THE GUARDIANS | Title: Serious Play by Nicolas Buffe
Photo by Nadia Bouzid
Four enormous caryatids stand with their arms raised at the entrance to Museum Garage. They have the posture of figures holding up a palace, with faces that belong in a Japanese cartoon. Above them, an elephant carries an obelisk through a dense arrangement of scrolls, dragons, gloved hands and stars. Nicolas Buffe has been wonderfully excessive here. All this ceremony accompanies the business of getting a car into a parking garage.
His facade, Serious Play, occupies the entrance and exit on NE 41st Street, across from ICA Miami. Buffe is a French artist based in Tokyo, and the mixture comes from a visual vocabulary he has been developing for years: European ornament, American cartoons, Japanese animation and video games. The hierarchy between those references seems of little interest to him. A cartoon glove can take its place in an elaborate architectural frame as comfortably as a classical figure.
The elephant offers a way into that history. In his earlier sculpture Pulcino, Buffe brought together the elephant and obelisk from the 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Bernini’s monument in Rome and Disney’s Dumbo. The Renaissance book, with its pursuit of love through imaginary architecture and gardens, also informed his 2014 exhibition at Tokyo’s Hara Museum. That is the pleasure of looking closely at his work: something that appears amusingly familiar can lead somewhere much older and stranger. The title Serious Play invokes the humanist idea of serio ludere, of playing seriously.
The drawings Buffe presented at ICA Miami show how much of the facade began on the page. Translating that line into a building required a different set of skills. Fabricator Zahner cut and milled layered black-and-white polyethylene to reproduce his drawings, mounting the pieces at varying distances from the backing. Many have lights fitted behind them. In daylight, the relief casts shadows; after dark, the backlighting separates the shapes from the wall. The four sculptural figures at street level stand 23 feet tall, bringing the composition down to the entrance people actually use.
Buffe’s is one of five facades on the seven-storey building at 90 NE 41st Street, completed in 2018. Craig Robins commissioned Terence Riley to develop the concept, and Riley invited WORKac, J. Mayer H., Clavel Arquitectos and Buffe to join his own firm, K/R. His brief followed the logic of an exquisite corpse, giving each participant an allotted area and depth rather than requiring a single architectural language. TimHaahs handled the architecture and engineering of the garage itself. The visual disagreement was designed in; the building still had to work as one structure.
That distinction matters in the Design District. A garage of this size could occupy a substantial stretch of street with very little to offer someone walking past. Here, the project includes approximately 22,000 square feet of ground-floor retail space, while the commissioned facades give the parking levels a presence of their own. The practical infrastructure supporting the shops receives the same attention to appearance as the places people have come to visit. Buffe’s portion makes that especially clear because his most elaborate gesture surrounds the car entrance.
I like the generosity of putting this much imagination into that particular part of a building. The garage serves the district’s commercial ambitions, certainly, but the pleasure of looking at Buffe’s creatures is available from the pavement. The drawing is large enough to read across the street and intricate enough to reward another look up close. Even with the ramps visible behind those arches, he makes the entrance feel like the beginning of an adventure.
