TROPOLISM

"Architects are formalists. Deal." David Smiley told me that when I was a wee student in the thicket of the early 90s argument about being-a-formalist-or-not. We make things. It's a useless distinction to think otherwise. He was also conveying that what is of concern to us is how those forms are deployed in the service of an idea, and, more importantly, how deep that idea could get. I don't mean Deleuze-deep, I mean mad wicked deep.

Like Roy McMackin deep. His current show at Matthew Marks is all about furniture. The forms change when the ideas behind them change. Sometimes a subtle shift in idea leads to radically different forms...at other times the forms shift slightly. It's a powerful lesson in keeping the idea first. The deep idea.