... an invitation to examine up close the meeting of late modernist dreams with the concrete worlds of compromise.
A slew of legal battles, primarily about copyrights and professional ethics, have turned the brilliant architect David Yannay into a sort of modern Michael Kohlhaas, the haunted hero tragically seeking justice. “Yannay was ‘religious’ when it came to copyright and intellectual property, and developed a pathological disregard for copycats who boast of achievements that don’t belong to them,” writes architect Michael Burt of his colleague in a catalogue on the exhibition “David Yannay: Architecture and Genetics,” a comprehensive look at Yannay’s work (1935-2006) that opens on Thursday at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art....
“David Yannay was one of the last dreamer architects,” says architect Dr. Eran Neuman, the exhibition’s curator. Many architects from Yannay’s generation “woke up from the dream, and after realizing that reality is different, went for more communicative architecture, mainstream, less radical, and adapted themselves to the market,” continued Neuman, “while Yannay went his own way, did nothing to please. His architecture is not for ratings, but deep, valued architecture.”
A central component of the exhibition is “presentation” – a complete collection of works that Yannay began to develop in 2002 and updated until his death. The presentation, which has already been shown at exhibitions at the Technion and in Moscow, includes methodological analysis of his architectural theory alongside a compilation of almost all his works. The result is a hypnotic and chaotic series of geometric patterns. Neuman sees it as one of Yannay’s most important works, his opus.
Even though Yannay denied the existence of fashion in architecture, his ideas are tied to some extent to modern schools of thought, which came out against the modern mainstream after World War II. The “humanist” modernism of the previous era failed to uphold its promise to build a better world. Leaving behind that broken vision, architects of the post-war generation believed that science would help them create a new, wonderful world. According to museum curator Dr. Susan Landau, postwar architects, in an attempt to “scientize” architecture, drew inspiration from new studies in life sciences, mathematics, anthropology and cybernetics.
Neuman places Yannay’s work against a background of current trends in digital-genetic architecture, and in the context of a few recent international exhibitions that researched and mapped the digitalization of architectural planning. The recent exhibitions include a series curated by American architect Greg Lynn, a leader in the field, called “Archaeology of the Digital” on digital trends in architecture. The series presents the evolution of architecture following the advent of computerization. Yannay was a pioneer in this field and his works, according to Neuman, “integrate well in discourse about this local trend as well, archaeology within digital architecture in Israel.”