masterful 8 1/2, Fellini uses
contrasting pearl earrings to great symbolic effect, but not a single oyster is ever
seen or mentioned in it or any other of his films. So, if José Oubrerie’s painting and
architecture are autobiographical, must we know at least something of his life to truly
understand his creative achievement?
Fellini is correct, though his statement is far from the Truth. For, while every
single work of art, whether pearl, painting, or project is indeed autobiographical in its
embodiment of the intentions, techniques and character of the artist, it is also always
biographical in its reflection of the external and internal forces that shape its coming
into being, though these forces are more often than not occult to the self-awareness
sine qua non to autobiography as such. Does an oyster know it is in an ocean, for
example? Or how it makes a pearl? Or that every molecule in it, the pearl, the ocean
and everything else on earth – including you and me - was born inside the nuclear
cauldron of a star before being spit out to become the stuff of our world? Does not
that mind-blowing fact also belong to every biography? It is, after all how Joni Mitchell
came to write the poetic phrase “We are stardust, we are golden” into the lyrics of
her song, Woodstock, and why those words are inscribed on a marble bench in the
courtyard of the physics department of Princeton University.
Furthermore and I believe most importantly, for a work of art actually to work as
art, which is to say to act as a transforming impulse sent from the artist across time
and space to anonymous others, it must also always be radically divorceable from
any relation to the specific terms, dramatis personae, and context of its origination.
Only then can it enter into and renovate the life of someone else in those imperceptible
and unpredictable ways that are the actual, inestimable work of art. A bird never
sings – it just screams one of two comments at the top of its lungs: the imprecation
“get the hell off my limb!” or the seduction “Hey, baby – how about a tumble?” both at
the top of its lungs. Only we hear songs.
A pearl, after all, is nothing but an oyster’s corn-pad until it escapes from its ocean
home, sheds all traces of its lowly origin and makes its way to Tiffany’s and from there to
Audrey Hepburn’s neck. The beauty of the pearl does not depend on knowledge of its
biography; moreover, the “jewel” dare not reveal the terrible truth that lingers deep inside
it, the coarse grain of sand that gave rise to its existence and remains ever at its center.
So, as a matter of intellectual preference, when I write as a critic I concern
myself primarily with those effects of a work of art that elude autobiography, and
such has been the case when I have written elsewhere and at some length about
José’s Miller House and the Corbusier-Oubrerie Firminy Church. Or, why, when I wrote
about Steven Holl’s Bloch addition to the Nelson Atkins Museum, the entire analysis
derived from two paintings in the Museum Collection, one by Caravaggio the other by
Rauschenberg, and neither part of Holl’s biographical or autobiographical formation of
the architecture.
On the other hand, José is the dearest of friends, so I am keenly aware that his
works are extraordinarily alive with his mind, spirit and soul, and yet how individual
and distinct each one is, each truly a favorite child. So I am torn. For example,
whether or not one knows anything about José, upon entering into the vortex of color,
material changes, and sectional complexity of the Miller House in Lexington, KY, a
layperson or expert alike will feel an immediate gush of joy. It is somehow inevitable.
Yet, although often noted by writers, still none of the hundreds of pages of otherwise
fascinating architectural analyses of the building adequately explains it. Yet for anyone
who knows José personally, that sense of weightless enchantment comes as no
surprise, because the space feels just like the embodiment of José’s personality.
In fact, the great French poet and thinker Paul Valéry made of that very
embodiment a first principle of architecture. In his Eupalinos ou L’ Architecte, Valéry
distinguishes buildings that are mute, from those that talk and those that sing – and
attributes the transcendences of the latter to the intentional gifts of certain rare
architects. Valéry writes the work in the form of a Platonic dialogue wherein Socrates
meets the great architect Eupalinos in the afterlife and discusses architecture. At one
point, Socrates remarks on the intimate beauty of a particular temple of the architect,
to which Eupalinos replies:
“O douce métamorphose ! Ce temple délicat, nul ne le sait, est l’image mathématique d’une fille de Corinthe, que j’ai heureusement aimée. Il en
reproduit fidèlement les proportions particulières. Il vit pour moi ! Il me rend ce
que je lui ai donné.”
[ Oh sweet transformation! This delicate temple, no one knows, is the mathematical image of a girl of Corinth, whom I happily loved. It faithfully reproduces her particular proportions. It lives for me! It returns to me what I have given it ..” ]
But did Oubrerie intentionally portray his own lightness of spirit in the Miller
interior? Probably not, rather, it likely sidled into the work unconsciously, the more
common route of such deliveries we assume these days; that is, if it is there at all.
Later in his dialogue, Valéry addresses the thorny question of the very possibility
of embodiment when his Socrates relates the story of finding on a beach in his
youth a marvelous, but ambiguous object. To every thought that came to Socrates’
mind about what it might be - shell, nautical fragment, sculpture, stone - the object
answered yes, maybe. So frustrated by the promiscuous generosity of the object
to be whatever its beholder saw it to be, the young man threw it back into the
ocean and immediately changed his mind about his future life, deciding to become
a philosopher instead of an artist.
Even if we assume José is somehow in the Miller House, Peter Eisenman has
raised the status of this surreptitious transposition of affect to that of an important
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issue in his theoretical take on the building.
After reading a book of five analytic essays devoted to the Miller House,
Eisenman remarked that they all missed the main point as far as he was concerned.
The truly original architectural achievement of the house, he argued, depends on
the extreme contrast between José’s dutiful regard for Le Corbusier’s sober realism
as manifest in the brutalist concrete exterior and the unmistakably non-Corbusian
effervescent fantasy of the interior, a contrast that Eisenman attributed more to an
unconscious oedipal struggle within the architect than to any specific expressed
intentionality. And as an analytic insight, there can be little doubt that the stark
contrast between the moods of the exterior and the interior is crucial to the surprising
amplitude of elation one feels. While the interior and exterior are each considered
extensively in various ways in the volume, I should point out that the contrast
between the two is never mentioned. And, I must admit, it is also very hard to shake
Eisenman’s biographical-Freudian account once heard.
But Oubrerie is not just a blithe spirit. He possesses an insatiable curiosity for
all things artistic and an adept intellect that matches his inquisitiveness step for step.
He has infamously been the most outspoken radical on the Ohio State Architecture
faculty since the day he arrived, consistently chastising the faculty, young and old,
for their failure to think more deeply about their own work and that of their students
as well as for their reticence to embrace architecture as a cultural adventure, not a
service profession.
The most fascinating content in his José’s car on any given day, other than
interesting wines, are the books he has just purchased, which will inevitably chart
an unruly range of interests, from a volume of poems, to a tome on ancient or
contemporary philosophy, to a history of some sort or another, to a monograph on a
designer, artist or his favorite of all – a structural engineer.
He and Cicely travel to visit cities, buildings and museums whenever possible,
and more nights than not they can be found in an untried restaurant, or at the theater,
cinema or a concert. He is always juiced to discuss a building, book or performance
in critical or philosophic terms, and let down when others lack the energy or insight
to join him. When the phone rings in the morning around 8am, as it often does, I know
José is about to ask me if I’ve seen some new architectural project that has caught his
eye online and to ask what I thought about it. So I rush to the computer, turn it on, make
small talk while it boots to Google, and get ready yet again to fake prior knowledge and
well-formed opinion, afraid to be caught by my friend not staying current.
So, when it comes to his paintings, particularly the three in this exhibition,
for example, what shall I write here? He will willingly tell you the autobiographical
background: that he was trained as a painter and that painting was and remains his
first love; that his parents were worried he could not make a living as a painter and
so he turned to architecture to appease them; that he was drawn to work with Le
Corbusier as much because of the latter’s paintings as his buildings; that when asked,
he describes the major distinction between his own work and that of Le Corbusier as
the “painterliness” of his own work. And Oubrerie is fully aware, in that description,
as all schooled in architecture would be, that “painterliness” is not just a casual,
descriptive term, but a reference to the work of H. Wollflin, who, in 1893, introduced
the concept into architecture as part of his distinction between the Baroque and the
linear or drawn quality of the Renaissance.
But I know more, at lot more. I know, for example, that he paints on a canvas
that is laying horizontally, as if it were an architectural drawing, which has a decided
effect on the composition. I know many of his personal inspirations for the paintings
in the show, not just for their forms and pictorial organizations, but for the sources
and motivations of their color schemes. I know, for example, that the first, “No.1” of
the black and white series was in a sense an intimate portrait of me told through a
memory of Picasso, and that the themes of the “No. 2” in this show derive precisely
from that source – hence its title. However, I also know it is using these themes to
moving into uncharted territory. Should I reveal this knowledge here?
And as any friend would, I also know quite a bit of his life-long unconscious
struggle with painting – how he feels the desire to paint so strongly it sometimes
paralyzes him in a way that doing architecture never does. And in each of the
paintings, I can show you fascinating specific, detailed evidence of the consequences
of all of this knowledge, but then what would I have done for you: brought the painting
to life by revealing the bird’s message, or kill it by forever quieting its song? [see “How
I personally plan to view this exhibition”]
And just so you know, I struggle with this very question every day of my
life as a critic and teacher as well. At what point do I ask the architect what his
or her intentions were, how they conceived and executed the project? When do
I read another critic’s writing about the same work? Certainly as a professional
commentator, I must ask such questions and read the writings, but too early and
I have lost the chance to hear for myself the song, too late, and so intoxicated am
I with my own song-hearing that I no longer care about the “content”, whether the
architect’s or another critic’s.
Which is why, though I know the French Cultural Center in Damascus reasonably
well, I wait to make final my (first) thinking about it for a forthcoming in-depth study
of the work by one of my favorite architectural critics and so refrain from commenting
on it here. And also, when I learned that José would be showing in this exhibition
a project he did that I had no idea existed, The Chapel of the Mosquitoes, I would
not allow him to send it to me in advance, though the very title started me thinking
of other works of architecture, such as Francois Roche’s Mosquito Bottleneck.
Would the two works compare, I wondered? After all, both architects are French
experimentalists. Did José know that project? I assume yes – he seems to know
everything in architecture that I do and more, but we’ll see. In any case, the
prospect of meeting his project for the very first time on the walls of a small gallery
in Rhinebeck, set within an installation design by José himself, was too tantalizing to
spoil. After all, every true believer in architecture knows that the theater and stage set
are as important as the play itself.
[N.B. To be honest, more important! I mean think about it –
how would you know it was a play, if there were no stage?]
Jeffrey Kipnis
June 2015
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Left and right:
José Oubrerie, The Chapel of the Mosquitoes
Elevations, 2015, courtesy of the architect
The Chapel
of the
Mosquitoes
15
16
Above: José Oubrerie, The Chapel of the Mosquitoes, exterior isometrics
2015, courtesy of the architect
Below: José Oubrerie, The Chapel of the Mosquitoes, interior isometrics
2015, courtesy of the architect
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José Oubrerie, no title # 3
05-25-2015, 48” x 60”
acrylic on canvas
Damascus
project
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Right:
José Oubrerie, Selected
French Cultural Center Plans, 1972
courtesy of the architect
Far Right:
José Oubrerie
French Cultural Center
south elevation, 2015
baltic birch
2’2” x 1’8” x 3’1”
courtesy of the architect
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José Oubrerie, no title #4
05-29-2015, 48” x 72”
acrylic on canvas
Miller
House
Right:
José Oubrerie, Miller House Exterior Elevations
2014, courtesy of the architect
Left:
José Oubrerie, Miller House First Level Plan
2014, courtesy of the architect
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25
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José Oubrerie, Miller House Second and Third Level Plans
2014, courtesy of the architect
José Oubrerie, Miller House Exterior Elevations, 2014
courtesy of the architect
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Last
Letter
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Right to Left: Alain Taves, Guillermo Jullian de la Fuente, Le Corbusier and José Oubrerie
photo: Roggio Andreini
June 1, 2015
Dear Le Corbusier,
Your dedicated and passionate employee José Oubrerie has just promised me he will be
showing three projects and three paintings at an exhibition that will be opening July 11, 2015
at our little gallery in Rhinebeck, New York. I don’t think you ever saw his completed version
of your amazing church at Firminy—truly an astonishing space of spirit-filled light that finally
opened in 2006 with José’s dedicated completion of the design.
Église Saint-Pierre of Firminy, as you conceived it, was key to the Model City sector of Firminy
Vert, but construction didn’t begin until 1971, six years after you drowned at Cap Martin. It
was stalled due to political squabbles from 1975 to 2003, but when the project was declared
“heritage” architecture, it was financed and completed. I had seen its 1970’s foundation in
ruin, so was overjoyed to attend 2006’s opening events. The light and space inside are truly
spectacular. A World Architecture Survey in 2010 ranked your chapel second in the Most
Significant Work of the 21st Century category.
I have just returned from seventeen days in India where I had the chance to visit your amazing
work in Chandigarh and the four buildings you made for the city of Ahmedabad. In Chandigarh,
the High Court was in session and one of the judges was happy to stand for a photo with me.
I walked your Trench of Consideration to stand below your monumental sculpture Open Hand,
which they finally built to your specifications in the 1970s. However, the city blocked people
from gathering there for many decades. On January 29, 2010, Chandigarh’s government lifted
the ban on social gatherings at the Open Hand, allowing the area to be open to citizens daily
between 10:30 am and 3:30 pm. When I sent a photo of myself at your Open Hand to José, he
texted back, “Tell them to add the colors Le Corbusier wanted! I can send them if they don’t
have them!”. You would love the technology we have now to instantly send photos and texts
across the globe (but I would bet if you were here now, you would still carry your sketch book!).
In Ahmedabad I had the great opportunity to meet Balkrishna Doshi, your dedicated Associate
for Indian projects who, at eighty-seven, is in good health with amazingly clear memories.
He told me how you wouldn’t show up at your office at 35 rue de Sèvres until 2:00 pm, after
spending your mornings writing and painting. He also told me about the dinner in Ahmedabad
where in a single meeting regarding the Mill Owners’ Association Building—still looking
spectacular today, by the way—you agreed to do all four of your projects in the city. I saw
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they are restoring the paint colors in your Villa Shodhan, which looks striking with its roof
gardens grown in lush and green. I am sad to report, however, that the Sanskar Kendra
Museum is in shabby disrepair.
Doshi told me he tried several times to arrange a meeting between you and Louis Kahn who truly
worshiped your work. Doshi, in fact, drew Louis Kahn to come to Ahmedabad to design the
Indian Institute of Management by using visits to your great works there as an incentive.
In August of 1965, days after you departed this world, Doshi stopped in Paris at 35 rue de
Sèvres to pay his respects on his way to Pennsylvania to see Louis Kahn. When he arrived in
Philadelphia late on a Sunday afternoon, he went directly to 1250 Walnut Street, rang the bell, and
caught the keys that Louis Kahn threw down to him so that he could enter the office.
Opening the door Kahn said, “Have you heard about Le Corbusier?” Doshi replied, “Yes, I am
just coming from there.” Kahn, seated at his desk with a bottle of Aquavit said, “Now for whom
should I make my work?”
Your former employee Paffard Keatinge-Clay wrote to you in 1999 telling you:
But what are you most famous for today, my great master? Outside the closed
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circle of Architecture, it is for the Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut. Not because it
is a rule to be followed, but because it strikes directly to the heart of all people
of all beliefs, of all ages, and it will be forever so.
You remain a guru whose work I deeply respect,
but I am not without curiosity about the humor in this photo.
Today we celebrate the work of José Oubrerie which carries
on in a deeply intuitive connection all the things in architecture that matter most.
Sincerely,
Steven Holl
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How I plan to view this exhibition
Jackson Pollock, Blue Poles, 83.5 in. × 192.5 in. 1952
This is by no means a set of instructions, or
32
even a recommendation for others. But to
allow the reader to peer into my own processes
and see the themes in the short essay at work
for me, I offer my plan for July 11 in Rhinebeck.
Now, as much as José does, I love
paintings, and I know they are prima donnas.
Wherever they hang they are the center of
attention, they know it and they luxuriate in
the role, much to the eternal frustration of
sculpture. Architecture, on the other hand,
loves to stay just beneath the close attention
that a starring role attracts, for it is from that
vantage point that it can perform its most
stunning magical effects. So, even if you
are dumbfounded by your first moments in a
spectacular space, as I have said you must be
at the Miller House, or in an entirely different,
operatic mode will certainly be by the sublime
space of Firminy church, very soon thereafter
your attention will return to the normal details
of everyday life. And it is then when the
architectural genius actually works its wiles,
much as a soundtrack does in a film, subtly
shaping your moods, emotions, and thoughts
every second.
Such will be the case for José’s three
paintings in this show as well, and that is a
good thing, for they are each enticing works
deserving of close attention. On the other
hand, I for one, do not want them to confiscate
all of my attention, as they are going to try to
do – poor things can’t help it – so I plan to cast
them in the role of the exhibition’s Greek chorus
– a source of its poetry in its own right, but also
the source of hints about the performances
of the other five works of architecture: the
three works by José on display, his installation
design, and the soundtrack itself, Steven Holl’s
design for the gallery.
To do that, I will go back and forth
between the paintings and the show, each
time playing with the former to enliven the
latter. I will think for example, about how they
were painted, and about how they relate to
other paintings as well as to the works in the
show. I will remember they are painted lying flat
horizontally, but not like Pollock did on the floor,
but as an architect does at a drawing desk. So
when I see Jeff K R’lquin Iteration # 2, I will
wonder, for example, if I should look at it as
a plan view. Indeed, might each be in a plan
view? Now, I know the first in the Jeff K series
was unmistakably conceived in elevation as
one would see a building’s façade or a normal
portrait painting, but this one and indeed these
three – are more ambiguous, more field-like
than figure-ground. And I expect that field
quality to dominate my sensations as would
a John Luther Adams composition. Much like
the “No. 9” exercise that you will learn of below,
I will also think about other works that these
paintings remind me of, ones that belong to
my life, not to José’s – such as a certain floor
work by Polly Apfelbaum, for example. Then I
will return to one or another of the projects, or
perhaps try to listen anew to the installation.
But let me repeat, this is not advice for others;
it is just what I will do. Rather, the crux of the
advice is to inscribe yourself into the show, be
in it as a character, however you can do that
with the same effortlessness all eight of the
works around you convey.
Now, to conclude, I know I make far too
much of how José sets the canvas when he
paints – as an architect rather than a painter,
I believe. But here is why - consider this story.
The seminal American art critic Rosalind
Krauss has made a case, flawed I believe,
but compelling nevertheless, that Jackson
Pollock’s mature action paintings, those dating
from 1949 onwards, are best apprehended as
floor works, not wall paintings. Her argument
derives in large part from the fact that the artist
painted them in that posture. In that same year,
Pollock stopped giving his paintings evocative
names, as he had regularly done before and
started entitling them with numbers such as
Number 30 to reinforce the neutrality that the
abstraction driving the work seemed to require.
About five years later, however, he began to
suggest and allow evocative nicknames to be
associated with the paintings and eventually
even to replace the number title. Thus does
Number 11, become Blue Poles and Number
30 become Autumn Mist. Interestingly, in the
perspectival point of view these titles install,
these names reinforce the artist’s decision to
take the works off the floor and situate them as
traditional wall paintings, contradicting Krauss’s
contention. Pollock’s decision to revert to
evocative names was immediately repudiated
by critics at the time and has ever since been
treated by the art intellectual community as a
fundamental disservice to the works of art. It is
seen to limit the total work the art might do by
describing the subject matter for us, e.g. the
poles or the mist.
I believe the critics are correct of course.
Like Schubert, Pollock was a very weak
individual, far too vulnerable for an artist of his
originality to the opinions of almost anyone
else and too needy of approval from anyone
and everyone. No wonder the regressive
titles have stuck. For this reason, most of his
paintings, even in the best of his periods, are
quite mediocre – too decorative, too complicit
in soliciting a favorable response – Blue Poles is
a classic example, and the name is just the tip
of the iceberg in its triteness and inadequacies.
Only a very few of his paintings manage to rise
above the torture of his internal, psychoanalytic
struggle to become true masterworks.
This conflict over titles between the critics
and the artist is a classic case of the conflict
between biography and autobiography. Who
knows the work of art best? Who owns it? The
artist or the lover? The parent or the spouse?
But then, allow me to add the last possibility –
the radically divorced relationship. So, if you
want to have some art theoretical fun, go, as I
have done on more than one occasion, to the
Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. It’s only an
hour from this gallery! Take a recording of John
Lennon’s “No. 9” from the Beatles White Album
(1968), an mp3 player and a pair of earphones
with you. Then, visit Pollock’s No 9 (1949)
while listening for 8 minutes to the musical
experiment. I cannot say for certain of course,
but I’ll bet – particularly if you are in a certain
age group – that you will know and feel what I
am predicting will happen.
Jeffrey Kipnis
June 2015
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José Oubrerie at the site of
The Chapel of the Mosquitoes
60 Round Lake Road, Rhinebeck, NY
July 31, 2014
‘T’ Space is honored to present the work of
José Oubriere. We thank him for his passion
and generosity in making this significant
exhibition and for his inspiring commission,
“The Chapel of the Mosquitoes.”
‘T’ Space Director: Susan Wides
Catalogue Design: James Holl Design
José Oubrerie’s architecture team: Alex Mann,
Cory Frost, Brian Polgar, Allison Drda, and
Dustin Page
Miller House model: Alex Clark
Miller House plans: Mark O’Bryan and
Benjamin Wilke
Miller House color facades: Mark O’Bryan
Damascus model water jet cutting:
Charles Frost, Frost Engineering
We are also grateful for the contributions of
Jeffrey Kipnis, Steven Holl, The Austin Knowlton
School of Architecture at Ohio State University,
Javier Gomez, Jessica Merritt and Gail Wides.
The ‘T’ Space programs are made possible
by the support of the Steven Myron Holl
Foundation, a 501(c)(3).
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Prepared by MagCloud for Susan Wides. Get more at jamesholl.magcloud.com.