Architect’s Exhibit Focuses on the Conceptual

On the deceptively simple face of it, Ben Nicholson’s unexpectedly juicy exhibition at Woodbury University appears to be an exaggerated computer-aided vision of suburban architecture. It resembles a Utopian fantasy along the lines of Disneyland’s “House of Tomorrow,” circa the late 1990s.

But, that’s not the half of it. Nicholson is less interested in concrete, realistic possibilities than conceptual trains of thought, and that’s the real subject of his show. The British-born and now Chicago-based architect has assembled a compelling and not easily deciphered forum of ideas about architecture, the role of things and spaces in our lives, and broader philosophical questions.

The most obvious and immediate paradox in the gallery is the difference between image and text. The gallery walls are carefully stocked with prototype architectural renderings, with the 3-D modeling and digital-worldly palette of colors that we recognize as the products of computers.

Placed between these engaging and weirdly colored images, though, are small, easy to overlook blocks of text that act as a kind of intellectual caulking between the pictures. The words, in faint green letters against black, appear as an afterthought, until you begin reading and are seduced by their reasoning and eloquence.

It’s only at this point that you realize the symbiotic relationship between words and images. Where these two aspects meet is in the elusive silly putty of ideas. In this show, co-presented by Woodbury University and Santa Monica’s Form Zero Architectural Gallery, what you see--in the way of visual stimuli--is not necessarily what you get. It’s something of a setup, an elaborate ruse that raises as many questions as it pretends to answer.

In taking in the show, we’re forced to juggle different modes of perception. We look at images, then ponder a description of an architectural detail Nicholson calls the “Angst Collector” or the alliterative: “Possessions--possessed by possessions.”

In a paragraph describing the prototype house’s entrail-like intercom system, he explains that “the words exude from every pore of the house, its parts become musical instruments, for the silky hush.” A “fridge” is “a synonym for the horn of plenty, a cornucopia of jottings from the supermarket.” Curtains “fold into the windows’ edge, presenting a semiliterate curvaceous blur of the night’s openness.” For Nicholson, it’s a short trip from household objects to poetry.

Elsewhere, he leaps to architectural in-joking by giving a flip definition of the term to “pilasterize,” as “the compression of architectural thought into a tight space, verging on flatness.” And yet architectural theory can be more compelling than other theoretical realms, because it deals with concerns that can be abstract, historical and about basic human needs, all at once.

The irony in this exhibition is that the drawings themselves are scarcely pragmatic. They pose as drawings from a Modernist “machine for living” sensibility, but are wilder than the discarded whims of Frank Gehry, in terms of practical realization and user-friendliness.

On another wall of the gallery, and from another conceptual place entirely, Nicholson hangs bent, gnarled fragments of B-52 bombers. Once instruments of death from on high, they’re now emasculated, reduced to junk art on a wall in Burbank.

In short, the real and mangled material of his bomber relief sculpture, rescued from the military scrap heap, has settled onto the neutral ground of art. It has been presented and transformed, like the seductive but impractical drawings of an illusory home, into fuel for contemplation.

BE THERE

“Ben Nicholson: Two Houses, Part Two” through Oct. 17 at the Woodbury University Gallery, 7500 Glenoaks Blvd., Burbank. Hours: 12:30-4:30 p.m., Tue.-Fri.; (818) 767-0888.