Neil Spiller: an Architect Between Project and Art
Museum of Docklands, 1986 [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]
The first time I came across Neil Spiller’s work was on a small end-of-the-day lecture, given by Spiller himself, as the program complementary part of a short course on drawing. The oratory and the graphics of that lecture were undoubtedly familiar but with sufficient je ne sais quoi of uncommon that obliged a doubled attention in order to actually understand its contents. Except for the place where the lecturer presented his work, the small conference room was immersed in semi obscurity. With a serene posture and a subtle humor – but without ever laughing – Neil Spiller unraveled the rosary of truths, ironies and sarcasms of his career, with references to the people and key-moments linked to the drawings that illuminated on a big white screen behind him. The speech would foment an clipped ambience of giggles and laughs coming from the audience, while on the big white screen were projected images of drawings executed in paper, with lines sometimes precise, of an irreprehensible technicality, other times free, as freehand drawing; traces of an exact fineness alongside with others of necessary thickness; stains and shadings that range from inky blacks to shining greys; in some drawings, the marks made on the paper give form to a more or less familiar while in others to some that the audience recognize as an object of some sort but which scale doesn’t become immediately self-evident; in others still, the drawings would appear as something absolutely abstract. Eventually, the lecturer would abandon his post towards the screen and pointed out this or that image detail to accompany his dissertation, identifying one or other less evident technical nomenclature. In spite of the abundant artistic dimension, and overcome the apparent strangeness, the work shown on the big white screen could after all be seen and classified as architectural drawing. Yet, to reduce Neil Spiller’s work production (individually or in collaboration with other artist and architects) to a set of artistic properties or a set of architectural project techniques would be too simplistic. It’s hard to synthesize and encompass under one single category all his imaginative and symbolic production, all of its semiotic content, being undeniable the contribution of this prolific architect to the discussion of drawing and architecture contemporary practices and paradigms.
Neil Spiller is Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London, having been before that Dean of the School of Architecture, Design and Construction and Professor of Architecture and Digital Theory at that same university. Prior to that he was Vice-Dean and Graduate Director of Design at the Bartlett School of Design, University College London. Neil spiller is also known for having directed in 2004 the foundation of the AVATAR (Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research) Group, now based at University of Greenwich. This group has its own Masters and PhD programs and conducts research into advanced technologies of architectural representation, with special focus on the research of the impact of new technologies such as virtuality and biotechnology in the 21st century design. Neil Spiller and the AVATAR Group are recognized by its contribution to paradigm shifting of architectural discourse, research, experimentation and teaching. And in that context Spiller believes that “[design] tutors are creative midwives that help deliver students’ individual work that is influenced by the past but not in thrall to it” (Spiller).
Aligned with this artist work are extemporary predecessors such as Giovanni Piranesi, Etienne-Louis Boulee (both from the 18th), Hermann Finsterlin (more recent, born in 1887), or the collaborative duo Alexander Brodski and Uliya Utkin (that belonged to the surnamed “paper architects”) and contemporary others, such as Lebbeus Woods, constituting major references of the so called visionary architecture. This most unconventional and experimental visionary architecture is relativized by two almost paradoxical perceptions: one in which the notion of impossible to build edifications is inexistent; and the other in which the edifications will hardly be habitable or functionalized by human beings in spite they are thought as such. Although Neil Spiller’s drawings seem absolutely utopic, the edifications projected by him only look like so just because there isn’t any financing source eccentric enough to support such construction endeavor. His works come from the architectural project prescriptions genesis but it merges on the artistic work. In the end, that could be the love-hate relation, a mixt of stigma/triumph, of the visionary architecture with the artistic product. In fact, such works – or projects? – live on that possible/impossible duality that makes this form of architecture may only dwell in the paper. In a way to concretely and physically construct what Neil Spiller projects (also valid for the other visionary architects) would annihilate the architect-artist vision. Let’s agree: certain things, certain visions, only hold their magic if they never leave the paper (many times even in the embryonic state of the sketch or the preliminary study). Interesting fact on Neil Spiller’s work is that he subverts the normalization technique itself for architectural drawing presentation. The project visualization keeps the typical nomenclatures – elevations, cuts, axonometric views, exploded views, extrusions – but it requires some imagination exercise so one may experience the concretization of civil construction in question. In fact, the nomenclatures are there, yes, but may not be what an well advised observer when it comes to the good rules of the craft might expect (see Drawing for a new AA School project, e.g., or Museum of Docklands). One can observe how since Dean Street (and even Drawing for a new AA School project) the most identifiable and orthodox architectural drawings gradually transmute into project graphics more and more autonomous under an artistic perspective, in spite they never lose sight (literally) of project’s drawing and the idea of anauthentic materialization. It won’t be necessary to be a in-depth connoisseur to intuit that drawing and architecture have a long history of partnership, of inherence, of complicity even. However, the possibility for drawing to acquire a certain autonomy from what is foreseen to be built holds in itself a great power. It’s drawings that could be edifications but that probably never will, because of the eccentricity of the endeavor as much of the drawn work autonomy. And yet, both conditions hold the art work manifestation as they subject themselves to the multiple readings of who observe them. The literalness of those readings is a dichotomy: more liberating when the project, still on paper, is voted to utopia or more evident when the drawing is thought as an edification to be built (if it wasn’t for its eccentricity size make of it an almost nullity from the usability point of view). Here, definitely, form doesn’t follow function. It’s not rare therefore to find architects that practically abandoned the idea of drawing as a project tool and embraced the exclusive potentiality of drawing as a valence in itself. Anyway, and under the light of the advents of art history since modernism to contemporaneity, this kind of creative work brings us new ways of seeing and doing, new ways of experiencing and exercise our relation with architecture and drawing. Drawing is shown to us once more in its dimension of support for the process of imagination and architectural concretization and in the way we communicate those faculties. The work of Neil Spiller is therefore a great contribute to the critical mass of contemporary drawing practice evolution and the exploration of its paradigms. The work Velasquez Machine reflects even a certain preoccupation with that contribute, not in absolute to drawing, but to art in general. For Neil Spiller it was since Velasquez (1599) that artists begun to be more and more narcissistic, in which they themselves are simultaneously the subject and the object of their art works (see the examples of Tracey Emin or Nan Goldin, major names of contemporary art). The preoccupation with the position of narcissism within contemporary art is patent in this architectural object: through the subversion of a narcissist manifesto Velasquez Machine refers to the author’s interest in putting into evidence the “straddle [of] representation and abstraction, a critical perturbation in the history of art” (Spiller). However, Neil Spiller preoccupations go well beyond than art’s elemental concepts.
Since its beginnings that Neil Spiller makes attempts to introduce narrative in architectural work. If on one hand the idea isn’t new, on the other hand the narrative has disappeared form the architectonic program since modernism, due to is attitude of “sanctity of functions and programme” (Spiller). The intention of this architect when it comes to narrative becomes self-evident even in his early works (as in Drawing for a new AA School project) and is extended to the more recent works such as Millennium Pavillion. Millennium Pavillion shows that notion of edification as a metaphor or narrative in which a series of events lead by the eventual user build up the building’s function. For Neil Spiller society conforms the body – the body is architecture’s conduct. As the body gets modified, so does the architectural possibilities. “Architecture will have to respond at a variety of new scales, some microscopic, others cosmoscopic” (Spiller).Communicating Vesselsit’s probably Neil Spiller’s most paradigmatic work.Communicating Vessels was initiated in 1998 and continued until today as a body of work in research on architecture’s design. In this work there are two research foci: in one of them is reiterated the influence of several human scientific production areas (the biotechnology, the virtual and the nanotechnology) in architecture, namely in “relation to the old dichotomy between architecture and landscape” (Spiller); the other research focus constitutes itself in the approach of the architecture paradigms that seek new spatial arrangements more appropriate to our time. Neil Spiller says that that “by looking to some of the spatial tactics of the Dadaists, Pataphysicists(1), Surrealists, Situationists, OuLiPo(2)and the Symbolists, we can gain an insight into new spatial arrangements […] that are appropriate for our time” (Spiller) as an authentic metaphor for the counterculture within the progression of contemporary art itself. This research project is now over 250 drawings and thousands of words in prose and theorethical explanation. As land in sight navigation, this work’s process strips itself gradually off the technical and, why not saying it, sacrosanct architectural constraints to constitute itself towards an art work, assuming however that dimension of a project that at its genesis it’s an architectural one (always in the presence of the preoccupation with the spatial planking that conform architecture).
Who seeks illustration in the world Neil Spiller created will be profoundly disappointed, it’s a vain task. “A good scheme and drawing must have enigmas, a certain elbow room to allow further speculative re-reading” (Spiller). His drawings are complex and formulate equally complex thoughts. Lebbeus Woods wrote on Neil Spiller:
“For Neil Spiller, drawing is thinking. He does not ‘express’ thoughts already formulated […]. Rather, he formulates thoughts through drawing, indeed by drawing. […] We feel, upon entering the drawings, as though we have found an entire world, whose exploration will take us away from our familiar one, but eventually bring us back to it, our perceptions enriched, our imaginations stimulated and expanded, the better to appreciate the familiar in new ways.”
Drawing for a new AA School project,in Covent Garden. Interior Perspective: Life; 1985. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]
Millenium Pavillion, 1996. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]
The Object Beside Itself (Communicating Vessels), 1998. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller].
Velasquez Machine, 2002. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]
Dean Street,1985. [Courtesy Prof. Neil Spiller]
To know more about Neil Spiller’s work:
lebbeuswoods.wordpress.com
(1) Pataphysics: pataphysics is a branch of philosophy or science that examines imaginary phenomena that exist in a world beyond metaphysics; it is the science of imaginary solutions; it was created by Alfred Jarry (1873) who defined it as "a science of imaginary solutions and the of laws that regulate exceptions".
(2) OuLiPo:Ouvroir de Littérature Potentiellewhich can be roughly translated as "workshop of potential literature". Is a loose gathering of (mainly) french-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques (http://oulipo.net/).
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