Calatravaland

Santiago Calatrava explaining his skyscrapers to mayor of Valencia Rita Barberá and former premier of the Regional Autonomy of Valencia Francisco Camps. Photo courtesy El País.

El País reported recently that the government of the Autonomous Region of Valencia, when it was presided by Francisco Camps (the Popular Party leader who resigned recently over allegations of corruption), paid architect Santiago Calatrava over €15 million to design three skyscrapers for the city of Valencia that, it turns out, are never going to be built. The unusually high "fee" for such a preliminary study, not to mention the lack of an architectural competition, are not the only irregularities, however. The site of the three controversial skyscrapers is adjacent to a monumental opera house, a science museum, an IMAX cinema, a stadium, and a bridge all designed by... (tada!) Santiago Calatrava. Such a concentration in one place of so many large buildings by one architect is rare, and rather questionable in its wisdom.

True, a number of architects are historically associated with cities in which they built their careers: Palladio with Vicenza, Gaudí with Barcelona, Mies van der Rohe with Chicago, to name only some examples. But their works do not appear conspicuously amassed the way Calatrava's work appears to be in Valencia. The problem with Calatrava's architecture is that it long ago became a signature style, which is to say a cliché. When sparsely distributed around the globe in different cities, it is not very perceptible. But when overdone in one place, a cliché easily becomes a theme park.

Calatrava's early work, mainly bridges, are appreciable for containing some rationality. But in his later work, especially larger buildings, rationality gives way entirely to spectacle and showmanship. The true "function" of Calatrava buildings is to impress--the uses for which they are designated are mere pretext.  The elongated and elevated proportions of the science museum at the City of Arts and Sciences, for example, make that building appear much larger than it is in reality; not unlike the way an aggressive dog makes its hair stand on end in order to appear bigger and more menacing.

The problem with the "City" of Arts and Sciences is that it is not designed by an architect-urbanist, but by an architect-sculptor of stand-alone objects. An architect-urbanist, when commissioned to design a large-scale urban project, will usually devise a plan in which the finer components--the buildings and public spaces that comprise it--are passed on to several architects to design, thereby ensuring that a single architect does not dominate. In the City of Arts and Sciences, however, Calatrava controls every detail, material, and color palette (white). Alright, to be fair: one of the buildings at the City of Arts and Culture, the aquarium, is by another architect, Felix Candela; but it is off to one end--a transition piece between the port of Valencia and Calatravaland.

It is useful to compare Valencia's City of Arts and Culture to another expensive cultural mega-project in Spain of roughly similar size and also designed in one signature style: the City of Culture of Galicia by Peter Eisenman. Here, six large buildings will, when completed, form an artificial hilltop landscape of sorts. But therein also lies a difference: The City of Culture of Galicia is actually relatively dense and compact. It is not a sprawling arrangement of similar-looking stand-alone objects, but a single structure subdivided by the overlay of a pattern of streets and public spaces.

Calatrava's work can be taken in low doses. It seems ideally suited for tourist consumption: an intense, once-in-a-lifetime "experience" to take photos of and post on facebook. But you couldn't take living there for very long. A good thing it is, then, that these towers are not going ahead. In fact, considering just how corny Calatravaland would begin looking with three skyscrapers added to it, I wonder if this might not have been the plan all along.

From White Cube to Big Box: Three Exurban Themes in the Work of Kim Adams

Kim Adams, Minnow Lure

[originally published in 2002 Biennale of Sydney: (the world may be) fantastic]

"Non-places are the real measure of our time; one that could be quantified...by totaling all the air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called ‘means of transport’ (aircraft, trains and road vehicles), the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets, and finally the complex skein of cable and wireless networks." –Marc Augé

In a recent solo-exhibition at the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto, Kim Adams's large, colourful sculptures were displayed on heavy-duty warehouse shelving that lined several walls of that gallery's vast central space, permitting a rotating display of his works to occupy the floor. This industrial-commercial display strategy was not only entirely consistent with Adams's practice of ad hoc appropriation–his sculptures are assembled from consumer goods–but was also very effective at transforming the cultural geography of the gallery space, temporarily converting an urban art gallery (itself, interestingly, a converted industrial building) into its very antithesis: a "big box" warehouse store of the sort that can be found on the sprawling fringes of cities the world over.

The work of Kim Adams is very much about place. In particular, it is about the non-place of contemporary "exurbia." Kim Adams addresses the aesthetics of the changing, dynamic zone at the edge of the contemporary city; the space of agri-business, "new" tract-houses, shopping malls, warehouse stores, automobile dealerships, industry, trucking depots, new and improved roads, recreational parks; as well as landfill sites and garbage dumps; the space of both dreams and derision. It is this geographic transition zone between the rural and the suburban–and the human values that are invested in it–that forms the critical subject of Adams's work. I would like to discuss three exurban themes that resonate in Adams's work: populism, automobility and utopia.


"Many people like suburbia." –Robert Venturi

Suburbia, the condition that has given rise to the exurb, is the common referent of North America; its popular voice and the base of its populism. Kim Adams understands this populism: he celebrates DIY culture, invites active participation, and employs the stratagem of the decoy as a vehicle for people to access his work.

DIY culture thrives in exurbia. On farms, doing-it-yourself is a necessity, while in suburban neighbourhoods it is a widely practiced hobby. Rural and suburban houses are typically stand-alone structures constructed of "stick-frame", lending themselves particularly well to self-modification, while driveways, farm sheds and garages offer ideal spaces for those who are mechanically inclined to modify vehicles. DIY itself represents an independence from the aesthetic dictates of urbanity. In addition to comprising a form of bricolage itself, Adams's work is also largely inspired by his ongoing research into popular bricolage. He has built up an exhaustive collection of "research slides" documenting "ordinary" street remakes of vehicles, trailers and homes.

Adams has also experimented extensively with installations and vehicles that invite viewers to participate in his work. In early works such as Mini Ride (1984) and Toaster Ride (1985), he constructs roller-coasters outside and inside the gallery respectively, inviting the public to ride them with himself present as Carney. Other sculptures, such as Gift Machine (1988), which hands out gifts to passers-by, are conceived to occupy streets and other public places, and instigate conversations. Interestingly, when the question "is this art?" is inevitably posed, Adams does not reply in the affirmative because, as he puts it, "then the conversation just ends right then and there." Adams presents himself precisely as an "ordinary person" and not as an artist in order to engage, rather than alienate, an exurban sensibility that is often hostile to contemporary art.

Familiarity is present in Adams's work as well, functioning also as a vehicle for popular engagement. His sculptures are assembled from ordinary objects of the sort one finds in "big-box" warehouse stores; anything from car and truck parts and industrial hardware to patio furniture, gardening equipment, sports gear, and children's toys. With their familiar logos, bright colours, and oftentimes seamless assembly, Adams's sculptures resemble, at first glance, a new line of consumer products, thereby acting as "decoys" that lure shoppers into the world of art.


"That's what a house is: it's where you keep your stuff while you run around getting more stuff."–George Carlin

The automobile is to the suburban house what the elevator is to the skyscraper: it is the mechanical invention that is necessary in order to make the building type inhabitable. Yet while both the house and the car represent the most important purchases of a typical suburban family, aesthetically, the automobile is inversely related to the house. The suburban tract house is typically conservative and conformist, while contemporary automobiles are works of cutting-edge design. A car expresses a great deal more about the aesthetic predisposition, taste, and personality of its owner than does a house, which must always display a polite facade. Indeed, for many the house represents a solid financial investment while the car is seen as a disposable toy. The house is expected to accrue in value while the car depreciates rapidly, placing the two in a compensatory relationship.

Works such as Chameleon Unit (1988) and Two Headed Lizard With a Single Shot (1986) appear to hybridize vehicle and home. Both of these works are on wheels–as are indeed most of Adams's works–yet both also make reference to domestic architecture by means of garden sheds, recalling the suburban house's lesser cousin, the mobile home. Interestingly, trailer parks with mobile homes–communities often disparaged as "trailer trash"–are often the first kind of residential architecture we encounter when we approach a city, representing the suburban dream of living between city and countryside par excellence.

The trailer is the leitmotif of Adams's work. Earth Wagons (1989-91), for example, in addition to being a trailer itself, also plays host to a number of reduced-scale models of trailers. Symbolizing automobility par excellence, usually for escaping the city, trailers are the very embodiment of modernist-utopian values such as modularity, standardization, flexibility, freedom of movement and living in proximity to nature.


"The whole of French soil should be turned into a superb English park, adorned with all that the fine arts can add to the beauties of nature." –Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon

Exurbia has been the subject of much utopian thinking. From Ebenezer Howard's Garden City and Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City through the recent "New Urbanist" experiments of Seaside and Celebration–all sited well away from pre-existing cities–finding an ideal synthesis between town and country has long preoccupied utopian thinkers.

It is in Adams's miniaturized scenarios that he most directly addresses utopian ex-urbanism. Adams works with reduced-scale similarly to "real" or full-scale: he buys ready-to-assemble kits that are mass-produced and available commercially, then joins the parts in unorthodox ways. What is significant here about the use of the reduced scale-model, however, is that it provokes more than a passive gaze; inviting the viewer to actually dominate over it. It is for this reason that reduced-scale models, from museum dioramas to architects' models and model train sets, have long been objects of popular fascination. A model is no more than a representation of something real or imagined, but, whether it is an art object, a means for visualizing a three-dimensional design or a toy, a model is also an idealization of that which it represents; something more perfect than the "real" thing. In fact, a scale-model is utopian, since it is placeless and free from contingency. Models are other, alternate worlds upon which real impulses, including those of mastery and domination, can be projected.

Adams's miniaturized works, like their full-scale counterparts, also act as decoys, concealing something behind the attractive appearance of a consumer product–in this case that of a model train set–in order to lure the viewer. The expectation of models is that they are perfect, harmonious places, and it is this very expectation that makes the scenarios played out in Adams' models effective. In Earth Wagons (1989), for example, leisurists and tourists–modern nomads–can be seen happily playing in a landscape that has been devastated by the very infrastructure of tourism and consumerism: by an excess of roads carrying excessive traffic, factories spilling chemicals, and garbage dumps full of discarded products. The landscape, though exaggeratedly dense, is nevertheless ex-urban. As with every utopia, we realize that a promising appearance conceals, in fact, a nightmare; that it contains its very opposite.

By way of its exurban nature, then, Kim Adams's work can be seen within the art world as iconoclastic. The art world is highly urbanized: its capital is New York City, the densest, most urban environment in the world. Its biennials, such as this one, happen in major urban centres. Contemporary art is, moreover, highly differentiated from the more traditional, folkloric and craft-based art-forms that are more typically based in rural regions. In this regard, Adams is clearly an urbanite, but one who brings ex-urban culture into the city and secularizes its most sacred spaces. The work of Kim Adams bridges not only high and low, but also centre and periphery.

Kitbashing, street remakes, and bisexual architecture: a conversation with Kim Adams

Research slide from the collection of Kim Adams


Rafael Gómez-Moriana: Kim, you gave a talk in 1988 at the Christiane Chassay Gallery in Montreal in which you showed slides of "street remakes": vehicles and buildings re-made by their owners, such as buses with beetlebody roofs, pick-up trucks with home-made campers and other creations of a do-it-yourself culture. What struck me about these often quite humorous images was that, collectively, they constituted a typological study - or a body of research - into a pop-vernacular building tradition. How do you come across all this material: do you just bump into it while motoring across the Arizona desert? And secondly, how does this research inform your practice?

Kim Adams: My research began in high school while I was skipping classes. I found street life more interesting. Later, I began traveling with a caravan as part of late-hippie culture: in those days, converting your bus was what you were supposed to do. Paint it yourself, make the roof higher, start having babies, start traveling. It was a freedom culture of sorts, and I did enjoy the idea of being a gypsy. I was a musician at the time too, playing in acoustic love bands. One day, I came out of an art gallery in Victoria and there was a vehicle that somebody had converted for hunting. From that point on my art practice changed and I just started seeing these things all over the place: a bus with a Fargo van on the top where the kids would stay. A lot of those finds were accidental but I was keeping my eyes open. People have also contributed to the slides - sometimes students will give me some when I do a talk. When I moved to Ontario this culture had disappeared. It's rare, it's really rare to find these things today. There isn't as much experimentation. Things are pretty well done and bought as is. The inventiveness is not there anymore. My father's generation could fix things with a little binder twine, while today we have to trade it in or have somebody else fix it. The old Volkswagen was something that could be rebuilt and made into something else. You made love in it, you listened to Jimi Hendrix in it, you got married in it. The cottage business or street industry is quite rare today. I mean, getting licensing in Toronto is very difficult: when we did the Curbing Machine in 1988, we had to get a permit and a license, and we had to lie about it. We got it under the category of being a dumpster, because it was on the sidewalk as well as on the road. So it was a dumpster. With the Toaster Wagon in San Diego, the officials seemed to run out of the office every time we requested a permit. We only got busted a couple of times, and they couldn't even describe it to head-quarters: "What is this?" "Well, actually, it's two VW buses. " "On the sidewalk? How did it get on the sidewalk?" And I would just say; "It's the back ends of two buses put together to look like a toaster." "Well, next time you come here, don't go on this side of the street, go on that side of the street."

RGM: Why wouldn't you just tell the authorities or whomever that it's art?

KA: Because then the conversation just ends right then and there. When someone would ask, "What is this?" and I would answer, "It's a Curbing Machine - do you want to try it?" they might become interested. But if I said, "It's an artwork," they'd ask "Who's paying for that?" The subject of the conversation becomes the taxpayer. But when a work just sits in an abstract, quiet way people do a second take on it. French-fry truck, that's right. Ice-cream truck, that's right. Satellite dish spinning around with man sitting next to it. That's not quite right. And then it's: "How much, how much?" "Nothing. Just try it." "Well what's supposed to happen?" It would keep the conversation going. When I did all three of my machines on Granville Island in Vancouver, which is near an art school and therefore a trained area, the trained people came up and said, "This is artwork right?" And I would reply, "No it isn't." "I know it's artwork! I saw the poster!" "Yeah right, OK. Go away, will ya?" I'm waiting for tourists. I don't need conversation about whether it's good or bad art.

RGM: You seem to enjoy a rapport with your audience. Earlier installation works, such as Leisure's Restraint at the Ydessa Gallery, consisted of rides that gallery visitors could actually enjoy. You would even be present to assist with the operation of the rides and to answer any questions. Where does this interest in your audience come from? Why do you care so much about your audience?

KA: My first ride piece was at the garbage dump in Victoria. The gallery thing had already been done and I was looking for some other venue. So I got permission and built an interactive possibility for whoever hangs out in dumps. That was my audience and it worked out fine at first, but then somehow it got press and became public. Media people were coming over from Vancouver, as well as bus tours. It got on the art circuit and that just completely changed it. Then I was asked to do a gallery show in Santa Barbara along the same lines. What happened was wild. The entrance ride came into the corridor and crashed through this truck. There was another ride called the Moon Ride - a half inch steel rolled plate that would crash into the main building support and shake it. A third ride involved going through a video room. I wanted an attendant so I became that attendant. At the dump, though, I wasn't an artist, I was just this guy, and people were asking "What are you doing?" I was testing myself. "What do you do with it?" "You get inside it and then it just moves." Then people would come back and bring the kids, and teenagers came on Friday nights. I was living nearby in my van at that time and got to know this other culture, as well as the police, who kept on moving me away. From there, this idea of movement went into galleries for awhile. The gallery itself was a learning experience for me: what do you do with that space? What is it? What is its meaning? The Curbing Machine came out of these questions, the idea of just planting this thing outside the gallery in the street and seeing what happened. And sitting at the same street corner for a month, there are enough lessons in that memory for a lifetime.

RGM: So being an attendant at these rides you created was really a pretext for observing people - for conducting more research?

KA: Sure, but it was also to see how comfortable it is for people to get up on a platform with a spinning disk - I had to provide something to hang on to.

RGM: These sound like architectural concerns. Indeed, it seems that many of your works are inhabitable or proposing some form of inhabitation.

KA: Almost.

RGM: Alright, almost inhabitable. I'm thinking here of the Decoy Homes and Auto-Office-Haus. Of course, as an artist all media are open to you but this isn't the case for architects. Architecture carries a degree of public responsibility, from which art is exempt. Do you ponder this question much? Does the fact that you're an artist make your architecture any different?

KA: Well, I would love to say it's architecture, but it's not. I learned that in 1988 when I built the Chameleon Unit. I flirted with the idea that it's possibly architecture, but just a little. The Decoy Homes come out of Donald Judd's work at that time, the earlier plywood boxes on angles. Riding a train across Ontario I noticed between here and Windsor there are more garden sheds than houses. Viewed abstractly from the corner of an eye, these sheds look just like houses; the same dumb shapes. The idea of a model emerged: why not buy three or four of them, stack them, and make a Surfer Shack. I was just borrowing what the urban realm offers, but in abstract. Looking at it as abstract forms allows you to borrow from it. I was finding stuff at Canadian tire. That was the beginning of my shopping. There was a whole period when I was building things from scratch and trying to re-invent the wheel; in fact I was often trying to make four wheels exactly the same. I didn't see the simple side: it took a lot to find it. And that was Canadian Tire. "Four lawn chairs and three garden sheds, please," and I would just set them up in the studio. But how they work as models is important because garden sheds are not made for people. So that's where the Decoy Homes become models, or maquettes. There is a little bit from the visual world of architecture, though. The Chameleon Unit, the truck piece, was the first piece I made that you could actually live in. I could buy these units that are made for truckers to sleep in and convert them into "apartment" units in the plaza in front of the new American Express building at Battery Park in New York City. It got reviewed in Architecture magazine as an ashtray, this horrible ash tray right in front of this beautiful piece of architecture. So in 1988 I learned that there might be a difference here, and now I never say I make architecture. Gordon Matta Clark's work was not accepted as architecture, even though he studied it. When he shot those windows out of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, that was an architectural show and architects dumped on him. I mean it was the art world that enjoyed the curiosity of the difference between art and architecture and it crossed over that way. When I worked in Germany there seemed to be a conversation with my work that I wasn't experiencing so much here, where I am a freak or a weird guy. In Germany I was taken quite seriously: Auto-Office-Haus was looked at as a serious proposal. They didn't talk a lot of art at all, but said it was bisexual architecture. I had to look more at the living possibility of the structure, effectively propose it as a small living space.

RGM: The history of architecture is full of proposals that have remained unbuilt, and indeed some proposals have been designed to be unbuildable.

KA: This is probably where we sympathize with each other. Unrealized projects are celebrated in Germany now; the unrealized has actually become subversive. The conversation came up a lot: "We'll realize this project." In Canada our problem is that things don't get realized. Here, the unrealized is a reality.

RGM: So all of your works are models, whether full-scale models, or miniature scale models. How did you actually get into miniature scale? Was it through constructing studies for your larger models?

KA: My first memory of sniffing glue at a young age was when I built a model kit of President Kennedy's boat. After that I was constantly building models. Especially cars. Model building was big. Then it disappeared. At the University of Victoria I got back into making model cars because It seemed to make more sense than learning abstract painting or something like that. The first car piece I ever saw was by Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim in the 1978-79 retrospective. He had a VW bus on the ramp, together with the survival sleds. And it just made so much sense right there in that gallery, which is basically a car park. Just think: Winnipeg, Regina, these prairie towns, they all have mini Guggenheims. I think that made quite an impact on me, just seeing a car in that high-art situation. I didn't understand the survival part. I was just thinking, “Ooh, cars look alright in galleries, especially old, rusty ones.”

RGM: Both your full-scale work, if we can call it that, as well as your miniature work, is assembled from off-the-shelf components, things you can buy, whether actual car parts or model-car kits. Where does the "craft" come into it? Is craft even important here?

KA: It's making these model-building kits look like the period. that's what the craft is. Painting it to look aged and square; they have to look how the kit's supposed to be made. But then it's also when you start "bashing" them. All my work is what I would call "kit-bashing." This is a common term in the model industry: you cross breed a Volkswagen with a Cadillac, and you've got a kit bash. They must do it in architecture too, although I don't know if they talk about it in those terms.

RGM: In architecture there's a lot of value placed upon a kind of originality that has to do with having things made from scratch. It's very much an Arts-and-Crafts ideal. In fact, a lot of architects have a disdain for ready-made products from catalogues because these products are associated with commercial building production. Meanwhile, you've even begun incorporating action figures in your work.

KA: The Breughel Bosch Bus is a proposal for an amusement park - Breughel-Bosch Land - at Niagara Falls. The work is a theme park at 1:87 scale, so the bus itself would be about twelve stories high. You take your family through this late industrial-age North American steel plant turned amusement park. The action figures are there to make the piece believable as a proposal for fiction but it's also about the shutting down of the steel industry in many towns.

RGM: Much of your work deals with the average middle-class family's two principal purchases: the house and the automobile. Yet, while the typical new house today is backward-looking, cars are cutting- edge design. There's a real irony to seeing a new "ye-olde" tract house with a sleek late-model car parked in the driveway. If you look at historical photographs of the villas of Le Corbusier, on the other hand, it is the cars that Le Corbusier liked to park in the foreground as symbols of modernity that look antiquated today, not the villas. In the Decoy Homes, for example, the house becomes a vehicle and the vehicle a house. A lot of your work is about mobility as lifestyle but it's a lifestyle that is less current today.

KA: It's from my parents' generation, no doubt. But I don't know what is going to happen with the next generation; maybe they'll have computers in the trailers. When I was invited to do Chameleon Unit and they gave me some money I felt guilty and I didn't want to make something that wasn't functional. If it fails as art, at least then you can still live in it! Or sleep in it. That work really came out of a fear of being homeless.

RGM: Are you still shopping at Canadian Tire as much as before or are you working with different kinds of components now that require other sources?

KA: When I first discovered Canadian Tire as a source for art materials I would get a buzz. Everything on the shelves - from ironing boards to cups and tents and fishing rods - turned into art supplies. Canadian Tire became an exciting place to be. The garden sheds were my first entry because they were always on display outside. Everything was there, including the hardware to put things together. No welding: everything had to be fastened mechanically and treated as a supply. But some of that excitement wore off after ten years. I still check it out - I keep my eye out for new models, such as the Space Saver shed - but I don't buy as much from there. In 1991, I made a new work because they came out with a new model. I've been increasingly investigating other industries. I'm looking for new shapes so that's what's making me move to other places. The computer has generated a curiosity for making shapes. Right now I'm working with GM and Ford, just for the new shapes and bodies - especially the new truck bodies. And working with a company here in Toronto that makes interesting computer shaped cargo boxes for trucks. We're working on a project in Vancouver that'll become a housing workshop that folds out so that a little truck comes out of there that has fake artworks made of wood, rubber and plastic stacked to look like hamburgers and desserts. The whole thing will look like a gift shop. With miniature models it's the same: they're all available materials. They're all industrially made, so pretty well anything I want to put together I can find. Specialized model stores have become a major new supply.

RGM: If you could do a residency in any factory, store or warehouse that you desired, where would you choose to go?

KA: Well it would be automotive, probably where they build the Smart Car in Germany. The place where Airstream trailers are assembled would have been wonderful earlier. In Europe, they're interested in having artists working in industry. I was approached by BMW but I wanted to take the shell off a BMW and make it look like another car and they weren't into that. They Just wanted me to paint one. I said "Can I drill holes? I've got to do something else with it!" And that was the end of that project.

RGM: In your earlier work you fastened things together that were always recognizable, whereas it seems that in your more recent work one can't quite recognize the components as readily.

KA: Yes, the recognizing gets a little bit more special this time. You have to look more carefully. The language has become more specialized. It's still off-the-shelf, but now stuff is kit-bashed in such a way that it becomes its own image. I'm always surprised at the many people playing with the Toaster Wagon who don't know the spokes. And then there are people who recognize it right away: "That's what I thought it was!” With others, I've had to tell them, "No, it didn't come like this; it's two old VW buses." With other models you'll recognize a tractor cab, but a corn feeder from combines? It's allowed me to expand into the full range of kitbashing possibility. It's finding the parts! I could design from scratch, perhaps using computers. But I still have to have that satisfying level. I think if I was asked to build some of these models I have here strictly from scratch I would be very unhappy. Combining things together is satisfying in some way.

[originally published in C International Contemporary Art #70, summer 2001]