Mario Merz

La Pianta della Vite nella Sfera Occidentale (1991) is one of Merz’s most intense and complex igloos—an in-between work, poised at the threshold of architecture, living organism, and thought. The igloo—a hemispherical structure measuring three metres in diameter—emerges from a metal framework clad in bundles of wood, held in place by a mesh that follows their irregular inclinations. Among the vegetal fibres surface a metal funnel and a long cylinder of beeswax: silent, almost ritual presences that introduce a different sense of time—slow, archaic. The work is not built through accumulation, but through resting and contact: materials supporting one another, curves receiving planes, stability and tension coexisting.

Here, architecture sheds all functional rigidity and draws close to the growth of a plant. The cladding becomes a primary gesture, a founding act of space: not a wall, but a skin; not a closed structure, but a living surface. In this transfiguration of architecture into a natural organism echoes, from afar, the intuition of Gottfried Semper, for whom the origin of dwelling lies not in stone, but in weaving, in interlacing, in defining space through a flexible and mobile envelope.

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The Igloo was created for the solo exhibition at Galerie Jean Bernier in Athens in October 1991.

Its structure has ten bundles of branches, held vertically and leaning at various angles, tied to the metal mesh

arranged around the structure. Three of the bundles rest on metal funnels inserted into a cylindrical element

made of sheet metal.

“Here the person is a systematic transfiguration of the truths of the plains. They are plans supported on

curves, resting on peaceful and aggressive inclinations; it is like two overlapping values. The support, or rather

the vision of the natural and not-natural object—what I would do with the vision of the movement of natural

forms, becomes almost a plant that transforms architecture into something natural through its covering, and

into a profoundly architectural phenomenon,” declares Merz. (1)

If on one hand the Igloo evokes a natural architecture, in which nature and culture merge into a single whole,

on the other it recalls the natural origins of architecture: its cladding as an “eminently architectural

phenomenon” echoes Gottfried Semper’s well-known theory on the textile origins of architecture. (2)

The Igloo’s title refers to the bundles (the vine plant) supported on the semi-spherical space, which could be

interpreted as half of the terrestrial sphere—as the western hemisphere. Or, on a different interpretive level,

the work alludes to the complex significance of the vine plant in Western culture.

(1) The artist in conversation with B. Pietromarchi, in B. Pietromarchi, Mario Merz. Igloo, catalog of the exhibition “Università

dell’architettura” founded by Bruno Zevi, section “Spazianze,” edited by A. Zevi, Testo & Immagine, Torino 2001, p. 24.

(2) Cf. G. Semper, The Four Elements of Architecture, Laterza, Rome-Bari 1992.