The stormy relationship between human beings and the machine has produced an enduring intellectual conversation that has sometimes degenerated into a deafening dialectic. Neil Denari brings a moderate and optimistic outlook to this subject. His work represents no angry stand-off between the human/natural world and the machine/constructed world, nor is he swept away by all of the grand, giddy possibilities of technological invention. He looks for how these reported adversaries can share objectives in common, how they extend each other Architecture, as much as any art form, embraces this dialectic, and it represents Denari’s method of research and the material consequence of his philosophy.
His proposed West Coast Gateway, 1988, is an architectural expression of the complex, problematic concept and practice of acculturation in a technological age. Intended for a long, narrow slab raised 30 feet above one of Southern California’s strands of highway, the project features two buildings at opposite ends of an enormous pedestrian freeway. Building 1 of the proposal suggests the idea of origin—the place of individual histories and cultural diversities. Building 2 expresses the methods and messages of a universal culture formed by electronic media and global communications. The two buildings have tough, technically inspired viscera. The forms and skin of technology begin to tell of the strange coexistence of Los Angeles’ unique Western and worldly characters, as well as its essential placelessness as the site between East and West. Denari’s vocabulary exposes the psychological dimension of the immigrant experience—how most major cities have become enormous immigration processing plants. The elevated site can sustain no roots. The peculiar spatial concept of “air rights” expresses the new conundrum of regional identity. The location of this gateway is its most provocative aspect.
In his entry for the Tokyo International Forum, 1989, Denari again took a slightly perverse approach to site. The program called for the insertion of a major cultural center in one of the most congested cities on earth. The project expresses a kind of urbanistic illogic to cope with the implosion caused by a fixed, diminutive landmass and a burgeoning population. He uses the main axes of the building site to create a structure of two distinct pieces. The site edges shape and deform the project. The model shows great pods of space suspended in steel structures; pieces are chaffed by separate activities and identities made comprehensible by technological innovation. The mechanically reproduced drawings substantiate the project’s strange poetry. The piece as a whole recalls a big machine produced not by the anonymity of the assembly line, but as a consequence of craft, vision, and particularization.
Denari’s proposals are delicate apparatuses that respond to contemporary phenomena. They are the inventions of an artist whose searching philosophy is in struggle with the imperviousness of architectural language. Denari suggests how an architecture might respond technologically to the conditions of a new century. He challenges the conventional obedience to context, scale, and even form that have limited a full humanistic discourse of the future.
—Patricia C. Phillips
