YAŞAR UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE SCHOOL OF NATURAL AND APPLIED SCIENCES

MASTER THESIS

BETWEEN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

REDEFINING ADAPTIVE REUSE IN THE WORKS OF

GORDON MATTA-CLARK

ISRA KIRLAR

THESIS ADVISOR: ASSIST. PROF. DR. N. EBRU AYDENİZ

INTERIOR ARCHITECTURE

PRESENTATION DATE: 23.11.2017

BORNOVA / İZMİR
NOVEMBER 2017
 ABSTRACT

BETWEEN ART AND ARCHITECTURE - REDEFINING ADAPTIVE

REUSE IN THE WORKS OF GORDON MATTA-CLARK

Kırlar, İsra
MSc, Interior Architecture and Environmental Design
Advisor: Assist. Prof. Dr. N. Ebru AYDENİZ

November 2017

Nowadays, adaptively reused abandoned buildings shoulder a conventional

architectural function like giving shelter, being places for education or entertainment.
But the main aspect of abandoned buildings is that they have outlived their duties, have
lost their identities and are no longer in possession of a function. On these grounds, it
is of importance to question, if the building can regain a new identity without having
a conventional architectural function and to look after new potentials in the adaptive
reuse practice. The discipline art is seen as more relaxed practice in terms of function
than architecture, because art is not functional in traditional terms, unlike architecture,
it does not need to cover functional, social or economic dependencies.

The aim of this thesis is to expand the concept of adaptive reuse by moving outside
the traditional boundaries of architectural function and considering art as a revitalizing
discipline, where architecture can benefit from, to find out traces of new potentials of
buildings reused with a non-conventional function. This investigation demonstrates
through theory and criticism from theorists the importance of non-function for
adaptive reuse from the beginnings of modernism until today. This thesis mainly
focuses on the avant-garde architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s social
interventions on abandoned buildings and sites as public sculptures and on recent
projects effected by Matta-Clark’s destructive way of uncovering new potentials and
making meaning through buildings.

Key Words: adaptive reuse, intervention, public sculpture, function, Gordon Matta-
Clark, resocialization

v
 ÖZ

SANAT VE MİMARLIK ARASINDA – GORDON MATTA-CLARK’IN

ESERLERİNDE YENİDEN İŞLEVLENDİRME

Kırlar, İsra
Yüksek Lisans Tezi, İç Mimarlık ve Çevre Tasarımı
Danışman: Yrd.Doç.Dr. N. Ebru AYDENİZ

Kasım 2017

Günümüzde terk edilmiş yapılar için kullanılan yeniden işlevlendirme kavramı

barınma, eğitim veya eğlence mekanları gibi geleneksel mimari fonksiyonu
kapsamaktadir. Terk edilmiş yapıların temel özelliği kimliklerini kaybetmiş olmaları
ve artık yapının eski işlevini yerine getiremediğidir. Bu gerekçelerle yapının
konvansyonel mimari işlevi olmaksızın yeni bir kimliğe kavuşması ve yeniden
işlevlendirme alanı için müdahalelerin ne tür potansiyeller açığa çıkardığını
sorgulamak büyük önem taşımaktadır.
Sanat ve mimarlık disiplinleri, çoğu kez işleve olan bağıntılarıyla ayırt edilirler. Sanat,
mimarinin yanında fonksiyon açısından daha rahat bir dissiplin olarak görülmektedir,
çünkü sanat geleneksel anlamda işlevsel değildir ve mimarinin aksine işlevsel, sosyal
ya da ekonomik bağımlılıkları yoktur. Bu tezin temel amacı, yeniden islevlendirme
kapsamında mimari işlevin geleneksel sınırlarının dışına çıkmak ve sanatı mimarinin
yararlanabileceği canlandırıcı bir disiplin olarak ele almak ve aynı zamanda
fonksyonel olmayan müdahaleler sayesinde açığa çıkardığı potansiyelleri bulmaktır.
Bu tez, modernizmden günümüze, mimar ve teorisyenlerden elde edilen teori ve
eleştiri yoluyla, aslında birbirine tezat olan, işlevsizliğin yeniden işlevlendirme
alanındaki önemini kanıtlamaktadır. Bunun icin avant-garde mimar ve sanatçı Gordon
Matta-Clark'ın terk edilmiş yapılara ve alanlara yapmış olduğu müdahalelere ve
günümüzde etki ettiği yeni projelere odaklanılacaktır.

Anahtar Kelimeler: yeniden islevlendirme, müdahale, fonksyon, kamusal heykel,

Gordon Matta-Clark, yeniden sosyalleştirme

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Assist. Prof. Dr. N. Ebru AYDENİZ
for her guidance and patience during this study.

I would like to express my enduring love to my family, who are always supportive,
loving and caring to me in every possible way in my life.

İsra Kırlar
İzmir, 2017

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 TEXT OF OATH

I declare and honestly confirm that my study, titled “BETWEEN ART AND
ARCHITECTURE - REDEFINING ADAPTIVE REUSE IN THE WORKS OF
GORDON MATTA-CLARK” and presented as a Master’s Thesis, has been written
without applying to any assistance inconsistent with scientific ethics and traditions. I
declare, to the best of my knowledge and belief, that all content and ideas drawn
directly or indirectly from external sources are indicated in the text and listed in the
list of references.

İsra Kırlar

December 22, 2017

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT v

ÖZ vii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

TEXT OF OATH xi

TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii

LIST OF FIGURES xv

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1. Problem Statement and Research Questions 2
1.2. Aim and Scope 3
1.3. Literature Review 3
1.4. Structure and Methodology 5

CHAPTER 2 INTERSECTION OF ART AND ADAPTIVE REUSE 7

2.1. Contextualizing Adaptive Reuse 7
2.2. The Role of Conceptual Art in Adaptive Reuse 13
2.3. Function as an Intersection for Art and Architecture 18

CHAPTER 3 GORDON MATTA-CLARK 25

2.4. Introducing Gordon Matta-Clark 25
2.4.1. A Career between Art and Architecture 27
2.4.2. Anarchitecture: Influences, Motivation and Ideology 30
2.5. Analyzing Selected Works: Methodology and Tools 32
2.5.1. Splitting 35
2.5.2. Pier 52 39
2.5.3. Conical Intersect 44
2.5.4. Office Baroque 49
2.6. Effects on Contemporary Adaptive Reuse Projects 55

CHAPTER 4 CONCLUSION AND FURTHER RESEARCH 63

REFERENCES 66

xiii
 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 2.1.1 Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau, 1931 .......................................................... 8

Figure 2.1.2 Museum of Castelvecchio by Carlo Scarpa, 1956-1964 ..................................... 9

Figure 2.2.1 Art as Idea as Idea by Joseph Kosuth, 1966 ...................................................... 14

Figure 2.2.2 One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth, 1965................................................. 14

Figure 2.2.3 Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value by Sol
Lewitt, 1968 ............................................................................................................ 16

Figure 2.3.1 Fun Palace by Cedric Price, 1962 ...................................................................... 21

Figure 2.3.2 Parc de la Villette by Bernard Tschumi, 1982-83 ............................................. 22

Figure 2.4.1 Gordon Matta-Clark, 1973 ................................................................................ 25

Figure 2.4.2 Food Restaurant, 1971 vs. 2000 ........................................................................ 27

Figure 2.5.1 Conical Intersect, 1975 ...................................................................................... 32

Figure 2.5.2 Splitting / Four Corners ..................................................................................... 34

Figure 2.5.3 Location of Splitting today, via Google Maps, 2017 ........................................ 35

Figure 2.5.4 Splitting, 1974 ................................................................................................... 36

Figure 2.5.5 Splitting, 1974 ................................................................................................... 37

Figure 2.5.6 Photo-Collage Section of Splitting, 1974 .......................................................... 37

Figure 2.5.7 Photo-Collage of Splitting, 1974 ....................................................................... 38

Figure 2.5.8 Location of Pier 52 today, via Google Maps, 2017 ........................................... 39

Figure 2.5.9 Pier 52, 1975 ...................................................................................................... 40

Figure 2.5.10 Schematic for Day’s End, Pier 52, 1975 ......................................................... 41

Figure 2.5.11 Day’s End, 1975 .............................................................................................. 41

Figure 2.5.12 Google Earth view of the renewed Pier 52, 2017 ............................................ 43

Figure 2.5.13 Location of Conical Intersect today, via Google Maps, 2017 ......................... 44

Figure 2.5.14 Conical Intersect, 1975 .................................................................................... 45

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Figure 2.5.15 Conical Intersect .............................................................................................. 46

Figure 2.5.16 Schematic for Conical Intersect, 1975 ............................................................. 47

Figure 2.5.17 Conical Intersect, 1975 .................................................................................... 48

Figure 2.5.18 Light Conical Intersect by Pierre Huyghe, 1996 ............................................. 48

Figure 2.5.19 Location of Office Baroque today, via Google Maps, 2017 ........................... 49

Figure 2.5.20 Office Baroque, 1977 ...................................................................................... 50

Figure 2.5.21 Office Baroque, 1977 ...................................................................................... 50

Figure 2.5.22 Plan for Office Baroque, 1977 ......................................................................... 51

Figure 2.5.23 Office Baroque, 1977 ...................................................................................... 52

Figure 2.5.24 Fragment of Office Baroque, 2004 .................................................................. 53

Figure 2.6.1 Pizzo Sella Art Village, 2016 ............................................................................ 55

Figure 2.6.2 Pizzo Sella Art Village, 2016 ............................................................................ 56

Figure 2.6.3 Art by Collective FX - Pizzo Sella Art Village, 2016 ...................................... 57

Figure 2.6.4 Bunker 599 by RAAAF and Atelier De Lyon, 2013 ......................................... 58

Figure 2.6.5 Bunker 599 by RAAAF and Atelier De Lyon, 2013 ......................................... 59

Figure 2.6.6 Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, 2017 ............................................ 60

Figure 2.6.7 Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, 2017 ............................................ 61

Figure 2.6.8 Turning the Place Over by Richard Wilson, 2007............................................. 62

Figure 2.6.9 Turning the Place Over by Richard Wilson, 2007............................................. 62

xvi
 CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION

Today, working with existing buildings, reusing and restoring them for a continued use
has become a sustainable and creative option within the architectural discipline.
Because working with the given fabric offers economic, cultural and social benefits
and initiates a revitalized environment. By conserving the old fabric, a variety of new
uses, culture and society can be achieved and by the time maintains the city’s identity.
In this point, adaptive reuse is regarded as an important field in the architectural
discipline making it possible to redefine and maintain diverse surroundings with
different building types from different timelines. By reusing abandoned and
unoccupied buildings even decreasing crime rates seem to be possible, because
inaccessible, unoccupied buildings and places arouse a sense of fear and insecurity.
The main aspect of abandoned buildings is that they have outlived their duties, have
lost their identities and are no longer in possession of a function. But it is also important
to question if the building can regain a new identity without having a conventional
architectural function.

To the end of World War II and the end of modernism, the intellectual and artistic
developments of the 1960s profoundly changed the attitude of the society towards old
buildings in order to develop new strategies to assure their continued use and
reintegration to their surroundings. At this time with the occurrence of the conceptual
art movement, adaptive reuse became a discipline with a philosophy and a theory
behind it. As one of the first precursors of adaptive reuse can be regarded the French
architect Pierre Chareau, who started to try out adaptive reuse between 1928-1932,
after him came Carlo Scarpa who transformed an old French apartment. Gordon Matta-
Clark came later in the 1960’s with a profoundly different idea. He as a trained
architect and practicing artists, intervened on buildings to simultaneously define a
place where art is accommodated and by the time where architecture is displayed as
the object of art and beyond. He made it possible through reusing abandoned buildings

1
and derelict sites to create art, by using architecture as a tool and furthermore to
provide a consciousness about art and architecture in a context.

1.1. Problem Statement and Research Questions

Adaptive reuse has to overcome in contemporary architectural design conventional

functions like simply providing shelter or more complex duties like designing specific
surgery rooms for hospitals. But besides the conventional sense of function, it is
important to look after new potentials in the adaptive reuse practice, in order to prevent
a continued repetition of same strategies, which can cause a lack of creativity in further
architectural development and also might cause a loss of diversity in contemporary
architecture. The urban fabric needs to stay diverse, to provide a variety of culture and
conserving the city ‘s identity, architecture needs to learn from other disciplines. Not
only historic buildings but also abandoned just old buildings need to be readapted to
maintain diversity and achieve development of the city’s own character. Therefore,
adaptive reuse is at first glance a good option but it has limitations as to overcome
functional, social and economic concerns. In contrast to architecture, art is a discipline
free from all these concerns. Regarding the building as a public sculpture serves here
as a common ground for both disciplines.

Therefore, the hypothesis of this investigation is defined as followed; the adaptive

reuse of abandoned buildings as public sculptures provide a redefined form of
architectural function in terms of adaptive reuse. According to the hypothesis, the
research questions are formulated as followed:

1. Adaptive reuse is basing on functional terms. Can a buildings reuse as a public

sculpture provide any architectural function?

2. What kind of new uses and potentials can be revealed, in order to redefine the
concept of adaptive reuse?

3. If the existing building becomes through intervention a non-functional public

sculpture, can we speak of being literally adaptively reused?

2
1.2. Aim and Scope

This thesis is questioning the dependencies of adaptive reuse and the conventional
architectural function in architecture. Therefore, in this investigation Gordon Matta-
Clark is regarded as the key contributor of reusing buildings on a destructive and non-
functional way. Matta-Clark’s works were carried out in the timeline from 1972 until
his death in 1978, whereby the majority of his interventions on abandoned town houses
and industrial buildings took place in New York and were carried out in Europe.

The shifting in Matta-Clark’s works from the buildings conventional identity as to

fulfil architectural function like living in it, into an abstract form of architecture leads
to focus on the term function in adaptive reuse and regarding other disciplines besides
architecture, in order to benefit from them and to develop architectural theory and
design principles. The aim of this thesis is to expand the concept of adaptive reuse by
moving outside the traditional boundaries of architectural function and considering art
as a revitalizing discipline, where architecture can benefit from, to find out traces of
new potentials of buildings reused with a non-conventional function. This
investigation demonstrates through theory and criticism from theorists the meaning of
function in adaptive reuse from the beginnings of modernism until today and focuses
on the avant-garde architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s interventions on
abandoned buildings and sites as public sculptures and on recent projects effected by
Matta-Clark’s destructive way of uncovering new potentials and making meaning
through buildings.

1.3. Literature Review

Gordon Matta-Clark’s idea of intervening in abandoned buildings with an artistic

manner to assure their integration back to the urban fabric, aroused the questioning of
the dependencies of architectural function in adaptive reuse. Therefore, an
investigation began about literature containing adaptive reuse principles and the search
for meaning of function vs. no function in the works of Gordon Matta-Clark. This
investigation leads to Fred Scott’s (2008) Altering on Architecture, Bollack’s (2013)
Old Buildings, New Forms and Brooker and Stone’s (2004) Re-Readings it came out
that none of the mentioned authors focused on the architectural non-function of Matta-
Clark’s works in adaptive reuse explicitly, but they gave important insights about how

3
adaptive reuse is defined, each by their own point of views. After a search for the
meaning of architectural function began, therefore Matta-Clark’s works, interviews,
sketches, scribbles and writings in Matta-Clark (1974), Moure (2006), Crow, Kirshner,
Karavagna and Diserens (2003) and Breitwieser, Fend and Lee ( 1997) contributed the
main bibliography for this thesis, which also gave fundamental knowledge about
Matta-Clark and his way of intervening, but it came out that none of the mentioned
authors focused on the buildings future function in terms of adaptive reuse either.

Bilge Bal (2017) suggests in her publication Gordon Matta-Clark ‘ın kadavralarında
Mimari Tanı[mlam]alar a kind of dictionary for reading Matta-Clark. The dictionary
is intended to reveal speculative diagnoses associated with the cuts of Gordon Matta-
Clark's architectural interventions and representations, which are based on reading in
the structure and approaching it as a story-building element. She argues that Gordon
Matta-Clark's architectural interventions make it possible to make the theory itself
poetic and are more experimental based praxis and shared poesies. She also argues that
for Matta-Clark, structure is not an aesthetic product or an object; the interventions are
"architectural" and that his works are poetic practices in theory that contributed to the
original sense of theory. Her findings come close to what is important for this
investigation to understand that Matta-Clark’s interventions are poetic practises that
contributed to the original sense of architectural theory.

Whereby the publication of Bahar Beşlioğlu (2010) created a more beneficial source
for this thesis to understand program in the works of Matta-Clark, but here the
connection to adaptive reuse is missing. In her publication, the idea of ‘programmatic
experimentation’ is described, in which experimentation leads to the evaluation of
program as concept. She reconceptualises ‘Program’ under two theoretical statements:
‘Concept’ and ‘Experimentation’.

The publication by Uluengin and Görgülü (2014) ‘Anarchitecture’ As an Oppositional

Positon in Architecture evaluates and emphasizes the contributions of Anarchitecture
to the understanding of space today, through the works of three distinguished
researchers in this field. They evaluate both the comprehension of space expressed in
the installations performed by Gordon Matta-Clark who has substantial works on
anarchitecture, whereby he set fundamental principles he sought to destroy. Followed
by the ‘free space’ concept of Lebbeus Woods, who is well-known for approaching
Anarchitecture in a more theoretical manner. They also describe the point of view of

4
Brian Heagney, who has explored Anarchitecture through the concept of space in
primitive communities.

It can be argued, that this thesis can fill the gap in literature to understand and redefine
adaptive reuse by the practice of conceptual interventions on abandoned buildings,
where the building earns a new function by losing the conventional architectural
function and begins to be a catalyst. Therefore, the above-mentioned literatures
contribute each on his own way for this investigation.

1.4. Structure and Methodology

The First Chapter is the introductory part of this thesis, where the problem statement
and the research questions, the aim and scope, the literature review, the structure and
methodology are defined. The Second Chapter has the aim to discuss both disciplines
art and architecture in a context. Contextualizing the words adaptive reuse and
intervention stands here as a representative for the architectural side of this
investigation, where the different methods of conserving existing buildings will be
defined and explained in detail in order to set the fundamentals. It is important to
deepen knowledge about what exactly adaptive reuse is and how we can approach or
identify an adaptive reuse project and its strategies how as insertion, installation and
intervention. The conceptual art movement, aims to support the artistic side of this
thesis in order to create common ground for art and adaptive reuse. Therefore, insights
are given about the development of the conceptual art movement in the 1960’s to the
end of the 1970’s and why it was from high significance for the beginnings of
contemporary adaptive reuse. Therefore, Sol Lewitt’s manifesto ‘Paragraphs on
Conceptual Art’ will be critically analysed. A critical analysis of the theory of
architectural function from architects of the modernism against conceptual architects
and artists, aims set the stance towards functionalism and function in architecture and
to clarify, if function can be regarded as an intersecting point of art and architecture.
Because If we adaptively reuse abandoned buildings into public sculptures, what is
then the function of the building. Does function in context of art exist and if yes in
what extend is function in architecture comparable with function in art.

Chapter Three contains a brief résumé of Gordon Matta-Clark’s way of approaching

buildings with a completely different manner and contributes to an in-depth knowledge

5
of the theory and practice Matta-Clark developed for approaching existing buildings.
The biographical introduction of Gordon Matta-Clark and an analysis of his
contradictory career as an architect and artist, will serve as a definition in order to
understand his strategies of approaching buildings. Therefore, four selected works of
Gordon Matta-Clark will be then analysed regarding their context with art and adaptive
reuse, these works are; The Splitting, Pier 52 (also Day’s End or Day’s Ending),
Conical Intersect and Office Baroque. Analyses of Gordon Matta-Clark`s works aim
to extend the debate between the field of art and architecture and supports the
exploration of new ways of building reuse and to understand these environments
through his perspective. At the end a contemporary view on recent works will be
carried out in order to see how Matta-Clark effected today’s building reuse, to develop
adaptive reuse as a discipline more focused on the value of the effects of the strategies
carried out and to define it as a discipline free from functional concerns. This part has
the aim to display intentions how to bring art and architecture into a context and
demonstrate what kind of new potentials a building can serve for.

The Chapter Four is also the last chapter of this investigation, which is concluding the
findings from the second and third chapter and demonstrates the new potentials of non-
functional approach in adaptive reuse found in the analyses. It contains further research
ideas and a conclusion regarding the second chapter as its theoretical part, the third
chapter as its practical part.

6
 CHAPTER 2
INTERSECTION OF ART AND ADAPTIVE REUSE

Ii.

2.1. Contextualizing Adaptive Reuse

One of the first theoretical approaches towards conservation was established by

Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879) in the 19th century. He defined the
way and necessity of conserving historic buildings with the following words:

“(....) the best of all ways of preserving a building is to find a

use for it, and then to satisfy so well the needs dictated by that
use there will never be any further need to make any further
changes in the building” (Viollet-le-Duc, 1990, p. 317)

In his words, he highlights the necessity of adapting buildings for new uses in order to
preserve their historical past and he recommends to optimize its new function that there
will be no need to change it again.

The practise of conserving historic or old buildings either through preservation or reuse
has been carried through history and is not a new method for maintaining old buildings,
because cities were not demolished and reconstructed every generation. They rather
carry on the story of their subsequent layers since ancient times, where every year
brings inclusions and rearrangements to the buildings physical environment. The term
conservation was developed after the second World War, when the large scale urban
reconstruction began and how preserving the urban heritage became the main problem
to solve. Therefore, international conservation organizations like ICOMOS
(International Council of Monuments and Sites) and ICCROM (International Centre
for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property) were
established. The Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments

7
and Sites were signed in 1964, which became an authoritative document in
architectural and urban conservation worldwide (Li, 2005).

In the dominance of historic preservation by strict restoration, some architects, like the
French architect Pierre Chareau and Carlo Scarpa started to try out adaptive reuse. E.g.
in 1928-1932 Chareau altered an old Parisian apartment with new materials and a
different approach into “Glass house” which can be regarded as one of the first modern
adaptive reuse approaches (Bollack, 2013; Li, 2005).

Figure 2.1.1 Maison de Verre by Pierre Chareau, 1931

Right after Chareau, between the 1950’s and 1960’s, Carlo Scarpa made a remarkable
intervention in the medieval Castelvecchio in Verona, Italy between 1956-1964. This
work was in terms of adaptive reuse a creative conversion of historically valuable
structures. Scarpa made use of new materials like concrete, steel and glass, steel and
concrete to emphasize the distinguishing in his intervention from the existing fabric
by applying contrasting materials. By the leadership of these architects, adaptive reuse
became a method to communicate, read and understand old buildings (Sanza, 2015;
Wilkes & Packard, 1990).

8
 Figure 2.1.2 Museum of Castelvecchio by Carlo Scarpa, 1956-1964

In the 1960’s, in America adaptive reuse saw also attention first in terms of urban
renewal, when preservation emerged as a civic movement. Adaptive reuse appeared
slowly later, when New York artists began to change the industrial buildings in SOHO
into lofts as places for living and working, which shows that adaptive reuse started to
show its potential not only as an artistic attempt but also a method to revive old
buildings, old districts even social life. By the time other successful practices from
various countries echoed worldwide, where the practitioners of adaptive reuse in the
field of architecture and urban heritage studies increasingly developed new systems
and solutions for this discipline. Following new charters, basing on the Venice Charter,
were the Nairobi Suggestion of 1976, Charter of Machu Picchu of 1977, Burra Charter
of 1979 and Washington Charter of 1987, were published. These new Charters had the
effect to extended the range of conservation and enriched conservation methods, where
adaptive reuse was then officially recognized (Wilkes & Packard, 1990).

It is important to distinguish between the different methods within the field of

architectural conservation and to clarify the personal understanding of the term
adaptive reuse, by the help of former definitions of authors, in order to determine the

9
context of this thesis. There are four methods of conservation, according to Stone and
Brooker (2004) listed as Preservation, Restoration, Renovation and Adaptive Reuse.

Preservation means to maintain the building in the found state, whether it is ruinous
or not, because it is of historical importance. The building needs to be made safe and
any further decay must be avoided. Restoration is the process of returning the
condition of the building to its original position or period so that the building appears
as was it has just been constructed. Renovation is the process of renewing, repairing
and improving a building back to its good condition again. (Cambridge Dictionnary ,
2017) (Stone & Brooker, 2004). Adaptive Reuse is the process of profoundly altering
a building.

But Scott (2008) distinguished conservation only by Preservation and Restoration and
Alteration, whereby he regards Renovation and Adaptive Reuse as in the same case.
Alteration according to him means “making good” and is defined as the process by
which a building is repaired, rotten elements replaced, damaged architraves and
mouldings restored (Scott, 2008).

Taking the term adaptive reuse apart and focusing on the words separately in
architectural terms, will lead to a deeper understanding of it. ‘Adaptation’ came from
the Latin words ad, that means to and aptare, that means fit. According to Douglas
adaptation means ‘any work to a building over and above maintenance to change its
capacity, function or performance’ as well as ‘any intervention to adjust, reuse or
upgrade a building to suit new conditions or requirements’ (Douglas, 2002). ‘Reuse’
means simply to use again. The word reuse in architectural terms is mostly used as to
alter a buildings function or reuse a building for a new (or the same) function. Reuse
as a single word is regarded as a very broad term, so that it can be also used in a context
of other disciplines besides architecture (Douglas, 2002). Therefore, it is preferred to
move on with the term ‘adaptive reuse’, which is more commonly used in the
architectural context. In contemporary architecture, adaptive reuse is described as the
practice of finding new uses for existing buildings or sites other than they were
designed for (Douglas, 2002). The function is the most obvious change, but other
alterations may be made to the building itself such as the circulation route, the
orientation, the relationship between spaces. Additions may be build and other areas
may be demolished. The term adaptive reuse has many other familiar uses and is
described also as adaptation, remodelling, conversion, retrofitting, refurbishment,

10
rehabilitation or reworking (Stone & Brooker, 2004). Principles of adaptive reuse
cover the memory and place, planning controls, environmental sustainability, social
sustainability and efficiency (Harrison, Clark, Mackay, Martin, & Snape, 2014).

Approaching a plan of an existing building is determined or based upon factors

explored within the analysis of the place. The strategy for approaching an adaptive
reuse project is categorized according to Stone and Brooker (2004) in three types,
which are determined according to their relation between old and new, these are
Insertion, Installation and Intervention.

Insertion – In an insertion a new element is placed within the existing (host) building.
The new element is in most cases an interpretation of the past. It is important that the
existing building is physically not altered.

Installation – In an installation the new element is installed within the boundaries of

the existing building. The elements installed are usually different in style than the
existing building, it is up to the architects own decision or style. Important is that when
the new elements are removed the building should be able to go back to its original
condition.

Intervention – In an intervention the existing building is so changed that it is not

possible to exist independently. The nature of the transformation is so that the old
(existing) and the new are totally intervened. It is an act that turns on the potential of
the place or reveals the restrained meaning of that building. An intervention only works
when the idea of the intended modifications comes from the clues of the existing
building. The existing building provides the story and energy for the intended change,
the rest is up to a highly intensive reading of the existing building. Here the reading
and the outcome can be also destructive as it is constructive, because to reveal
forgotten meanings it is allowed to remove and undo the existing (Stone & Brooker,
2004) (Berger & Wong, 2017). According to Scott (2008) the work of intervention is
also based on an analysis, of thought that must be both intelligent and intuitive and is
founded upon this initial analysis.

But Bollack (2013) categorizes in, Old Buildings/New Forms, Interventions as

Insertions, Parasites, Wraps, Juxtapositions and Weavings.

An Insertion is defined, as it is by Stone and Brooker (2004), as an act where the new
structure or a space is inserted in the existing building.

11
Parasites are defined, where the new piece is attached on the side or on the top of the
existing building and becomes one with it, but the structural support must be met
before by the existing.

Wraps as the name describes it, wraps the existing structure in a new envelope and
provides protection to the existing.

In Juxtapositions, the new piece stands next to the existing structure and does not
stand in a dialogue with older building but shares the same program.

Weavings are defined as when both buildings the new and the old being woven in and
out of each other, where the limits of new and old are not obviously visible.

As the term conservation encompasses a more general terminology, it is intended in

this thesis to use Adaptive Reuse as the practice of finding a new use for an existing
building, whereby the function is the most obvious change, over the above-mentioned
descriptions (preservation, restoration and renovation). Together with Intervention as
its strategy, where the old and new are so heavily intervened and the existing building
is so changed that it is not possible to exist independently, as defined by Stone and
Brooker (2004). Because it is intended in this thesis to uncover the potentials of works
by Matta-Clark, which are marked by his remarkable cut outs defined as interventions,
which fit none of the by Bollack described under-categories of intervention.

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2.2. The Role of Conceptual Art in Adaptive Reuse

The time between the 1960’s and 1970’s constituted also the creation of the conceptual
art movement, where adaptive reuse by the time became a discipline with a philosophy
and a theory behind it. To the end of World War II and the end of modernism, the
intellectual and artistic developments of the 1960s profoundly changed the attitude of
the society towards old buildings, in order to develop new strategies to assure their
continued use and reintegration to their surroundings. By the time in New York
according to the decline of manufacturing and warehousing many industries closed,
which lead to the abandonment of the buildings, where artists began to insert
themselves and buildings became the material for art production. Dancing events, food
experimentations, happenings and site specific performances became the active
participants, where conceptual art and in particular Sol Lewitt’s work provided main
inspiration for the development of adaptive reuse and intervention in particular
(Bollack, 2013).

The Conceptual art movement commenced, when artists around the world began to
experiment with art and no longer consider it as only a physical product. This
movement started when artists began to search for different ideas than regarding art as
only visual appealing and profit oriented elements, ideas emerged like art as an idea or
art began to be regarded as knowledge and the emotional part of an object became its
value. From the mid-1960s through the mid-1970s conceptual artists produced works
and writings that completely rejected standard ideas of art. They implied that concerns
such as aesthetics, expression, skill and marketability were all irrelevant standards by
which art was usually judged. Conceptual art is a movement that highly values ideas
over the formal or visual components of art works. Their claim was that articulating
an artistic idea as the artwork must be enough to regard it as a work of art (Bollack,
2013). Conceptual art can be described as a notion where art is the concept itself.

The Fluxus artist Henry Flynt, was the first, who wrote in 1961 about Concept Art, of
which the material is concept as the material of e.g. music is sound, he described
performance pieces with this term. One of the first definite approaches were made by
Joseph Kosuth in his art works in 1966, titled as Art as Idea as Idea, this work
resonated the growing idea-based approach to art, where he exchanged linguistic
definition of pictorial image by means of definitions, which were taken directly from
the dictionary and enlarged in the form of a copy (Newman & Bird, 1999).

13
 Figure 2.2.1 Art as Idea as Idea by Joseph Kosuth, 1966

In One and Three Chairs Joseph Kosuth assembled an object, a photograph of that
object and an enlarged dictionary definition of the object. Thereby he questions what
actually constitutes a chair in our thinking. It is questioned if it is the solid object we
see and use or if it is the word ‘chair’ that we associate with it and communicate it to
others. Furthermore, this work confronts the person with how we make use words to
explain and define visible, everyday items. It also conveys how words represent, define,
describe, or signify things. It explores how language plays an integral role in
conveying meaning and identity and aims to make more aware of why and how words
become the verbal and written equivalents for commonplace unreal, solid things and
objects (Newman & Bird, 1999).

Figure 2.2.2 One and Three Chairs by Joseph Kosuth, 1965

14
It is important to note that beside Joseph Kosuth and Sol Lewitt: Andy Warhol, Jackson
Pollock and Gordon Matta Clark were also regarded as a conceptual artist. The
terminology ‘conceptual art’ was developed by the artist Sol Lewitt in his essay
Paragraphs on Conceptual Art (Newman & Bird, 1999).

“In conceptual art, the idea or concept is the most important

aspect of the work. When an artist uses a conceptual form of
art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made
beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.” (Lewitt,
1969, p. 1)

Lewitt points out that it is not important how a piece of art looks like, the important
part is the concept or idea behind it and that art ‘may exist distinct from and in the
absence of an object as its representation. In conceptual art, the idea becomes the
machine that creates the art and if the artist has an idea and carries it out, then all steps
are important and of interest like “scribbles, sketches, drawings, failed works, models,
studies, thoughts, conversations” (Lewitt, 1969). Even if the idea is not made visible
and stands as a concept in the mind can be regarded also as a work of art. All these
steps lead to an output as new techniques and media like photography, videos, musical
and architectural drawings. Sol Lewitt points out that any kind of three-dimensional
art is expressive art and appeals to the eye or emotions of the viewer rather than to his
mind. Accordingly, anything physical that arouses visually interest cannot be described
as conceptual art, but except that if the conceptual artist wants to ameliorate his
emphasis on materiality or if he wants to use materiality it in a paradoxical way it can
be allowed to call this work conceptual (Lewitt, 1969). It can be argued that conceptual
art can be or can look like almost anything, important is the idea or concept behind it
rather than the finished art object.

The effect the conceptual art movement was so immense that nearly everything was
brought into question, for example critics and artists questioned museums and art
galleries as an institution. They also questioned the idea why art must be represented
in museums or galleries. This questioning emerged a new challenge and developed
ideas where art became action and helped in redefining the building and landscape as

15
interactive spaces. With these assumptions of conceptual art, art was redefined. Firstly,
it could be displayed out of museums and galleries and secondly the typical
categorizations like painting and sculpture etc. dissolved and could be replaced or
expanded with different types of media, e.g.: photography, collages, video etc. After
the traditional boundaries of displaying art in museums or galleries disappeared, the
process of viewing art was expanded. From now on the city, the buildings and the
environment could be redefined as the artists’ canvas to create site and program. (Lee,
2000) (Breitwieser, Fend, & Lee, 1997).

Figure 2.2.3 Buried Cube Containing an Object of Importance but Little Value by
Sol Lewitt, 1968

The Burial of the Cube took place in a local garden, but these photographs, referring
to the notion of the series or process, are the only proof that Lewitt's actions actually
took place. The Buried Cube relies on the idea, as opposed to a finished object, where
we do not see that the event takes or took place and without knowing what the cube is
containing. Lewitt documented this artwork with photographs, which relied only on
the idea instead of the finished project. As a conceptual piece, this work was produced
shortly following the publication of Lewitt's 1968 manifesto, where he described the
new Conceptual art movement (Powell, 2012).

16
He defines, in the manifesto "The execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes
a machine that makes the art." and "Once it is out of his hand the artist has no control
over the way a viewer will perceive the work. Different people will understand the
same thing in a different way." (Lewitt, 1969).

It can be argued that conceptual art can be defined and perceived different and
individually. Even for artists and architects it can be defined different. For architects a
concept is the idea that is at the center of the project and allows people to work together,
but the common ground for art and architecture is that the concept is a liberating device
for both, that shifts the focus of the aesthetics of the work into site or project specific
concerns (Bollack, 2013). Therefore, it is traceable that adaptive reuse is effected by
this artistic shift and that many artists and architects especially Gordon Matta-Clark
was influenced by this movement, because he generated a practice that fused
Conceptual art’s critique of cultural institutionalization and conventional aesthetics.

17
2.3. Function as an Intersection for Art and Architecture

Regarding art as a practice outside the gallery, effected and created a relation to
architecture, because architecture as a discipline already outside the gallery has to
overcome functional, social and cultural needs, in which art was not or was limitedly
involved before.

Gordon Matta-Clark as an example, and the main actor of this investigation, was one
of the architects and by the time also artists of the 1960s and 1970s, whose work was
based on conceptual art traditions. He began his artworks by reusing abandoned
buildings as sculpture and ensured their interactive integration back to the urban fabric
with an active manner; by making remarkable cut-outs in a deconstructive way. But
Matta-Clark’s interventions were regarded according to Walker (2009) as ‘a
weakening of the built form’ and addressed more ‘anti-functionalist ideals’, because
his works did not meet the “institutional” architectural functions like shelter and
similar. These ideals became more obvious when he introduced in 1974 his
Anarchitecture project, which was an idea developed by Matta-Clark and members of
the Soho art community, in order to transmit their critique to the contemporary culture
in which architecture was or is still conceived as to fulfil functional ideals.

As James Attlee stated Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture in his research

paper Towards Anarchitecture: Gordon Matta-Clark And Le Corbusier:

“The Plan is the generator. The house is a machine for living

in. Do not forget the problem of architecture. The problem
of the house has not been clearly stated.” –Le Corbusier -
(Attlee, 2007, p.5)

This text represents Le Corbusier’s high modernist ideals, which claim that good
architecture can only be produced by the realization of practical needs. But Le
Corbusier’s approach towards function, stands in total contrary to Gordon Matta-
Clark’s ideals of function. Le Corbusier suggested with modernist ideas a mass-
produced utopia basing on functionalist ideals, whereas Matta-Clark supported ideas
at the level of the small community, that through informal but intense discussion and

18
shared experience could act as a hothouse for new ideas. Matta-Clark makes it explicit
in the letter he wrote to Carol Godden that he is against Le Corbusier’s ideal
architecture.

“An-machine for not living with an extract from Le

Corbusier’s Verso Un Architect (edge of paper destroyed)
showing the virgin machine he wants to live us in.” Gordon
Matta-Clark (Moure, 2006, p. 371)

This statement is the reverse of Le Corbusier’s words. The virgin machine representing
the new building, can be interpreted here again as an opposite stance, because Matta-
Clark’s focus lies on existing and abandoned buildings. Le Corbusier’s ‘machine for
living’ solves practical need as the need to live in, but according to Matta-Clark it was
not solving anything except how to make a living (Jacobs, 1961). There should be
more values besides making a living. Matta-Clark’s approach to the built environment
supports notions of adaptable architecture, as stated by Attlee (2007) “Anarchitecture
can be shaped by and for the multi-purpose requirements of the public” (Attlee, 2007),
in contrast to Le Corbusier’s ideal buildings. As stated by Beşlioğlu (2010), Matta-
Clark defined uselessness as “a metamorphosis of use [that] automatically generates
non-use, logistically it’s unavoidable.” Matta-Clark generated this idea in order to
avoid pragmatism and by the time to manifest his actions of being radical suggestions.
The intend in his interventions were not only making destructions to demonstrate a
criticism of Modern Architecture or on its architectural discourse, which by the
leadership of Corbusier reduced the built environment to a machine city. His aim was
to convey an architectural analysis of the existing building before the intervention was
carried out (Beşlioğlu, 2010). The reason for his stance against modernism and Le
Corbusier refers to the time when Matta-Clark, before he went to university, lived in
Greenwich Village. Then under the leadership of City Planning Commissioner Robert
Moses began to carry out the Corbusian town planning ideals and began demolishing
Greenwich Village and replacing the place with new high-rise building (Attlee, 2007).

19
Supporting the idea of a complex multi-purposed environment, Robert Venturi’s
Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) can be also regarded as from
high significance between many critical studies of modernism that appeared in the
mid-1960s. Venturi’s manifesto was about a non-straightforward architecture and an
architecture that “promotes richness and ambiguity over unity and clarity,
contradiction and redundancy over harmony and simplicity” (Venturi, 1977). Venturi
criticizes modernism for rejecting the complexities in architecture and solving
exclusively accommodating. He also emphasized that a visually complex, constructed,
environment is necessary for a vivid social environment (Venturi, 1977) (Haddad &
Rifkind, 2014).
The Italian architect Aldo Rossi, in The Architecture of the City (1984), defined the
city as a collective artifact, which is built over time and characterized by the society
with its buildings and other constant components. He argued that all major artifacts go
through many transformations in time, alternating functions and adapting to different
usages, which does not reduce their architectural significance. Instead of “function,”
Rossi argued, it is the concept of type which could be more useful as a tool for the
production of a legible and coherent built environment, which becomes a living record
of a society’s collective memory (Rossi, 1984).

Another major representative of modern architecture, before Le Corbusier, was Louis

Sullivan, he developed the phrase ‘form follows function’, this statement has the
meaning that the design of the exterior of a tall building (form) should reflect the
activities (functions) inside the building. Matta-Clark also manipulated this phrase into
‘form fellows function’ (Moure, 2006). This wordplay can be interpreted that a strict
observance of form narrows the usefulness of the building and diminishes its potential.
As described by Louis Kahn:

“When a building is completed it wants to say, look how I’m

made, but nobody is listening because the building is fulfilling
function. When it becomes a ruin, the way the building is made
becomes clear, the spirit returns.” Louis Khan (Cook & Klotz,
1973)

20
It can be argued that the spirit or essence of a building is something separate from its
function and perhaps in some cases oppositional to it. Lefebvre, in The Production of
Space (1974), regarded functionalism as a flattening form of space and as a
characteristic of modern capitalist societies (Smith, 2012). He advocated that
functionalism tenses function so that a possible multifunctionality of uses are
eliminated. Instead of the limitations imposed by a functional approach to use,
Lefebvre was interested in the cooption of space, the contribution of those processes
to directly achieve the production of a lived, social space. He advocated the idea that
“functionalism” impoverishes because it fixes use.

“Functionalism, stresses function to the point where, because

each function has a specially assigned place within dominated
space, the very possibility of multi- functionality is eliminated.”
(Lefebvre, 1974)

The multifunctional use of space was also traced by Cedric Price’s Fun Palace realized
in 1964. He developed for this project sciences of cybernetics, information and game
technology and theater to produce a new kind of improvisational architecture in
critique to the constantly shifting cultural landscape of postwar.

Figure 2.3.1 Fun Palace by Cedric Price, 1962

21
The Fun Palace was designed as a socially interactive machine, which was adaptable
to the ever changing cultural and social circumstances of its time and could not be
regarded as a building in a conventional sense. In 1962 Cedric Price began a
collaboration together with the avant-garde theater producer Joan Littlewood in order
to create a new form of leisure center, as an interactive, performative architecture, that
is adaptable to the changing needs and wants of the individual. As stated by Mathews
(2005) in The Fun Palace: Cedric Price’s experiment in architecture and technology,
Cedric Price told him before his death, that “The Fun Palace wasn’t about technology.
It was about people”. This statement emphasizes that his intention in Fun Palace was
social, he aimed to emancipate and empower the individual. Because through the
improvisational architecture, by arranging their own pedagogical and free time
environments by using prefabricated modules and cranes, the common citizens could
escape from everyday routine, where he can learn and unfold creativity. The Fun
Palace provided also a model for the 1976 Centre George Pompidou in Paris, France
(Mathews, 2005).

Figure 2.3.2 Parc de la Villette by Bernard Tschumi, 1982-83

Bernard Tschumi, who supported a very close vision. Tschumi’s first major work was,
the Parc de la Villette, which he won in competition as a “deconstructional” project.
His aim in Parc de la Villette was to take many of his critical and theoretical ideas

22
about space and make a new kind of architectural proposition. Tschumi worked at Parc
de la Villette, with three overlapping ordering systems. Here, points were organized in
a grid and lines were organized through the site. The intention in the layering was to
bring the logic of each system into question. The points were called folie and had no
predestined function, this should have the effect of associating the site with multiple
activities rather than a single use (Tschumi, 1996).

As stated by Rendell (2006): “Artists value architecture for its social function, whereas
architects value art as a free form of creativity. […] Art offers a place and occasion for
new kinds of relationship ‘to function’ between people.”. Art and architecture are often
distinguished by their relation to function. Art is not functional in traditional terms,
unlike architecture art does not cover social needs like giving shelter, when it snows
or designing special surgery rooms for hospitals. But it is functional in a figurative
sense, because art can encourage self-reflection, social change and critical thinking. If
we deal with the version of function in that broader term, “[…] we realize that
architecture is rarely given the opportunity to have no function or to consider the
construction of critical concepts as its most important purpose” (Rendell, 2006).

In order to sum up, here we have analysed first of all what adaptive reuse is and decided
to define adaptive reuse in the context of this thesis as the practice of finding a new
use for an existing building, whereby the function is the most obvious change. This
finding that the function is the most obvious change is from high significance, because
function in art and adaptive reuse constitutes the body of this investigation. The
contextualizing of the words adaptive reuse and intervention, helped in order to use
the right terminology throughout this thesis and furthermore helped in developing the
questioning of the word function. In order to link adaptive reuse with art, it was
necessary to understand the beginning of art when simultaneously adaptive reuse in a
contemporary sense emerged to life. Because Gordon Matta-Clark himself was a
conceptual artist and architect. According to Sol Lewitt in his essay about conceptual
art, he expressed that the idea becomes the machine that creates the art and if the artist
has an idea and carries it out, then all steps are important and of interest like “scribbles,
sketches, drawings, failed works, models, studies, thoughts, conversations”. This is
exactly what Matta-Clark did he noted every step from his about to be demolished
works through different media (video, photography, collages etc.). But another
important point conceptual art was that any kind of three-dimensional art, was

23
regarded as expressive art and appeals to the eye or emotions of the viewer rather than
to his mind. We know that Matta-Clark’s works are all three-dimensional works except
his notes and scribbles, but the outcome is three-dimensional. Accordingly, to this
finding it can be said that Matta-Clark’s critical stance towards aesthetic design and
that building and aesthetic design worked against each other and were solving no
problem in terms of function. They had the stance that aesthetic design was itself the
problem and countered the notion of design, which implies good taste, in terms of
Anarchitecture with improper models of space: the space of collapse and removal. Due
to the fact that Matta-Clark’s intentions, where not aesthetic three-dimensional works,
in contrast his works the idea was more in the foreground, his works can be still
regarded as conceptual. The term function and functionalism in the 1960’s and 1970’s
was debated with examples of the modern movement defined by Le Corbusier and
Louis Sullivan. The debate begins with that Matta-Clark’s works were regarded as ‘a
weakening of the built form’ and addressed more ‘anti-functionalist ideals’, due to the
fact that his works covered not conventional architectural functions like living.

24
 CHAPTER 3
GORDON MATTA-CLARK

In this Chapter, the avant-garde architect and artist Gordon Matta-Clark’s life, his
contradictory career as an architect and artist will be carried out. Gordon Matta-Clark’s
work is based on conceptual art traditions and begins with utilizing the building as
sculpture and its interactive integration to the space with an active manner; by making
remarkable cut-outs and unveiling light and space. In his works the perspective of art
is directed by action and experience together with architectural visual social, political
and spatial components (Walker, 2008). Entering and experiencing his works are free
of charge and are intended for all, who accidently or intentionally encounter it. His
intervening processes, simultaneously define a place where art is accommodated and
by the time where architecture is displayed as the object of art and beyond and created
a beneficial source for today’s practice and theory in art and architecture.

2.4. Introducing Gordon Matta-Clark

Figure 2.4.1 Gordon Matta-Clark, 1973

Gordon Matta-Clark was born together with his twin brother John Sebastian, as a son
of Anne Clark, an American artist and member of a surrealist group in Paris and

25
Roberto Matta a surrealist painter from Chile, in 22nd of June 1943 in New York.
Marcel Duchamp was the godfather of the twins. Matta-Clark spent his childhood
amongst an avant-garde artistic milieu and a social environment in New York, Chile
and France. After a few months of the birth of the twins, the parents separated. Anne
Clark travelled with both sons to France and after a short time finally turned back to
New Yok. Gordon Matta-Clark began studying Architecture in 1962, at the Cornell
University in Ithaca, New York. Even if, Matta-Clark received a formal architectural
education he was very influenced by Colin Rowe, who run the architecture program at
that time at The Cornell University. Colin Rowe, as another leader of conceptualism
constituted Matta-Clark’s major intellectual influence, who also displayed a critical
stance towards modernism and its destructive effect on the historic fabric of the city.

In 1963, Matta-Clark left Cornell to study one year French literature at Sorbonne Paris,
where he became aware of French deconstructionism and the detournament
organization, which is an artistic practice that stands for transforming artworks by
creatively disfiguring them. Matta-Clark broke up his study in France and turned back
to New York, where he graduated from Cornell University, in 1968. He remained at
Ithaca and collaborated on Earth Art (1969) exhibition organized by the curator
Willoughby Sharp and also assisted Dennis Oppenheim in Beebe Lake Ice Cut (1969).

Gordon Matta-Clark, Carol Godden and Tina Girouard founded in 1971 a conceptual
restaurant in the then rundown SoHo New York, which they named FOOD. This
restaurant was managed and run by artists, where they turned dining into an event food
performances and ongoing art projects by downtown artists. Matta-Clark became very
active in the SoHo art scenery, where he was beside FOOD involved in renovating
SoHo lofts. Around 1972 it can be said that Matta-Clark has become popular for his
so called “cuttings”, building transformations by extracting parts of it. His focus was
to operate on abandoned leftover buildings by sawing and cutting floors, roofs, walls
and doors into abstract shapes. But Matta-Clark’s career was cut short, right after his
marriage with Jane Crawford he died due to cancer in August 27,1978, at the age of
thirty-five.

26
2.4.1. A Career between Art and Architecture

The Food restaurant played a significant role in how Matta-Clark first began working
with both disciplines art and architecture, together. Matta-Clark described Food as the
first project where he technically thought about his total oeuvre and a key contributor
for the rest of his works. Food was actually a restaurant project at Prince and Wooster
Street, New York, which Godden, Girouard and Matta-Clark run together at the artistic
but rundown milieu SoHo, New York, between 1971-1973. This restaurant became a
key meeting point for artists and contributed to the economic and social development
of the SoHo art district (Bilir & Usta, 2012).

Figure 2.4.2 Food Restaurant, 1971 vs. 2000

Matta-Clark explained to Liza Bear during the interview that after his graduation he
began with renovating lofts in a functional way. He described his first ideas about
concerning reuse and the effects of Food, that living in New York created a need for
adaptation that, inhabitable spaces were transformed into studios or exhibition areas.
The act of altering continued when his restaurant Food became a business, he began
to redesign the interior, he cut up and rearranged counters, built-in work spaces, cut
out walls and room dividers. The Food restaurant was the first project when he
approached a space on an aggressive and destructive level, because the first design of
the place was not as practical as needed. He explained, that this was the first and last
time when he worked within the architectural context in a pragmatic way.

27
Even if Matta-Clark’s interventions might be regarded as away from conventional
ideals of architecture, they contain important ideas of architecture like materiality,
occupation and transformation. These values can be seen as architectural ideas, that
increase and strengthen our awareness of the built environment. Matta-Clarks interests
lay more on spaces on a non-functional level, but he also underlines according to
preserve the buildings from demolishing that he could adapt his works of art to be
potential functional (Walker, 2008). He explains his intention with the following words:

‘There is no reason why one should not live in that place. In

fact, I would be very interested in translating cuts like this into
still usable or inhabitable places. It would change your
perception for a while, and it would certainly modify privacy
a great deal.’ (Moure, 2006)

Here it can be observed that Matta-Clark had actually intentions to keep his work alive
by giving them a functional identity. If he had the chance he would adapt his
interventions into a liveable place. The reality which lay behind that he never could
realize this is that literally all of his project were destined to be demolished
(Breitwieser, Fend, & Lee, 1997). The reason why he always chose that kind of
buildings he explained that they were the ones that were available. (Moure, 2006)

Due permission and financial issues and to the fact that at that time Matta-Clark was
not as well-known as he is today, maybe today he could get any building he wants to
create art and that building could survive as long as he wanted.

“Why hang things on the wall when the wall itself is so much
more a challenging medium? A simple cut or series of cuts acts
as a powerful drawing device able to redefine spatial situations
and structural components.” Gordon Matta-Clark (Lee, 2000)

He was more interested in the building itself than to fill the building with uses and he
enjoyed also the fact that neglected and abandoned buildings where just there open to

28
anyone and apart from anyone’s protective property motives. These were places with
a lost program that immediately needed to be redefined and rescued. Abandoned
buildings created also a place like a playground for his experimentations, where he
could unfold his ideas intentions and plans without regarding any conventional rules
(Moure, 2006) (Crow, Kirshner, Karavagna, & Diserens, 2003). Matta-Clark’s works
can be regarded as a polarized practice as either art or as architecture. It can be said
that Matta-Clark’s intentions of working with architecture in a deconstructive way did
not developed out of hate towards architecture, but out of respect.

“It’s not about using sculptural ideas on architecture, it’s more

like making sculpture through it. So, it seems that there’s
always been a constant relationship in my work between
architecture and sculpture, and now one has taken over the
other, rather than one having to do with building the other.”
Gordon Matta-Clark (Moure, 2006)

In the interview section above from Matta-Clark and Liza Bear, it can be said that
Matta-Clark was comfortable between both disciplines and that he was conducting
both simultaneously. He carried out his works of art in-between art and architecture
and he never chose one. He studied architecture, never worked as one but worked with
it, because architecture constituted the substance of his works, “he gave up architecture
as a career, he continued […] on architectural discourse” (Walker, 2008).

29
2.4.2. Anarchitecture: Influences, Motivation and Ideology

Due to the Conceptual Art movement artists and architects like Gordon Matta-Clark
began to challenge the conventional functionality and utopian idea of beauty of
architecture. The Anarchitecture movement, of which Matta-Clark was an influential
member, emerged into life in the 1970’s by a group of artists including: Laurie
Anderson (writer, performance, film), Joel Fischer (painter, sculptor, performance),
Tina Girouard (dance, stage design, video), Susan Harris (choreography, sculptor,
video), Max Newhous (electronic music, flutist), Richard Nonas (sculptor), Alan Saret
(environmental sculptor, performer), Gen Highstein (sculptor), Bernard Kirschenbaum
(engineer, architect, sculptor), Richard Landry (musician, composer, photographer)
and Gordon Matta-Clark (architect, sculptor, photographer), who later became the
representative of Anarchitecture.

In 1973, the group met every single week, for three months, in order to discuss the
unclear character of space and thought about transitional architectural practice. They
regarded that building and design worked against each other and were solving no
problem. They had the stance that aesthetic design was itself the problem and
countered the notion of design, which implies good taste, in terms of Anarchitecture
with improper models of space: the space of collapse and removal. Matta-Clark
himself described these places as ‘interruptions’ (Beşlioğlu, 2010). Anarchitecture’s
aim was to demonstrate an alternative attitude to buildings, that included voids, gaps.
Leftover spaces and places that were not developed. For example, interrupting places
that we encounter in our daily life, that make reference to movement space, like places
where we tie our shoes. Due to spatial ambiguity, the term (until this time,
Anarchitecture was not developed yet), the group tried to fix a name for their ideals.
In Matta-Clark’s notes it can be seen that he tried several wordplays until agreed on
Anarchitecture, he scribbled down “An Ark Kit Puncture, Anarchy Torture, An Arctic
Lecture, An Art Collector;” (Lee, 2000).

The notion Anarchitecture was developed then as “against architecture”, the word can
be divided into two words, ‘architecture’ is the practice of designing and constructing
a building; the prefix an- associated more often with anti or in this case with anarchy.
Anarchy can be defined as a state of political and social disorder due to the absence of
governmental control. The fusion of these words result in the concept behind
Anarchitecture (Lee, 2000). This term invented by Matta-Clark “does not imply anti-

30
architecture but rather is an attempt at clarifying ideas about space which are personal
insight and reactions rather than formal socio-political statements.” (Moure, 2006).

In March 1974, the group introduced Anarchitecture as an exhibition, in order to

transmit their critique to the contemporary culture in which architecture was or is still
conceived as to fulfil functionalist ideals. In this exhibition, architecture is interpreted
as a symbol of modern culture's extremeness and its negativity. In this context, the
term is based on the criticism of the negative aspects of the world we live in; it was
born as a reaction to the conflicts in society, to the architecture made for political and
economic competence and trade (Uluengın & Görgülü, 2014). It can be argued that
Anarchitecture had the potential to act against social conditions because while after
the post-war era many architects wanted to contribute to the society through new
building, Matta-Clark wanted to make a significant change he knew that he could not
change the environment. So, the idea of Anarchitecture approached existing
abandoned buildings with a destructive rather than a new constructing manner, in order
to solve social problems. Matta-Clark made it possible to question the space by
communing architecture and sculpture and turned them into collaborating disciplines.
He tried to understand the space beyond the general acceptances by his intervening
cuts. In this context, it is possible to say that the cuts are a stance against the general
acceptance and that Matta-Clark is seeking to perceive space differently from the space,
which is systematically produced.

31
2.5. Analyzing Selected Works: Methodology and Tools

Figure 2.5.1 Conical Intersect, 1975

Matta-Clark’s works, ideas and experimentations influenced and inspired many artists,
architects and students until today and surely will in future. Because Matta-Clark
challenged radical and new modes of exploring and subverting urban and social
environments. His idea was more interested in how to extend a real environmental
situation into a more accessible space for people (Crow, Kirshner, Karavagna, &
Diserens, 2003). For him the manipulation of materials was more a matter of
comprehension, which extended into his attempting to insert himself into a social
fabric or as he expressed it as “searching for some kind of almost hermetic place in the
city that I can identify. It is a strange sort of connection and divergence at the same
time.” (Moure, 2006). Gordon Matta-Clark was one of them who made it, through
cutting and working through abandoned and neglected buildings with a chain saw and
reconnecting walls and floors, he blew in new life to these unoccupied places.

Matta-Clark used abandoned buildings, mostly without permission and destined for
demolition, due to this fact a concern about permanence aroused. To overcome this
concern Matta-Clark made used of different kind of media in order to document the
process of his temporally limited artworks. From the first contact with the building to
the final display of the project, the use of drawings, models, video, photography and
collage constituted the integral part of his artmaking. The most important media in
Matta-Clarks works were photographic collages. He first began with this media caused

32
by frustrating, because he could not capture his interventions in a single photo scene,
because the total cut did not fit in the frame, it was to that time technically not possible,
today the panorama photo technique could have been used instead. With the use of
photographic collage, it was possible to connect floors, walls and ceilings at the same
time and he could also achieve a three-dimensional effect. To make the collages Matta-
Clark sliced and glued the positives on the light table by himself (Attlee, 2007). Even
if he criticized the way that art has to be installed in art galleries and that these places
are only empty halls, he admits that he himself put also objects and documentation of
his works in galleries.

“All too often there is a price to pay due to exhibition

conditions; my kind of work pays more than most just because
the installation materials end up making a confusing reference
of what was not there. But for me, what was outside the display
became more and more the essential experience.” Gordon
Matta-Clark (Breitwieser, Fend, & Lee, 1997)

But Matta-Clark’s explanation above justifies why, because the installed the cut-outs
or documentations, photos or collages of his projects had the effect that they
represented the main work which was presented outside the gallery and stand as
evidence of the projects negatives. The Splitting project is the best example for this
practise, which is going to be analysed in detail in 4.1.1., after bisecting the building
into two halves, he removed the four corners and placed them in a gallery (Figure 4.2)
(Moure, 2006) (Walker, 2008).

The second most used media by Matta-Clark is video documentary in order to

approach the process of site-making. The narrative parts in his films are missing and
technically there is no need for it, because all steps of Matta-Clark’s interventions can
be visually encountered and experienced uninterrupted. In the documentary film, about
the Splitting, the camera moves through the building and every progress the power saw,
the hammer and the outcome of the work as passages of light and space is recorded.
Through the use of media even years after its demolition, it is still possible through the
writings, drawings, scribbles, photographs, collages and films to track and understand

33
Matta-Clark’s vision today (Attlee, 2007). The act of a building becoming an art object
will be analysed by the help of Gordon Matta-Clark’s most iconic works. Why not
mixing up art and architecture and moving away from the conventional way of
adaptive reuse - reusing a building in the context of art is that possible?

Figure 2.5.2 Splitting / Four Corners

Through analyses of Matta-Clark and his works of art, it is possible to encounter the
way how he has sought to invest and give meaning to urban spaces and to investigate
an alternative attitude towards buildings. It is very obvious in his biography that he
was influenced by many movements, which can be read from his works. For example,
by Colin Rowe, his instructor at The Cornell University and leader of conceptualism
or when he left for studying French literature at Sorbonne University in Paris, he was
influenced by French deconstructionism and detournament movement. These
influences contributed to Matta-Clark’s biggest work on which all his art works are
basing on. Anarchitecture’s aim was to demonstrate an alternative attitude to buildings,
that included voids, gaps, leftover spaces and places that were not developed. For
example, interrupting places that we encounter in our daily life, that make reference to
movement space, like places where we tie our shoes.

34
 2.5.1. Splitting

Splitting was one of Matta-Clarks’ best known works. The building he had chosen for
this project was located in Englewood, New Jersey at today's 322 Humphrey Street,
Englewood, New Jersey, New York (Matta-Clark, 1974).

Figure 2.5.3 Location of Splitting today, via Google Maps, 2017

It was a home destined for demolition as part of an urban renewal project. The art
dealer Holly Solomon and Horace Solomon owned this building and gave it to Matta-
Clark until the demolishing. Gordon Matta-Clark described in his interview with Liza
Bear (1974) that the building was probably build in the 1930’s and had even no
insulation (Moure, 2006) (Matta-Clark, 1974). In his original notes stated and in the
short video documentary (Matta-Clark, 1974) about the Splitting, that he filmed, every
move of the intervention can be followed step by step. In the documentary, the first
thing that attracts attention is that Matta Clark and his friends make two parallel cuts
down the centre of the building by the help of a chainsaw. As the next step one half of
the structure is jacked up and the support is removed. Removing the support has the
effect that the house is then split into two parts and looks like it has been cracked
through the centre and accordingly the building allows sunlight throughout the whole
building (Matta-Clark, 1974) (Moure, 2006).

35
 Figure 2.5.4 Splitting, 1974

Matta-Clark described the effect of the split with his own words, as the last image in
the documentary film of Splitting:

“The abandoned home was filled by a silver of sunlight that

passed the day throughout the rooms." (Matta-Clark, 1974)

This means that through the crack in the middle, the before not visible sunlight is
allowed into the house and according to the new act the building revived. In his
interview with Liza Bear, Matta-Clark describes that the most difficult part of the
whole work was not the physical difficulty but getting to know the building literally
by experiencing: ‘It seemed to take cutting through it with a chain saw to get to know
it.’ (Moure, 2006). He describes that physically action was required to reveal its
meaning. Matta-Clark’s idea of changing the message of architecture is achieved here
through opening a volume and by erasing its intimacy so everything can be shown and
one can have access to everything. Matta-Clarks intention in the cuttings can be
interpreted as to make the space more articulated by preserving the buildings identity
as a place and as an object. By the help of the cuttings he intended in this project a
dynamic transformation process that redefines the existing (Moure, 2006).

36
 Figure 2.5.5 Splitting, 1974

Figure 2.5.6 Photo-Collage Section of Splitting, 1974

37
To conclude the Splitting, this project is a total dissection of the building where walls
and doors, roof and ceiling are united by light openings. The building embodies an in-
between state, the building’s current reality the materialness of the human habitat and
its future demolition. Splitting changed the nature of a simple architectural object by
critical cuts and generated a dissociated three-dimensional entity opposed to the idea
of an organized system. This project is an example that debates, as in Chapter 2.3,
ideas of modern architecture reacting to Le Corbusier’s idea of the house as a machine
for living. Matta-Clark’s action, intentionally violent and aggressive, enhances the
contradiction between some abstract ideas of modern architecture and the decay of this
model in suburban areas of the city. Matta-Clark photographed his work and made
collages out of them in order to record the building, which is destined for demolition,
but the reason for filming was that he could view his work of art in all its extent and
transmit the experience and the way of its making; the sense of the intervention. In the
photo sequences, it can be see that the once conventional domestic space was altered,
stated by Matta-Clark, ‘into a sundial on a grand scale’ and into an interior space with
changing light plays (Lee, 2000).

Figure 2.5.7 Photo-Collage of Splitting, 1974

38
2.5.2. Pier 52

Pier 52 or with its other names The Day’s Ending or The Day’s End project was an
abandoned warehouse building from the 19th century and was located on a constructed
pier at the Hudson river, on Pier 52, at the end of Gansevoort Street and West Street in
lower Manhattan, New York (Moure, 2006).

Figure 2.5.8 Location of Pier 52 today, via Google Maps, 2017

The building was a fifteen-meter-high steel structure industrial building and measured
180 meters in length and 20 meters in width. The façade of the building was made of
tin that was already corrugated (Lee, 2000).

Although it was Matta Clark’s longest surviving work, at least it lasted two years, it
could not have been entered by public because it was abandoned by police and stand
closed until it was demolished. Matta-Clark had actually no permission to use the
abandoned warehouse to make an intervention, because the building and site were
owned by the New York Sanitation Departement. Because of this project, Matta-Clark
was threatened for months by lawsuits and became a fugitive even if for a short time.
But Matta-Clark considered that the area was a place in need for a transformation and
wanted to change the perception of the area from an unsafe and derelict place to place
of creative work of art.

39
 Figure 2.5.9 Pier 52, 1975

Gordon Mata-Clark worked three months inside this building (Crow, Kirshner,
Karavagna, & Diserens, 2003). He had firstly the idea to choose a pie shaped cut for
this project, his idea behind was to take a piece for himself from the 19th-century
imperial New York. He described his intention with the following words:

‘So, I thought that since the 19th-century robber baron

American railroad pier was cutting up American business and
American holdings throughout the country, it would be
appropriate to take a pie-like slice out of it.’ (Moure, 2006)

It is apparent that Matta-Clark’s approach to the site was also driven by its political
status. He selected this place and the shape of the cuts according to his experience
within the building site. After spending three weeks with observing the sun movement
through the building across the floor, he started with a complete different shape – with
an arc a less rectilinear shape other than he used in his older works (Lee, 2000).

40
 Figure 2.5.10 Schematic for Day’s End, Pier 52, 1975

In this project, Matta-Clark tried to tie different intersects together. He first made the
roof cut and studied the movement of the sun going across the floor. He tried to build
a relationship between the sun and the earth. After the roof cut came the arc shaped
floor cut, that followed the beam of light (Figure 4.9). The floor was a thick wooden
floor. The opening lead a three-meter-wide channel and ‘river door’ across the middle
of the pier, which revealed the water of the Hudson river below the building (Figure
4.10) (Lee, 2000).

Figure 2.5.11 Day’s End, 1975

41
The last opening was designed in the centre of west end at the river side of the pier,
where it cuts the sun light at its highest point and where all cuts intersect. The three
cuts through the shell of the dark warehouse, allowed through the intervention light to
the interior. With these interventions, spatial potentials like the relationship of solid
and void and dark and light are awakened.

“I would really like to express is the idea of transforming

the static, enclosed condition of architecture on a very
mundane level into this kind of architecture which
incorporates... this sort of animated geometry or this
animated tenuous relationship between void and surface
[...]implies a kind of kinetic, internal dynamism of some
sort”. Gordon Matta-Clark (Lee, 2000)

The intervention becomes an experience where the interior and exterior of the building
are united and working together in order to open up and invite the environment into
the new space and reverse (Crow, Kirshner, Karavagna, & Diserens, 2003). Also, the
other name Day’s Ending or Day’s End thought by Matta-Clark for this project, comes
from the light play, the game starts when the sun is at its highest point and after that
ends with the sundown (Moure, 2006). Even if the building was not accessible to the
public due to its illegal status there were the art dealer Holly Solomon and the sculptor
Joel Shapiro, who had the chance to enter and witness the piece. Holly Solomon
describes the effect of the building on her as a religious and spiritual experience like
‘being in a Cathedral’ and according to the scale of the building and its near to the
water that a sense of fear arouses. Shapiro was in almost the same view like Solomon,
he had the notion according to the large scale of the art work, that Matta-Clark was
‘creating some kind of abyss’ (Lee, 2000).

After all, in 1979 the Sanitation Department decided to replace Matta-Clarks work and
renewed the façade of the building, because they found no aesthetic value in its earlier
state. Today, the building is still owned by the Sanitation department and works as a
deposit and parking site (Figure 4.12).

42
 Figure 2.5.12 Google Earth view of the renewed Pier 52, 2017

Due to the fact, that Matta-Clark was not supported by the official owners and the work
was non-durable at the end, he made it possible through interventions to create from
abandonment an interaction with the environment. Even if the building was not
literally accessible to the public audience, it encouraged a dialogue between the New
York art communities and persons who had the chance to enter the building. Gordon
Matta-Clark succeeded with this work to communicate the spatial experience of
internal and external correlation.

43
2.5.3. Conical Intersect

Matta Clark’s Conical Intersect project was realised in fall 1975, for the 9th Paris
Biennial in Les Halles, 27-29 Plateau Beaubourg street, Paris. Under the framework
of the urban renewal project, many of the abandoned buildings were demolished just
to make space for the cultural centre The Centre George Pompidou, which was going
to be designed by Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano.

Figure 2.5.13 Location of Conical Intersect today, via Google Maps, 2017

The Centre George Pompidou was still under construction, when the French authorities
offered Gordon Matta-Clark two of the, about to be demolished, 17th century town
houses to perform his art for the Biennial. The two town houses were built in 1699 for
family Lesseville (Breitwieser, Fend, & Lee, 1997).

Matta-Clark’s intention in the creation of this work was to set a critical and spatial
statement on the gentrification process of the Parisian neighborhood, which was at its
highest point due to the new cultural Centre George Pompidou (Spector, 2017) (Lee,
2000).

44
 Figure 2.5.14 Conical Intersect, 1975

The aim of Matta-Clark was here to implement, stated by Matta-Clark, “an alternative
vocabulary with which to question the static, inert building environment” (Moure,
2006). Gordon Matta-Clark continued in this project to work with circular forms as
he began in The Day’s End. As shown in Figure 4.18, 4.19 and explained by Matta-
Clark by the help of the above stated words, the cut-through opening in the north wall
measured four meters in diameter. It can be seen that the cone shaped spiral falls
through the walls, floors and doors and at the end close through the roof of the building
at house Beaubourg number 27. The cone stands in 45 degrees to the street, where it
allows pedestrians to see into and through the building. It was even possible to see the
Centre George Pompidou through the buildings, which can be regarded as a homage
to the old and new, unbuilding and building (Figure 4.14) (Crow, Kirshner, Karavagna,
& Diserens, 2003).

Gordon Matta-Clark continued in this project to work with circular forms as he began
in Pier 52 (or the Day’s End). As shown in Figure 4.18, 4.19 and explained by Matta-
Clark, the cut-through opening in the north wall measured four meters in diameter. It
can be seen that the cone shaped spiral falls through the walls, floors and doors and at
the end close through the roof of the building at house Beaubourg number 27. The
cone stands in 45 degrees to the street, where it allows pedestrians to see into and
through the building. It was even possible to see the Centre George Pompidou through

45
the buildings, which can be regarded as a homage to the old and new, unbuilding and
building (Figure 4.14) (Crow, Kirshner, Karavagna, & Diserens, 2003).

Figure 2.5.15 Conical Intersect

It can be seen that the cone shaped spiral falls through the walls, floors and doors and
at the end close through the roof of the building at house Beaubourg number 27. The
cone stands in 45 degrees to the street, where it allows pedestrians to see into and
through the building. Matta-Clark described the hole as “the hole recalled the structure
of a telescope from outside the building, a periscope from within”. [...] As Dan Graham
note, “with the aid of this periscope, viewers could look not only into the interior of
the Matta-Clark sculpture/building, but through the conical borings to these other
buildings that embody past and present eras of Paris” (Lee, 2001, p. 180). It was even
possible to see the Centre George Pompidou through the buildings, which can be

46
regarded as a homage to the old and new, unbuilding and building (Figure 4.14) (Crow,
Kirshner, Karavagna, & Diserens, 2003).

“This is the most recent of a series of works using buildings

neither as object nor as an art material but as indications of
cultural complexity and specific social conditions in an urban
fabric. The transformations of the structures were not
conceived of as formal structural exercises but a contextual
investigation.” Gordon Matta-Clark (Moure, 2006)

Figure 2.5.16 Schematic for Conical Intersect, 1975

Matta-Clarks’ intention in the making of this project was to question the internal
dependencies of the structural system in order to create an urban dialogue. He
described his interventions as exercises that should serve for a contextual investigation.
The Conical Intersect was open to everyone, the cone-shaped intervention as a void
‘offered passersby a view of the buildings internal skeleton’ (Moure, 2006) (Spector,
2017). Even if the artwork was destroyed soon after the Biennale, still today artist and
architects draw back on his works.

47
 Figure 2.5.17 Conical Intersect, 1975

For example, Pierre Huyghe, a French artist projected exactly twenty years later in
1996 Gordon Matta-Clark's movie about Conical Intersect as ‘Light Conical Intersect’
onto the wall of the building where it originally stood (Huyghe, Tiravanija, & Lee,
2004). This projection stands as a representative of the conical void the only difference
is that Huyghe interpreted and solved the project through light not through a cut
(Figure 4.21).

Figure 2.5.18 Light Conical Intersect by Pierre Huyghe, 1996

48
2.5.4. Office Baroque

Gordon Matta Clark was invited for the creation of the Office Baroque project in 1977
by the city of Antwerp, Belgium, for the 400th anniversary of the Flemish painter Peter
Paul Rubens, to carry out an art-work on a five storey 1930th office building of a
former shipping company that went bankrupt. The title of the project was selected in
honour to the baroque artist Rubens and the office building, in which the art work was
carried out and according to Matta-Clark as he described it “Office-Went-Broke”.

The five-storey building was located in Ernest van Dijckkaai 1, Antwerp, Belgium, a
well visited touristic place opposite to the Het Steen Castle (Crow, Kirshner,
Karavagna, & Diserens, 2003).

Figure 2.5.19 Location of Office Baroque today, via Google Maps, 2017

The project Office Baroque was intended to be seen from the inside and outside.
Therefore Matta-Clark planned to remove a quarter sphere from the corner of the
building (Figure 4.24 and 4.25), from street level to the sub attic, but the municipal
authorities did not allow an intervention on the exterior part of the office building.
They feared that it would be dangerous and unpredictable for passers-by to have access
to the building. Consequently Matta-Clark had to call off the outside of the planned
intervention and concentrated himself only in the interior part (Breitwieser, Fend, &
Lee, 1997).

49
 Figure 2.5.20 Office Baroque, 1977

Figure 2.5.21 Office Baroque, 1977

Compared to his older projects, the limitation of the authorities guided Matta-Clark to
approach the building in a different way, his different focus on the planning of the
project (Crow, Kirshner, Karavagna, & Diserens, 2003).

50
 “To develop ideas about spatial rhythm and complexity that I
might otherwise never have done [...] an almost musical score,
which a fixed set of elements played their way up and down
through the layers.” (Lee, 2000)

Matta-Clark described in his notes that for the first time he could use all five floors
and the roof in order to design a multi-layered structure, therefore he used two circular
arches that define the space as the shape and the size of rooms.

The result was that the arches change through the building floors and “a series
arabesque slices opening the whole building to an ever-changing promenade of
internal views” (Moure, 2006).

Figure 2.5.22 Plan for Office Baroque, 1977

51
Figure 2.5.23 Office Baroque, 1977

52
The final result did not offer a single point of view of the total work, but Matta-Clark
reconstructed a series of the viewpoints in form of video and photo-collage in order to
explain the spatial and visual effect. The Office Baroque was Matta Clark's’ fore last
architectural project before his death, his last project was Circus- Caribbean Orange
(Moure, 2006). Today only fragments and documentation in formats like collage,
photography and video documentary remained. Figure 4.28 shows one of Office
Baroque’s last surviving pieces, the teardrop shaped cut-out from the parquet wooden
floor including its support beams. On the wall hangs the negative of the piece, a
photograph displaying the buildings floor, where it was actually cut out and functions
as a remembrance of Office Baroque (Moca, 2004).

Figure 2.5.24 Fragment of Office Baroque, 2004

In order to conclude all here mentioned works of Matta-Clark; In the Splitting, the
dissection of a buildings walls, doors, ceiling and roof were united into a public
sculpture, where simultaneously light openings were enhanced. The purpose of the
building lies here in an in-between state, this state in a twofold place can be explained
as followed: the building as the physical representative of the human habitat and its
future state the demolition. According to the fact that the buildings function as a place
for living was drastically altered, it can be argued here that it is adaptively reused. Even

53
if altered in a non-functional way, through the dynamic intervening process this place
is now more articulated as the existing buildings identity as a place and as an object.

In Pier 52 or ‘Day’s End’ Matta-Clark used the idea of the hole, where he made three
principal cuts one on the floor and two on the walls, which faced the Hundson river.
The half-moon like cut transformed the former warehouse with a large steel structure
and corrugated façade into a basilica like place reminiscent of light and proportions.
Pier 52 itself belongs much more to the domain of architecture than sculpture and it
embodies Matta-Clark’s ideas about the relationship between project and place; the
building’s circular cuts relates to the sun path and the Hudson river, which transform
the site into a changeable urban landscape that discloses a thin line between art and
architecture. The former warehouse itself is transformed from an abandoned industrial
structure into a metaphysical social space.

In the Conical Intersect Matta-Clark made again use of the hole, where he cut a cone-
shaped hole with an axis of 45 degrees into two 17th century town houses, that enabled
viewers to look into the interior of the building and also through it. Due to the fact that
the intervention was realized in 17th century townhouses, the metaphor of the hole
stands for the connection between past and present. The site was also by the time
neighbouring the almost finished Centre Pompidou designed by Renzo Piano and
Richard Rogers. Matta-Clark’s idea was to create a space allowing a looking through
demolished surfaces and heavy masonry to the new light structure of the Centre
Pompidou. The hole, stands for the debate of destruction and modernization, it can be
regarded as a concept of the relationship among history and current events. On the
other hand, the metaphor of the hole refers to a sense of loss.

In Office Baroque, Matta-Clark intervened the first time in a multi-layered manner,

which he carried out on a five storey 1930th office building in Antwerp Belgium. In
this work, he uses all five floors and the roof in order to design a multi-layered structure,
therefore he used two circular arches that define the space as the shape and the size of
rooms as a result and different from his other works he develop ideas about spatial
rhythm and complexity. As it was in his previous work Conical intersect, this work
also fills the gap between the buildings past and its instant state of demolition, it by
the time enables people to appreciate the complexity of the visual and spatial
relationships of the existing building, which were in terms of architecture and art
adaptively reused.

54
2.6. Effects on Contemporary Adaptive Reuse Projects

Gordon Matta-Clark’s works and his way of adapting buildings back into the urban
fabric effected many artists and architects until today. It is important to look at recent
works, where abandoned buildings were reused in the manner Matta-Clark did it, in
order to see what kind of strategies have been applied, what sort of potentials have
been revealed and what types of interventions where made to recommend and develop
adaptive reuse beyond its functional aspects. Contemporary ideas as similar to Matta-
Clark’s intentions in site making and revealing hidden values of abandoned buildings
and sites happened to the village Pizzo Sella. The Pizzo Sella Art Village is located on
the slope of Pizzo Sella in Palermo Italy, on top of a foreland facing the gulf of
Mondello. It is one of the many suburban areas outside of Palermo, locating 170 houses,
which were part of an illegal construction. As the name tells, Pizzo Sella is frequently
described as the hill of shame (Romano, 2017).

Figure 2.6.1 Pizzo Sella Art Village, 2016

The illegal construction began in 1978, where more than a hundred single family
houses were build and along to it many of them were never completed, but a few of
them were actually inhabited. In 2001, the houses were confiscated by the authorities,
but recently a decision by the Court of Cassation definitively returned them to their
owners. Some of the houses are still inhabited by their owner, many are abandoned. In
the meantime, the Pizzo Sella Art Village was born, which is today an open-air

55
museum open to all, tourists, locals and artists. In 2013 promoted by the Palermo
collective Fare Ala and a group of artists who, together with several well-known artists
began painting on the exterior and interior walls of the uninhabitable and uninhabited
buildings to bring attention to the place. The intention and strategy here is to give new
vitality and also new value to a territory, that was regarded for the last forty years as a
place of decay and abandonment (Fersini, 2016). The intervention method here is street
art, the buildings are painted by several artists in the interior and exterior in order to
express the abandoned village’s current state and make them more articulated. As seen
in figure 3.3.5 the exterior façade of an abandoned villa is painted with a huge face of
a bold man with widened eyes, who seems to be concerned or frightened and who has
an opened mouth, for which the windows were used as the mouth. This painting shows
the potentials of a building, which now stands as a political representative, the opened
mouth of the man shows that from now on someone begins to say something, that the
artists have a word to say about that place. It can be said, that the buildings’ function
as a critical intervention in Pizzo Sella Art Village became the representative of the
social status of the place.

Figure 2.6.2 Pizzo Sella Art Village, 2016

Another example is the photo in Figure 3.3.3, where the attention is drawn on the
remarkable hill-view. Here again by the use of art, painting a camera as the intervening
method to the building, the focus is drawn on the view from the window. The painting

56
is carried out on the interior façade, around the window, with a terrace, of a room with
a view. As visible in Figure 3.3.3, two hands are holding a camera, which looks very
dynamic as someone is instantly making a picture. This intervention on the interior of
the abandoned building provides not a conventional function to the building in order
to adaptively reuse it, but the artistic intervention helps us in order to reveal, what was
hidden before, in this case it is the beautiful view to the hills of Palermo, which
enhances by the time the value of the building and adapt it back to the environment as
a social place.

Figure 2.6.3 Art by Collective FX - Pizzo Sella Art Village, 2016

Another example of a building, which was adaptively reused through intervention as

into a social place is Bunker 599. The Bunker 599 was realized by RAAAF and Atelier
De Lyon in 2013 and is one of the seven hundred leftover bomb shelters on the New
Dutch Waterline at Culemborg, Netherlands. The history of the Netherlands could be
interpreted in terms of the trials that have given the country its current form over the
centuries by being reclaimed from the North Sea, which is more than three-quarters of
the country's total area. Dewatering, to make more usable land, has not only remarked
the borders of the Netherlands over the centuries, but has also made its people experts
in the construction and management of dykes, which became an important defense
system in the 16th century during the eighty years of war against Spain. The
hydrogeological defense system, the flooding of certain low-lying areas to isolate and

57
protect certain areas became famous in 1815, with the realization of the New Dutch
Waterline (NDW), which is the military defensive line used until the Second World
War to protect and isolate the towns of Muiden, Utrecht, Vreeswijk and Gorinchem.
This defensive ring was not used after the end of the war, but still preserves today 700
bomb-proof bunkers, which were built in 1940 (Archdaily, 2012; Glancey, 2013).

Figure 2.6.4 Bunker 599 by RAAAF and Atelier De Lyon, 2013

The intervention method RAAAF and Atelier De Lyon, carried out in forty days, was
a one-meter cut-out throughout the monolithic concrete structure of the building, by
the help of a diamond wire-saw. The bunker separated into two halves has two main
strategies, first to bring light into the bunker and to reveal its interior, which was cut
from view before, to open it up and see what was inside. And second to let pass a
boardwalk, that stretches through the bunker right into the water in order to reconnect
it with its historical past and to open it up to the present audience. The Bunker 599
connects military landscape and architecture with the public, and juxtaposes heavy
concrete construction with the silent waterfront. Bunker 599 reminds through its
deconstruction of Matta-Clark’s ‘Splitting’ (1974) project with the vertical cut, in
which a narrow strip of light connects the spaces of the house. As also used by Matta-
Clark this operation highlights the contrast between past and present and solid and
void and turns the monolithic bomb shelter into a monument with a historical meaning

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and a present outlook for visitors to experience and socialize the place, inserted in the
site linking the landscape and water. The project interpreted the architecture and
transformed it from a historical document into a monument, drawing the attention of
the audience from the view of a finding into the viewing and understanding of an
artwork.

Figure 2.6.5 Bunker 599 by RAAAF and Atelier De Lyon, 2013

Another contemporary work, which was undergone a radical intervention, as in the

works of Gordon Matta-Clark, is the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art (in
short Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, South Africa. This project was realized and
completed by the architect Thomas Heatherwick in 2017. The building is housing a
former grain silo, which was built on Cape Town's waterfront in the 1920’s,
overlooking the Atlantic on the V&A waterfront (Victoria and Alfred waterfront) and
was and still is the tallest building in South Africa. This area was thirty years ago
regenerated for retail, real estate and tourism on the remnants of two damaged 19th-
century harbor basins (Victoria and Alfred). The silos themselves were built over coal
sheds that before supplied steamships. The building was once used to store and grade
maize from all over South Africa, but with the beginning of containerized shipping,
the building lost its purpose. Reused today, the museum part is not the only facility
within the 9500sqm complex, there are also a hotel, bars and restaurants integrated
(Heatherwick, 2011; Heatherwick-Studio, 2017).

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 Figure 2.6.6 Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, 2017

The abandoned grain silo building is composed of two main elements; a grading tower
and a block of 42 silos. The building was in a bad state, covered with dirt and the walls
were painted in white before the intervention began. The strategy here was to preserve
and reconnect the building with its history. After peeling off the white paint the
concrete structure became visible and even if concrete evokes coldness and hardness
it got a warmth here, because after inspecting the concrete it came out, that it contained
stones and materials only specific for that area, which could not be found in modern
concrete. In order to pursue this act of finding history on the building itself, sections
were carved out of the forty-two 33-metre-high concrete tubes former vertical silos, of
the buildings inner and exterior parts (Figure 3.3.6), each with a diameter of 5,5 metres,
with no open space, in order to experience the volume of the building from within. In
the centre of the museum is an atrium, that is based on the shape of an original corn
from the silo, that was found in during the site visit. This one grain was scaled up 27-
meters high, to the full height of the structure and that corn was the representative of
the carving pattern. For the cut-outs double-blade handsaws carved the curvy interiors
from the building, which created afterwards a x-ray-like view into the buildings
structure, which reveals the original intersecting geometries in an unexpected way. It
is visible, that as it was in works by Matta-Clark, also here the use of destruction,
cutting-out, was preferred, which revealed the potentials of the once-silo building.
Through the deconstructive intervention process on the silo tubes new potentials like

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light are revealed, in earlier times the silos contained grain and light was cut from
sight, now the long tubes allow light inside. Also through the carving process the
atrium’s height is enhanced and discloses senses and resemblances e.g. like in Matta-
Clark’s ‘Pier 52’ (1975), with a cathedral like space and turns the building into place
reminiscent of light and proportions.

Figure 2.6.7 Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, 2017

Richard Wilson was another person, who made use of intervening in buildings by
cutting them. As Matta-Clark, Richard Wilson used the strategy of intervening into an
abandoned building in order to redefine and reconnect the architectural space with the
environment. The installation artist and sculpture Richard Wilson, was born in 1953 in
London, to the same timeline with Matta-Clark (1943). Even if ten years it is not wrong
to argue, regarding his works, that he was influenced by him and the conceptual art
movement. Wilson’s most famous work is ‘Turning the Place Over’ for the 2007
Liverpool Biennale, until it was switched off in 2011. This public art was an
architectural intervention, where Wilson cut out an 8-metre diameter circular piece,
over three floors, of the façade of an abandoned building, the Cross Keys house
(Wilson, 2008). Unlike Gordon Matta-Clark, he reused the cut-out piece and attached
it on a new motorized structure, which had the effect that the façade could turn around
itself in a two-minute cycle and revealed an open and closed status of the building, just
like a window (Narita, 2007). This act has the effect where the audience explores,
experiences and interacts with the space, just by passing by. The opened and closed

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 Figure 2.6.8 Turning the Place Over by Richard Wilson, 2007

state of the oscillating oval piece creates an every-two-minutes changing game of the
total volume (in the closed status) and an illusion of depth (in the opened status),
showing the interior structure of the building. The cut-out piece is not only inverted
when it is rotating, it also fluctuates into the building and out to the street. The
oscillation of the cut-out piece reveals the carved out inner of the building and the
distortion, when suddenly the façade of the building physically turns directly over
around one-self, uncovers feelings like wonder and the sense of illusion, disorientation
and emotions like fear and danger in the viewer.

Figure 2.6.9 Turning the Place Over by Richard Wilson, 2007

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 CHAPTER 4
CONCLUSION AND FURTHER RESEARCH

It is also important to say that this thesis’s aim is not to show an anti-functionalist
tendency towards architecture, but to enhance arts revitalizing effect on architecture in
order to develop a more creative and vital environment. The transformation of
abandoned buildings into public sculptures can be regarded as a common ground for
art and architecture and that this action can contribute to the development of
architectural theory and design in the adaptive reuse process, because it shows how
urban life; space and place; ownership and access can be addressed through works that
involve intervention as a strategy of adaptive reuse. For example, Mies van der Rohe
was a craftsman, le Corbusier was a painter and both were architects. Architecture
without art cannot exist, but the architect moves in a field of tension between
commerce and culture. Here it is not wrong to see art as a mode of cultural production,
which is much more independent from economic and social concerns. Throughout this
thesis, we have seen that art can offer architecture a chance for critical reflection and
action. And as analysed in the works of Gordon-Matta Clark when architecture is
regarded as art in means of “public sculpture”, it becomes clear that artistic
interventions can initiate the activity of architectural design and the occupation of
buildings. This thesis suggested the field of adaptive reuse not to stand only in relation
to architecture but also to co-opt art as a discipline, because if we want the
development of architecture as a practice, it is important to look at art and move outside
the traditional boundaries of its field. Therefore, as stated by Joan Ockman to pursue
a constant development in the architectural discipline it is important to look and learn
from other disciplines.

“The architect’s only option is to find a course for

revolutionary praxis outside the traditional boundaries of
his field.” (Ockman, 1984)

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Gordon Matta-Clark produced within his short life great architectural interventions
and provided a valuable knowledge about how art can stand in context with
architecture. Matta-Clark succeeded in intervening the artistic, visual, spatial and
architectural with the city’s social and political aspects while he worked with
architecture or as Matta-Clark said he worked “through architecture”

During this thesis, we have seen interventions with a main methodology: the cutting
process. The cutting process is under categorized as a method of intervention, which
itself is under categorized as a strategy of adaptive reuse. As the final result of the
cutting process it can be argued that the abandoned building, in all of in this thesis
discussed works of Matta-Clark, became a public sculpture with not a conventional
architectural function. As described also at the beginning of this thesis the conventional
architectural function is to give a building the purpose of functioning e.g. as hotel,
restaurant, bar or museum etc. Through the works of Matta-Clark we have seen that
by the help of artistic interventions, different values of a building can be revealed,
without being physically used by people. Matta-Clark’s cutting-works embody
experiences of building by unbuilding and deconstructing spaces and building by
removing. The result of reading disintegrating structures by the practice of removal
and making by unmaking create new ways of dealing with given structures, these
processes were as important to the aesthetic effect of his works as the finished objects.
The act of making meaning took place differently in each of his works, where the
audience was able to interpret the works in a way that is different to the artist’s and
architect’s initial aims. The findings make it possible to call a building, which was
undergone an artistic intervention like cutting, adaptively reused, hereby it is not
important if the building has or has not a function on a physical level. Because the aim
of adaptive reuse is to reuse an existing building or site for a purpose other than it was
designed for. The main findings in this context lead us to a more metaphysical use,
which can be revealed by this sort of intervention as cutting. The new use of the
building can be reached through the revealing and viewing process: cutting it open.
Though it can be argued that besides the functional aspects of adaptive reuse, the
viewing process can be regarded as a developed version of adaptive reuse. The
building is then literally adaptively reused because it is integrated back to the urban
environment not in a conventional manner, but the building provides many other
potentials besides its conventional functions as a hotel or restaurant or museum. In the

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contemporary works we have seen, that Zeitz MOCAA is by the time a museum, a
hotel with bars and restaurants, but beside all of these conventional functions, it
became through artistic interventions a place for everyone, where only the building
itself can stand as the work of art, which can be encountered through a viewing process
that by the time reminiscent of its past. Pizzo Sella Art Village is reintegrated through
street art, which gives critical reflection to the areas current political status as being a
former illegal construction site. Bunker 599 turned from a historical bunker into a
present monument. Or as it is in the last contemporary example, in ‘Turning the Place
over’ the building functions as where isolated volumes create feelings only by viewing.
These contemporary examples stand as evidence for abandoned and former useless
buildings for being adaptively reused by artistic interventions, that gain the use of
communicating perception, feelings and senses with the viewer. The building, through
revealing hidden values, is integrated to the urban fabric and receives attention from
the audience by being experienced. In terms of this investigation the act of articulating
architecture trough cutting open – making potentials and hidden values visible can be
called Resocialization, because from then on, the building stands in a constant
communication with its viewer.

Further research can be carried out in the field of adaptive reuse and social architecture
like the Fun Palace by Cedric Price or the Pizzo Sella Art Village, which is a very
young and not so well known project, wherefore it was very difficult to access
literature.

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