The best houses are cheap, weird and fleeting

[imomus]

Adrian Searle interviews German artist Thomas Schütte in today's Guardian about his newly-unveiled Model for a Hotel, the latest project for the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. It was originally going to be called Hotel for the Birds, and takes its place in a growing sub-division of Schütte's oeuvre, the artist's fanciful architectural models. He's made, for instance, a series of one-man houses -- the ironic existenzminimum theme so dear to Rafael Horzon and others marked by the Bauhaus's researches in this area -- as well as a House for Terrorists, "the chimney at a jaunty angle, the wall panels in primary colours," Searle writes. "Schütte has even fitted miniature sinks and a toilet. The model is sort of sleek and funky. The thinking is that if you were to give terrorists a nice house, they wouldn't bother terrorising people any more."



Thomas Schütte's architectural models haven't made it into Die Gestalten Verlag's excellent new coffee table book Spacecraft: fleeting architecture and hideouts, though Thomas Demand's have, which shows that the editors and I are on the same page about how artists are making some of the most interesting architecture these days (my favourite thing at the last big spate of art fairs here in Berlin was the fantasy architecture of Matthew Houlding).



With mainstream architecture increasingly being taken over by boring managerial types on the one hand and flashy hyped iconic sharkitects on the other, it falls to artists to capture our imagination with dwellings that break the mold. They might be people as sombre as the late Bernd Becher, whose flat, grey documentary shots of decrepit industrial buildings nevertheless packed more charisma and enchantment than any finny office-and-shops development. Or they might be flamboyant self-proclaimed "architectural parasites" like Berlin-based Iranian Shahram Entekhabi, whose thing is to customize existing ("host") architecture with stripey red tape which, accumulating, obscures its facades completely.



The Spacecraft book is, thankfully, high on quirk and escapism, and happy to cross the boundaries that usually divide art from architecture from design. You'll find Simon Starling's shed and Erwin Wurm's Fat House, a sort of architectural comfort food, a Pillsbury dough house that talks to you reassuringly, and looks like it could be eaten in an emergency -- if those terrorists housed by Thomas Schütte decide they don't like their accommodation after all, for instance.

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Other favourites from Spacecraft: the brilliantly dense chic shanty towns of Dionisio Gonzalez (the Shanty Town chapter also includes all manner of weird and wonderful sheds), spreads for old Click Opera favourites like Terunobu Fujimori and Nathan Coley, and the attention given to cheap, fleeting structures (especially those built for temporary exhibitions). Sometimes I think the only reason I've been, so far, uninterested in owning the structure I live in is that architects just don't build their structures cheap, weird or fleeting enough. But then I'm the kind of guy who always likes the building site more than the building.

Comments

Re: Which dwelling do you like best?

[maps-or-guitars.livejournal.com]

I vote for the squirrelbucket.