A Facade Applaud

by Zane Fischer, for disCOURSE

When ART Santa Fe Presents announced that it would hold an international architectural competition to design a facade along the west side of El Museo Cultural for this year’s contemporary art fair, I figured it was just the kind of sassy gumption Santa Fe needed to show that we’ve got a pulse that isn’t always so provincial. When the winning team of Peter Elsbeck, Cristina Greavu and Eric Rang (Washington University students studying in Finland, we’re told) was announced alongside the runners-up, it was tough to tell if the jury had made the right call. When the facade actually began construction a few weeks ago, I kept waiting for it to be finished, to suddenly develop some weight and presence along the ribbed edge of the building and feel a solid and significant transformation of the space.

Didn’t happen.

I felt crestfallen. Worse, I felt paranoid that such an adventure would never again be undertaken, after such an anticlimactic realization of a spotty plan. But then I took a second look. The first victory of the piec, Shifting Lines, was the decision to be less of a facade and more of an echo. Rather than hiding, distorting, or enforcing anything upon the existing building, the work takes the corrugations, beaten and tweaked as they are, and magnifies their presence with an undulating, ethereal extension. It’s the soft touch that works so much better than the forced hand. The construction, an overbuilt armature of steel with a outdoor grade fabric ribbon, riddles the side of the building with a juxtaposition, simultaneously staccato and fluid, that is musical in its execution. With proximity and angle, the tune changes—a different but simultaneous note to everybody that encountering it at any given moment.

Initally, I was concerned also that such a mild treatment of the building would vanish in the mayhem of Railyard construction and dust, but Shifting Lines has quietly developed its own presence, as it were meant to be there all along. ART Santa Fe Presents, in one fell swoop, imported an exciting dialogue about our relationship to built environment, our honesty in terms of acknowledging facade, took a chance on student work, upped the visual ante of Railyard design, and instigated what deserves to be an ongoing and significant award in Santa Fe. Plus, local artist and steel worker Lex Lucious got a hell of a commission to fabricate that armature.

If the kind of competition and instigation to excellence which brought us Shifting Lines can continue, the identity of Santa Fe, especially in terms of the breadth and scope of work which is accomplished and welcomed here, will ratchet—if just a bit—in the right direction.