Rude forms among us

Rude forms among us focuses on rude stone monuments through large-scale models, diagrammatic drawings, and archival photographs. It depicts a dolmen’s resolution as low, not high. Its joints as butted, not mitered. Its gaps as shimmed, not sculpted. Its stones as rude, not hewn. Neimark brings our attention to these rather ordinary formations alluding to forgotten narratives, eroded tectonics, and muddled grammar. Featured in the show are original dolmen portraits by Eugène Trutat from the Vieux-Toulouse Museum, exhibited for the first time in the United States. Perhaps unexpectedly, their rude forms seem to comfort us now—all of us, children included—as they bridge the gaps between the canon and the world.

Anna Neimark is a principal of First Office, a practice cofounded with Andrew Atwood in 2011. Built projects include a collaboration on the Pinterest office headquarters in San Francisco, a temporary screening room at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, and some small houses. Their texts have been published widely, in Log, Perspecta, Project, and Future Anterior, and have been compiled in a Graham Foundation book Nine Essays, published in 2015. That same year, First Office received the Architect’s Newspaper’s Best of Young Architects prize and became a finalist in MoMA PS1’s Young Architects Program. Neimark is on the faculty at SCI-Arc. Her work focuses on prehistoric stone formations, called dolmens, and other rude stone monuments.

Image: Eugène Trutat, Hommes et dolmen, 1859–1910. © archives des Toulousains de Toulouse, en dépôt à la Bibliothèque municipale de Toulouse, France.