UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI: MARCHÉ
Pritzker Prize winning architect Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis
designed a 353,000 sq.ft. student recreation center on the campus at
the University of Cincinnati, which opened in May 2006. Rebeca Méndez
was commissioned to create two permanent installations at the center;
one in the convenient store (c-store) and another at the food court.
Thom Mayne takes devilish pleasure in handing over his tortured geometric surfaces to artists for them to treat as their canvas. For his restaurant Tsunami Asian Grill at the Venetian in Las Vegas (1999) he had designer Rebeca Méndez drape every last inch of his splicing and folding walls and ceilings with nearly 2000 square metres of photographic murals. Loock: “Her supergraphics doubled up what the surface does with the geometrics by adding another layer of dimensionality. It was very interesting to see Rebeca deconstruct our folds and compose her own spaces. Her visuals make our shapes friendlier and better to understand, so for Cincinnati we asked her back again for two projects.” A synergistic match, because as a professor at the Design | Media Arts Department at UCLA, Méndez’s research focuses on the notion of thinking of architecture as interface, and interface as a kind of architecture, connecting people through immersive spaces, physical objects and systems to local and global networks.
In the convenience store of the Rec Center Méndez was asked to create six murals measuring 7 by 3 metres to be suspended from the ceiling. The university imagined market scenes; Méndez had her own solution in mind. Hovering over the giant bags of Doritos and university paraphernalia she composed 24 extreme panoramic landscapes. Méndez refers to them as “...ever sustaining landscapes. All products and nourishment have as their origin the extraction or harvest of the raw materials provided by the earth.” Méndez’ interest is to give the viewer a glimpse of these raw materials in their integrity and beauty, as well as expose the distribution and processing of these goods before they are conveniently packaged for consumption at the ‘c-store.’
Formally, the horizon lines of the landscapes have become thresholds onto imagining new, non- existent landscapes where glaciers float over puffy clouds and Nordic cows graze on top of tropical waters. Using her own documentary photography from far-flung places like Patagonia and the Sahara desert, Méndez’s landscapes tease the viewer to see beyond the horizon, which she views as “the perpetual aim of humanity.” Méndez sees this urge as a double-edged sword, and instilled in her murals this sense of ambivalence. Each of the six murals has an overall dominating colour—red, orange, yellow, blue, green and white. The first five of those colours correspond to the United States’ Department of Homeland Security’s National Alert Threat Levels red corresponding to ‘severe’ and green corresponding to ‘low’. Méndez realised that ‘peace’—the most important ambition of humanity—and its corresponding colour, white, were missing from the chart, and it became her sixth panel. Her subtle critique, in her words, “exposes the sadly backward state of affairs of the current United States government.”
For the second project at the new Rec Center, Morphosis asked Rebeca Méndez to use large-size prints to clad murals on four cones, two of them reaching twenty metres high and piercing through the roof. The cones envelop the kitchens of the food court, and hide all the piping and machinery necessary for such enterprises. What often happens in spaces like these is that the occupants fill them with evergreen ficus trees to liven up the interior, often leading to dreary, dried out dust collectors dying in a lonely corner. Permanent flora printed on the cones, Morphosis imagined, would avoid this tragic fate. Méndez and Mayne discussed D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s seminal work On Growth and Form (1917), which posits that processes in nature fit mathematical equations, setting out to prove a unity of life by its relationship between form and function. To expand on this, Méndez studied Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science (2002) where he states that repetitive application of simple computational transformations is the true source of complexity in the world. Méndez’s investigations into how to create a visual dialogue between flora, the architecture, and the (audiences of the) site led her to select grass—specifically giant reed grass —for her design. Mayne was immediately keen to the idea, imagining, a la David Lynch, that the grass would be strewn with an ear, a cigarette butt or used condom, all seen from the eyes of an ant, but Méndez interest was less in the narrative and more in the rhythm and organizations generated by the grass itself. Over many months and continents, Méndez photographed grass from various points of view and under the different conditions light and wind create, to reveal the patterns that one simple form—a blade of grass—produces through complex organisation. She felt the vital force of life itself in them.
The brief asked for the murals to be printed on fire-retardant canvas and applied to the structures. No manufacturer wanted to be responsible for the installation of the murals, as the cylindrical structures were irregular with hard to reach angles, so the margin of error was huge. After a year of work, Méndez had a week to come up with an alternative, recalled her Mexican heritage of mural painting, and found a couple of traditional paint and brush muralists, Susanna Dadd and James Griffith, two bohemian artists who have given many a Hollywood celebrity home a delicious touch-up throughout a long career. Sue Dadd: “The cone murals simply needed to be made, had to exist.” Just five weeks were available to produce them, which meant it was only physically possible to paint 25% of it. Heartbroken Méndez killed many of her darling blades, adding neutral sky. Griffith: “I was on a painter’s high, painting faster than I ever did, and then realising it was not fast enough, speeding up.” Amid the dust and noise of milling construction workers—who to their delight all turned out to be Democrats, and very disgruntled about the 2004 presidential election, in which they felt the election result of Ohio was rigged—they rose at 5 AM to paint green grass up to 5 PM. Dadd: “It was very challenging. You would constantly get lost, go grass blind.” Griffith: “The way the grass criss-crosses, and comes together in fluid intersections is exactly how the geometry and the flow of the building works. It was such a beautiful collaboration and achievement, from the plasterers to our work to the designer to the architect; we felt like cellists in an orchestra performing for a brilliant director a piece by Beethoven the best we ever will.”
“She is relentless in her inquiry... She has an extremely engaging brain that understands the broader conceptual notions of architecture.”
– Tome Mayne, In ‘Hip, Hot, Now: 25 Angelenos We Love’ In Tu Ciudad Magazine
Thom Mayne takes devilish pleasure in handing over his tortured geometric surfaces to artists for them to treat as their canvas. For his restaurant Tsunami Asian Grill at the Venetian in Las Vegas (1999) he had designer Rebeca Méndez drape every last inch of his splicing and folding walls and ceilings with nearly 2000 square metres of photographic murals. Loock: “Her supergraphics doubled up what the surface does with the geometrics by adding another layer of dimensionality. It was very interesting to see Rebeca deconstruct our folds and compose her own spaces. Her visuals make our shapes friendlier and better to understand, so for Cincinnati we asked her back again for two projects.” A synergistic match, because as a professor at the Design | Media Arts Department at UCLA, Méndez’s research focuses on the notion of thinking of architecture as interface, and interface as a kind of architecture, connecting people through immersive spaces, physical objects and systems to local and global networks.
In the convenience store of the Rec Center Méndez was asked to create six murals measuring 7 by 3 metres to be suspended from the ceiling. The university imagined market scenes; Méndez had her own solution in mind. Hovering over the giant bags of Doritos and university paraphernalia she composed 24 extreme panoramic landscapes. Méndez refers to them as “...ever sustaining landscapes. All products and nourishment have as their origin the extraction or harvest of the raw materials provided by the earth.” Méndez’ interest is to give the viewer a glimpse of these raw materials in their integrity and beauty, as well as expose the distribution and processing of these goods before they are conveniently packaged for consumption at the ‘c-store.’
Formally, the horizon lines of the landscapes have become thresholds onto imagining new, non- existent landscapes where glaciers float over puffy clouds and Nordic cows graze on top of tropical waters. Using her own documentary photography from far-flung places like Patagonia and the Sahara desert, Méndez’s landscapes tease the viewer to see beyond the horizon, which she views as “the perpetual aim of humanity.” Méndez sees this urge as a double-edged sword, and instilled in her murals this sense of ambivalence. Each of the six murals has an overall dominating colour—red, orange, yellow, blue, green and white. The first five of those colours correspond to the United States’ Department of Homeland Security’s National Alert Threat Levels red corresponding to ‘severe’ and green corresponding to ‘low’. Méndez realised that ‘peace’—the most important ambition of humanity—and its corresponding colour, white, were missing from the chart, and it became her sixth panel. Her subtle critique, in her words, “exposes the sadly backward state of affairs of the current United States government.”
For the second project at the new Rec Center, Morphosis asked Rebeca Méndez to use large-size prints to clad murals on four cones, two of them reaching twenty metres high and piercing through the roof. The cones envelop the kitchens of the food court, and hide all the piping and machinery necessary for such enterprises. What often happens in spaces like these is that the occupants fill them with evergreen ficus trees to liven up the interior, often leading to dreary, dried out dust collectors dying in a lonely corner. Permanent flora printed on the cones, Morphosis imagined, would avoid this tragic fate. Méndez and Mayne discussed D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s seminal work On Growth and Form (1917), which posits that processes in nature fit mathematical equations, setting out to prove a unity of life by its relationship between form and function. To expand on this, Méndez studied Stephen Wolfram’s book A New Kind of Science (2002) where he states that repetitive application of simple computational transformations is the true source of complexity in the world. Méndez’s investigations into how to create a visual dialogue between flora, the architecture, and the (audiences of the) site led her to select grass—specifically giant reed grass —for her design. Mayne was immediately keen to the idea, imagining, a la David Lynch, that the grass would be strewn with an ear, a cigarette butt or used condom, all seen from the eyes of an ant, but Méndez interest was less in the narrative and more in the rhythm and organizations generated by the grass itself. Over many months and continents, Méndez photographed grass from various points of view and under the different conditions light and wind create, to reveal the patterns that one simple form—a blade of grass—produces through complex organisation. She felt the vital force of life itself in them.
The brief asked for the murals to be printed on fire-retardant canvas and applied to the structures. No manufacturer wanted to be responsible for the installation of the murals, as the cylindrical structures were irregular with hard to reach angles, so the margin of error was huge. After a year of work, Méndez had a week to come up with an alternative, recalled her Mexican heritage of mural painting, and found a couple of traditional paint and brush muralists, Susanna Dadd and James Griffith, two bohemian artists who have given many a Hollywood celebrity home a delicious touch-up throughout a long career. Sue Dadd: “The cone murals simply needed to be made, had to exist.” Just five weeks were available to produce them, which meant it was only physically possible to paint 25% of it. Heartbroken Méndez killed many of her darling blades, adding neutral sky. Griffith: “I was on a painter’s high, painting faster than I ever did, and then realising it was not fast enough, speeding up.” Amid the dust and noise of milling construction workers—who to their delight all turned out to be Democrats, and very disgruntled about the 2004 presidential election, in which they felt the election result of Ohio was rigged—they rose at 5 AM to paint green grass up to 5 PM. Dadd: “It was very challenging. You would constantly get lost, go grass blind.” Griffith: “The way the grass criss-crosses, and comes together in fluid intersections is exactly how the geometry and the flow of the building works. It was such a beautiful collaboration and achievement, from the plasterers to our work to the designer to the architect; we felt like cellists in an orchestra performing for a brilliant director a piece by Beethoven the best we ever will.”
“She is relentless in her inquiry... She has an extremely engaging brain that understands the broader conceptual notions of architecture.”
– Tome Mayne, In ‘Hip, Hot, Now: 25 Angelenos We Love’ In Tu Ciudad Magazine
