Monsterpieces

Monsterpieces: Once upon a time… of the 2000s!
Aude-Line Duliere and Clara Wong. Oro Editions, 2010 (140 pp., US $19.95)

Monsterpieces, by Aude-Line Duliere and Clara Wong resonates ironically with the over-stimulated architect, its retro two-tone color scheme nostalgic of black sharpie on yellow trace or neon highlighter on monochrome Xerox, an inherently analogue reproduction of digital icons, wrapped in a cinematic bellyband of vellum.
The act of drawing and redrawing a building echoes archaic architectural education— reproducing Palladio's plans and Corbusier's sections as "formal analysis" training. Through drawing and redrawing you retrace the process of the architects in their conception of a project, although in Monsterpieces, rather than retracing, the authors are de-tracing: erasing the past and inventing a new path to the "future anterior," the present that will be. Redrawing is the means to own the project, creating parity between buildings with almost no shared characteristics (Future Systems' Selfridges and the Eiffel Tower?). A family is formed from the disparate buildings, although each retains their specific deformities: monsters with "a tension between consanguinity and anomaly." The authors give us a chance to own these buildings, to reimagine them, to the extent of inviting the audience at New York's Storefront for Art + Architecture book launch to contribute their own imaginings to an extended bestiary. Young architects must understand, process, metabolize, or kill their monster fathers. They are baby monsters, or will create their own baby monsters.

The drawing techniques emphasize surface and silhouette (poisonous yellow marker hatching and CAD spline fill) to highlight the prominence of skin and form in assuring the longevity of these selected iconic monsterpieces, fulfilling "the wish for self-expression" on the skyline. Like monsters, these buildings rely on their silhouette to terrify the denizens of the night city.

The problem of form persists, and, after name-checking the various "generators" (program, ecology, rationalization, diagram, function, reproduction, mechanization) the authors assert that the only lasting property is physical shape, within which function dissolves; form is the rock in the river of adaptive social ecology. Even site and context are dissolved as the buildings become animated and abandon their physical territory, the "KASAdaMU SCIKHA" floats away, the Blur "Aquarium" relocates to New York, in fact all the monsters are depicted as naïve, scale-less drawings floating in a context-less black page, providing the visual wipe before you enter the cinematic world of the next fictional past.

The iconic buildings are therefore detached from the present time, from their contextual place, and from the context of carefully calibrated renderings and diagrams. The book itself, and for that matter its authors, are detached from context: they float around the world docking at buildings, firms, schools, to absorb and redraw their theory and practice.

This book is a low-tech masterpiece that deserves cult status alongside Atelier Bow-Wow's Pet Architecture Guide Book and Tsunehisa Kimura's Visual Scandals, as an irreverent encyclopedia of the present viewed from the future. A series of 2000s cult buildings are depicted in a future mayhem, where the outside world is full of scaled-up terrors and menacing skies. The interiors housed by the formal skins of the monsterpieces offer a secluded realm of post-rationalized future refuge.

But the book is hypertrophied, weighed down by too much self-reflectivity: the authors' drawings and one short essay are the most interesting parts of the book. The recognition the book received before it was published is impressive, but Monsterpieces should maintain its grotesque confidence and publish only the meat, no fatty trimmings. Set the monsters free from their cage of critique!

Jessie Turnbull is an architect practicing with Stan Allen Architect and teaching at Parsons School of Design in New York.