There’s a compulsive, obsessiveness about the work in this book that for me makes it one of the most enjoyable things I’ve seen in a long time. Architecture itself is an obsessive process, but it requires the kind of level-headedness that is definitely not shared by the artists’ whose work features in Beyond Architecture. These artists take buildings and cities as their starting point, but very quickly jump off into an imaginary world of Babel’s Towers made from corrugated cardboard, soap and melted chocolate.
The book was conceived by German academic and artist Luke Feireiss, whose collage, Dirty Dub Disaster, 2004, also features. It’s primarily a picture book and Feireiss does not make much attempt to understand this rich strand of artistic practice which, as he says, links architecture with visual culture. A short introduction explains that it is an ‘erratic compilation’, which is accurate although probably underestimates the time and care that has gone into tracking down the artists. Contributors range from the very well known: Jake and Dinos Chapman’s hellish depiction of a McDonald’s strewn with corpses, to the relatively obscure, such as Matias Bechtold’s intricate, corrugated cardboard models of imaginary cities.
The range and sheer number of artists who are inspired by architecture must surely reflect the intensity of the recent building boom, with rapid urbanization in the Middle and Far East, and the explosion of architectural form and material experimentation in global architecture.Many of the artists have a dystopian view that is an explicit critique of the official architecture. Squint/Opera’s manipulated photographs in Flooded London, show snapshots of suburban streets imagined some time after a catastrophic flood. Kobas Laksa’s photomontages (Urban Gangrene), which were the centerpiece of the Polish pavilion at the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale, show recent Polish architecture transformed: a church becomes a waterpark and a slaughterhouse inhabits an airport.
There’s also a lot of whimsy: a cityscape made of chocolate by Naoko Tone and Atsuyoshi Iijima, and Jordi Colomer whose Anarchitekton series of comical films show a man in the foreground, carrying a model of a building as if it was a flag, with the real thing in the background. Some of the works are simply great pieces of design, which makes me wish the artists could be invited to turn their fantasies into real buildings. For example, Larissa Fassler’s large model of the void space of underground pedestrian tunnels turned into a positive form; or Dionisio González’s proposal for distorted concrete interventions in the shantytowns of Sao Paulo and Río de Janeiro. Beyond Architecture is a reminder of how constrained and conservative architecture can be. For these artists, the sheer scale of towers, megastructures and cities is part of the inspiration. In the real world, the majority of architects shy away from making such bold statements.
Beyond Architecture: Imaginative Buildings And Fictional Cities, edited by Robert Klanten and Lukas Feireiss, is published by Gestalten, £40
