Jonathan M. Houser

BIOGRAPHY

I am an independent architect living and working in Copenhagen, Denmark, where I have been teaching at The Royal Academy of Art, School of Architecture since 2015.

Currently I am engaged with a project made in collaboration with director Michael Madsen to be shown at Louisiana in the fall of 2018 as part of “The Moon” exhibition.

In the spring 2016 I won the competition for a Pavilion at the art museum Gl. Holtegaard that is now built in their baroque garden. Concurrently I received a one-year working grant from the Danish Arts Council. In the fall 2016 I was awarded for my competition entry “Memorial for the Perished War Sailors 1940–45” and collaborated with director Michael Madsen on the project “Odyssey”, where I have done conceptual spaceship design for a multi-generational journey through interstellar space. My imaginary project “Island of the Dead” was shown in the Danish Pavilion at the 2016 Biennale in Venice.

Since receiving my Masters Diploma in Architecture from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 2014 I worked at Lundgaard and Tranberg, Architects where I was design architect on the winning competition for a “Museum for the Danish Resistance 1940–45” that is currently being built in the historic centre of Copenhagen. You can se that HERE. I also took part in the development of schematic design for the new “Museum of Natural History” that is about to begin construction within the Botanical Gardens in Copenhagen. You can see that HERE.

Exhibitions:

2018
The Spring Exhibition, Copenhagen, Denmark

2017
VESSELS, Leth og Gori, solo show, Copenhagen, Denmark
Fall Exhibition, Den Frie, Copenhagen, Denmark

2016
The Art of Many, La Biennale di Venezia, The Danish Pavilion

2015
EVA, Kunstakademien, Stockholm, Group Exhibtion, w. Mikael Stenstrøm
Fall Exhibition, Den Frie, Copenhagen, Denmark
One to One, The Royal Academy of Art, School of Architecture, Copenhagen

2014
End of the Year Show, The Royal Academy of Art, School of Architecture

2013
Summer Exhibition, Royal Academy of Art, London

Architecture competitions:

2016
“Memorial for the Perished War Sailors 1940–45”,
2nd prize (Shared) in open competition
“Moth House – A menagerie for Gl. Holtegaard”, 1st prize in open competition

2014
“The Abandoned Street”, 1st prize in open competition, collaboration with Mikael Stenstrom

Education:

2012–2014
Cand. Arch., The Royal Academy of Art, School of Architecture, Thesis advisor: Anders Abraham

2011
The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, The Cooper Union, New York

2007–2010
B. Arch., The Royal Academy of Art, School of Architecture

The Search – Louisiana

Architecture and film installation, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art - "The Moon", 2018
Made in collaboration with Michael Madsen.
With support from: Det Danske Filminstitut, Statens Kunstfond, Dreyers Fond, Nationalbankens Jubilæumsfond, Statens Værksteder for Kunst.
Photo: Hampus Berndtson

Coming from The Moon exhibition and entering the installation space, a sense of otherness is evoked by an all blue interior with rounded corners. A space that creates a sense of infinity while at the same time feeling dense and claustrophobic – an introvert space with no relationship to the exterior. The blue color being associated with planet earth, the night sky and CGI film sets. A large circular aluminum table sits in the middle of the room, lighted by a hovering disk above it and standing on 21 legs, each having a unique shape cut from 20mm aluminum sheets.

The floor beneath the table is dotted with lights in odd shapes filtering through holes in the table creating a mysterious glow of unknown silhouettes in the hall of columns underneath. Together the light disk, the table and the shadows form a sort of cosmology reminiscent of the relationship between sun, earth and moon. Something, which can also be experienced when standing at the table seeing the horizon created between the light disk and the table surface.

The installation for the Louisiana Moon Exhibition has several agendas. The functional aspects of the installation are interwoven with experiential and material levels, into a form that is both simple, clear and at the same time ambitiously multifaceted, drawing its principles on a wide range of associations and references.

On a functional level the installation is first and foremost a space for recruiting crew members on a fictional multigenerational space odyssey as imagined in the documentary film and trans media project: THE SEARCH. In the installation the museum guests can test themselves through interaction with an app developed for the purpose and presented in the installation on tablet screens and hereby be judged whether they are suitable for the mission as its conveyed by the overall project. The questions posed to the museum audience are based on the narrative of the documentary film and focuses on the existential and philosophical implications of multigenerational space travel and the potential loss of humanity that applies to such an endeavour.

The entire scene is meant to be both both familiar and alien – a place of ritual perhaps?

The concrete reality of the aluminum table surface contrasts the abstract and scale less qualities of the blue space thus making each seem more real and more unreal. A sort of concrete fictional space is established in this dialogue – an aspect closely related to themes investigated in the documentary film THE SEARCH, which the installation is also part of.

The architecture of the table is based on the idea of Giuolio Camillos memory theatre, its conception, material and formality meant to embody an idea of planet earth – a table of remembrance around which crucial decisions about the mission can be made.

Conceptually the tabletop is conceived as a palimpsest of seven hand-traced layers combined to one 20mm thick aluminum plate. The layers are combined to one form that unveils itself in holes cut through the tabletop. The table thus represents certain aspects of planet earth ranging from microscopic images to images of ephemeral phenomena. From a section through the mineral composites of granite to the imaginary plan of Rome as drawn by Piranesi.

This recipe for creating the table results in an artifact with a surface dotted with signs of multiple meanings intersecting and blurring each other, thus becoming a slice of time related to ancient Sanskrit engravings with meanings lost and language eroded. A manmade fossil, which depending on the point of view, is both an archaic table from the past or perhaps a fragment of the future.