From 1981 on, projection artist and social activist, Krzysztof Wodiczko, has been utilizing public space as an arena to raise that consciousness of architecture’s ability both to mirror and create cultural values. His projections employ the building’s façade as a canvas to reveal hidden but powerful messages that formulate our attitudes on important social and historical issues. “Not to speak through the city monuments is to abandon them and to abandon ourselves losing both a sense of history and the present…,” Wodiczko believes (Public Address 87). His goal is to liberate the truths hidden beneath those deceptively innocent facades, to reveal the relationships that cultural, social and economic institutions have attached to them so they can no longer function as their agent. “I am not about revolutionary messages on walls,” he insists. “I want to analyse the relationship between the human body, the body of someone who lives here, and the social body and the body of the architectural and spatial forms around that body” (87). This essay will examine four of Wodiczko’s projects through which he investigates these relationships in Los Angeles, Manhattan, and Charlestown, Massachusetts.
In his 1987 projection onto the façade of the Los Angeles Westin Bonaventure Hotel (commissioned by the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art), Wodiczko provides a paradigmatic example of this conflation of architecture with culture. The five towered steel and glass John Portman designed Westin Bonaventure, completed in 1976, and famously criticized by Jean Baudrillard in the opening quote for its solipsistic isolation from the city continues,: “The glass facades merely reflect the environment, sending back its own image. This makes them much more formidable than any wall of stone…Everywhere the transparency of interfaces ends in internal refraction” (220-221). The isolation, facilitated by the disrupted connection between the exterior and interior, is perhaps a metaphor for the segregation between the affluent users of the complex and those who service it. Baudrillard continues his criticism of the truncated communication and abortive connections created by contemporary life that augment the deliberately architected inaccessibility of urban complexes like the Westin: “Everything pretentiously termed ‘communication’ and ‘interaction’ – walkman, dark glasses, automatic household appliances, hi-tech cars, even the perpetual dialogue with the computer – ends up with each monad retreating into…its self-regulating little corner and its artificial immunity…” (220-221).
That isolated immunity is critiqued by Frederic Jameson in his essay “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” for its violation of the very city fabric with which it seeks to connect. He condemns the structure of its “peculiar and placeless dissociation…from its neighborhood (Jameson 243), a dissociation in part reflected through the deliberately obstructed access to the Westin complex. The entryways, “downplayed to the bare minimum” (243), he describes as “rather backdoor affairs” (243). They are unannounced and admit one to floors which require an elevator to gain access to the lobby (243), deliberately creating a very disorienting atmosphere. The lobby, an atrium court topped by a sixth floor greenhouse glass roof, is one of the Westin’s main attractions. Although it is intended as a pleasure garden containing plantings, reflecting pools and fountains, access is heavily controlled by high security measures that prevent the intrusion of “undesirables.” Despite the fact that it is built by private funds and offering profit for the same private interests (including Portman himself), the hotel gobbles up public space and urban resources in areas that once served the poor, working classes, and lower middle classes as dwellings and unofficial community centers.
It is that disjuncture between private economic interests and public rights that Wodiczko’s projection engages.