Martin Szekely – Construction
Musée des Arts décoratifs et du Design, Bordeaux
2018
Traveling margin
Cecil Balmond
Artist, designer and engineer, Cecil Balmond transcends the conventional boundaries of discipline – working in the crossover between art and science. He has spent over 40 years investigating the relationship between form and the very roots of order at the core of life. Before setting up Balmond Studio in 2011, he was Deputy Chairman of Arup (London) and ran the critically acclaimed design group, Agu (Advanced Geometry Unit). Balmond has also taught at some of the world’s most influential design and architectural institutions, including Penn Design, Yale University and Harvard Graduate School of Design (Department of Architecture). He is the recipient of many awards including Officer of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Architecture (2015), the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture (2016) and the Gengo Matsui prize for the Serpentine pavilion in London designed with Toyo Ito (2002). Balmond has designed an important number of buildings and infrastructures, including the Bordeaux maison Lemoine in 1998 (with Rem Koolhaas, Oma, Arup Agu), the Portuguese National Pavilion in 1998 (with Alvaro Siza, Eduardo Souto de Moura, Arup Agu), the Pedro e Inês footbridge in Coimbra, Portugal, in 2006 (with Adão da Fonseca & Associados, Arup Agu), the Centre Pompidou Metz in 2009 (with Shigeru Ban, Jean de Gastines, Philip Gumuchdjian, Arup Agu) and the Cctv, headquarters of China Central Television in Beijing, China in 2012 (with Oma, Arup Agu). He has published several books and his book informal won the Riba Sir Banister Fletcher Prize for best book on architecture (2005).
Martin Szekely’s work gives the impression that, at the beginning, the Pi chair was a conscious art object. But with the present works – Construction, Artefact, MAP – a statement is being made that “objecthood” is put aside, and he seems to be searching for fundamentals that lie behind the obvious: the essence of space and an inner serial punctuation that leads to an entity – which is very different from the tradition of drawing – to fix a design.
Fine art by itself is, in a way, use-less because it has no function, or its “function” is on emotional and psychic levels of the unconscious. But objects, such as tables and bookshelves, are pragmatic and must function for their purpose. Martin Szekely’s current work, presented in this exhibition, lies between the object and art. If it is fine art, you can engage with it, and you’re free to move in any direction after engaging with it. But functional things like furniture lead you to specific notions of space: you are stuck with a certain orientation, a certain engagement, tactile surfaces and visual patterns. If, in such objects, the obvious typologies are not assumed but derived from abstract notions, while remaining functional, the work moves somewhere else, towards an art of hypothesis, an area between art and function.
By introducing certain emergent tendencies in how things may connect, Martin Szekely is taking away the notion of the fixed object associated with function. Allied to this is his choice of material, a transcending medium between the idea and the fact. So when you are participating in the function, you are not in a settled world. In my opinion, that is what he is trying to do.
It is clear to me that in Construction he is trying to deny a boundary. He would like the work not to be defined by stop ends. He avoids classification and denies category. The work implies continuity with a hint of catastrophe, which creates danger in some way, and an excitement. Trying to move away from fixed boundaries seems to be inherent in his aims. In my work too, and my writings, I refuse the fixed boundary as a concept – I talk about “traveling margin.” Conventional objects have limits. Construction has the notion of not being limited – because it can keep expanding or shrinking.
I like to put myself in danger, but the problem is that I have to build buildings and the risk is huge. But that is the very nature of vulnerability. The maison Lemoine in Bordeaux feels like it is going to collapse. Martin Szekely also seems to touch on such uncertainty. A building is a big artifact, in a sense an elaborate, multi-faceted piece of furniture, especially the smaller-scale house or pavilion. Perhaps Martin Szekely’s approach would be very interesting for a house – he should design houses!
Construction is the kind of piece made from what I call a reciprocal grid. Normal grids would be coaxial, intersecting on axes, straight through. But here, each section relies on the other. It is an old idea, tried by Leonardo da Vinci, although he did not build anything real from it. I used such a grid in two of my designs, a park in Saint Louis, Missouri in 2004 and the Serpentine Pavilion in London in 2005. I began with simple coaxial grids, as anyone does. Then I started to question, open it up and deny fixity. I let the joints “slip.” I had developed a theory of the informal that was about locality, juxtaposition and hybridity. This theory offers a different classification from a traditional esthetic, and I was deliberately placing impurities into the classical idea of symmetrical form.
This idea of informal grew within me as overlaps, slips, jumps. I came up with a design for the Serpentine Pavilion of a grid that had to shift in connection, sending a “shiver” up through the work. This reciprocal grid had a great effect. Each piece of timber slips into the next piece, yet set to one side. I calculated that we would not need any bolts, but the local authority refused. They wanted absolute safety – but if you make the joints perfect it can work! Essentially, the shell form works as a cascade and was built by hand in a progressive way, starting at one corner. Martin Szekely’s Construction has this idea of reciprocality, and he puts a nice finesse on it. As you change the direction, the sequence is moving. If you keep the sequence, it all stays similar. If each piece of bamboo slipped into another with a tight fit, perhaps no screws would have been needed.
People are used to the idea of no illusion to space, and therefore fix on rigid partitioning, subdivision. If the parts are all equal and compartmented, you feel solid. The moment you shift in space, like the reciprocal grid or any “traveling margin” that denies the boundary, you feel unsafe or insecure because you don’t know where the construction stops. It does not feel finished, so it is not an object. We demand objects. We don’t like tendencies.
With the Étagères, Martin Szekely is using the notion of a “portal frame” in structural engineering. The work is a shifting cellular thing, but it is not the same as Construction. Here, you gain stability by very close proximity to what it would have been if it were straight. It is a clever solution to a stiffness problem. But this work looks more stable than Construction.
The esthetic pursued by Martin Szekely leads to an interesting debate: whether minimal materiality is the right thing to do, or to focus on the vulnerability of a joint. If the materiality is heavy, more substantial, maybe the positioning of the jointing technique would not matter.
Szekely has chosen to get to the absolute minimum. It is almost not there, so the eye engages with position, not relevance. The solid is denied. He partitions the action of joining into phases – not explicit and unitary, but implicit and phased. Once the logic of permanence is shifted in an interesting and intelligent way, the form is underwritten by ornament – not ornamental in the traditional sense of decoration, but in a fundamental organizing way.
Modernism allied with the minimum killed a lot of rich thinking – including the proper function of ornament. It is easy to strip everything out, and ultimately you have, as in architecture, the glass box. I have fought against this and taken a much riskier path, pursuing a lively baroque in some ways, to create a kind of overlapping esthetic. Regarding a built form, this can mean that one cannot differentiate between architecture, structure and ornament. I would raise ornament as a necessary adjunct to form, a complementary reading that imparts richness. Martin Szekely’s work is minimal, but he reveals an organizing motivation and staged sequences to arrive at a function: those beautiful crosses are certainly ornamental and the honeycomb aluminum is a lovely, very strong material. His position is about a sub-reading of the main forms and structures. That becomes “ornament” for me. I don’t know what else you would call it – a secondary reading of structure? For me, it is a necessary part. If that were not needed, then it would be mere decoration. But here, all the rhythms and sub-patterns lead to the motive force of an emerging entity.
The GlassGlass table is more consciously a table. But in the tied cable, a reverse reading of form takes place, away from the “compression totality,”1 as is the norm. Again, with the use of glass and the cables, we have the feeling of precariousness. In this sense, Martin Szekely has achieved what he wants. I’m not sure if his aim was to feel this vulnerability. I think so, but if he wanted an all-glass feeling, with the top not being supported, then I think there were other ways to do it.
The Bing glass stools are good because they feel like natural processes.
With the MAP table, the flat top itself is being denied. There are very strict geometries here with squares and rectangles. The rectangle must be twice the square. By using different materials with different geometries to make the top, he is sort of denying the “continuous monolith” reading of a tabletop.
And such an assemblage can be expanded forever, can also be felt and understood as a traveling margin – no boundaries of constraint.
With Manière Noire, another strategy of solid and void is at play. The piece denies its solid edges. When you look around it, you are not sure whether this is going to be in there or out. You see this in, you see this out. Solid-voids inform these kinds of works, where there are hybrid conditions being solid and void, not one or the other. And the bigger the object the more porosity comes in, more void, and the solid is undermined. In a manifestation of conundrums, which matters: the void or the solid? And again, a material as thin as possible – here carbon fiber, very thin, very beautiful. These things are expensive!
Looking at Unit Shelf, I feel there must be something inside the plaster – otherwise it would break. Using vertical glass stop ends is nice. The shelves are functional, but it depends on how they connect, whether they are unitary, smooth and glued, or forced into hidden grooves. It does not seem like the latter. Here again, a guessing game arises of how to read stability and continuity.
Unit Tower displaces the eye from a central axis, which is effective and nice. The moment you shift the idea of a fixed orientation, the work is more interesting. Then the question is, from the artist’s point of view, whether you are putting art into it deliberately or whether you are removing the function, confusing it, phasing the functionality with other materials and connections. A mystery of form arises. The more mystery comes into an object, the more you move it towards art. If you really understand it, in the sense of what the artist meant, then it is not art. Therefore, the more you see a mystery, you are not sure if it is a kind of magic. To give function and transcend that purpose, because you can’t quite explain it, is to leave off niceties and prettiness and conventional shape, and to enter the making of an emergent beauty.
I don’t normally give interviews on other people’s work, but I understood that Martin Szekely was interested in my projects and approach, and I wanted to look for some common ground.
Cecil Balmond first became familiar with Martin Szekely’s work through photographs. During an encounter in London, his thoughts about the designer were noted by Étienne Tornier.