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Olafur Eliasson’s
The Cubic Structural
Evolution Project 2004,
National Gallery of
Victoria. Purchased by
the Queensland Art
Gallery Foundation
Grant 2005. Detail
seen through the
NGV’s water wall.
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Looking out
through the window.
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Members of the
public were invited to
construct the project
from white plastic
Lego blocks.
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Detail.
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Under
construction.
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Mounds of
white blocks form a
layer of debris around
the tower bases.
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Detail.
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The project
grew larger and more
complex over time,
as more people added
their contribution.
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Karen Burns considers The Cubic Structural Evolution Project 2004 by Olafur Eliasson.
If you haven’t yet heard the Icelandic/Danish
artist Olafur Eliasson spoken of in architectural
circles, you probably will soon. A star of contemporary
installation art, Eliasson appears with increasing
frequency in architectural writings, studio projects
and conversations. An interview with the eminent
New-York-based architectural theorist Mark Wigley was
included in a 2006 book on the artist, Your Engagement
has Consequences On the Relativity of Your Reality, and a
recent architectural essay collection, Soft Architecture,
includes Eliasson’s famous Weather Project, a large-scale
installation at the Tate. The artist’s work parallels
a number of contemporary architectural interests
while remaining publicly critical of architecture’s
institutional power and residual Modernist impulses.
It is a little disappointing, therefore, to be somewhat
underwhelmed by one of Eliasson’s works, The Cubic
Structural Evolution Project 2004, exhibited at the
National Gallery of Victoria earlier this year. “It’s
pretty,” said one of my students.
Eliasson describes his installations as constructions,
seeking to avoid the word “architecture” by favouring
the making of environments. We might counter
this hard-edged polemic by noting that increasingly,
architecture is investigating the ways in which
a building can successfully manage its internal
microclimate through a greater regard for external
conditions, in the pursuit of more environmentally
sensitive design. Moreover, architecture is also
concerned with tactile sensations and affect. Helene
Furjan, in one of the Soft Architecture essays, argues that
the new architectural skin is a “thick skin”, attentive
to its adjacent ambient conditions. Eliasson’s wary
distance from architecture is perhaps rooted in a
reaction to Modernism, but his political critique of
capitalism and sense that art should be distant from this
economic system may also provide a clue to his stance.
His materials are ephemeral. This is post-object
art. His projects are usually participatory, and in
this he eschews the role of the solitary artist as the
arbiter of a work’s production and meaning. Many
of these concerns are shared by architects, so I find
his anti-architecture position a little puzzling and a
little misguided. It feels as if he is wrestling with the
ghost of what architecture has been. Perhaps it’s best to
ignore this and look at productive intersections with
contemporary architecture.
The Cubic Structural Evolution Project 2004 enshrines
Eliasson’s fascination for and critical disagreements
with Modernism. In seeking to fashion a post-Modernist
sense of space, Eliasson, I assume ironically in
this project, uses some fundamental elements of
twentieth-century space. This work reflects on
the continuous production of urban space and the
fluctuating demolition and rebuilding of cities. His
chosen materials are quite spare and simple: some
four hundred thousand white Lego blocks deposited
on a long white timber table about eight metres long
and two metres deep, accompanied by white stools for
the participants, and a mirrored tabletop that covers
most of the surface of the table. Using the Lego blocks,
gallery-goers were invited to construct the project.
On the two occasions I visited the installation,
building was well underway and many towers covered
the table. The towers varied in their form, from
traditional Modernist slabs to skeletal open frames,
Metabolist towers, crane-topped roofs and a massive,
leaning, solid wall tower. And my personal favourite,
a robot tower. Despite the variety, the work was
aesthetically unified because of initial decisions made
by the artist. And these decisions were central to the
aesthetic sensibilities governing the project and the
determining conditions framing the trajectory and
choices of the participants.
Colour choice was carefully controlled: only white
Lego, of one dimension, was available. How different,
messy and more like a city the project would have been if
all the colours and sizes of Lego had been made available.
Aesthetic control over colour was further exercised in the
choice of a white painted timber surface for the table and
stools. Undoubtedly the decision was ideological as
well as aesthetic. Eliasson, in an interview with Wigley,
associated Modernist architecture with whiteness.
During the interview, conducted after The Cubic Structural
Evolution Project 2004’s production, Wigley observed that
the colour white only became a hallmark of Modernism
in the postwar period. Earlier, canonical Modernism had
used beige and other counterpoint colours.
Perhaps Eliasson knew that Moshe Safdie had used
white Lego blocks in the design process for Habitat.
Nevertheless, this one aesthetic choice provided a
means of artistic control in a project generated by
its users. Other directions may have been set for
participants. Is it possible for people not to build towers
when the curatorial wall text describes this as a city
project? The choice of material may have guided
participants further. Lego is designed for vertical
stacking rather than horizontal extension. People are
generating this project but they are operating within a
set of constraints determined by the artist.
The miniaturized white city of towers was visually
alluring, in part because a model of a city allows us an
encompassing view of a space that in its lived reality
exceeds our powers to grasp it. These are the pleasures
of Modernism as well as some of its perils. But a neat,
totalizing vision of the well-made and orderly city was
refused in this project. I was most compelled by the
hundreds of white Lego blocks that piled up around the
bottom of the towers and formed rising white mounds.
Many of the towers were obscured at ground level, mired
in this white debris. Ruination from below threatened.
These discarded or as yet unused Lego blocks
resonated with metaphorical possibilities in a way
that the towers’ literal forms did not. The mounds
could be snowdrifts or ruins or remnants of the past,
|or war-damaged, collapsed structures. And in the
tension between the two kinds of construction a larger
vision of history emerged, wider than Modernism’s
shores. Eliasson is undoubtedly part of this history,
working upon Modernism’s ruins.
The installation was simple and visually appealing,
unified in its white aesthetic and presenting a
compressed history of twentieth-century towers. The
tower prevailed, suggesting the extent to which these
forms have permeated a larger public consciousness. But
those of us internal to architecture are well acquainted
with the critique of Modernism, and Eliasson’s other
projects offer different kinds of spatial experience.
The Weather Project – a large, ephemeral installation
of yellow light and fog – was experiential, ambient
and an affect-charged engagement with the viewer’s
senses. The Tunnel used non-conventional building
materials to construct a wire-arched tunnel whose
external “wall” comprised rows and rows of terracotta
pots housing flowering pelargoniums. (At least, that’s
what these botanical specimens look like to this
non-horticulturalist.)
My disappointment, then, on viewing the work
at the National Gallery was founded in a passing
acquaintance with the artist’s other works, which,
in their use of non-traditional materials, sensation
and climatic ambience, seemed to intersect with the
direction of architecture’s contemporary currents.
The Cubic Structural Evolution Project 2004 was pretty,
but not as memorable, nor as promising of alternative
environments, as some of the artist’s other works.
Karen Burns is an architectural historian,
theorist and critic based in Melbourne.
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