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In a high-rise New York apartment with a wide window that surveys the Manhattan grid below, the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings are in bed together. The Chrysler melts in a silvery swoon, shagged out, while the beacon atop the Empire State Building still glows fiery red and on the bedside table the Statue of Liberty’s arm holds up a torch suggesting more passion to come. But oh no! The lovers have been caught at it. At the door is the forbidding RCA Building, which has left its usual station at 30 Rockefeller Plaza to see this!
Madelon Vriesendorp’s 1975 skyscraper sex romp drawing Flagrant Délit – “caught in the act” – can be seen twice in her exhibition Mind Games: as a standalone print and as the cover of Delirious New York, the 1978 book by her ex-husband Rem Koolhaas that is both a surreal history of the city and a subversive manifesto for a new kind of modern architecture. Vriesendorp is what exactly? An architectural cartoonist? A cartoonist architect? She is certainly more than just a graphic prankster, and won the 2025 Soane Medal given to visionaries who have “furthered and enriched the public understanding of architecture”. Hence this show. And it all started with skyscrapers copulating.
In 1975, Vriesendorp co-founded OMA – the Office of Metropolitan Architecture – with Koolhaas and Elia and Zoe Zenghelis. Today, OMA is a leading global architectural firm responsible for Euralille and the Beverly Hills Prada Store: the ultra-urban sublime is OMA’s forte, though it doesn’t feel that sublime when you’re waiting for a train in Lille. Back in the 1970s, when all this was a dream, OMA produced provocative, unbuilt projects and Vriesendorp’s cheeky drawings gave their radical, ironic vision a suitably comedic form. In another of her sexed-up dreams, Manhattan itself becomes a bed floating among phallic half-sunken skyscrapers in a post-coital apocalyptic reverie.
The drawings and prints of New York that dominate the first part of this show wittily expound the thesis of Delirious New York, which argues that Manhattan’s chaotic, egregiously capitalist development in the 20th century produced a much more livable, lovable, psychically satisfying architecture than the cold rational utopias of Le Corbusier. European modernists tried to discipline the future but New York’s architectural pirates built sensual modern structures as anarchic and rich as medieval castles, inviting fantasy. Vriesendorp’s cartoons delight in that. The Statue of Liberty sits sad and naked on a bed among modernist fragments, while elsewhere the Chrysler and Empire State are in bed again, this time undisturbed.
Yet while rampant skyscrapers are all very well, that was then and this is now. Modernity has left a big cleaning bill as the climate gasps under its excesses. In the second part of the show, recent creations by Vriesendorp reveal an optimistic, witty approach to the climate crisis in sculptures made from recycled materials. Egg cartons become monster masks and plastic milk bottles become dragons.
In a separate space adjacent to the central delirious lightwell of Soane’s museum, she creates a surreal Freudian tableau from cardboard. Two people sit at a table playing a game in which they have to move “symbolic objects” around a model room while around them are large colourful versions of the same objects, including a stripy snake and patchy dog. It’s a recreation of a mind game she likes to play with visitors and friends.
But comparisons with the original surrealists are unfortunate. Vriesendorp’s art is too relaxed to stir the unconscious, too rational to tap the irrational. At times, you feel you are overhearing private jokes between architects – if you haven’t read Delirious New York, you may be nonplussed by all the high-rise rumpy-pumpy. And is it really that thrilling that she designed a book with postmodernist guru Charles Jencks, or has worked with a member of Turner-winning urban regeneration outfit Assemble?
Still, no visit to this magical museum-cum-home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields is ever wasted. The architectural visions Vriesendorp has illustrated all reject straight-lined purist modernism for building styles that rejoice in imagination and unreason, because we are not simple creatures and we need our stranger sides to be reflected by buildings. John Soane fought a similar battle: working in the Georgian age at the height of neoclassicism, with its straight columns and rational proportions, he twisted this style into a melancholic poetry. When he designed a vast new Bank of England, he not only gave it the scale of an ancient Roman basilica but commissioned a painting of what it might look like in ruins far in the future.
Vriesendorp’s erotic skyscrapers fit right into Soane’s mirrored spaces. Her show is an intriguing postmodern footnote to his premodern wonderland.
English (US) ·