ARCHITECTURE : REVIEW : Danger: Walls With an Attitude : The design firm Coop Himmelblau combines European modernism and California experimentation in two LACMA installations

In the long history of museum exhibitions, few installations have approached the effectiveness of two related shows currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art: “Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy” and “John Heartfield: Photomontages.”

The separate, but contiguous, shows, which cover the first floor of LACMA’s Anderson Wing, were designed by the controversial Austro-American firm Coop Himmelblau, whose dual offices in Vienna and Los Angeles reflect its members’ ties both to European modernism and to California experimentation.

At a time when the museum world and the profession of architecture are suffering deeply from the worldwide recession, when LACMA, in particular, is experiencing severe financial problems and when Himmelblau, despite its hot international reputation, has shockingly little work in the United States, it is a stroke of good timing that the current collaboration achieves such heights of excellence.

When “Utopias” and “Heartfield” opened in late October, they received enthusiastic reviews from Times art critic William Wilson, who focused logically on their artistic “content” while briefly applauding their sympathetic installations. In the six weeks since their opening, however, with less than a month remaining before the shows close in January, the interest aroused by the connected exhibitions in the architectural community demands a separate assessment of their path-breaking installation designs.

When Wolf Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky formed an architectural office in 1968, the two young architects, fresh out of school, eschewed the Establishment practice of naming the firm for themselves and chose instead the winsome sobriquet that translates into English as the Blue Sky Cooperative.

“We are tired of . . . historical masks,” they proclaimed in a manifesto reminiscent of contemporaneous war cries by Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg.

“We want architecture that bleeds, that exhausts, that whirls and even breaks. Architecture that lights up, that stings, that rips, and under stress, tears. Architecture should be cavernous, fiery, smooth, hard, angular, brutal, round, delicate, colorful, obscene, voluptuous, dreamy, alluring, repelling, wet, dry, and throbbing.”

The firm’s most noted work to date is the elegantly skewed steel-and-glass Funder Factory in St. Veit/Glan, Austria (1988), and a futuristic rooftop law office in the heart of old Vienna that crouches like a high-tech grasshopper atop a swag-encrusted 19th-Century office building. Current projects under construction or in final design stages include an art museum for Gronigen, the Netherlands, a studio-residence for German artist Anselm Kiefer, a cinematheque for Dresden, Germany, and the set designs for Stravinsky’s “Oedipus Rex,” to be staged at the 1994 Salzburg Festival by fellow enfant terrible Peter Sellers.

In Salzburg, the “sets” will be placed only in the entrance foyer and on the outside front of the opera house. Opera-goers will experience and walk through them before taking their seats before a virtually empty stage.

Only slightly less fantastic is a steel-and-glass house being planned for a family of four in L.A.’s Topanga Canyon. Throughout its work, Coop Himmelblau has stressed the modernist commitment to an architecture of structural explicitness.

Frank Stepper, who joined Himmelblau as a third partner in 1982, works solely in the Los Angeles office while Swiczinsky holds down the Viennese side. The peripatetic Prix floats back and forth between the two.

“We decided to establish the L.A. office,” Stepper says, “because we were attracted to the region’s tradition of architectural experimentation.”

They appreciated the city’s modernist heritage in the work of such earlier Viennese expatriates as Rudolph Schindler and Richard Neutra and such American mavericks as John Lautner, a Taliesin disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. And like most members of their architectural generation, they were drawn to the offbeat genius of Frank Gehry and the circle of younger L.A. architects who acknowledge his patrimony.

But they also came here, Stepper insists, because they so admired the best of contemporary film and music, the cutting edge of which was clustered in Hollywood.

“We assumed that these brilliant, crazy people might decide they wanted our crazy architecture,” he says--and want it in a way that a previous generation of moguls and actors, such as Josef von Sternberg, Albert Lewin, Luise Rainer and other Hollywood figures, had been drawn to what was then considered the equally “crazy” modernism of Neutra and Schindler. But to date, at least, that has not been the case.

“I am baffled,” Stepper says, “by the brilliant figures in the entertainment world whose own work is clearly on the edge of their fields, who live and work in such old-fashioned buildings.”

*

One leading figure of the Los Angeles cultural Establishment, LACMA curator Stephanie Barron, was an exception to such regional blindness in her excited discovery of Himmelblau at an early showing of the firm’s still-unbuilt “Open House” for Malibu. Barron’s fellow LACMA curator Timothy Benson shared her enthusiasm and decided to commission the architects for the “Utopias” show. The result is that LACMA has become the client-patron of Himmelblau’s first completed work in America.

Cogently conceived and organized by Benson, who oversees the museum’s Robert Gore Rifkind Center for German Expressionist Studies, “Expressionist Utopias” presents and explicates the visionary prescriptions by early 20th-Century German artists and architects for the better society that was to come.

“While Utopia is a vital ingredient of nearly all social ideologies,” Benson argues in the exhibition catalogue, “it is not so much a fixed ideal as a mediation between the ideal and the real, a means of propelling thought forward, of helping it transcend what already is. As an embodiment or vision of what might be, utopia defines itself through opposition to the historical context, thereby gaining a strong social resonance.”

During the period between the turn of the century and the Weimar period of the 1920s, the curator concludes: “Germany endured extreme social disjunction brought on by galloping industrialization, the horrific world war that industrialization made possible and the social and economic instability that followed. The architectural fantasies at the center of this exhibition represent a response to these conditions, expressing the faith among artists and architects in the power of aesthetic activity to shape a better world.”

The five major parts of the exhibition emphasize this chronological and topical development. In the opening section, “Paradise,” the works are mounted on long, sloping wall fragments suggesting fallen trees in the Expressionist forest. The viewer then moves through Himmelblau’s Neo-Expressionist street-scapes toward visions of the utopian “metropolis,” to urban and rural architectural fantasies, to negative antipodal reactions to utopia and finally to the expression of utopian and dystopian visions in Expressionist theater and film, particularly Robert Wiene’s “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1919) and Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1926).

*

In designing the installation, Himmelblau was careful not to mimic in a literal way the Expressionist forms of 80 years before, but rather to allude, from a 1990s perspective, to the essence of Expressionist utopian values. Certain objects in the show, such as Johannes Molzahn’s “Roar of the Stars” (1919) and Hermann Finsterlin’s “Geometric Penetrations” (1923), suggested the directions the designers should take. Whereas certain actual Expressionist environments, including the epochal sets for “Caligari,” featured dark, claustrophobic spaces, Himmelblau’s installation design emphasizes open and light-filled, if no less vertiginous, spaces. It favors metal, wooden and glazed, transparent surfaces, the latter allowing the backs of labels and pictures to show through to the other side.

Columns tilt and hover in suspended animation like the mechanical dolls of Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet. Ascending and descending paths form bridges connecting thematic sections. In an acknowledged tribute to their friend Frank Gehry, Prix and Stepper backlighted the unfinished wooden props supporting the tilted walls to effect dramatic patterns high across the gallery’s ceilings. Section labels are projected by spotlighted stencils onto the floor.

In one particularly effective gesture, wispy line drawings by Finsterlin, originally drawn for reversible display on translucent tracing paper, are enlarged and conveyed to glass partition walls.

Though several observers have averred that the installation “overwhelms” the materials being shown, the consensus tilts strongly in the other direction. Himmelblau’s rich forms, in fact, seduce and direct the viewer into an ever more focused viewing of the work. The show demands that visitors traverse it slowly, stopping often to survey the variety of architectural perspectives.

As Benson was organizing the LACMA-generated “Utopias” exhibition, Barron was planning the installation of German artist John Heartfield’s left-of-center, anti-fascist, agitprop photomontages, a show originated by New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Barron decided that the borrowed show should be closely linked to Benson’s exhibition and that Coop Himmelblau should design them both.

Whereas the “Utopias” installation supports that show’s frequently mystical aura of sublime Expressionist fantasy, the Heartfield installation is appropriately more direct and loud. Choosing starkly painted walls rather than the natural surfaces of the “Utopias” installation, the designers display the original Heartfield materials on tilted surfaces while projecting overhead vast enlargements of the same startling images. While MOMA’s New York installation was a noncommittal lineup of objects along the gallery’s walls, the LACMA-Himmelblau installation heightens the explosive, in-your-face nature of Heartfield’s confrontational art.

*

In this complex double installation, several flaws mar an otherwise perfect achievement. In both shows, certain labels and texts are difficult to read because they are placed out of convenient eye range or because they are printed in too small a typeface on transparent, reflecting surfaces. In the visually compelling and historically edifying slide show at the rear of the exhibit, wretched acoustics render the narration almost inaudible.

The curators claim that high costs prevented the proper acoustical insulation--a problem that in better financial times could have been easily solved with a call to a sympathetic board member or museum patron. Even, however, in these worst of times, the relatively generous funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and other agencies should have been stretched to cover such essential educational items.

When 4-year-old Allyson Onoye recently visited the Heartfield exhibition with her grandfather, she nearly bumped her head on a sharply protruding wall and made the observation that this was a “dangerous” show. While the museum should try to “childproof” its exhibitions if it wishes to engage the coming generation, Allyson’s characterization of the show as dangerous was more complexly insightful than she knew.

The savage truths of Heartfield’s montages would indeed seem dangerous to the Nazis he would ridicule so mercilessly in the 1930s. They would also seem dangerous to the rulers of East Germany, where Heartfield, the socialist, languished as a non-person until his lonely death in the 1960s. Likewise, many of the Expressionist utopian visions would seem so dangerous to the Nazis for many of the same reasons that they declared them degenerate and banished them from sight.

In other ways, ironically, various Expressionist motifs, especially the use of “columns of light,” seem dangerous in retrospect in predicting the Nazi spectacles of Goebbels, Speer, and Riefenstahl.

*

For anyone interested in the potential of design in both its brighter and darker moments, from the early-20th-Century objects on view to the late-20th installation of them, “Expressionist Utopias” and “John Heartfield” are not to be missed. LACMA, particularly, in its winter of discontent, should be applauded for such an adventurous and successful achievement. In fact, the convergence of talents in the conception and installations of these remarkable exhibitions constitutes a memorable event in the city’s cultural history.

* “John Heartfield: Photomontages,” through Jan. 2, and “Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy,” through Jan. 16, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Wed.-Thur., 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; Fri., 10 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat.-Sun., 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Call for holiday hours: (213) 857-6000.