On October 10, fans and friends crowded into E.TAY Gallery in Tribeca to hear Jesse Reiser, Nanako Umemoto, and Stan Allen discuss Reiser + Umemoto’s architecture alongside noted critic Jeff Kipnis. In the end, Kipnis didn’t show, but fellow theorist Sanford Kwinter, a close friend to Reiser + Umemoto, was able to step into his role on short notice.
Reiser kicked off the evening by presenting a trio of ambitious projects in Taiwan, whose models and drawings the gallery had on display in the exhibition Building Beyond Place. Two of those projects, the Taipei Pop Music Center and Kaohsiung Port Terminal, are currently under construction. The third, a pair of train stations in Taiwan’s Alishan National Scenic Area, is unlikely to be built, but its experimental use of monocoque shells and glued laminated timber lattices expands the firm’s prodigious tectonic repertoire.
As Allen noted, the three projects share more than a common geographic home. “This is a body of work with a strong internal coherence,” he said. “Every new development somehow comes out of the previous work.” Allen, a longtime friend of Reiser’s and his erstwhile classmate at Cooper Union (Allen and Reiser graduated in 1981; Umemoto followed in 1983), has the benefit of familiarity. For the rest of us, Reiser + Umemoto recently published Projects and Their Consequences, the first volume in a planned series of monographs. Paging through four decades of work, it’s clear that Reiser + Umemoto are nothing if not consistent. The book reveals how formal and tectonic innovations emerge, develop, and transform between projects, only to later reappear in new contexts and put to different purposes.
Kwinter characterized their approach as a pursuit of synthesis: “It’s a realized dream in which structure, the logic that produced it, and the architecture itself are all one and the same,” he said. “A kind of immanence.” In a less philosophical but more tangible tone, Reiser likened it to making carburetors, things whose form, structure, and function are so tightly entwined as to be self-evident. The firm has developed many such carburetors over the years, and they enjoy plugging them into new places, tweaking and repurposing them. With a deft reversal of flows and arrows, the diagrammatic machinery behind the Cardiff Bay Opera House became the basis of Kaohsiung, an organizational logic of concentration turned into one of dispersion. At the end of the night and from the back of the room, Steven Holl offered his candid assessment: “My favorite thing tonight was ‘reverse the arrows.’ That’s brilliant.” Indeed.