He's still critiquing the architecture profession, only now he's one of its practitioners.
The 68-year-old poet-artist-architect has built only a handful of structures since officially declaring himself an architect in the late 1980s, yet he has probably done more to shake up the field with his theories and fantastical renderings than most architects do with bricks and mortar. His provocative ideas have infiltrated the work of such firms as UNStudio and Foreign Office Architects.
Those explorations are the subject of a major retrospective titled "Power Fields" at the Slought Foundation gallery in West Philadelphia, curated by Christine Poggi of the University of Pennsylvania and Meredith Malone of St. Louis' Kemper Art Museum. You can bet this survey won't be Acconci's last.
Coming from outside the club, Acconci has been able to look at architecture with a provocateur's eye. Just as his performances were a way of rebelling against the commodification of art, his architecture now questions the building as an exalted totem that exists apart from its users and its place.
That critique is timely, given that architecture increasingly treats cities as mere backdrops for stand-alone icons.
Anyone who makes buildings and public spaces, Acconci believes, is really a kind of dictator. And he reluctantly includes himself in that description. "One of the reasons architecture fascinates me," he explains, "is that when you design a space, you're designing behavior."
Architects determine how we walk through a building, where we can sit, and whether we'll ever get to see sunlight from our cubicles. The relationship between creators and users is never easy. When architects honor our arrival by designing a soaring vault of space, we praise them as heroes. When they force us to squeeze sideways past the sink to reach our gym locker, we curse them as sadists.
