Musings on a Glass Box

Diller Scofidio + RenfroIn collaboration with David Lang and Jody Elff

Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain

261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris

October 25, 2014 - February 22, 2015

Published at Hyperallergic.com herehttp://hyperallergic.com/183396/architecture-that-integrates-the-human-body/

View of the left gallery of Musings on a Glass Box Photo © Luc Boegly

View of right gallery in Musings on a Glass Box Photo © Luc Boegly

View of screen in right gallery in Musings on a Glass Box Photo © Luc Boegly

View of screen content in right gallery in Musings on a Glass Box Photo © Luc Boegly

Installation view of ‘Musings on a Glass Box: Diller Scofidio + Renfro’

The Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain in Paris commemorates its 30th

anniversary with “Musings on a Glass Box,” a two-part immersive installation by

controversial New York design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that nearly empties the

museum’s ground floor. This huge emptiness, besides signifying a power and grandeur

seen before in art museums in Paris, places the Jean Nouvel’s building — its glass walls,

mechanical systems, and acoustics — under closer scrutiny. For its third installation at

Fondation Cartier, Diller Scofidio + Renfro plays with the architecture of the building,

incorporating a very effective integral sound art component by composer David Lang that

offers the most rewarding sensual element to the installation.

Visually, “Musings on a Glass box” looks kind of dumb in its bland emptiness, but it is

actually technologically sophisticated, particularly when one learns of the robotics that

engineer Marty Chafkin developed for it. The high ceilings and transparent walls of the

Fondation Cartier building, made from the best glass technology of the 1990s, are used

here as perverse starting points to goof on one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s highest goals: to

connect the interior to the exterior world. Diller Scofidio + Renfro takes that ambition to

an extreme and presents us with the cliché of a leaky roof when the rain drips in. This is

the gag of the left half of the show, where one enters the theatrical setting of a cold,

cavernous empty space to encounter only a single red plastic bucket on wheels. The

windows have been blurred over with some sort of translucent material. Soon, the bucket

begins slowly moving about the space — and suddenly stops — so as to catch a naughty

leak from the ceiling. Only three drips drop into the bucket, before it starts to move

around again. The bucket moves apparently on its own and in random directions, before

precisely halting in position to receive three drops more, and so on, elsewhere.

However, in many ways it is the sound of the installation that rewards the visit, by

delighting a focused mind with a textured symphony. The drop of water hitting the half-

filled bucket below sets off an audio response that amplifies and expands into a

mammoth reverberating noise that includes hints of a human chorus, creating one huge

hum that makes for a meditative experience.

The use of water, sound, sensors, robotics, and remote communications — achieved

through Jody Elff’s real-time sound processing program — recalls Diller Scofidio +

Renfro’s extraordinary creation of an artificial cloud jutting out onto Lake Neuchâtel at

Yverdon-les-Bains, The Blur Building. It, too, had a powerful and restless sound

environment, there designed by Christian Marclay.

The second half of the installation, located on the right side of the building, consists of an

immense jumbo-tron that looms from the ceiling close to the ground. One slithers under

the screen by use of little black go-carts into a literally top-down architectural folly that

results in a rather oppressive (but fun) experience.

The Fondation Cartier’s two ground galleries have been hooked up to interconnect in a

feedback loop. As the drops of water fall into the bucket, they create light changes that

are then captured in real time by a tiny camera (installed inside the bucket) and are

transmitted and amplified onto a screen in the right gallery. It’s a neat idea, but, visually,

a big come down. All that potential visual impact of the suspended huge screen seems

wasted on blurry and shaky abstract images that amount to almost nothing of visual

interest. I assume that we are supposed to be satisfied with the grand scale of it all, as the

great screen hovers over us like a great truth that cannot be questioned, but only tinkered

with.

This out-of-whack sensual link between the two galleries reveals and rectifies the

imbalances and incongruities between our visual perception of the outer world as

captured by technology and our inner, less palpable audio experiences. “Musings on a

Glass Box” suggests for architecture a new goal for connecting interior to exterior by

designing spaces that integrate the human body. For Diller Scofidio + Renfro, that means

spaces laced with intelligent computer-robotics run by an algorithmic code which

connects our experiences of sight and sound into one seamless digital and spatial

experience. As such, “Musings on a Glass Box” appears to be a rather modern musing on

the tension between our personal, inner experiences and the dominant visual spectacle of

architecture, a cogent apprehension that yields fantastic intellectual aftermaths.

Many intelligent and visceral questions and obsessions are raised in this show concerning

interfaces between body/mind/machine/structure. For example, the circulation of data in

this in-and-out playhouse suggested to me that one challenge of our computer era, with

its round-the-clock time zone, is in dealing with a shift away from sensual vision towards

mechanical vision. This thought, in turn, encouraged me to enjoy the rest of the day

outdoors.

Joseph Nechvatal