The Architectural Landscape

Published in Next Level magazine, Edition 2, Volume 1.

The Architectural Landscape - text by Jonathan Hill

Nature

Architecture was always defined in relation to it's nature. Either nature is a model for architecture or it's opposite. Whether considered different or similar, the assumption that they are two distinct entities is questionable, however. First, because the terms 'architecture' and 'nature' are intellectual constructs through which we comprehend and create our world. Second, because very little nature is only natural. It is increasingly modified by military, governmental and corporate intervention. As nature and architecture blur, terms particular to one are found in the other. Traditionally, the sublime is evoked by a desolate and expansive landscape exposed to the drama of natural forces. The pleasure of the sublime is first threatening then reassuring once comprehension increases and fear diminishes. For the last two hundred years, the city has personified a terrifying and thrilling presence engendered by a rampant industrialized economy veering close to catastrophe. In photographs of Chicago, Las Vegas, Montreal and Tokyo, Leon Chew depicts this urban sublime. He photographs valleys, flatlands, crags and cliffs. But unlike the surrealists, who conceived the city as petrified nature to experience it anew without preconceptions and history, Chew depicts the city as urban and natural.

Viewed from a low-level, the horizon bisect each photograph into nearly two equal halves. Even in Landscape 003, depicting the interior of a Chicago car park, the ground plane draws the viewer towards the horizon and the distant 'sky', the focus of natural forces in the sublime. In three of the photographs, a glowing sky is on the cusp of transformation. Only in Evangelic is the sky black and static, appropriate to Las Vegas, a city that needs no natural light and feeds on the artificial. In Landscape 001, the ventilation grills in the ground plane mirror the curtain walled facades of the corporate towers, and the forces depicted are natural and local. The Chicago air is full of water vapour slipping in from Lake Michigan, rendering the buildings less weighty and material. In Chew's other photographs the forces are artificial and generic. Electromagnetic weather replacing natural weather.

The Architectural Landscape - continued

Home

The home of the home is seventeenth-century Dutch culture. Paintings of the time depict an obsessively interior world. With it's emphasis on cosy comfort, family values and the accumulation of personal possessions, the seventeenth-century Dutch home is the model for the contemporary home. But the safety of the home is really the sign of it's opposite, a fear of the tangible or intangible dangers inside and outside. The characteristics demanded of a home - stability and consistency - are a personification of those demanded of architecture as a whole. The purpose of the home is to keep the outside outside and the inside defined. The stability of the home may provide gratification but it can also, simultaneously, create anxiety because the security and spacial purification it offers can never be fully achieved.

Traditionally, threats from the outside come in a number of guises, notably inclement weather and undesirable people. Both are associated with the formless, fluid, unstable and unpredictable. Sometimes the threat of the outsider merges with the threat of the outside. For the seventeenth-century Netherlands - a culture that both enjoyed wealth and felt guilty about it - the flood tide eased the 'moral ambiguity of good fortune' and initiated a period of rebuilding compatible with a bourgeois market-driven society. The flood tide - a natural force, coupled with the forces of morality and the market. Today physical barriers - such as doors and walls - are no longer sufficient to keep the outside outside and the inside inside. While means to exclude weather increase, electromagnetic weather flows in and out of our home via the phone, radio, television and computer. The threshold between one world and another is indistinct. Modernist architecture is associated with a quest for visual transparency between inside and outside, which is linked to social transparency. But Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the most influential architect of the glass corporate tower, argued that reflections are as important as transparencies.

The television is the contemporary symbol of the home. In Evangelic and Shibuya 2am, only a television in a glass curtain wall indicates the depicted landscape is viewed from an interior. Rather than the precise threshholds of the seventeenth-century Dutch house, the symbol of the home is cast into the city, to appear as a monumental image floating above the horizon. The television is both of the city and of the interior. In Evangelic, a television evangelist is the equivalent to a modern day flood tide, offering to ease the 'moral ambiguity of good fortune'. The reflected image in Shibuya 2am is the opposite of Evangelic. The private and intimate actions of an interior are projected onto the city. Full of the electromagnetic forces of the contemporary sublime, Chew's photographs are notably empty of people. The sublime is best experienced alone.