Conversation with Jorge Otero-Pailos about Analogue Sites, a Public Sculpture Exhibition on New York’s Park Avenue

The public sculpture exhibition Analogue Sites by artist Jorge Otero-Pailos encompasses Biosignature Preservation on East 53rd Street in front of the Seagram Building; Analogue Sites on East 66^th Street and Byproduct Material on East 67^th Street in front of the Park Avenue Armory. The sculptures are in dialogue with an iconic mid-century modernist landmark and a 19^th-century historical building. The exhibition, which runs from April 1 through October 31 2024, is presented in partnership with NYC Parks’ Art in the Parks Program and the Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue. It is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts, with funding provided by the Onera Foundation, the Queen Sofía Spanish Institute, the AECID, the Consulate General of Spain in New York, the New York State Council for the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor, the New York State Legislature, and individual donors.

This conversation between Jorge Otero-Pailos and Julia P. Herzberg took place on December 1, 2023 and was subsequently edited for clarity and length in August, 2024.[1]

Jorge Otero-Pailos is a Spanish-born, New York-based American architect, artist, and theorist specializing in experimental forms of preservation. He is Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.   

Julia P. Herzberg is an art historian, independent curator, and Member of the Sculpture Committee of The Fund for Park Avenue.

The US Embassy in Oslo, Norway was built in 1959 by Eero Saarinen. It was one of many US embassies designed by world-famous architects from the mid 1940s through the early 1960s. Following increasing terrorism threats and attacks on US diplomats from the mid-eighties, the US government dramatically altered security for overseas diplomatic posts, and constructed perimeter fences of galvanized steel around many US Embassies around the world, including the one in Oslo. Finally, in 2017 the US government decommissioned the Eero Saarinen building since it could not meet the increased security standards. Because the Embassy was technically US territory, it was exempt from Norwegian laws and could not be protected while the US still owned it. Therefore, the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage (Byantikvaren) and Oslo’s Cultural Heritage Management Office (Byantikvaren) announced they would designate it as a national and city monument. The moment the sale was executed, the site returned to Norway. This transfer gave predictability to the real estate market, so that when the building was offered for sale, private investors could factor the future legal protections in their pricing. The new owner, committed to preserving the embassy building, understood the benefits and responsibilities that come with owning a landmarked building. But the legal protection afforded to the building excluded the surrounding fence. Jorge Otero-Pailos, who was part of the team that  preserved the newly landmarked building, was given permission to uproot the fence, thereby saving it from the scrapyard. The following conversation elaborates on the processes involved in saving the “fence” as an artistic act of preservation.

The former US Embassy in Oslo designed by Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, completed in 1959 Photo credit: Oslo National Archives

Julia P. Herzberg (JPH): When did you become involved with the decommissioned US Embassy that the Fredensborg SA investment company purchased from the Norwegian government at auction?

Jorge Otero-Pailos (J O-P): When Fredensborg purchased the building, it did so with the understanding that the company had to adhere to all the specific regulations determined by the Norwegian heritage authorities. For example, they knew some of the interiors could not be altered, including the three entrance halls, the atrium, the public library, the theater, one floor of offices, the ambassadorial suite, and some other interiors. In order to achieve the architectural results it wanted, Fredensborg decided to hold an international competition for architectural ideas to preserve the building. I was invited to be part of the architectural team, a joint venture between Lundhagem Arkitekten and Atelier Oslo Arkitekten that won the competition.

JPH: How did the two architectural teams come to know you, or vice versa?

J O-P: I had been going back and forth to Norway since the beginning of the 2000s, and for a period of time I taught at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. So I was a known quantity in Norway’s art and architectural circles. Preservation architect Erik Langdalen and I have collaborated on many projects and also worked on books together including Experimental Preservation, 2016, with Swedish historian Thordis Arrehnius. We joined as the architectural preservationists on the team that Lundhagem and Atelier Oslo put together, which included among others, Luis Callejas (LCLA office) as landscape architect.

JPH: During the periods you taught in Oslo, tell me how you became interested in, as well as familiar with the US Embassy, Saarinen’s masterpiece.

J O-P: I became interested in the Saarinen building because of its architectural importance as a mid-century embassy. In 2012, I brought over my students from New York because I had gotten wind that the embassy was going to be sold. This was five years before it was actually sold. We started to do research on the building, which included documenting its significance, and analyzing the possibilities of what could be done with it after it was decommissioned.[2] That long research project got me interested in embassies in general. As a result of my ongoing interests, I took students to do work on other US embassies around the world that were about to be decommissioned, such as those in London, Mexico City, and the Hague.

JPH: Well Jorge, your work at the former US Embassy in Oslo—embracing as it did research and analysis is extremely interesting as the preliminary work that led to your sculptures on Park Avenue.

Let’s delve deeper into the details of how you convinced Fredensborg, the new owner of the Saarinen building to give you the fence once the architectural plans for the new preservation of the building were decided. Perhaps we can begin with your thoughts regarding the importance of keeping the fence instead of demolishing it. What arguments did you advance?

J O-P: The designation report on landmarking that had circulated in advance of the embassy sale built the case for significance around the figure of Eero Saarinen as the original designer. This meant that only those aspects of the building that could be directly associated with Saarinen could be protected. It was clear that the fence was going to be sent to the scrapyard because it was not part of the original Saarinen design. Therefore, it was not protected. I tried to convince the new owner and the heritage officials that there were other ways to assess the cultural significance of the fence. I felt the fence was important because it was the only material trace that spoke to the more recent history of American diplomacy.

JPH: Well, as you have so clearly expressed: preservation is at the heart of your professional interests! So you were confronted with a dilemma of sorts. Did the new owner feel the same way about the irrelevance of the fence as did the Norwegian landmarks commission?

J O-P: Yes. The owner had to protect the fence by law, but he understood the importance of finding a way to save it. So he donated it to me and helped support my attempt to save the fence in a more experimental way through art. I’m interested in the ways that art has the ability to protect, save, and preserve in ways that are not imaginable within the traditional systems of preservation.

JPH: I am very curious to hear how you resolved the complicated deconstruction of the huge fence. How much advance time did you have to remove it, and how did you uproot it?

JPH: So if I understand correctly, you wanted to totally change the straight lines of the former fence into curving lines, wherever possible?

J O-P: Yes, I wanted to give the sense that a line is not just a straight shot between two points, but that a line has or can have curvature. A line can have movement in and out: a line is a negotiation between two sides.

When I worked on the sculptures after they were moved from the former embassy site, I came to realize that movement was a visual analogue to the diplomatic work of negotiating between the inside and the outside the embassy—between the governments of the United States and Norway. Their work involved negotiations, back and forth dialogue. Negotiation between two sides is at the heart of the art of diplomacy.

JPH: In the month or so before the fence was pulled up by heavy machinery, did you formulate any ideas with respect to what you would do with the huge pieces of the fence? How would you transform those salvaged pieces?

J O-P: At first I did sketches and water colors of what I might do. I knew I wanted the artworks to stand vertically and to turn the fence from a two dimensional, front and back object to a three dimensional object in the round. The original fence was a plane that set viewers up in a frontal or even confrontational relationship to each other. The new three dimensional sculptures, or de-fences, as I like to call them, are three dimensional objects that can only be fully appreciated by moving freely around them. I am very pleased that they are now on Park Avenue where viewers are in perpetual movement.

After we removed the fence from the site, we moved the pieces of the hot-dip galvanized steel pieces to a rented welding shop outside of Oslo where I continued to work out sketches and watercolors for how to put the pieces back together. At the time I thought a lot about Harry Bertoia’s and Alexander Calder’s metal mobile sculptures. Harry Bertoia was of particular interest to me because he had been commissioned to do a monumental sculpture in the atrium for the US embassy in Oslo. He created a small maquette that looked like a deconstructed fence. However he never realized the full sculpture. The maquette makes it clear that Bertoia was riffing on Saarinen’s atrium, which has a teak fence spanning vertically between the multiple floors of balconies.

Saarinen’s teak fence is symbolically very important. An embassy is the official place where people work on behalf of the United States (ambactus means servant in Latin). The building is actually called a chancery, from the Latin cancellus meaning gate, chancel, a screen that separates and protects while allowing the possibility of actual or only visual movement in and out; in other words a gated fence. Saarinen’s fence is a symbol and reminder that the building is a chancery. That was another reason I felt it was so important to save the fence. It is quite literally a symbol of the embassy, the same and different than the chancery. It is also why I looked so closely at Bertoia. His sculptures have a fence like quality to them, often using horizontal and vertical elements stacked and welded together. He worked with Saarinen on many projects, including the MIT chapel and the General Motors Technical Center outside of Detroit where he designed metal screens that were reminiscent of fences.

JPH: Why was Calder’s work of particular interest to you?

J O-P: Well, Calder would take the I-beams that modern architects used in straight lines, and twist and turn the steel into sculptures. You may remember the sculpture he did in front of Mies van der Rohe’s Chicago Federal Center, which riffed on the straight steel of the architecture and created these curved metal riveted sculptures. Calder made the steel dance. I had these sculptures in the back of my mind, and that’s how I started working on the twisting and turning of the metal fence.

JPH: Let’s return for a moment to the work you did on the day when the construction crew uprooted the entire fence. There seems to be a performative element to this. Did you document the process?

J O-P: It was recorded by a film crew. I recognize that as I gestured and directed the workmen operating the tractors to uproot and twist the fence, the process was like live action sculpture in the making. You are right that the pushing, pulling, twisting, and turning became a performance of sorts in front of the former embassy.[3]

JPH:  At the end of the extraction, the construction team placed all the different parts of the fence on top of each other on flatbed trucks and drove them to an open field outside of Oslo where the steel pieces were laid on the ground.  What kind of work did you do after the sections of the steel fence were scattered in the open field? How did you continue to work on them?

J O-P: Well, I would walk around them, pick up a piece on the forklift, and bring it into the welding shop. Then I would weld it together with other pieces and do additional twisting wherever necessary to make individual sculptures. Each sculpture is different. I spent several months in Norway working on them. I completed fifty-one sculptures.

Artist working on his sculpture in the welding shop outside of Oslo, 2019
Photo credit: Hacienda Films

JPH: You have mentioned to me the importance of the tractor with the backhoe and claw attachments that you used in transforming the pieces of fence into sculptures. Can you explain what the role of the tractor was in your artistic process?

J O-P: I wanted to upturn the conventional use of the tractor in the demolition of buildings, and see whether I could use it to make art, to produce something rather than to destroy something.

The tractor, both as an object and as a word, became very important to me in my ongoing work. The word tractor and the word treaties have the same origin. They both come from the Latin word tractus, which means to drag over the land. The English word treaty has the same meaning of dragging a subject out into a public arena for consideration, debate, and ultimately to reach an agreement.[4]

JPH: At what point in this entire process did you become interested in and, or knowledgeable about the treaties between Norway and the United States?

J O-P: It was really after I made the sculptures that I began reflecting on the tractor I had used, and it led me to the treaties. I began reading all of the treaties that had been signed at the chancery between Norway and the United States. I thought about the messages that went through the fence and what was actually negotiated through it. I asked myself what were those messages? What negotiations did the fence enable? Those negotiations were also part of the cultural and diplomatic significance of the fence. To tell the story of the fence, it was necessary to also bring those treaties out into the public sphere. That’s when I began working on the artist book “Treaties on De-Fences,” which turns the treaties into artworks that show the texts of treaties becoming fences, and fences becoming treaties.

JPH: What realizations did you come to with respect to two seemingly oppositional meanings? You have spoken about de-fencing as both a defense and a protection, but also an un-fencing, an un-protection. Can you expand a little on these thoughts?

J O-P: I’m interested in things that can be two things at once: for example, artworks that can also be acts of preservation; things that can be simultaneously literal and figural. The sculptures are quite literally fences that have ceased to function as such. They are literally de-fences, yet any child can also recognize them as fences. They retain their character and materiality as fences, which is what makes it possible for us to read them, and use them as evidence in telling their story as de-fences of the embassy. Figuratively, their physical presence is what diplomacy really looks like: a manner of presenting oneself to others as both open and closed, available and guarded at the same time. A good diplomat presents him or herself like the sculptures, as someone that you can see right through, and as someone guarded that can keep sensitive information from view, right in front of your eyes.

JPH: Sure, diplomacy has to be about opening and protecting information. This is necessary to successfully negotiate treaties with other countries. You chose the literal words from those treaties to title the sculptures. These titles give us clues about what the artworks are about. You went beyond that and created prints that show the treaties where the titles come from. I can see how this play of the literal and figurative is also at work in the prints you created bringing together the sculptures with the treaties from which you derived their names. Can you describe where the names of the sculptures on Park Avenue come?

J O-P: The sculpture titled Biosignature Preservation draws its name from the 2011 Space Cooperation arrangement between Norway and the United States. The title reflects the scientific quest to uncover ancient traces of biological life preserved within geological strata or ice. Such traces are observable on Earth, notably in the Arctic, and scientists hope to locate similar indicators on Mars. The sculpture titled Analogue Sites draws its name from the same agreement. The title describes the meticulous scientific exploration of environments mimicking extraterrestrial conditions, known as analogue sites. These sites serve as earthly proxies for locations like Mars, aiding in the understanding of potential extraterrestrial habitats and biosignatures, such as evidence of past living organisms petrified in stones. The implementing arrangement outlines protocols and responsibilities for the exploration and study of analogue sites, crucial for simulating extraterrestrial environments and advancing our understanding of habitats beyond Earth. The sculpture Byproduct Material derives its name from the agreement on Atomic Energy Peaceful Uses between the United States of America and Norway, ratified in Washington on June 11, 2016. In this agreement, the term “byproduct material” encompasses all radioactive substances, excluding special fissionable materials, generated by exposure to radiation during the creation or utilization of special fissionable material.

JPH: So you are saying that you considered these different possibilities of meaning for a fence as you were creating them?

J O-P: Yes … But I have to say the project was not born fully formed in one day. What is interesting for me was the artistic process of discovering the cultural significance of the fence. As preservationists we are tasked with assessing the cultural significance of objects. There are normative methods for assessing cultural significance such as archival research. My work attempts to demonstrate that art is also a valid method for assessing cultural significance. It also shows that it is not possible to assess cultural significance of an object without changing it in fundamental ways. Preservationists for too long have claimed positions of exteriority vis a vis the objects they evaluate. Hopefully this work will help us recognize that to evaluate heritage is not simply to change the nature of the objects under scrutiny, but also that in that challenge lies a creative opportunity to expand what objects we collectively consider worthy of care, and therefore to preserve a fuller, more realistic record of our past.

JPH: And central to this discovery was the way in which you took a vernacular object, the post and rail fence, albeit built by military engineers to make it durable, and you gave it movement.

J O-P: Exactly, the fence was meant to look like a nondescript vernacular object, even though in reality it was a highly designed object unlike any other fence you might encounter. Through their transformations into art they now show their differences clearly. These are solid bars of steel that were hot dip galvanized. You cannot buy a fence like that anywhere. This is a military grade fence. The fact that the steel bars are solid is what made it possible to bend them without breaking. So my treatment (another word deriving from tractus) of the fence, my bending of the steel was not only about present movement and diplomatic exchange, but also to present the solidity of the steel, which is a character defining feature of this unusual military grade fence. This military materiality was intentionally hidden by the original design, and internationally revealed through my artistic treatment and assessment of the fence.

[1] We would like to express our gratitude to Isabel Rivero, Senior Media and Program Development Manager at the QSSI and Laurence Lafforgue, Partner, Otero-Pailos Studio for their assistance in preparing this interview for publication.

[2] For a discussion of the embassy in Oslo, its commission, design, construction, function, and critical reception, see David. B Peterson, US Embassies of the Cold War: The Architecture of Diplomacy, and Defense. New Canaan, CT: Onera, 2022, pp. 110-115.

[3] Originally, the process was filmed and then digitized. A short Vimeo exists that documents some of the process. See https://vimeo.com/925522483

[4] The artist created Treaties on De-Fences I, 2023, an artist’s book that features fifty-one archival pigment prints, 36 x 23 in. each (framed). The edition of thirty prints aims to raise awareness and advocate for the preservation of modernist US embassies. The prints further embody the energy of the sculptures and the diplomatic treaties from which the sculptures derive their names. For further reference see https:www.oteropailos.com