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Gordon Matta-Clark's Indelible Influence on Architecture: The late artist—whose work is spotlighted in a new
show—inspired many architects

TEXT BY FRED A. BERNSTEIN

Posted November 15, 2017

Gordon Matta-Clark was intensely political. When he sawed a house in half ( Splitting, 1974), he was
commenting on the dissolution of the American family. When he cut a hole through the floor of a
Bronx tenement, he was calling attention to society’s failure to provide adequate housing.

But the social commentary alone didn’t make him one of a small number of artists whose work has
had a profound impact on architecture. (Others in that pantheon include Donald Judd and James
Turrell.) That impact, which continues 40 years after Matta-Clark’s death, can be traced to his
trademark approach to the built environment, in which walls, floors, and ceilings were not
sacrosanct, but subjects of destructive investigation.

Matta-Clark, the son of artists Roberto Matta and Anna Louise Clark, studied architecture at Cornell
in the late 1960s, a period of dissolution, disillusionment, and protest. After graduating in 1968 he
returned to his native New York City and began not to build but to respond to existing buildings. In
the Bronx, Matta-Clark began sawing holes through the floors of tenements; the borough’s derelict
housing was his raw material.

The exhibition Gordon Matta-Clark, Anarchitect , at the Bronx Museum of Art (through April 18)
includes not only photographs by Matta-Clark of the resulting cutouts but an actual floor-joists-
ceiling sandwich that he removed from one of them. If it worked as sculpture in his makeshift gallery
on Greene Street (and is one of many compelling reasons to see the Bronx Museum show), it was
much more than that, the equivalent of tissue prepared for biopsy. The artist Dan Graham has written
that “Matta-Clark saw his ‘cuts’ as probes . . . opening up socially hidden information beneath the
surface.” It is a jarring reminder of an age when buildings were being stripped or torched all over the
South Bronx; Matta-Clark shed light on the conflagration.

When contemporary architects carve away at structures as a way of revealing things never meant to
be seen, they are channelling Matta-Clark. (Fittingly, Matta-Clark’s archive is housed not at an art
museum but at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.) Take Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s decision to
hack off a corner of New York’s Alice Tully Hall. Charles Renfro explains the approach as one of
two possible “sculpting moves”—inspired by masters hundreds of years apart: “When you think of
the solid material you are acting on as marble, you get Michelangelo,” Renfro says. “When you think
of the solid material you are acting on as a building, you get Gordon Matta-Clark.

But the architect whose work bears the greatest resemblance to Matta-Clark may be Steven Holl,
whose buildings often appear to be carved out, rather than constructed. Indeed, the removal of
spherical volumes from a rectangular solid (the genesis of Holl’s experimental Ex of In House in
Rhinebeck, New York) is a cousin of one of Matta-Clark’s most famous pieces, called Conical
Intersect. Created for the Paris Biennial in 1975, it consisted of a cone hollowed out of two derelict
17th-century buildings near the site of the Pompidou Center.

Rem Koolhaas, too, has Matta-Clark instincts. Chosen to build a student center alongside a Mies van
der Rohe building in Chicago, Koolhaas exposed the foundation of Mies’s building, something the
perfectionist Mies never intended to display, and showcased it behind a picture window.
Matta-Clark died of cancer at 35. There is no telling what he would have achieved as an artist if he
had lived. And there is no telling what he might have achieved as an architect, had he chosen to
pursue that path. We get a certain hint of what his buildings might have looked like, though, in the
work of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Holl, Koolhaas, and other contemporary masters.