By Stan Allen
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There is a striking photograph, taken on the fifth of May, 1936, that depicts an enormous crowd gathered in what was then called Piazza dell’Impero, to hear Benito Mussolini speaking from the balcony of Terragni’s Casa del Fascio in Como.1 Forcefully distancing image from context, Johnston Marklee have appropriated this iconic photograph as the foreground for an abstracted cut-out of their Stack House in the Grand Traiano Art Complex, Grottaferrata. The resulting montage is one in a series of distinctive images that involve abstracted fragments of their own work grafted into canonical 20th century architectural photographs. Usually executed over the course of the design process, these montages serve to situate their practice in a complex dialogue with the modernist legacy. Other versions include the View House in Rosario framing interior perspectives of both Philip Johnston’s Glass House and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, or the historic photographs of Julius Schulman repurposed to situate Johnston Marklee’s new buildings simultaneously in their actual Los Angeles sites and at the same time in the mythological space of post-war California and the Case Study Houses experiments. Johnston Marklee are attentive to both content and form: these are not only canonical buildings, they are canonical photographs. They recognize that in this era of super-saturated image production, not only do we view architectural history through the veil of representation, buildings themselves are fated to live through images and reproductions. There is a complex web of associations here, as if architecture’s signifying mechanisms have become temporarily unmoored from time and place.
It would be tempting to see this as a facile play with architectural history, or a return to post-modernist strategies of quotation. But theirs is not a scenographic architecture: Johnston Marklee are dedicated builders who have crafted a fully realized, three-dimensional architecture that works in the spatial and sculptural register. In these montages, their own work appears as a disembodied abstraction, blank space re-framing the image in question. Modernism’s preoccupation with space over object is a key lesson Johnston Marklee have learned from their 20th century precursors, and architecture’s capacity to dissolve its physical presence and act as a framing device is central to their practice. A scan of their source material reveals deep modernist roots: Mies, Terragni or the Case Study architects, among others. There is no post-modernist irony to distance Johnston Marklee from their source materials. These montages are a gesture of deep respect, and an affirmation that the modernist legacy, even a full century on, is something worth upholding.
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