Roula MatarL'architecture selon Gordon Matta-Clark

Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978), a major figure in American art in the 1970s, produced a body of work of great diversity during his brief career. Experiments with materials, installations, performances, architectural cut-outs, drawings, films, photographs and photomontages bear witness to this multiplicity of approaches and media explored. He first made a name for himself through his cuttings and dissections of buildings, working on abandoned buildings slated for demolition. For a long time, these spectacular cuttings have prevailed in analyses, and have most often been considered as attacks on architecture.
However, as an architect by training, Gordon Matta-Clark has sought above all to experiment, in his own words, with “alternative uses of the most familiar spaces”. On the basis of archival documents, this book proposes to read his work from this point of view coming from architecture, by considering the movements of his spatial thought and its architectural stakes, in all the singular places explored. Whether it is cutting out the walls, floors and ceilings of abandoned buildings; creating an implicit perspective under a funeral slab; installing a shelter in a tree; designing mobile basket houses; building a wall from rubbish found in the street; wanting to climb to the sky with a rope ladder or wanting to live in a balloon building, what do his projects say about his idea of architecture?