To open the fall season, Max Protetch will feature Repertoire, Tobias Putrih’s third solo show with the gallery.

A meditation on and extrapolation of ideas put forth by Yona Friedman in his 1974 treatise Toward a Scientific Architecture, Repertoire is the newest in a series of exhibitions designed by Putrih as quasi-scientific experiments. Here, the artist works with a couple to develop ideas about their ideal dwelling. The artworks that result from this process include Lego models, site photographs, constructions built by the artist, and interviews with and portraits of the couple; Putrih will also lecture about the process in the gallery during the exhibition.

For Repertoire, a couple (Jessica and Stuart) were guided through a variety of exercises: selecting a site (a mountaintop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire) and photographing it; tracing lines on the photograph depicting the way in which their gaze moved across the scene; collaborating on a series of structures made of Lego bricks. The results of these exercises allowed Putrih to come up with a conceptual and formal model for a structure the couple might want to inhabit. In a three-way conversation, Putrih, Jessica and Stuart exchanged interpretations and opinions, prompting one another to consider their intimate experiences of places where they grew up and how those experiences relate to future spaces they might like to inhabit. A final group of objects, built entirely by Putrih, uses the previous models, data, and conversations as starting points. Accompanying these experimentally-oriented objects in the gallery is a photographic portrait of Jessica and Stuart in which they appear reflected in each other’s pupils.

Repertoire consists of physical and conceptual models that question the relationships between architect and client, artist and viewer, and on perhaps a most basic level, between a group of people engaged in collaborative enterprise. And where Yona Friedman’s idea was to establish an objective, self-generating repertoire of architectural solutions so that clients could make their own decisions about the spaces they would eventually inhabit, Putrih analyzes the results of a more or less abstract series of exercises. Even when these exercises and their results border on the arbitrary, Putrih suggests that real freedom of choice is only possible at that precise though formless moment when the `client’ is not yet wedded to a particular result. In the case of Repertoire the objects that this process generates remain themselves hypotheses, questions about the nature of aesthetic preference and architectural function.