Feels Blind Feels Blind

Mastenbroek's deceptively verdant Pavilion stages the deepest doubts and frustrations of his profession in a powerfully compacted, poetic form, an anthem of rage that Stadler hopes to untangle and reshape into a manifesto of hope or a call for optimism. Mastenbroek's poem speaks simultaneously in radically contrasting registers--rigid/soft, relaxing/harrowing, living/dying, boastful/ashamed rage/grief. This program will not seek to resolve them but examine what use and power there is in the aggressive entanglements they produce.

The program relies on music to articulate the highest pitch and complexity of these entanglements. In addition to selections from Bikini Kill, Greek-Dutch composer Calliope Tsoupaki's "Three Songs for Trojan Women," will be played in the Pavilion on the nay, and instigator/musician Katía Truijen will perform a closing recessional, also in the Pavilion. In case of rain, bring umbrellas.

Matthew Stadler is an American novelist and critic currently living in Rotterdam. His novels, including Allan Stein, Landscape: Memory, and The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee, have earned him numerous honors, including Guggenheim and Ingram-Merrill Fellowships, the Lambda Award for best gay novelist, and the Hinda Rosenthal Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Last year, nai010 published his book, Deventer, about the interplay of power and hope in urban planning, and he gave the 10th annual Benno Premsela Lecture, "Interior Decorating in War Time," at the Portugese Synagogue in Amsterdam.

Calliope Tsoupaki is prize-winning composer of Greek origin whose work is performed throughout Europe. She studied piano and music theory at the Hellinicon Conservatory in Athens. She continued her studies with Louis Andriessen at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, and graduated in 1992. After ending her studies, Tsoupaki settled in Amsterdam and began a career as an internationally acclaimed pianist and composer.

Katía's music sounds like walking through the city, without knowing exactly where you are going. Her songs might take you to a public square, an abandoned alley, her house or a hidden garden. Along the way you might run into familiar strangers, sweet ingredients, pink skies, old trees and sore feet. In 2011 she released her debut album Sights. Together with her band, Katía ras recorded a new EP for every season. The EP's Part of the Plan (Spring), Fall/Awake (Summer) and Hide the House (Autumn) are available on Katía's bandcamp. At the end of the year she will release the Winter EP.

If Nietzsche, in Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), called for "buildings and situations which as a whole would express the sublimity of self-communion and seclusion from the world," Bjarne Mastenbroek has answered with a refusal. His New Pavilion is a tomb to such willful ambitions. We might ask the architect to help "have ourselves translated into stone and plant," but Mastenbroek answers that this is not the work of architects. The architect is no longer a Nietzschean figure of power and will. The architect is scrambling amidst the fragments of will. He can only provide the bare minimum, the frame within which we will author our own lives. Even into the 21st century, the Nietzschean architect survives, but only when clients are rich enough to provide the architect power. Mastenbroek refuses that absurd spectacle by conspicuously stripping his pavilion of all their typical features. His New Pavilion asserts that architecture is not the photogenic conversion of wealth into built space, but the insinuation of human life into the space of the world.

The New Pavilion is a zero-reset, an honest answer to the question "what is architecture now?" What does architecture provide once you strip away the endless yards of other ambitions and hopes which have gathered around the figure of the architect and mummified the profession, to assess the architect's degree zero? What is the starting place for architecture now?