Individually, Dan Graham and Jeff Wall have consistently investigated architecture for its parallels to human psychology. For them, the act of opening a door reiterates the experience of psychological interiorization; looking up into the broadening expanse of a portal suggests the physical manifestation of the unutterable infinite. Every physical detail of an abode becomes a recreation of a state of mind, and an ironic description of human emotional needs. This history informs their collaboration on The Children’s Pavilion, 1989.
The architectural sources for this half-sized model are diverse. The piece combines the functional elements of a playground (with its king-of-the-mountain conquests), a cave (with its connection to the elemental subterranean and to birth), and a pavilion (with its public function as a communal site and its private function as a place of retreat into memory and contemplation). It also reveals a fundamental aspect of architecture, as outlined by Walter Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”: “Architecture has always represented the prototype of a work of art, the reception of which is consummated by a collectivity in a state of distraction.” This idea of perceiving architecture “distractedly” through simultaneous tactile and visual experiences is reinvigorated by this work. It is an architectural experience that is concretely rooted in both a child’s sense of play and in Benjamin’s idea of a “distracted” (or nonpedagogic) esthetic perception. Without didacticism, The Children’s Pavilion extends an accurate reading of child’s play into the elevated strata of uncritical perception, of perception without reliance on the too-common catechism of precategorized information.
The nature of one’s experience of the piece was established from the moment of entering the gallery. A spherical structure sat in a corner. The architectural renderings, plan views, and sectional views hung on the far wall. The other walls contained enlarged versions of the photographs that are to appear on the interior of the pavilion. All this was presented without any hierarchy of importance. A half-circle yawned its negative space, issuing a quiet invitation to the viewer. (Since this model is half the size of the intended original, an adult had to bend low in order to enter the portal.) Inside the soft-white and gray sphere were nine round photographic portraits of children of varying ethnic backgrounds, shot dramatically against expansive skies. Although the clothes of all the children seemed to bespeak similar class membership, their facial expressions and hand gestures established the sanctity of individuality. These back-lit photographs, which created a kind of contemporary iconographical reference to cathedral stained-glass windows, shone down onto a floor constructed of descending concentric rings; these led down to a mirror suggesting a basin of water. Directly above this reflective surface was the apex of the dome: an oculus with its convex two-way mirrored surface simultaneously reflecting both the bottom of the interior and the spectacle of the sky outside.
Real sky could be seen within the same mirror that reflected the ever-receding repetitions of the interior photographs, with their imagined sky. Real people on the interior could look up through the oculus to see real people who might be standing on the exterior of the oculus. Thus, in a carefully orchestrated play of a cacophony of perceptions, Graham and Wall represented the ever-fluctuating psychology of children. Perceptions shifted, the sky changed its glow and light, and images were mirrored to infinity, making the whole structure resemble something of a cross between a cathedral and a fun house. This seemed a truthful architectural representation of a child’s psychology: awe at the enormity of the world’s mysteries combined with delight and fear at all the entropy and chaos that result from the failure to control logically those mysteries.
— Dena Shottenkirk
