Daniel Arsham
Interview with Diane Dispar
Diane Dispar: How would you characterize work that is being made in Miami right now, and do you feel as if the city has had an impact on your work?
Daniel Arsham: I think that this city is in a period of drastic change, the kind of change that happens only every thirty or fourty years in a city of this size. There are so many high-rise buildings being put up and so much other construction going on that from certain vantage points, the entire city looks like a construction site with a forest of cranes moving about. I have lived in many different places in this country, some urban and others more rural, and the spectacle of construction here is greater than I have seen anywhere. I think its greatest impact on me is that it causes me to notice things about the landscape that were not necessarily apparent before. It can make areas that were once completely familiar to me, completely foreign. I used to live in a house that was demolished to make way for a large condo project. There were things about that block that you would know about only if you lived there. Small inconsequential marks in the pavement become landmarks of some event, and more than anything it showed me that my memory of that place is so bound up in the way that it was put together, I mean the physical nature of the house, its proximity to the next building and all of the strange architectural anomalies that happened inside. There is also a kind of architectural chance that happens in a block populated by multiple structures that is often lost in complete urban planning. I don't know, these things affect you.
DD: You mention there were architectural anomalies. What do you mean by that?
DA: The house I lived in was supposedly built by the Dupont family. They owned a larger house on the corner and in 1930 they built the house I lived in for their daughter. It was a typical Miami Bungalow type house, nothing extraordinary, but pleasant. The front of the house was completely symmetrical. In 1999, a few friends of mine rented the house with the intention of converting it into an exhibition space. They tore down a few walls and added others in order to create a more refined space. In doing so they covered up portions of the interior architecture, things like the fireplace, windows, closets, electrical outlets etc. In many places you
could see the remnants of the previous physical space, emerging from a wall, or making a room appear smaller than it felt like it should have been, but in others those remnants were invisible. There were all kinds of interruptions like this. I love that kind of thing. The sort of impromptu alteration of space, and the remnants it leaves.
DD: When we were in New Mexico you described the forms that were in your most recent work as being in a space between building and ruin, hinting at a larger structure that is either under construction or that has been lost. It occurs to me now that Miami is somewhat like that.
DA: I don't think that it is just this city, but you are right that there are places here that have these kind of ambiguous structures. Some of them have obvious purposes, either already executed or for the future. One thing that happens here with all the construction is that you have a building under construction, and right next to that you have a building being demolished. You can have this kind of moment where the two are the same, indistinguishable from one another. That space exists in the drawings, but for me they are this kind of study of built forms, nothing too complicated but starting with a simple block and evolving into more complex structures that can be used, structures that have some type of physical relationship with a person. The drawings were also looking at the relationship between an organized group of forms that could be used, like a staircase for instance, and built forms that don?t appear to have any organization, like a pile of blocks.