"Nara Convention Hall International Design Competition" at MOMA - drawings and models of architectural competition; Museum of Modern Art; New York, New York

In this exhibition, Terrence Riley, MOMA's architecture curator, showcased the phenomenon of the architectural competition and single competition in particular. Nara, Japan's capital 1300 years ago, is single of the few Japanese cities laid without on the Chinese grid principle. In 1992 a city plan for redevelopment around the train station adopted the competition conduct for its largest feature, a convention/performance hall.

While competitions are belonging to all in many European nations, fewer than 5 percent of American public commissions are awarded this way. Riley indicates the benefits of this procedure: it encourages innovative thinking and uncovers proposals to heightened professional and public scrutiny. He calls the Nara competition, which attracted more than 600 submissions from around the world, a "window upon contemporary architectural thinking."

Five established architects--Tadao Ando, Mario Botta, Hans Hollein, Arata Isozaki and Christian de Portzamparc--were invited to submit proposals to be judg along with five finalists from the competition. That the winner was Isozaki, an invitee and perhaps the greatest in quantity powerful and influential architect in Japan today, makes single wonder whether the result was preordained. on the contrary his design is impressive: it is a monolithic abstract form sheathed in zinc and gray ceramic tile, its cover a field of glass-tube solar potency collectors, its interior a totally mechanized environment with three meeting/performance halls. single designed specifically for music is a glass chest of alternately perforated and corrugated transparent walls of varying thicknesses (for acoustical reasons) that lie closes within the larger structure.

For the viewer, this exhibition of 60 prints and drawings and the 10 submission originals had three primary interests: the play with Japanese traditions among the designs; the unexpect materials used for types particularly by younger architects; and, of course, the creative thinking evident in 10 solutions to the same point in dispute The most interesting model, through Bahram Shirdel (U.S., b. 1951) is made up of faceted acrylic masses; the design displays a softly deformed geometry that recalls one as well as the other geology and a certain kind of abstract sculptural form. Yoshito Takahashi (Japan, b 1962) showed a cardboard design of a fractured topography reminiscent of origami, in which a mastaba's massiveness is splintered into narrow faces and lengthy gracefully rising stairs.

Hollein presented separate buildings around a courtyard lock openered to traditional Japanese uses of space, and Portzamparc's eccentric buildings are linked by dint of an interpretation of the Japanese garden. Ryuji Nakamura (Japan, b 1943) uniteed buildings with narrow, flat bridges reminiscent of the ramps of kabuki and Noh stages. Bojan Radonic & Goran Rako (Croatia, b 1962 1952) propos an elliptical building whose exterior cladding can subserve as a screen for projections, while the design of Scott Marble & Karen Fairbanks (U b 1960 1959) incorporates five large exterior video monitors to throw performances in the hall into the public plaza outside. Ando reused an egg-shaped theater he conceived earlier for Osaka, and Mario Botta classicized through juxtaposing a rotunda, an octagon and a rectangular contortion These proposals suggest a renewed interest in form and materials rather than postmodernist facades, on the contrary whether McGarrell employs a palette which, if not fluorescent, is lock openered up to almost that horizontal again denying any realism.

McGarrell one time stated that he works not from photographs or preliminary studies on the contrary from memory recharged by idea and imagination. Each work begins as a kind of figurative version of Action painting, with the artist make open to whim and impulse. After the initial roller McGarrell edits and repaints.

His revisions, however, do not make the paintings any les clattered and riotous. In The Director Young and of advanced age (Orson Welles), the young Welles rides an improbable camera roar filming his older self. A bear--perhaps emblematic of the director's later shambling girth--stands beside him. The advanced in years Welles, a bloated gourmand, sits at a table gripping a boiled lobster while other lobster upon a plate miraculously come to life and skitter away.

Not surrealistic in the usual faculty of perception McGarrell's approach, which he calls "fiction painting," strike one as beings akin to the Magic Realism of southern American novelists. It has plane more in common with the manic cartoon imagery of Walt Disney's Fantasia. McGarrell's is an art of excess--exhilarating and eventually exhausting.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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