Subject: "Architecture and Hygiene": Lecture delivered by Adam Kalkin
Sent on: 11/22/2002

"Architecture and Hygiene"

Lecture delivered by Adam Kalkin at the Graham Foundation, 6 November 2002

Adam Kalkin is an architect, a performance artist, a conceptual artist, and an inventor who has applied for five patent applications. Accordingly, his November 6 presentation at the Graham Foundation featured photographs and drawings of his architectural works; images of his conceptual art; video clips; and cartoon sketches of his inventions, all of which appear in his new book, Architecture and Hygiene (Batsford Books, 2002). Kalkin claims that he bears no particular allegiance to any one of these art forms, and as his presentation unfolded, it became apparent how these various creative activities inform one another and how they are all expressions of a common set of ideologies, interests, and obsessions.

Kalkin began his lecture, which drew liberally from inquiries and comments from the audience, by proclaiming that he takes an unconventional and indirect approach to architecture. In both his architecture and art, Kalkin enjoys experimenting with unusual juxtapositions of cultures, spaces, materials, and sites to yield surprising and unfamiliar results. For example, a house he designed on Martha's Vineyard conjoins an antique barn and an industrial warehouse. The idea for the house was conceived when Kalkin saw advertisements for the two buildings next to one another in a newspaper and decided to realize this adjacency by combining the structures on a single site. Kalkin's own house in New Jersey consists of a turn-of-the-century cottage with a decorous, formal interior created by the noted designer of White House interiors, Albert Hadley. Kalkin placed the cottage, however, inside a lofty metal and glass prefabricated building terminated by a vertical nine-square grid of concrete-walled rooms. The resulting home manipulates the relationship between interiors and exteriors and challenges traditional understandings of domestic spaces.

Many of Kalkin's buildings are created from shipping containers set inside a prefabricated metal building that serves as a shell. The "Jetway House," which has not been built, is devised of four vertical shipping containers placed inside a larger warehouse at each of its corners. An airplane passenger boarding bridge protrudes out of one end of the warehouse. Kalkin's "Collector’s House," a fictional home for a collector of folk art, is divided into three twenty-foot trans-oceanic shipping containers placed inside a prefabricated metal building with two aluminum and glass garage doors on either end. A curtain on the outside of the house can be closed to create a private patio. The cost of the home, which is on display at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont, was $125,000. Similarly, the "$99,000 House" is made of shipping containers and a steel building; this generic, low-cost dwelling can be ordered by calling a toll-free number. Yet, as Kalkin noted, the house presents a clear trade-off between value and aesthetics, and is not appropriate for everyone.

It is not surprising that the city, with its clash of experiences, objects, sounds, and cultures, inspires much of Kalkin's work. In a New York City apartment he designed, everything is moveable to represent the transitoriness of urban life. In a conceptual art piece called "Baby Monitor," multiple baby monitors are gathered together in a superstructure and each is linked to various spaces throughout the city. The work, Kalkin explained, brings together the fractured and unseen happenings of urban life.

At the center of Kalkin's methodology is the privileging of the emotional and physical over the rational. Kalkin uses his work to articulate, or even substitute for, physical sensations, and he considers his art and architecture to be an extension of his own mind and body. Key to his artistic labor is the idea of mental "hygiene," or the process of cleansing his mind and resolving internal issues through his work. Kalkin's complete satisfaction with his work arrives when he has climaxed at a state of "maximum hygiene," or greatest clarity. Kalkin conceded that creating architecture and art in this way can be an exclusive process that denies everyone but the artist the opportunity to participate in the work.

In this sense, Kalkin believes that his work should fulfill not just his client's fantasies, but also his fantasies as an architect and artist. He thus places great importance on establishing a just, even moral relationship with his clients that will allow both parties' expectations to be met. On the one hand, this relationship demands that the architect strive to establish a personal connection with his client in order to respond instinctively to the client's needs and the programmatic aspects of a building. On the other hand, according to Kalkin, the client must be willing to take a risk and enter into a relationship with the architect that allows the latter a degree of selfishness, or the independence to wander and experiment within circumscribed limits.

Kalkin's patent applications are one way he achieves "mental hygiene," and he shared with the audience several of the inventions for which he is seeking patents. In one, the sole of a sneaker is cut into fine layers, each of which has an image on it. As the sole wears down, each layer is exposed to create a very slow-motion film. His idea for "stereophonic rumble strips" entails placing rumble strips of various musical frequencies on federal highways so that automobile tires play melodies. Billboards would announce song titles and composers.

The book Architecture and Hygiene is available on Amazon.com. For more information on Kalkin's work, visit his website, www.architectureandhygiene.com.

Lecture review by Stephanie Whitlock, Graham Foundation.