Our image of modern architecture is black and white, quite literally. It’s an image of black ribbon windows in white stucco walls, of slender steel columns behind clear panes of glass. James Welling’s contemporary photographs of architect Philip Johnson’s 1949 Glass House, on display now unitl March 6 at Regen Projects, richly confuse this image.
     Welling has captured the house, a landmark of American modernism, with a digital camera and handheld lenses in a series of layered, intensely colored photographs. The prints in the show offer a view of the building that’s tactile, textured, and surprisingly tender.
     Most canonical photographs of the house look on it orthogonally, so that its glass skin seems to disappear and its entire structure to dissolve into its manicured surroundings. Welling shoots slightly eccentric perspectives that take in more of the glass and the landscape, and complicates these views by layering them with fields of strong color. This treatment brings out the stubborn physicality of the building. Immense red and green sunspots mottle a glass wall. An orange-colored spill of light reveals the rough surface of an interior carpet.
(more…)

There’s something naughty about Living Architectures, a series of four short films by Ila Beka and Louise Lemoine on view now at Storefront for Art and Architecture, through February 27. Sitting in the dimly lit gallery on worn theater seats and watching them unfurl in continuous loops on the wall feels a bit like visiting a peep show. While each film documents an iconic building by a well-known contemporary architect (Rem Koolhaas’ House in Bordeaux, Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church, and Herzog and de Meuron’s Pomerol Winery), it also skillfully exposes it.
     The movies open with images celebrating the formal beauty of these structures before honing in on less pretty physical realities. Footage shows water leaking from the ceiling, floor, and walls of the Bordeaux house. Bird’s-eye interior views of the Bilbao museum reveal poorly resolved geometries and a redundant steel frame. In highlighting these flaws Beka and Lemoine challenge the cultural authority of high architecture, a challenge which seems justified. The buildings they’ve chosen to examine have been conceived ideally, without a deep consideration for practicalities.
     The filmmakers also take aim at the discrepancy between the cool, lucid images of these buildings and the prosaic life that unfolds inside of them. A housekeeper struggles carrying a vacuum cleaner up the perilous winding staircase of the Bordeaux house.  
(more…)