Ricas y Famosas and The Architecture of Hyper-Ambiance

NOT FOR PUBLICATION

Ricas y Famosas and the Architecture of Hyper-Ambiance

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Gustavo

Leclerc

2007

Ricas y Famosas and the Architecture of Hyper-ambiance

Standing at the bottom of a staircase edged with ornate iron

grill-work, a young woman clothed in a stately plain gown peers

directly ahead at her photographer. All around her, white

cylindrical columns and Romanesque marble statues of graceful yet

imperious gods echo her upright curving stance. The interplay

between these various participants in the untitled photograph by

Daniela Rossell (Fig. 1) suggests a liveliness beyond the

stillness of the frame, collapsing the formal distinctions

between the animate and inanimate objects within the image. The

statues appear substantively the same as the woman. One could

imagine these stiff figures stretching out after a lengthy pose

for the camera, or conversely, the women herself frozen in her

eternal goddess-like stance.

This genre of interior

design and domestic

architecture is favored

by an elite class of

21. Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the seriesRicas y Famosas (1994-2001).

Mexican citizens today.1 The moods and ambiances defining these

spaces are exaggerated by special effects,2 some of which are

created for their photographic representations and others which

remain as consistent elements within the domestic interiors. The

special effects within these spaces create two distinct moods,

labeled for this analysis as: On the Down Low and Genie in the Bottle. The

ambiances characterizing these domestic interiors, influenced by

the atmospheric moods, are also informed by aesthetics of glamour

and hyper theatricality.

Domestic interiors such as those captured in this photographic

series, Ricas y Famosas, by Daniela Rossell,3 display the unique

architectural style of glamour favored by many of Mexico’s rich

and famous citizens, replete with winding staircases, neoclassic

and baroque sensibilities, stuffed large animals, monumental

statues, and tropical themed murals, each adding their part to

this series’ unfolding story of transgressive sexuality,

extravagance, and domination. While the photographs document

extreme wealth within a country of legendary poverty, the

resultant popular outcry also stems from the unsettling merger

between fantasy and reality exhibited within these opulent homes

through the integration of objects, people and textures.4

1 Rossell, Daniela, Ricas y Famosas, (Madrid, Turner Publications S.L., 2002).2 For a further discussion of “special effects” in Architecture see Sylvia Lavin, “The Temporary Contemporary,” in Perspecta 34 (2002): 128-35. 3 Rossell.4 For more information on the public outcry which ensued from the publication of these photographs, see Ruben Gallo, New Tendencies in Mexican Art: the 1990’s, (New York, Palgrave MacMillan, 2004), 47-69.

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The central actors in these fantastical domestic stages are the

daughters and granddaughters of the nation’s most powerful

politicians. These

fair skin women in

the photographs

represent glamorized

versions of

themselves to their

unseen audience.

Interacting with

their domestic

environments,

including the

various statues-as-

servants populating the interior spaces of these homes, these

women assertively “strike a pose.” Though highly contrived, these

suggestive dynamics between animate and inanimate objects

function to create an illusion of social engagement (fig. 2). Yet

beyond the photographic mediations, these interior spaces also

contain an on going hyper theatricality captured within the

photographs.

Their “hyperness” stems from the fact that the homes’ appearance

of “being populated” exists outside of the presence of human

participants. The prevalence of life size human sculptures (which

range from Roman gods placed up high, to African servants

scattered throughout the floor spaces) along with the numerous

large stuffed animals, suggest the permanence of a “conversation”

within the rooms. In these instances, the proposed dynamics

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2. Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series 2. Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y Famosas (1994-2001).

between gods, humans and animals suggests a controversial

archetypal quality.

One of the earliest instances of purposeful, architectural,

ambiatic theatricality within a domestic setting can be seen in

the home of Sir John Soane in London, England, created during the

eighteenth century.5 Its sense of theatricality, which is still

present in the home’s current state as a museum, comes from the

manipulation of special effects, including hue, light and shade.

Soane constructed

mysterious, partially

obstructed vistas of

interior spaces, which

served to confuse

spatial understandings

and confound observers’

own situatedness. As a

visitor moves through

Soane’s gothic

inspired spaces, she

transitions from spectator to participant. While viewing objects

up close in Soane’s domestic collection, or traversing the

spaces, a visitor assumes a character role in the theatrical

unfolding events, staged by the careful manipulation of

“spectacular” effects. While the homes depicted in Rossell’s

photographs express very different aesthetics from Soane’s

(glamorous instead of gothic), they both utilize a high degree of

5 Furjan, Helene, “Sir John Soane’s Spectacular Theatre,” AA Files 47 (London, Architectural School of Architecture, Summer 2002): 12-22.

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3. Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas 3. Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y Famosas (1994-2001).

surface and sculptural effects to curate distinct narratives,

enabling them to achieve a high level of dramatic, interactive

theatricality (fig. 3).

In the photograph with the young woman sitting on the coach

(fig.3), she and her companion appear physically small and

insignificant within the overall spaciousness of the room. While

dressed in a shiny gold dress and at center stage, the woman on

the coach would normally stand out amongst other images, yet she

is overshadowed by the predominate presence of the large

chandelier to her right. This illusion of scale is affected in

three ways. The first is distance – the woman is further away

from the controlled viewing and so small; the chandelier is very

close-up and so detailed

and large. The second is

lighting – while the

chandelier is bright and

a source of light

itself, the volume of

the room is cast in

shadow along with the

people within it, making

it appear deeply

recessed in space. The third is the angle of viewing – the

perspective is from up above, looking down onto the room,

accentuating the suspended height of the chandelier, and casting

the objects distributed on the floors and walls to appear like

remnants in a used teacup.

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Rossell’s photographic project began

many years before its publication in

2002. Starting in 1994, she began enlisting the help of her

friends and peers as photographic subjects, each agreeing to

allow Rossell to document them within their homes. Even though

members of Mexico’s elite class, they styled themselves in

intimate, provocative ways. While either lulled into a false

protective zone formed out of being amongst friends or assuming

class immunity, their shock at public rage6 seems oddly out of

place, a naïve response to the reality of international exposure.

Almost like genies in a bottle (think of Barbara Eden in the lush

décor of her private bottle suite in the 1970’s television

series, I Dream of Genie) these families were caught within the

domestic confines of luxury, not only as beneficiaries of the

nations’ wealth, but as transgressors of its social values, their

power used only to pleasure themselves (Fig. 4).

Stephen Gundle equates this type of image making within the

framework of glamour. He points out in his article on

architectural glamour and mass consumption7 that the notion of

glamour itself derives from the concepts of magic, enchantment,

and spells.

Additionally, glamour

has been described by

Virginia Postrel as

originally meaning a

shimmering spell,6 Ibid. 53.7 Gundle, Stephen, “Hollywood Glamour and Mass Consumption in Postwar Italy,” Journal of Cold War Studies 4, no. 3, Summer 2002, 95-118.

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4. Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series Ricas y Famosas (1994-2001).


cast to create an illusion of beauty.8 In a contemporary context,

glamour still carries these connotations, as well as that of

disguise, deception, and possibility. The glamorous ambiance in

these interiors both promises and excludes entry into their

realms of desire (fig. 5). As during the time of the Depression,

when the aesthetic of glamour was first popularized, it currently

serves as an enabler of extreme class differences, allowing

privilege to flourish amongst a small group while the rest of the

country experiences economic hardship.9

In Alice T. Friedman’s article, “The Luxury of Lapidus”,10 she

discusses the idea of staging glamour within the context of a

1950’s hotel. She identifies specific aspects of glamour for this

staging affect – the dramatic and symbolic materiality of

objects, including the dark wood of antiques, the shimmer of gold

and ebony statues, and the brilliance of glass chandeliers;

regular access for viewing – the ability to continually see and

be seen from various architectural vantage points, and lastly,

the performative display of consumption. The domestic interiors

within Rossell’s photographs, located in cities as disperse as

Mexico City, Monterrey, and New York contain these aspects of

glamour, as well as the additional quality of multiple layerings

of imagery within both real and illusory environments.

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8 Rosa, Joseph, ed., Glamour: Fashion + Industrial Design + Architecture. Virginia Postrel, “A Golden World.” New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 2004, 11-21. 9 Gundle, 97.10 Friedman, Alice T., “The Luxury of Lapidus: Glamour, Class, and Architecture in Miami Beach,” Harvard Design Magazine, 11 Summer 2000, 39-47.

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5. Daniela Rossell, Untitled, from the series

A contented woman

poses in the center

of a tropical themed

room alongside a

resting leopard (fig.

6), while echoing a

similar painted image

of a lounging woman

and animal on a wall

behind her. These

couples are

juxtaposed by the

sculpture of an African servant/slave in full Moorish attire. The

layering of sameness within themed environments (woman mimicking

painting) is a dominant aspect of the mood in these interiors.

Additionally, the mood is created by the particular angles of

viewing. In this case, the seated woman sits just outside a large

entrance to another room, itself partially occluded by her

presence. The exterior of this room within a room is covered by a

full size mural which includes a naked man laying casually above

the entrance amongst the plants and animals. This representation

of “paradise” is reflected and fractured by its multiple

manifestations (on the wall, in the room, and beyond the room).

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In another instance, (fig. 7) a woman lies feet-to-pillow in a

green sheer dress with her hair separated out into curling

octopi-like sections around

her head. Lying next to her

on a pillow atop a pink

bedspread facing the

opposite direction is a

Native American baby doll

placed within a highly

decorated cradle board,

covered with swirling beads

and feather work. This

juxtaposition of objects of

privilege (beautifully

dressed woman, posing as

mermaid within her own

bedroom) and objects of

oppression (realistic

Native American baby doll

and cradleboard, as display within somebody else’s bedroom)

repeat the human sculpture-of-otherness found frequently within

these interiors, creating a disturbing impression of unrepentant

cultural domination.

Mood

The evocation of mood within these images is carefully managed by

special effects created through the interplay of various

architectural factors. These include manipulation of lighting and

scale, angle of viewing, layering of color and gestural schemes,

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repetitive figurative representations, and strategic placement of

objects to suggest intimate interaction. These effects create two

distinct types of ambiatic spaces: On the Down Low and Genie in the

Bottle.

On the Down Low

This popular phrase, and mood class, refers to activities or

communications not always known or acknowledged in surface

interactions, one’s that are meant to be kept quiet. The domestic

environments

characterized as such

have a feel of

permeating sexuality

(fig. 8). The images in

this category would

generally have remained

on the down low in other

contexts, in order to

comply with cultural

norms and expectations

for women of this class. Yet many of the scenes portray an in-

your-face sensuality more commonly associated with high class

prostitution, or fashion and pop culture magazines. Many of these

theatrical situations suggest scenarios with animate and

inanimate objects switching roles as aggressors or potential

victims (fig. 7). Many of the spatial participants are also

connected in terms of coordinated color, form and pattern. Common

special effects in this category also include the manipulation of

scale. Objects in the dominant position appear larger than life

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within the viewers’ line of site, both a result of photographic

mediation and an enduring quality of the spaces, in which sites

of viewing are carefully contrived through architectural features

(such as the stair landing above a room, the walkway overhanging

an interior below, and the openings of one room on to another,

framing curated compositions of objects.

The visual impact of the spaces in the Mexican homes is

especially poignant due to their dramatic saturation in color,

varying textures and the nearly palpable connection between the

photographer and the people within the photograph. This

connection makes evident the physical presence of the

photographer within the

spaces she documents. She

functions as both outside

recorder of events and

internal actors on the set,

invisible but with her own

gravitational force, like a

planet within a solar

system, influencing the

orbit of those around her.

This taught connection (and confusion) between subject and object

within the domestic settings, extends to the multitude of

photographic viewers, who get pulled into the frame by the same

gravitational force. Embodying the photographer’s invisible form

and seeing through her eyes, the audience is part of the

continuum, the cord of recognition linking object, subject and

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witness. The audience falls head first into the room, bearing

witness to acts of pleasure and defiance (fig. 9).

Other representations of architectural settings have created a

similar effect, with radically different approaches and

aesthetics. For example, the films of Andy Warhol and Tsai Ming-

Ling are described by Giuliana Bruno as vehicles which draw in

and absorb audiences through the depiction of slow motion

(in)activity in enclosed spaces.11

The women’s purposeful stances within their familiar environments

are paralleled by others in a variety of divergent environmental

and social context. The young men and women portrayed in the

book, Back in the Day, about 1980’s Brooklyn, are devoid of the

sexuality inherent in the documented Mexican homes, but full of

the attitude.12 Along the Brooklyn streets, in front of apartment

buildings, and beside crowded stores and rushing cars, people in

these photographs pause to show the camera their carefully

maintained and “cool” in-your-face styles. Often photographed in

groups, teenagers are shown dressed in coordinated styles and

colors, uniforms used

to express their

social bonds and

aesthetic tastes. In

a very different

context a world away,

Ray and Charles Eames11 Bruno, Giuliana. “Architects of Tme: Reel Images from Warhol to Tsai Ming-Ling,” in Log 2 (Spring 2004): 81-94.12 Shabazz, Jamel, Back in the Day, (New York, powerhouse Books, 2001).


in Southern California spent a lifetime posing themselves in

front of cameras within their home, also with matching custom-

made outfits.13 Beatriz Colomina states that, “the effect of the

Eames’ costume is the professional couple as a matching set,

carefully positioned like any other object in the layout.” Not

simply descriptive, in all three instances the images of people

within, and interacting with, their home environments (including

in the Brooklyn urban landscape) tell narratives of every day

acts and monumental layouts. The characters within these images

include the people, the buildings, the objects and environments

enclosing them. Each animate and inanimate object becomes

equalized as one more prop within the two dimensional

photographic plane.

Genie in the Bottle

13 Colomina, Beatriz. “Eames’ Images,” in Daidalos 66 (December 1997): 41-53.

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In this set of images, rooms are populated with oddly juxtaposing

objects and textures, overlapping and referencing one another.

Women are placed centrally as forlorn and melancholy (fig. 10).

Draped in luxuriant fabrics, they appear trapped and without

direction, genies in a bottle waiting for absent masters to

define their purpose. Accentuating this mood are the various

objects creating thick surfaces around the isolated women,

themselves as one

more surface

variation. In one

instance a young

woman lies with

her pinkish face

exposed among a

“carpet” of small

beanie baby-like

pink stuffed

animals,

themselves, as children’s toys, outside meaningful narratives of

history (fig. 11). A special effect prevalent in this category of

images is that of camouflage. There is an illusion of merging

like objects, including the women themselves, who become textural

variations within the visual field. As in Russell’s photograph

(fig. 1), the two and three-dimensional representations of

people, both sculptural and painting within the domestic spaces,

take on a greater significance in terms of defining, or creating,

the illusion of interaction within the space.

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In the photograph of the sitting room with the harem-themed mural

across the back wall (fig. 12), a young woman lies casually in a

bathing suite on a striped and tiled couch. With her arm raised

overhead, she looks at herself in a hand held mirror, mimicking

the women in the painting above her. The situatedness and

relationship between the various figures within this room is

blurred by the overall appearance of connectivity. The women in

the mural and on the couch both lounge half naked, draped by

various patterned fabrics. Yet, a powerful mood within the

photographs is not that of connection but isolation. While

interaction is implied, it seems to refer more to the interior

landscapes of the home’s residents. The décor of these various

rooms serve alternately as manifestation of fantasy and

nostalgia, and as devices of control, dictating the type of

action and

interaction

expected to

occur there.

To affect this

appearance of

sameness, of

equality within

a visual field

(a technique

shared by both

the late

modernist

duration films and the glamour rich homes), is that of layering.

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Within the minimal environments depicted in the films, this

layering is in regard to time, to “(b)roadening, expanding,

fragmenting, layering, exploring, rethinking time.”14 Within the

baroque inspired homes, the layering is in terms of textures and

patterns, upon the walls, ceilings, floors and furniture (all

receiving similar treatment). In both cases, the layering is an

equalizing factor, where no time points, objects or actions have

greater significance than any other within the visual field.

Looking again at the Eameses home, there is a similar layering

treatment of space. All surfaces are broken down into repetitive

patterns. Silvia Lavin in her article “The Temporary

Contemporary” describes this practice as conceiving of

architectural surfaces as thin picture planes.15 Colomina points

out that in the Eameses redesign of their home, they changed the

continuous walls of glass into multiple rectangles of varying

textures.16 These enveloping environments seem as three

dimensional manifestations of the eighteenth century

architectural drawings from England showing developed surface interiors.

These drawings of rooms within domestic interiors were splayed

out two dimensionally, with all surfaces, facing the four

directions, receiving equal obsessive attention. In Robin Evan’s

book, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, he interprets

these drawings further as describing the total design of an

enveloping surface.17 The Eameses home realizes this surface

enveloping effect within a modernist context, while the homes

14 Colomina, 47.15 Lavin, 5.16 Colomina, 47.17 Evans, Robin, Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays,(London, Architectural Associations Publications, 1997): 209.

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depicted in Ricas y Famosas, due so within a context of glamour and

theatricality.

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For our purposes we can distinguish two essential issues that

surface when analyzing the images in the photographic project,

Ricas y Famosas, by Daniela Rossell. First, is atmospheric ambiance,

which is in part the product of intentional mediation or

manipulation by the viewer/witness dynamic. The method of

mediation in representation employed by the photographer is to

arrange a new set of visual and atmospheric dynamics by

destabilizing the dichotomizing relationships between

subject/object, and context/viewer. By carefully creating a new

set of arrangements, that are simultaneously tightly control and

wildly loose, the role and value of the different elements

constantly and unpredictably shift places, changing their meaning

and importance within the setting. The space itself becomes

agitated, an invisible electric shock treatment is given to all

the four basic elements at play (subject-object-circumstances-

witness). This shock of the domestic becomes an enacted mad-

atmosphere, full of improv theatrics and shifts of moods. This

strategy resemblance more the dynamics of a live performance, not

a play carefully rehearsed in the safe confines of a theater, but

more like a ‘reality show’ enacted in the isolation and danger of

a remote exotic island.

The apparent unpredictable interchangeability related to the

notion that the representational elements are conditional seems

to be the result of a spell gone wild, and out of control. But

this process is carefully choreograph by the photographer and the

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paradoxical condition of calculated unpredictability perhaps

resembles a contemporary incarnation of Dali’s famous Paranoid-

Critical Method of analysis and representation. Rem Coolhas in

his analysis of the urban dynamics of New York states that it is

where:

Paranoid-critical activity is the fabrication ofevidence for unprovable speculations and thesubsequent grafting of this evidence on the world, sothat a “false” fact takes its lawful place among the“real” facts….These false facts relate to the realworld as spies to a given society: the moreconventional and unnoted their existence, the betterthey can devote themselves to that society’sdestruction.

Like some kind of deterritorializated double-agents

(subject/object), without any fixed allegiance to any specific

political cause (context/witness), they can easily assume any

personality that suits their purposes (high/low),and can always

be ready and open to the best offers (effects). The question

could arise as to who spies on whom, or more precisely, what is

being represented to whom? This may have an answer that always

remains elusive.

A second important issue that comes to light in analysis of the

Ricas y Famosas interior spaces is that of domestic curation. The

more traditional approach to home studies focusing on practical

layout and cold rational design based on need, does not match the

approach to décor and use evident in these homes as well as the

idea of curation. In this case, one can witness a kaleidoscopic

view of domestic architecture, where with slight adjustments to

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the configuration of objects, one receives a new and different

effect. It is through this simultaneous multi-focus mode of

perception and arrangements that we encounter a domestic

architecture that relies more on the interactions of the special

effects of the surface and atmospheric moods of the interior.

Like a disguised love affair, this agitated relationship gives

interiority to the surface. The charged surfaces become the

layout of an ambiance architecture.

With this in mind one can assume that the house is the space that

contains and displays not just the mysteries and anxieties of

particular cultural identities at the scale of the individual;

but also that the house is the place that produces and projects

our dynamics of desire and power within a larger social

framework. This is operationalized through the value driven

interactions between the people that live and work in the house

and the ordinary and extraordinary objects that fill it. It would

be easy to dismiss the value of these domestic spaces as

exuberant manifestations of extreme wealth and consumption, but

perhaps in looking at them through the idea of a spell gone wild,

Ricas y Famosas can bring to light one or two new tricks about what

the architecture of need always tries to hide and deny, that is,

its own bag of special effects.

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Ricas y Famosas and The Architecture of Hyper-Ambiance

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