New Forms Taschen 146

asked why he feels that art movements that reached their high point twenty years ago or morę should be looked to for inspiration, Dominique Perrault responds, 'Twenty years is just about the gap in time which exists between art and architec-turę.'²⁰

Ptg« 157 Philippe Starek Feli* Restaurant

Peninsula Hotel, Hon9 Kong. 1995

Situated on the thirtieth floor of one of the finest hotels of Hong Kong. this smali 165 m^: space includesa 100-seat restaurant, two bars and a mmuscule discothdgue. Starck's sense of the use of space has led him to cross the barrier between design and architecture, building his own structures. most notably in Japan.

The French artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud often creates artistic environments that cali on a refined sense of architecture, such as "Humań Space," a piece created in 1995, for the Ludwig Museum in Cologne. Raynaud has gone a step beyond this reference to the built environment in the Paris suburb of La Garenne-Colombes, where he created a structure that he calls "La Mastaba." Neither a home, nor a private museum, it is rather a space for the contemplation of his own art. The blank exterior walls are covered in his favorite white tiles, and the shape of the building, together with this immaculate cladding, makes for an incongruous presence in a fundamentally working dass neighborhood. Although Jean-Pierre Raynaud worked with the architect Jean Dedieu to build this highly unusual structure, its conception is his. Here, one takes a narrow staircase that leads below grade. Both the form of the mastaba and this stairway going into the earth bring forth references to ancient funerary architecture, which the artist does not reject, despite his thoroughly modern approach to art. This is a space of communion with art, and certainly with the prospect of death. Though the first function is readily assumed in much contempo-rary architecture, the second is usually avoided, although it is one of the great themes of the architecture of the past. It seems that it was necessary for an artist to build a structure so that architecture could find some of its own profound contact with the past, while remaining a witness to the present.

Just as art may enrich new forms in architecture, so furniture and interior design sometimes play their role. Another well-known figurę in France, Philippe Starek, recently created the Felix Restaurant in the Peninsula Hotel, Hong Kong. Though this is, strictly speaking, an interior design, it does make a case for the very type of curving unusual forms that Starek has translated into built form on occasion, espe-cially in Japan. The idea that furniture and other objects can take on unusual new shapes certainly has a bearing on the creative trends in architecture, as Starek, Mendmi and others have proved.

Finally, an example of the work of an architect that verges on the sculptural should be cited here. Bernard Tschumi's La Villette Follies, on the northern peri-phery of Paris, challenge the barriers that exist between art and architecture. Usually, it is said that architecture must serve a function, whereas art may be devoid of such practical concerns. Tschumi's follies, emblematic works of the Deconstructivist movement, do occasionally actually serve a purpose (ticket office, cafe or Red Cross station), but just as often they are decorative objects that give a geometrie pattern to the vast Villette park area.

56 Art ano Architecture