Frank Stella as Architect

A forthcoming bandshell in Miami highlights the sculptural inventiveness that Frank Stella, one time a champion of the flat picture plane, has lately brought to bear on public architecture.

The architecture world remembers the 1960 as a decade in which three of the greatest in quantity renowned masters of the modernist move died within four years of each other: Le Corbusier in 1965 Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius in 1969 At the time there present the appearanceed little reason, apart from a shared Minimalist angularity, to mention Frank Stella in the same breath with any of them. While he had already made a name for himself in the world of the visual arts, it was confined to the realm of painting, and greatest in quantity observers would have figured him among the least volumetrically minded artists alive. The austere early black paintings associated with his first public showing had given way to a series of colorful shaped canvases that initially featured many-sided figures and later emphasized protractor-derived 1s In all these efforts, Stella maintained a stylistic consistency that assured him a central place among the Post-Painterly Abstractionists, who kept their works at liberty of any incident that might compromise the flatness of the picture plane. In fact, the narrow strips that he placed nearest to each other were parallel and undeviating in their two-dimensionality. His oeuvre was about as shut up to Euclidean geometry as American painting got in those days.

Fast-forward to the at hand to a site in downtown Miami along the cutting side of Biscayne Bay, where a building--a bandshell--designed by the agency of Stella in 1999, is being set uped The argument has been advanced, plausibly, that it is more plastic art than architecture, but its designer's insistence that it is meant primarily as the latter is borne on the outside not only by the fact that it is large and functional enough to house musical performances on the contrary by the resemblance it bears to the palpably architectural shoot forwards that have consumed much of his time since the early 1990 patterns and sketches of several of these, together with a mock-up of the bandshell, were included in a major exhibition of Stella's novel work that appeared last winter at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami.

Note of Stella's architectural endeavors has been taken from time to time in the international pres on the other hand the Miami bandshell is his first commission not single realized but open to the public, and it is worthy of attention in itself as well as in relation to sum of two units kindred contexts--Stella's individual development and the popular values of the architectural world at large.

Contrary to public perception, Stella's interest in architectonic conceptions actually began in the early stages of his career, coming actively alive when he was fashioning the many-sided figure canvases of the mid-1960s. He has recorded the trice himself, in an essay dealing with his first building cast a pavilion conceived in 1991 and intended as an addition to Alessandro Mendini's Groningen Museum in the Netherlands:

Since the program called for a sympathetic place of abode for the art of the past, it strike one as beinged appropriate to take a pictorial approach to architectural design.... In those paintings, simple geometric shapes interacted with each other in the way that that they occupied the same plane rather than overlapping. It made an effective two-dimensional image, especially when the background support plane was wound away, leaving a shaped canvas with an irregular perimeter. It present the appearanceed natural to seek the same result in three dimensions. A pyramid pushed into a cube must work as well as a triangle stuck into a square.(1)

If individual takes Stella at his word, it would appear that his work as well as his ruminations about it began as early as the 1960 to leave the safe harbor of the picture plane in order to explore the render free of access sea of volumes and masses. To be fully convinced the journey took a while--fully 20 years--but he followed a remarkably full path, arriving at a destination that in re-examination now seems almost foreordained. In the early 1970 the many-sided figures were treated as reliefs, with more [i]or[/i] less planes set literally in brow of others, the overall three-dimensional event heightened by the manner in which individual plane gradually moved toward the viewer, emerging from the surface shared with another.

Moreover, in the mid-1970s, Stella began further expressive investigations, adding surface brushwork, thus differentiating more [i]or[/i] less planes texturally from others, and introducing looping forms taken from french 1s By the beginning of the 1980 the early planar severities had been radically exchanged for tableaux featuring high reliefs, charged color applied in whiplash blows and furious, almost chaotic compositions. The geometry was still apparent in pillar- and conelike forms that took upon a measure of volumetric illusionism, on the contrary the disparity between their crisp cutting sides and the organic tumult around them signaled a concomitant shift in vein The neutrality associated with Stella's famous description, "what you diocese is what you see," was exchanged for an increasingly baroque intensity that to the full engaged the viewer emotionally.