Siah Armajani. Building Dwelling Thinking
Through artworks halfway between sculpture and architecture, the Iranian-American artist Siah Armajani (b. 1939, Tehran) investigates ideas of space, building and dwelling, and their inherent relationships. On the occasion of the artist’s first major U.S. retrospective at the Met Breuer in New York, co-organized with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Victoria Sung describes Armajani’s artistic trajectory, from the models of houses and bridges to his most ambitious works of public art.
“Building isn’t merely a means and a way towards dwelling—to build is in itself already to dwell.”
– Martin Heidegger, Building Dwelling Thinking (1951)
Iranian-born and Minneapolis-based artist Siah Armajani is best known today for his architecturally scaled works of public art sited throughout cities in the United States and Europe. Armajani, along with such artists as Scott Burton, with whom he collaborated on the World Financial Center Plaza in Battery Park City, New York, pioneered a form of architecture-assculpture (or furniture-as-sculpture, in the case of Burton) that flourished in the 1980s and 1990s.
In 1988, for the opening of the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, Armajani unveiled a fully functioning pedestrian bridge that connects the Walker Art Center to downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. Crossing over 16 lanes of traffic, the 375-foot Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge (1988) is a remarkable feat of architectural and engineering skill. Drawing on such structural design concepts as dead load, which he defined in his notes as “the weight of the structure,” and live load, or “a load which may be removed or replaced on a structure,” Armajani combined traditional elements of arch, beam, and suspension bridges to create a structure that is at once utilitarian and unique.
To those familiar with this and other of Armajani’s civic works, including Study Garden (1987), the artist’s contribution to Skulptur Projekte in Münster that year, it may be surprising that Armajani has had no formal architectural training. “In 1966, I was studying philosophy and realized that there were so many ideas which I could not express in my painting,” Armajani recalled years later. “I was terribly dissatisfied with these paintings. … This dissatisfaction was based on the conclusion that there were certain ideas, not only philosophical ones, which could not be translated or expressed directly in the forms of painting and sculpture as they existed then.”
The forms of painting and sculpture as they existed then were the largely self-referential forms of Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism that dominated the American art world of the 1960s. Setting aside his all-over script-covered canvases (the young artist’s response to the painterly gesture upon arriving in Minneapolis in 1960), Armajani began to look further afield for “a compatible methodology that would incorporate political, social, and economic considerations.” His ensuing investigations in art and architecture would allow him to do just that. Indeed, his architectural-sculptural constructions, ranging from bridges and houses to gazebos and gardens, are laden with external meaning, or what the artist has called “the social history of lived-in structures.”
But to understand why the philosophy-student-turned-artist found resonance in architecture specifically, it is helpful to look at Martin Heidegger’s “Building Dwelling Thinking,” first presented in German as a lecture to the Darmstadt Symposium in 1951 and translated into English two decades later, in 1971. In this widely circulated text Heidegger situates the metaphysical question of being within the context of the built environment— human beings, he contends, negotiate their existence in relation to the physical world of things. A bridge, for example, is not merely a detached object, but rather something that through the very fact of its presence creates place:
The place is not already there before the bridge is. Before the bridge stands, there are of course many spots along the stream that can be occupied by something. One of them proves to be a place, and does so because of the bridge. Thus the bridge does not come first to a place to stand in it; rather a place comes into existence only by virtue of the bridge.
In other words, the bridge brings together that which comes before, that which comes after, and those elements both above and below. Armajani would illustrate Heidegger’s fourfold concept of the bridge with his series House Before the Bridge, House After the Bridge, House Above the Bridge, and House Below the Bridge (all 1974-75). From these bridge models, Armajani began to explore the philosophical properties of a dwelling, or house. His Dictionary for Building series (1974-75) consists of the architectural elements of a house, composed of cardboard, paper, and glue, deconstructed and reconstructed into some 150 permutations:
The house does not appear to me first in terms of its houseness, but rather in terms of its individual parts, or what I call instruments—walls, doors, floor, etc. By focusing on the parts, rather than the whole, I am trying to substitute synergy for gestalt. This means that the individual parts do not necessarily make or predict the whole. Synergy is a process in which the whole, as revealed through the relationship of its parts, is not complete. It is therefore a process of “becoming.”
Armajani disregarded the complete whole of the house, or the notion of the house as a single entity, and instead focused on the peculiar relationships of its parts to emphasize the indeterminate process of becoming that such everyday structures shape. Consider, for instance, Front Door Back Door (1974-75). As its title suggests, on one end we see a front door, and on the other, a back door. The doors are situated across from each other on a fiveinch span such that the entire model can fit on an outstretched palm. Yet, despite its seeming non-monumentality, the doll-sized maquette has the powerful potential to remind viewers of their existence in space. As Armajani has eloquently said, “Day in and day out, you go in through the front door and out through the back door,” pointing to a familiar pattern of movement through the house. The artist calls attention not to the architectural elements themselves but to the way in which these elements influence and inform the daily lives of their human actors.
Similarly, Steps Down to Cellar (1974-75) implies a definite direction that again points to the ontological nature of inhabited space. After all, as Gaston Bachelard notes in The Poetics of Space, first published in French in 1957 and translated into English in 1964, “We always go down the [stairway] that leads to the cellar, and it is this going down that we remember.” Human beings tend to recall cellars from the tops of the stairs, he argues, and attics from the bottoms of the stairs, and these are the imagined experiences that Armajani’s models deftly capture and convey. Though made of lightweight, throwaway materials, then, the Dictionary for Building models are weighted with human presence.
Armajani would realize this philosophically driven form of architecture on a large scale with his Reading House (1979) in Lake Placid, New York, as part of the “Art at the Olympics” exhibition throughout the city that year. Instead of building before dwelling, as is often the case, he made clear Heidegger’s notion that to build is already to dwell. In fact, the furniture was first placed on the allotted plot of land so as to receive maximum daylight, followed by the construction of the walls of the house. In other words, rather than having the external shell determine the interior confines of the imagined inhabitants, Reading House very literally underscores the centrality of their activities—in this case, reading—to the built space.
In the following decades, Armajani would continue to build structures that focused on the intended activities of their permanent or temporary inhabitants. From reading rooms to meeting gardens, to bridges and other passageways, these often idiosyncratic spaces make public the particularities of lived experience.
Victoria Sung is Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.