Plasma Studio’s AA
installation is a must-see, says David Cunningham
Plasma Studio is the very
model of a hip, contemporary young practice. With a name that sounds like a
drum ’n’ bass outfit, and a familiarity with contemporary theory that means its
press releases read like pages from chic French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari, Plasma
Studio displays a commitment to computer-aided design and formal innovation
that makes it seem the kind of practice for which the phrase “cutting edge”
could have been invented.
Partners Eva Castro and Holger Kehne’s latest official recognition
as being at the vanguard of the digital age is an exhibition at the AA, for
which they have constructed an installation of their most prestigious
commission to date — a floor at the Hotel Puerta
America in Madrid, which put them among such exalted company as Foster &
Partners, Jean Nouvel, Ron Arad
and Zaha Hadid. Their
remarkable corridor design is an origami constellation of stainless-steel
shards and sleek folds.
In transposing part of the
design into the AA Gallery, Plasma Studio has sought not simply to copy the
original, but to reconfigure it in relation to its new London space.
Essentially an architecture of complex surface, a bending and warping of the
building’s interior skin, it is reworked as a free-standing installation,
taking up most of the gallery space in a way that apparently seeks to
“respond”, by virtue of a series of computational calculations, to the specific
proportions of the Georgian architecture enclosing it.
The result is intriguing,
although part of its appeal in this context comes from its rather rickety
appearance. Constructed from laser-cut timber, only partially clad in its steel
skin when I saw it, the installation looks like a contemporary version of one
of Dada artist Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau
assemblages of seemingly incompatible materials.
Evidently the intention,
aided by projections and field recordings from the hotel itself, is to give the
visitor a sense of the spatial effects of the
One reason for this is that
the gallery space does not provide the structural rhythms, generated by
entrance doors, partition walls and service ducts, that
helped to provoke the productive spatial logic of the original project. If, in
Plasma Studio’s declared
aim is to realise the possibilities afforded by the
computer for the spatial production of new modes of complex abstraction as
against the reduction of architecture to commodified
brand image. The problem is that such abstraction can all too easily transform
into a safely consumable aesthetic image in a gallery context. Nonetheless,
Castro and Kehne’s designs are often both surprising
and technically impressive. However limited its impact in
this environment, as a small glimpse of this creativity a visit to the
exhibition is certainly worthwhile.
Plasma
until December 9 at the AA,
All rights Building
Design - CMD Publishing