Neil Denari and his Shrinkwrapping Obsessions

A version of this piece was published last spring in Manifold, published by Rice School of Architecture. It's a review of a lecture Neil Denari gave a year ago at Princeton titled "Shrinkwrapping Vague Things."  In his studio last fall at Princeton, "Air Tight," Denari's students designed a showcase for potential buyers of the Airbus A380: a tightly controlled experience, completely interior and wrapped around the Airbus.

At the lecture and in our dinner conversation afterwards, I was struck by that Denari's approached reminded me of what interaction designers do, from research and photographic explorations, down to crafting the tiny details. It's difficult to do on all scales, the macro to the micro, but Denari manages with aplomb. "Design at All Scales" is the firm's slogan. (We also got to geek out about the line-ups for the Golden Palominos and Public Image Limited, but that's a different story.)
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Immaculate Surface and Covert Construction

Neil Denari knows how to interact with his audience, how to externalize the projects, how to gauge the room, how to wield an image. He can argue about the lineup of 80s bands that you probably don't know. Above all, he is a deft architect with a broad portfolio of built projects, one who practices design at every scale. Denari's November 7, 2007 lecture at Princeton featured his scalar acrobatics and cultural ergonomics: the process of organizing into place a shrinkwrapping of vague things.

Ankles, eyes, hands, codes, software

Denari frames arguments with photographs. The images operate on a Lilliputian level, his lens catching young adults in Shibuya on a sultry August night. From the street-grade vantage, he catches the ankles of his subjects as the camera looks up at them against a black night sky. They are illuminated by small signs and doorways on a side street, and by Shibuya's grandest interface: the Qfront with its famous living billboard (the one you remember from Lost in Translation, with the walking elephant). The photographs capture moments at different scales. These instances shift from the body, to the door, to the sign, to the street, to the billboard. They catch people's interactions with devices, and yet the devices stand in juxtaposition with the spaces they inhabit: a boy holds a game controller in a crowded arcade; a photocopier backs against a sea of blue cubicles opposite a religious shrine. It is the relationship of the hand, the eye, and the billboard, a triangular interaction, micro-to-mini-to-macro, that Denari brilliantly catches.

Denari's moves reflect the approach of interaction design. This discipline is the creation of the products, systems and interfaces (usually electronic) with which people engage. It developed in the early 1980s out of the desire for the interior behavior of a computer to meet the molded exterior of its hardware. Doing this effectively requires an understanding of several levels of interiority: human behavior, system function, and site limitation, to name a few. Could we see his projects, especially his interior renovations, as a new type of software that brings many interactions into focus?

Pristine, in effect

Denari twice mentions Antonioni's Blow-Up during his lecture. This isn't a surprise, given the ways his zooming in and zooming out reveals what is not available upon first glance. MUFG Nagoya (a private client center for one of the world's largest banks)uses separations of scant millimeters on panels and joints on its 28-meter black stainless steel façade; zygotic shapes forming into circles and then lighting for the entrance; tangerine custom furniture for the lobby.

But zooming out to the High Line 23, a residential building on New York's High Line, Denari occupies a different dimension altogether. Here, it is a matter of hacking building code. Each facet of the "leftover" site the 13-story residential tower will occupy is won through negotiation. "Zoning x Desire = What it takes to build in Manhattan," quips the DMNA website. The building is the manifestation of these interstices. For the projects he showed, the typical plan and program are straightforward, nearly boring. It is always section that shows the potential and kinetic energy; it is the ceiling plan that shows the ulterior motive for circulation of the body and the eye. In construction, the elements meld together smoothly, vacuum-formed and glossy.

Or do they? With the 1956 House of the Future, Peter and Alison Smithson created a plastic house with undulating, white, pristine surfaces--at least, in effect. In reality, the Smithsons achieved the surface effect through layers of plaster on plywood: the result of detailed crafting and not of space-age manufacture.  As Denari zeroes in on the ceiling detail of the MUFG Ginza banking branch, he first shows the underlying metal framing. He then notes the moment where the wooden surface bends to meet the white, planar pathways of the ceiling.

But here, appearance and construction differ. Handworked stucco achieves the effect, not technology. It is similar to the prototyping tools industrial and automotive designers use as they model the form factor: they sculpt it from clay. Denari wins with cleverness, for knowing the right design tool for the job. When technology can't offer pristine effects, it doesn't matter whether the year is 1956 or 2007. The hand completes the curve and the eye is none the wiser.
 
Shrinkwrapping vague things, then, commands an understanding of motion beneath the surface, bringing things into alignment, the structures the film clings to. Denari plies these things on all levels in his conversations as well as his buildings. It is eye, hand and billboard, the laws and politics governing the site as much as it is 80s avant-garde rock and a contrail connecting LA to Tokyo. Through all its scales of operation, it is the dance of interaction that sculpts his immaculate surfaces of covert construction.

(Thanks to Shawn Protz and Enrique Ramirez for their insights and to the editors and staff at Manifold.)