The Museum of Fine Arts Houston revives the urban vision of the Argentinian artist Gyula Kosice, who sought to free humankind by setting housing in the clouds.
“Man will not end his days on Earth.” These words weren’t spoken by Elon Musk, nor were they intended to encourage colonization of Mars. When Gyula Kosice made this declaration in 1944, the future he sought were considerably more revolutionary.
Kosice was an artist, living in Buenos Aires under a military junta, observing a world war that would soon encompass Argentina. He had ample reason to dream up an interplanetary escape. Instead, his vision was to revitalize the world he knew by building a metropolis set amongst the clouds.
Gyula Kosice, La ciudad hidroespacial (The Hydrospatial City) [detail], 1946–72, acrylic, paint, metal and light, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment. © Fundación Kosice – Museo Kosice, Buenos Aires. © Fundación Kosice – Museo Kosice, Buenos Aires
What Kosice lacked in aerospace training, he compensated for with sculptural imagination. An exhilarating retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston compellingly situates his Hydrospatial City in the context of an oeuvre that expanded the meaning of sculpture as well as the relationship between art and life. Over a seven decade career, Kosice worked with materials ranging from acrylic to light to overcome volume and mass, paradoxically dematerializing the human condition by giving physical form to space itself.
Kosice considered himself an inventor, and considered space to be his realm of innovation. His earliest inventions were inspired by the Constructivist experiments of European artists including Naum Gabo and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, both of whom explored the sculptural potential of transparency and illumination. The ethereal works they made in the 1920s and ’30s, such as Gabo’s Translucent Variations on a Spheric Theme, influenced the bent acrylic sculptures Kosice began making in the ‘40s. But he was already posing his own questions about how sculpture could be fabricated to expand its form and function.
In 1948, Kosice created A Drop of Water Rocked at High Speed, a work that upset sculptural conventions even by the standards of the European avant-garde. The work was interactive, inviting the viewer to agitate a vial filled with liquid. In other words, the sculpture was fluid. There was no fixed shape or orientation. All the artist provided was a space for transformation.
This tabletop sculpture was the beginning of a lifetime devoted to aqueous media. Kosice made sculptures that moved liquid with motors and pumps, forming droplets and bubbles. Often contained in acrylic and enhanced with artificial light, these sculptures were visually stimulating and conceptually novel. Even if he’d done nothing else, his place in art history would have been secure.
But Kosice also harbored larger ambitious more closely aligned with a version of Constructivism promoted by the Soviet artist Vladimir Tatlin. In the first decades of the 20th century, Tatlin sought to put sculpture in the service of Communism, designing workers’ uniforms and personal flying machines. For the Soviet government, he planned a rotating tower taller than any the world had ever seen. Although most of these ideas were unrealized, the models and prototypes became symbols of hope in a period of hardship. An equivalent social mission, perhaps even more idealistic, motivated Kosice’s Hydrospatial City.
Gyula Kosice, Hábitat hidroespacial, maqueta B (Hydrospatial Habitat, Model B) [detail] from La Ciudad Hidroespacial (The Hydrospatial City), 1969, acrylic, paint, and metal, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, museum purchase funded by the Caroline Wiess Law Accessions Endowment. © Fundación Kosice – Museo Kosice, Buenos Aires. © Fundación Kosice – Museo Kosice, Buenos Aires
As early as 1947, Kosice wrote a manifesto calling for “movable, articulated buildings that can be suspended in space.” By 1950, he’d moved from words and sketches to maquettes made out of acrylic left over from past projects. Delicately suspended on wire, these “hydrospatial cells” were as curvy and transparent as his conventional sculptures. The difference is that they were intended to represent lighter-than-air living spaces. Metal figurines provided a sense of scale.
Kosice elaborated on his ideas in writing. The hydrospatial cells were meant to move through the skies independently, spontaneously gathering to form communities. The arrangement would be as fluid as water. Society would thereby be liberated from the strictures of personal property and borders. Exploration and play would be encouraged and augmented.
Over the half century that Kosice elaborated on his city, he simultaneously strove to make it more fantastical and more realistic. Fantasy was supported by the city’s futuristic appearance, as well as his poetic descriptions of architectural features. There was a “place to house women’s dreams and specific or abstract desires”, and a “space for lost steps and absences that are recycled”. All of this stood in stark contrast to the functionalism of Modernist buildings, such as those Le Corbusier proposed for Buenos Aires in the late ‘40s (a sensibility that endures in the optimization touted by Musk today). The Hydrospatial City was an artful rebuttal, intended to free “hydrocitizens” from “all self-imposed psychological and sociological constraints”. It was the first in a long tradition of visionary architecture scaffolding human liberation. Later examples include Constant Nieuwenhuys’s New Babylon, Superstudio’s Supersurface, and Buckminster Fuller’s Cloud 9.
Kosice’s attempts at practicality were less convincing than his caprice. For instance, he insisted that energy to power the hydrospatial cells could be harvested from the clouds by extracting hydrogen from water vapor. When he shared his city with NASA engineers in the ‘80s, they politely informed him that it would be prohibitively expensive. His response: The city could be funded by halting weapons production worldwide.
Perhaps he was right. At least he was correct to point out that humans have always pushed “toward the unknown in spite of everything”. In that effort, the hydrospatial cells were vehicles, fueled not by hydrolysis but by aesthetics. The Constructivism of Tatlin proved not to be in contradiction with that of Gabo.
Even in his most strident moments, Kosice acknowledged that his city was a sculpture, and that oppressive social conformity could only be overcome with art. If that art was capacious enough to house dreams and desires, man had no need to end his days on Mars or in the clouds.