_Four Houses, Some Buildings, and Other Spaces_

The room, or rather the frame of space, that comprised Ines Lombardi’s Untitled (OG Residence Scenography of Light and Correlations, 2013) was demarcated by a series of pastel color walls that, rather than by virtue of their structure, activated boundaries by positioning and juxtaposing scale, proximity and color. Entering this space the viewer instigated the acts of belonging and trespassing—and it was this notion of proximity, the politics of place as well as the culture and history of geographies and the built landscape, that underlay “Four Houses, Some Buildings, and Other Spaces.”

Although there have been extensive explorations of site, geography and place in exhibitions, curator Berta Sichel embarked on a hyper-intensive global exploration without any preconception to convey social good. Instead, Sichel selected projects that proffered unique challenges from Japan, to the United Arab Emirates, to Madrid and even the fictitious space of Joseph Hirshhorn’s proposed 1950’s utopian city in Ontario, Canada. This wide net in conjunction with the pedagogic nature of each project provided historical context and posed ever-relevant questions.

To this end, Bernard Leitner’s “The Saving of the Wittgenstein House, Vienna (1969-1971)” was a fascinating account—outlined in a series of letters, texts, photographs and a video—of the arduous process embarked on by filmmaker and writer Petrus van der Let to save the 1926 historic house designed by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The process threw into question the cultural value of the house, eventually requiring its aesthetic be judged in order to be deemed worthy of preservation. “Salamone,” a series of eerily dark photographs by Esteban Pastorino Díaz, documented Argentine government-sponsored town halls, cemeteries and slaughterhouses designed by architect Francisco Salamone between 1936 and 1940. Photographed at night and printed in the nineteenth century technique of gum bichromate, these images expressed the underlying perils of nationalist power and its ideology. This added another brooding sub-text to a multifaceted exhibition.