Nigel Coates

Venice Biennale 2008

La Biennale di Venezia, 2008

Hypnerotosphere / Nigel Coates
“At Home in the Modern World”, Corderie dell’Arsenale

Over the long and often surreptitious history of architectural story telling, some of its ideas have shaken up the world of architecture just as much as the most revolutionary buildings. Hypnerotomachia Poliphili by Francesco Colonna, first published anonymously in Venice in 1499 and one of the earliest such narratives in the canon, is a story of architectural vision with distinctly subversive tendencies. It attempts a radical shift; to replace medieval dogma with liberalised classical principles. Though erudite and poetic, it must have amounted to pornography at the time, especially considering the Dionysian architectural caprices that illustrate the story. No wonder it was influential, especially to architects and their patrons.
Hypnerotomachia (a contraction of sleep-Eros-strife) constructs a dream world in which Poliphilo, the protagonist, wanders through a dark forest in pursuit of his love, Polia. Like Odysseus, he encounters challenging situations many of which embody a classical and fantastical architecture rising out of the forest. In fact their similarity to the follies in English 18th century gardens is uncanny. Although love is the drive, many of the woodcuts of the architecture have an unbridled erotic character that reinforce the Utopian idea of the classical world, a world in which sexuality, veneration and fertility coincide with high ideals. They are a far cry from medieval notions of sin and piety.
So old yet so modern, this miraculous tome serves me as an imprint for a post-millennial perspective on architecture. It helps ask what kind of architecture can encompass a post-millennial humanism, and be constructed from an intimate understanding of the human condition? And how to avoid the incarceration of the human spirit that characterises so many of the efforts by architects during the twentieth century? The Hypnerotosphere installation explores these and other questions through the medium of space, and how together, we and other objects occupy it.
In this room, desire is the agent of change, the genie released from the bottle. It depends on the libidinal and creative force we might call Eros, and explores this erotic impetus in the terms of digital techniques of form making so intrinsic to contemporary design. It includes several soft, somewhat over-scaled sculptural ‘furniture’ pieces, several floating crystal islands that support micro architectures, and a movie loop featuring two dancers moving against a harsh urban backdrop. The movie is projected simultaneously onto a circular screen that surrounds the other objects to form a ‘sphere’. In a manner of speaking, the room is ‘occupied’ equally by us and by the objects.
All stems from the human body and how it feels to live in one, an undercurrent that has consistently been present in my work. My ongoing project Ecstacity puts human experience first, and suggests that architecture is as much in the realm of the user as the maker. I’ve explored the architecture of how people interact in public, how the human figure can become part of the iconography of buildings, and even how cities could be based on the topography of giant supine bodies. I designed and built the giant figures in the Millennium Dome, and chairs that contain the body spirit. On this occasion I want to explore the body as a sensing space amongst other bodies, in terms of feeling as well as function, and to begin this concatenation, I have shaped a loose typology of the sensing body into two simple but related elements.
Together the ‘furniture’ pieces define an abstracted domestic landscape. Each one has a saddle like combination of cushioned underbelly and a flap-like wrapping, in other words flesh and skin. They express the character of living bodies, and how their power to seduce one another. These two forms mutate and shape a variety of conditions, for sitting, lying, drinking and chatting. A third layer hovers above the furniture pieces; a set of lamps like passing clouds ‘drift’ above the space; each one carries several miniatures of an imaginary architecture generated by the forms similar to those of the furniture, literally castles in the air. They are just as fleshy as the sofas you’re sitting on – fleshy architecture, now there’s a thought.
The various architectural compositions expressed in these maquettes correspond to the differences captured in a photo sequence. If Muybridge had photographed dancers perhaps he’d have come up with similar images. The individual buildings are made up of the flesh and skin generic forms but with slightly different shapes and sizes, and varying relationships to one another. From one building to the next, the same vocabulary combines in slightly different ways, whether sliding, wrapping, climbing or collapsing, in fact the same generative phrases that were used in developing the contemporary dance component of the film and the furniture. Their movements swap, shift and tumble between one another. However the movement is most purely expressed by the dance. Indeed it was through the choreography that the lexicon of movement first acquired names; Liquid Landscape, Skin wraps Flesh, Con-struction and Tumbling Towers.
As if avatars standing in for the furniture, the buildings and us visitors, the two dancers move according to this lexicon. Their ‘flow’ takes place against the unsympathetic backdrop of some well-known case popolari, the gloomy canyons of the infamous Corviale on the outskirts of Rome. Though contentious for its architectural brutality at the time it was built – it is over 1km long and its lead architect committed suicide - it has acquired more of a Mad Max quality over time. Its inhabitants have become increasingly mixed, and as we can see from the abandoned playgrounds and meeting places that puncture the blocks, any pretence of Utopia has long since faded.
All these ‘bodies’, from viewer to dancer, from imaginary building to the space of exhibition - the Corderie themselves - reference a single system from various vantage points. Physical interaction between these bodies, their libidinous attraction even, provides the archetypal, and architectural, relationships used in the buildings that appear both in the castles and as fleeting images in the film.

Collaborators:
John Maybury with Jess Adams, Bradley Adams
Rafael Bonachela with Adam Linder, Paul Zivkovich
Nigel Coates Studio: Boris Cesnik, Andrea Mancuso, Tobias Klein, Ace
Morgan, Oscar Narud, Christostomas Tsimourdagkas
Photography: Ned Flex
Sponsors: David Gill Galleries
Poltronova srl
Swarovski
Slamp spa
F.lli Boffi srl
Royal College of Art