METAMORPHOSIS Skinned rooms.

ACTIONS Space and indexicality across art and architecture

TRACK B. METAMORPHOSIS / ACTIONS

Giuseppina Scavuzzo: gscavuzzo@units.it

Università degli studi di Trieste

A large part of contemporary architecture works on outer shells, technological skins as screens on which the media power of
architectures as urban objects is displayed.
Some works of contemporary art seem interested to another skin of architecture, with a different sensitivity, the inner one.
It is an invitation for architecture to turn its attention towards its introverted universe, which shares with art an intimate and
empathetic language.
Peter Eisenman includes Libeskind’s Jewish Museum among the Ten canonical buildings that, in his opinion, inaugurate a new
architectural canon. The canon inaugurated by this project is the incorporation of the concept of index into the architectural
language. The museum is read by Eisenman through Rosalind Kraus’s definition of index: unlike the symbol and the icon, the index
“establishes its meaning along the axis of a physical relationship to its referent” and is linked to the issue of absence and presence.
Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of a footprint in the sand reveals to him a human presence on the island.
When the foot lifts up from the sand it leaves the imprint in the depressed sand, at the same time a layer of sand clings to the bottom
of the foot. Thus, through a subtraction of matter, a void, the footprint records the time between the presence and the absence of the
man who left it. The cuts on the walls of the Jewish Museum are compared by Eisenman to this void and to the cuts in Matta – Clark’s
work, described by Krauss as a linguistic shifter “filled with signification only because it is empty”.
In 2017, an exhibition in Venice juxtaposes Matta Clark’s cut – out architecture with the works by Swiss artist Heidi Bucher, who
applies a perfectly indexical operation to architecture, but internally oriented. By coating the interiors of rooms with a thin layer of
latex, which she then peels off like a flayed skin, Bucher creates a surface imprint, an opalescent inner shell. Here there is an echo
of the poetic definition of architecture as “shell of thought” given by John Hejduk who uses the image of opalescent shells left by
some insects in their metamorphosis to another state of being.
Bucher’s “Skinrooms”, like the footprint on Crusoe’s island, are indicative of an absence/presence: they are the imprint of a house
shaped by a lived – in, now spent life. Behind the outer skins of architecture, akin to armours or screens, they show the inner skin
of architecture, the one in contact with the human skin, the sensitive organ of the inhabitant.

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A large part of contemporary architecture works on outer shells, technological skins frequently designed as screens on
which the media power of architecture as urban object is displayed. On the other hand, some works of contemporary art
seem focused on another type of architectural skin with a different sensitivity: the inner one.
These artworks are an invitation for architecture to turn its attention towards its own introverted universe, which shares
with art an intimate and empathetic language. The parallels between the two languages, however, do not only concern the
intimate character but the precise linguistic tools used to render the “poetic resonance” of this interiority.
This essay aims to explore some works of art and architecture in which the linguistic notion of index appears. In particular,
the works examined operate in an indexical manner on the surface of architecture, between the three – dimensionality of
space and the two – dimensional unfolding of its most sensitive organ, its skin.
In his book Ten Canonical Buildings 1950 – 2000, Peter Eisenman includes Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum among
the buildings he defines as canonical, but also introduces the notion of index by talking about the “struggle between
the indexicality of the building and symbolic resonance of the rhetoric” that takes place in the museum. It is therefore
necessary to define what Eisenman means by canon and index.

Canon

That of Eisenman is an unorthodox notion of the canonical. As Stan Allen explains in the foreword in the book, this is not
a “conservative idea of maintaining a timeless undeviating canon,” but its opposite: for Eisenman, says Allen, a canonical
work is “a hinge, a rupture, a premonition of something that necessarily signals a change (…) [Eisenman] is searching
for those moments when the paradigm shift [occurs] (…) A canon usually implies looking back to validate history’s
untouchable monuments. [The] Eisenman canon is instead anticipatory”1. For Eisenman, says Allen, a canonical building
inaugurates a discontinuity in the language of architecture that suggests other, future trajectories and possibilities.
In the case of the Jewish Museum, the discontinuity inaugurated is the negation of the linear axiality, considered
fundamental in Cartesian and classical space. This deconstruction of the axis is gained by engaging the index. Indeed, for
Eisenman, the Museum is “one of the most important realized indexical projects in architecture”2.

Index

Eisenman explains the notion of index through the reference to two lectures entitled Notes on the Index, given by Rosalind
Krauss at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York in the ‘70s.
The term index as defined by Krauss is similar to that established by Charles Sanders Peirce in the distinctions against icon
and symbol. For Peirce, an icon retains a visual likeness to its object, while a symbol operates on the basis of an agreed
conventional meaning. In contrast to the icon’s resemblance and the symbol’s conventionality, the index sustains a less
clear physical relation to its object but is defined by a material connection to it and is linked to the idea of absence and
presence. The index can also be considered a record, or trace, of an actual event or a process.
Eisenman gives an example taken from the novel Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe’s discovery of a footprint in the sand reveals
to him a human presence on the island. When a foot leaves the sand, an impression of the foot remains. At the same time,
a layer of sand clings to the bottom of the foot. Thus, through a subtraction of matter—a void—the footprint records the
time between the presence and the absence of the person who left it. In the second part of Notes on the Index, Krauss
presents another example of an index: the photograph. The photograph demonstrates both process and absence: “The
photograph is considered the index or trace of some condition of fact or reality, and while it is a physical object in itself,
it also reproduces signs of former presences, and therefore undercuts fullness by introducing these absences”3.

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 Fig. 1

Daniel Libeskind,
Berlin Museum
with the Jewish
Museum,
Scale model 1:100,
1989 – 2001,
Wood and paper,
MoMA
collection.

Fig. 2

Gordon Matta
Clark,
Splitting,
New Jersey,
1974.

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This dialectic of the empty and the full lends the index an uncanniness that emerges in an artwork operating on architecture
through the index as an empty sign of an event: the work of Gordon Matta – Clark. As the main representative of
Anarchitecture, by cutting holes in floors, walls and roofs of buildings to be demolished, he challenges the building of
its ability to shelter. As a result, the functions of the building are emptied, shattering any meaning, and transforming the
architecture into an abstract object.
For Krauss, this cut – out architecture represents “the ultimate icon for an indexical architecture” because it works as a
linguistic shifter: a term or action that is “filled with signification only because it is empty”4. Examples of linguistic shifters
are the words this and that, with which we indicate things, or the gesture of pointing a finger, which lends significance to
its referent, but remains empty itself: “an empty pronominal sign”. The cut in Matta – Clark’s work becomes an empty
sign of an event—someone has cut into the building—and at the same time empties the content of the architecture. The
cut, then, becomes the index of the absence.

The Indexicality of Libeskind’s Jewish Museum

According to Eisenman, the indexicality in the museum concerns the negation of axial linearity as an architectural
persistency to be subverted. This negation is achieved by tracing a missing axis onto the zigzagging form of the museum.
As this axis is impressed on the roof—the trace of a continuous path—it becomes disjointed. This is evident in the early
models of the project. In the realized project, this denied axis consists in inaccessible voids extending down through the
floors from the traced roof. These voids are segments of the axis, visible but not traversable.
In addition, the way the stairs are positioned prevents a visitor’s circulation through the museum on a single horizontal
level: “The subject’s movement along a Cartesian conceptual axis is interrupted, as is the ability to remain a single
comprehensible horizontal datum”5. It is a critique of the conventional need to understand space through movement that
is similar, for Eisenman, to Matta – Clark’s critique of the persistence of architecture, its solidity and habitability.
Performing an indexical relationship similar to Matta – Clark’s openings are the apertures on the facade of the Jewish
Museum: they disregard any formal respective window – to – room correlation, bearing no relationship to the interior
spaces.
Unlike conventional windows, they do not correspond to the different floors of the building but cross the surfaces,
indifferent to the relationship between structure and elevation, which makes the organization of a building comprehensible.
Moreover, the windows do not facilitate orientation inside the building, nor do they serve to illuminate the exhibitions.
Libeskind’s cuts then, even if they do not completely empty the architectonic element of windows of their meaning,
nevertheless challenge it, question it.
These actions can also be interpreted as arbitrary gestures that relate to the arbitrary and random execution of Jews by the
German state under Hitler. There is a symbolic reference that is realized through the trace, the index, of events that manifest
the “no meaning”. This leads Eisenman to state that: “Libeskind’s Jewish Museum oscillates between the indexical and the
symbolic, as the indexical register triggers a symbolic key, which then returns the symbolic to the arbitrary”6. Similarly, the
sequence of inaccessible spaces at the center of the museum can be interpreted in terms of poetic resonance, whereby we
feel the emptiness as a symbol of loss, a void left by the absence of the missing people, the victims. Eisenman describes it
as the “struggle between the indexicality of the building and symbolic resonance of the rhetoric”7.

Skinned rooms

Because of this indexical action on architecture, Matta – Clark’s works have been compared to the works of Swiss artist

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 Fig. 3

Heidi Bucher,
Flying Skinroom,
Bellevue,
1988

Fig. 4

Rachel Whiteread,
House,
London,
1993

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Heidi Bucher who applies a perfectly indexical operation to architecture, but internally oriented. In the autumn of 2017,
an exhibition in Venice juxtaposed Matta – Clark’s cut architecture and Heidi Bucher’s skinned architecture. On this
occasion, the films that both artists made demonstrating their action on architecture as an artistic performance were also
presented together.
Bucher’s work consists of covering the interiors of rooms first with gauze, then with a thin layer of liquid latex containing
mother – of – pearl pigments. She then peels off the latex like flayed skin, creating a surface imprint, an opalescent inner
shell. Over time, these surfaces change color, degrade, and take on the appearance of animal scales or something organic.
Pulled out through a door or window, these flaccid skins take on the shape of the room again, as freestanding sculptures.
In some of the performances, the shells, being lightweight translucent latex membranes, take flight and remain suspended
on the building from which they originate. Initially, Bucher chose familiar locations for her works, often interiors of
houses in which she had lived. In her parents’ turn – of – the – century residence in Winterthur, she gravitated toward the
wood – paneled study. The wall featured telling details, including reliefs of a fish and a dragonfly. These creatures pushed
Bucher to incorporate the idea of shedding as a rite of passage into her personal mythology. Her use of mother of pearl
was inspired by its sheen.
Bucher has chosen other places as subjects for the history of the lives they have hosted. In 1990, she created molds of the
Sanatorium Bellevue in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, notorious for housing such patients as Freud’s hysteric Anna O and the art
historian Aby Warburg. One of his works concerns the room in which the talks between the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger
and Warburg took place, which would later be recorded in the book The Infinite Healing, A Clinical History of Aby Warburg.
The cast of the room appears in this case as a ghostly reminder of the spaces, and thoughts, in which healing was sought.

Shell of Thought

This work reminds us of the poetic definition of architecture as “shell of thought” given by John Hejduk, who uses the
image of opalescent shells left by some insects in their metamorphosis to another state of being. Education of an Architect,
a collection of didactic experiences from Cooper Union, Texas, opens with a story about a phenomenon observed there:
“At dusk, some tree trunks seem to be phosphorescent … they give off a dull, blazing light […] the trunk of the tree is
completely covered with discarded shells which were the outer body of certain insects […] The inside has left, leaving the
outer form which looks like an x – ray, producing the luminous effect. Suddenly we hear a chorus of sound coming from
the dark leaves above. It is the sound of the insects hidden in the tree in their new metaphysical form. […] we can see the
insects’ shell forms clinging to the tree, empty shells, a form that life has abandoned. […] we hear the sound of the insect
in its new form hidden in the trees. We can hear it but we cannot see it. In a way, the sound we hear is a soul sound”8.
Only at the end of the book is the meaning of the story revealed: “Art, be it painting, literature, or architecture, is the
remaining shell of thought. Actual thought is of no substance. We cannot actually see thought, we can see only its remains.
Thought manifests itself by its shucking or shedding of itself; it is beyond its confinement”9.
This description, which associates architecture and shell as the physical trace of a thought whose poetic resonance is
retained, seems to reconnect with a long tradition of the poétique du coquillage, where the seashell is a symbol of the
adherence between life, form, and space.
Gaston Bachelard begins the chapter La coquille of his La poétique de l’espace by referring to Les coquillages by Paul
Valéry. Following the poet, Bachelard examines the principle that governs the form of the spira mirabilis: the process
of exudation and crystallization of organic matter through which shells are formed. The motto of the mollusk could then
be: “il faut vivre pour bâtir sa maison et non bâtir sa maison pour y vivre”10—first there is life, then home. Home is the
result of life, not a prerequisite for it. For Valéry, however, the construction of one’s own shell is, more than an condition

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 of life, a presupposition of the living being’s death. It is necessary for the mollusk to withdraw from the shell after having
constructed it with its secretion. It is, in fact, the shell itself, abandoned by the mollusk, that becomes the object of
intellectual and artistic attention. In the same way that for wood to resonate in a musical instrument, it must be emptied
of its lymph. It is, as in the image described by Hejduk, the transmutation into a durable and “resonant” form of the life
that is at last absent from its shell.

Skin and Fabric

Bucher’s Skinrooms, like the footprint on Crusoe’s island, are indicative of an absence/presence: they are the imprint of
a house shaped by a lived – in, now spent life. Unlike the works of Matta – Clark or the inaccessible voids of Libeskind,
Bucher’s rooms “remained inhabitable spaces, retaining the function of enclosure offered by the surfaces from which they
were modeled while radically transmuting the fundamental properties of those solid planes”11.
This is what ultimately separates Bucher from many of the other artists who have in recent decades turned toward various
forms of architectural trace, from rubbings or castings to reconstructions.
For example, in House—Rachel Whiteread’s most famous work—she casts the interior space of a home in concrete. Like
in Luigi Moretti’s models, the space is revealed through its solidification.
In Bucher’s molds, space is not solidified, but defined by its tremulous border, by the milky skin that waves in the air.
Instead of space, what is solidified is the point of contact between our touch and architecture. Bucher comes from the
world of fashion and her first works of gauze and latex casts were made on the body, directly in contact with human skin.
From these “bodyshells,” like cocoons left by a creature in metamorphosis towards another form, Bucher transfers action
into architecture. The indexical potential of skinned rooms reminds us that behind the outer hard skins of contemporary
architecture—frequently designed as screens or technological shells— there is also an inner skin of architecture.
This inner skin is in contact with the human skin, the largest organ of the human body, to which a dense network of nerve
connections gives the function of an organ of relation: the sentient organ of the inhabitant. Skin is also a tissue, and the
textile/architecture relationship occurs in works that pursue a sensitive connection with human touch.
One example is the concrete used by Peter Zumthor in his house in Haldenstein. By covering the formworks with fabric,
the Swiss architect performs the opposite operation to Bucher’s, as it is the fabric that leaves its impression on the
architectural surface and not vice versa. The result is a wall surface that preserves the texture of the fabric, to which our
touch is sensitive, so that “You would never stop caressing these walls”12.

A Human Imprint

Bucher’s casts, however, record not only the richness of material textures but also the way human life marks them:
scratches, cracks, and smoothing occur through use and are registered by latex. The use marks those materials with which
we come into deep connection because, like mollusk shells, even if they are not our secretion, they age and are modified
with us. Some materials are more susceptible to being marked by us, while others—which are increasingly in demand
today—have inalterability as their main guaranteed characteristic.
Environmental psychologist Robert Sommer has used the expression “hard architecture” to define buildings and
furnishings that aim to resist the user in order to preserve his or her safety and security. In fact, usually such buildings and
furnishings cannot be customized or modified by the user. In doing so, Sommer points out, such architecture will “resist
human imprint”. What resists our imprint exhibits indifference to us, and so repels us.
Another function of the index defined by Rosalind Krauss, as we saw at the beginning, is to point at things, like the

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pointing finger gesture.
Bucher’s works point us to the relationship between space and life, space and thought, architecture and human life and
thought, and witness this relationship through its absence, in the emptiness of the suspended shells.
Just as Libeskind’s voids and cuts symbolically refer to the men and women lost, so Bucher’s works symbolize not only
the past lives of their inhabitants but what we have lost—or we are in danger of losing—with respect to architecture.
In those voids, we feel the poetic resonance of (lost) tactile symbiosis with the places we inhabit.

ENDNOTES

1
Allen S., in Eisenman P., Ten Canonical Buildings 1950 – 2000, Rizzoli (New York 2008), pp. 9 – 12.
2
Eisenman P., Ten Canonical Buildings1950 – 2000, Op. Cit, p. 233.
3
Ivi, p. 232.
4
Ivi, pp. 232 – 233.
5
Ivi, p. 237.
6
Ibid.
7
Ivi, p. 238.
8
Hejduk J., Education of an Architect: The Irwin S. Chanin of Architecture of the Cooper Union, Rizzoli (New York, 1988), non –
numbered page.
9
Ivi, 340.
10
Bachelard G., “La coquille”, La poétique de l’espace, Paris, Puf, 1957, p.106.
11
Rose J., “Heidi Bucher”, in Artforum International, May 2014, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/201405/heidi – bucher –
46344, consulted on 20 May 2021
12
Canobbio A., ”Impassibile/Incandescente,” in Abitare n. 479, (February 2008), pp. 92 – 96.

REFERENCES

Eisenman P. (2008), Ten Canonical Buildings 1950 – 2000, Rizzoli, New York
Krauss R. (1977), “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America”, October, Vol. 3, pp. 68 – 81.
Wigley M. (2018), Cutting Matta – Clark: The Anarchitecture Project, Lars Muller Publishers, Zürich.
Bucher H. (1981), film Räume sind hüllen, sind häute (Spaces are shells, are skins), Produced and directed by Reinhart G., Edited by
Killer P., 33:36 min.
Bria G. (2018), “Heidi Bucher. Skinned casts of reality”, Domusweb, https://www.domusweb.it/en/art/2018/12/03/heidi – bucher –
skinned – casts – of – reality.html
Hejduk J., Henderson R., eds. (1988), Education of an Architect: The Irwin S. Chanin of Architecture of the Cooper Union, Rizzoli,
New York, p. 340.

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