FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1997. All Rights Reserved.
The artful architect
Richard Henriquez explores buildings as art while building art
by Mark Walton"Richard Henriquez: Memory Theatre"
at the Nickle Arts Museum untilAnyone who feels that contemporary architecture is a somewhat artless affair should visit the Nickle Arts Museum on the U of C campus and explore the inventive, idiosyncratic world of Vancouver architect Richard Henriquez.
The 55 year-old, award-winning architect makes up stories and mythologies about his building sites, collects objects from them and incorporates it all into his designs and artwork.
Included in the exhibit - which was co-produced by the Vancouver Art Gallery and curated by Howard Shubert of the Canadian Centre for Architecture - are presentation models, notebook sketches, drawings and photos of residential and institutional buildings and, of course, his found object sculptures.
The centerpiece of the show, so to speak, is the "Memory Theatre," a drum-shaped room, 12 feet in diameter, beautifully crafted in maple, which houses several cabinets bearing vintage toys and tools, family documents and photographs, and numerous other keepsakes belonging to the architect.
As one gallery attendant pointed out, Henriquez's installation and sculpture possess a distinctly Victorian sensibility. Indeed, the "Memory Theatre," which in Renaissance times served as a sort of quasi-mystical learning device and was adapted by Henriquez for his Vancouver home, reminds me of the Victorian penchant for curio cabinets and private museums. Moreover, his hybrid sculpture "Mythical Creature with Power Shoes," which is mounted on a surveyor's tripod, or "Chariot #1," which consists of a "deer skull with shark jaw, cow vertebra, bicycle seat, steel rods and bolts" as well as wooden scraps and a wheel, both look like misguided 19th Century experiments in robotics. Neither would seem out of place in an H.G. Wells novel.
Henriquez's preoccupation with certain things, such as bits of bone, has led some writers to allude to the archetypal nature of his imagery, especially the tripods, Tower of Babel structures and boats. In fact, one of his better known projects involved converting a commercial fishing boat into a writer's studio in Banff - after cutting through a mountain of bureaucratic red tape.
Henriquez's witty deployment of objects, however, does not indicate a fascination with the objects themselves as in pop art (although his "Turkey Bone Monument" would have given Claes Oldenburg a run for his money). Instead, they are relics, symbols or "fragments of the whole," as Henriquez noted in his lecture at the Nickle, and part of an "inclusive strategy whose goal is an expression of continuity, to give us orientation in place and time."
Henriquez's interest in acknowledging the past and present cultural context of his buildings is strikingly evident in the photograph of his own house. He jacked up the original main floor of the 1937 English-style cottage and inserted a new one underneath. However, he retained the old one - windows, door and all - as the second floor and the result is a literal layering of history.
When Henriquez planned Eugenia Place in Vancouver's West End, he also took into account the surrounding ecosystem. His architectural rendering includes the ghostly traces of trees that would have existed had it not been a building site. The apartment building itself features a solitary tree perched on the roof, while at ground level he added concrete tree stumps.
On occasion, Henriquez's strategy even entails myth-making, such as the time he decided that a new office tower would be best represented as a goddess stepping out of the ocean onto the beach. His proposal, which envisaged a Statue of Liberty-sized goddess head, was ultimately rejected.
At its worst, contemporary post modern architecture has been reduced to a simplistic decorative formula that has spawned Disney-esque shopping malls. Henriquez, however, has managed to infuse post modern eclecticism with depth and meaning. By investigating the history and cultural milieu of each of his buildings, he celebrates their uniqueness - something that is also reflected in his sketches, sculpture and architectural models and drawings.
Although "Memory Theatre" is a greatly reduced version of the Henriquez exhibit that appeared in Montreal and Vancouver, it is still worth checking out and not just by architects, designers and draughtspeople. It is nice to see that even in the hard-nosed, pragmatic profession of architecture, a person is only limited by the extent of their imagination.
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