The London Traveler

Imagine a house that explodes around you. Or one where you have to crouch and wriggle to get into it. Imagine making your home in a coccoon. Or living in a house made of paper. Or seeing your life explode in front of your eyes.

That gives you an idea what you’ll see at the Psycho Buildings exhibition. It’s not an exhibition of architecture, but an exhibition of artists thinking about architecture, and what it means to us – what it does to us.

If you’ve seen the press reviews, the boating lake on top of the building is the work that gets the headlines. But for me, it isn’t the most interesting exhibit. (And though it may be fun to take a boat out on it, I should point out that there’s a lucky dip to get to the top level of the exhibition, and you might not be able to visit it at all if it’s raining.)

I found much more interesting the feeling for the fragility of our built environment that comes through in many of the other works. Michael Beutler has constructed a maze of paper and mesh, so delicate that you feel you’ll tear the tissue paper if you even breathe too hard. There’s something, too, a bit rag-and-bone about this construction; as if it’s been put together out of the fragments of something more robust, more real – something that’s been destroyed.

Los Carpinteros, from Cuba, show a house in explosion, shards and debris cascading through the air. This is, quite literally, ‘deconstruction’. The execution is stunning. And then Mike Nelson goes further, in his homage to the Gothic fantasy writer HP Lovecraft. Here we see a room that has been attacked by a mad axeman or a wild monster – gouges in the walls are witness to the violence that has destroyed the house.

Do  Ho Suh’s work, too, invokes the violent smashing of domesticity, with ‘Fallen Star’, in which a Korean chalet has smashed into the corner of a neat American brownstone. A staircase made of mesh etherealises the house, takes its forms and makes them ghostly and fragile – and of course useless; the staircase is a huge hanging bag, so that in the end, it goes nowhere, just up to a fabric cul-de-sac.

In Atelier Bow-Wow’s ‘Life Tunnel’ it’s our own fragility rather than that of the building that’s the focus. Steel clad walls bulge inwards, and force us to crouch as we go through the tunnel, so that the passage becomes a sort of ritual rebirth – a reference that’s clear in the name of the exhibit. The contrast between the masculine hardness of steel and the feminine spaces within challenges our perception of space.

I’m a big Rachel Whiteread fan, and I was particularly interested in her ‘Village’ installation. Rows of dolls’ houses line a slope, as if built on a hillside; their windows are lit up. Some of the houses seem to be almost transparent as the light penetrates through their thin walls. But there’s nobody in the streets; there’s nobody at home. These are houses, but they’re not homes; they contain nothing but space. The strangely silent landscape holds no stories, no memories.  Like so much of Whiteread’s work, it’s all about what isn’t there.

This is a marvellous exhibition. You might not like every work, but every single piece will have an impact on you – whether you like it or not. There’s real life in this work – real vitality; and, in just a couple of them, real beauty, too.
Where: Hayward Gallery, Southbank Centre

When: till 25th August: 10-6, late night Fridays till 10pm

How much:  £10 (£6 concessions, £4.50 under 16s)

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