During his long reign over the American art scene through the 1960s, New York critic Clement Greenberg espoused the separation of the arts and the purity of their respective disciplines. The proper subject matter of a picture was the paint itself – its application, its color, the strokes. A painting should not be spatially illusionistic, but flat. A painting should be only itself and not represent anything outside the picture. As a work, its unity should be immediately apparent, and the picture should possess “onceness,” its ability to be taken in at a glance.
Greenberg, America‘s art pope, would have excommunicated Massimiliano Fuksas. Fuksas is first of all a painter and first of all an architect, and he does both simultaneously, often together, embedding architectural images in his paintings, and painterly gestures and an artistic sensibility in his buildings. The Roman architect is effectively an abstract expressionist in both arts, hybridizing each discipline with the other. Greenberg would not be amused.
But Fuksas has had some very good company over the last 25 years. Arguably the most innovative architecture has been done by architects bringing other fields into architecture, cracking open the discipline. Zaha Hadid was influenced by Suprematist painting, and Bernard Tschumi, by performance art. Peter Eisenman imported Deconstruction, and Daniel Libeskind, phenomenology and textuality. Frank Gehry was influenced by the light and space artists of Southern California, and Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelblau, by the explosive intensities of rock music. French architect Claude Parent was an omnivore devouring philosophy and art. And a whole new generation has imported the algorithms of exotic programs intended for other fields into their offices and onto their screens: Greg Lynn, Hani Rashid, Lise Anne Couture, Jesse Reiser, et al. Collectively as a group the architects broke with historical Post-Modernists by avoiding architectural history.
They were not referencing Palladio to beget more Palladio, keeping architecture within its traditional domain, but were opening architecture as a system of thought to other systems, hybridizing the fields, looking at architecture from other perspectives, growing architecture into different branches. The result was what biologists call hybrid vigor. For Fuksas and his colleagues, architecture is not an island but an open system that can be nourished by other systems. Fuksas was among a group which drew broadly from the contemporary culture around them instead of seeking lessons primarily from a more remote, and cooler, past. he was, and is, designing in a very intense present.
In the Italian context, there is nothing new about Fuksas’s position. Renaissance men like Leonardo and Michelangelo practiced across the arts, and throughout Italy, it was customary for painters to extend real architectural details in wall and ceiling frescoes, blurring illusion with reality. The disciplines were not separate but overlapping and complementary. Fuksas was simply updating the tradition of the Renaissance man with abstraction rather than representation.
Still, recent art and architecture figures religiously kept the disciplines separate. Richard Serra has said that architects cannot do sculpture because sculpture is not possible when plumbing is involved. Philip Johnson, by his own admission, never let the art he collected influence his design.
But Fuksas is not a literalist: he does not translate art into architecture (and vice versa), as did Le Corbusier, who also painted regularly and seriously. But Corb to a large extent did translate his still lifes into design, into what might be called architectural tablescapes – as in the roofscapes of usable forms atop his Unités d’Habitation. Even his site plan for Chandigarh was populated by object-like buildings positioned on a flat plane composed like a painting. Fuksas does not translate his exuberant abstractions into architecture on a literal level. The relationship is much more subtle. Most of his paintings contextualize buildings, or the suggestion of buildings, in an energy field of washes, colors, blotches, strokes and passages, sometimes in pencil. The paintings, usually acrylic, may evoke Anselm Kiefer, Willem de Kooning and perhaps Cy Twombly, but they really belong mostly to Fuksas’s own very active hand and inventive imagination. Unlike others, he does not really import another discipline into the field, but works like an artist, whether in painting or architecture. With an artistic sensibility, he finds the potential for artistic expression within any commission.
His unpredictable but characteristically moody paintings summon feelings or sensations around a building, which the buildings seem to absorb into their fabric. Ironically, he paints in a very loose style that is abstract and expressive, and perhaps even Abstract Expressionist in Greenberg’s sense – except for the presence of architectural representations. The paintings are luscious, generous, gestural, beautiful, vivid. The eye always travels across the canvas, captive of its self-contained center of gravity, and there is an immediacy and “onceness” to them.
If one assumes that paintings by architiects are stepping stones into their architecture, one can speculate that Fuksas’s paintings are a meditation, even an incitement, that ushers him into a zone of creativity. Fuksas of course does draw architectural diagrams, done in a loose, gestural hand, but they are not dreamy, evocative and “painterly” in the same way as his paintings, which seem conceived to loosen up the buildings and to transport them toward the unexpected. In any event the buildings are never depicted literally but seem to be depicted in the throes of a dream.
Fuksas reads all the briefs, zoning requirements and specifications that factor into a commission. But the antidote for the rules and regulations is the canvas or paper, which he approaches with all the good-natured lust and even savagery of a 4-year-old wielding a brush. The paintings are generous, spontaneous and intelligently impulsive, and they push boundaries of well-behaved architectural exploration. The images seem to surge rather urgently on and off their surface.
It is possible that rather than translating the subject matter of the paintings when he builds, he is simply channeling the energy of his paintings. In any event, the intensity of the paintings, the fury, clearly implies the artist has plunged into the canvas, diving into the feelings he cultivates. He visualizes emotions, and then builds them.
The unwritten and unwritable fact about artistic production is that artist cannot really work outside HIS temperament and character, and if Fuksas carries over the emotional urgency of his paintings into architecture, he is simply being true to his himself. The two arts as he practices them share a related impulse, and he does not lose their intensity in translation. The more recent buildings are especially gestural, sweeping, and full of movement, with abrupt, energizing juxtapositions. His paintings and designs not share facts in an overlap of imagery, but they do share an essence.
If one squints at images of, say, the MyZeil in Frankfurt or the Armani showroom on Fifth Avenue, one senses the sheer energy of the forms and spaces, the intensity of curves in a constant state of compression and expandion, tension and relaxation. The tumultuous environments recall the smaller storms he creates on canvas. He builds the sense of the paintings if not the exact form. Just as the eye moves around on all his canvases, the eye roams these spaces, and perception cues the senses, giving the body a heightened experience. The voluptuousness of the paintings translates into voluptuousness in space. Fuksas creates worlds. Perhaps painting gave him the taste to detach and liberate himself from the day to day, from the demands of gravity, from what Richard Serra calls the plumbing. Practicing liberty through painting is a discipline of invention. Fuksas says that he does not have a style, but from the beginning he displayed the same elegant ferocity in architecture that he demonstrated in his paintings.
A critic, author, teacher and architect based in New York, Joseph Giovannini is a prominent figure in American architecture. A Pulitzer nominee in criticism who trained in architecture at Harvard, he has authored many monographs and museum catalogue essays, and has taught on both East and West coasts, at Columbia, Harvard, UCLA and USC (mostly at graduate levels). He has put theory into practice in his own design practice. His work – including apartments, lofts, galleries and additions – has been widely published. He is noted for his three-dimensional Space Paintings.
