Some years ago at the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, I saw an exhibition of architectural maquettes depicting buildings and cities that in some strange, spectral sense were instantly familiar, though they didn’t approximate buildings from real life; instead, they were modeled from the architectonic worlds of literary classics. The show’s premise was unique yet not unfamiliar. The singular relationship between language and architecture might be distilled by the most common term for a poetic unit or grouping of lines: the stanza, which means “room” in Italian. This relationship can also be

For his recent exhibition, Pierre Vadi presented a group of works realized over the past two years. The pieces chosen, all sculptural, were arranged on the floor and formed a landscape seen from above, an imaginary city map. The elements—their materiality surprising, their colors artificial—intermixed an industrial finish with an intriguing kind of organicism, even a sensuality. The show’s title, “Cplsion Cldestine” (a poetic compression borrowed from the American writer David Foster Wallace), immediately announced the work’s psychological charge.

Arranged in a rigorous grid, the