Letter from Roberto Matta-Echaurren to his son Gordon [later known as Gordon Matta-Clark], postmarked 9 January, 1962:

Matta’s letter can be found in a dossier of original documents, previously in the possession of Gordon’s mother Anne Alpert Clark, and now annexed to the Matta-Clark Estate and deposited in the special collections of the CCA. Matta’s letters to the family he had abandoned a few months after his twin sons were born, as well as Gordon’s letters to his mother from his student days at Cornell, are a valuable testimony to the triangular family tectonics that may have supported the career of an itinerant anarchitect.

Matta’s fatherly advice implies that architecture comes with the sanction of paternal authority and the benefaction of the father’s renowned architect friends. They, and perhaps not the architecture school, represent, for Matta, his son’s real schooling in architecture. The same month of January 1962, Matta sent a letter to Josep Lluís Sert, Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, who wrote back three weeks later saying that he “would be glad to see [Matta’s] son if he comes to Cambridge,” but notes that “[u]ntil now,” he had “not received any communication” from him.¹ Later that year, Gordon would accept an offer from Cornell.

Architecture, as Matta suggests, comes as a temporary “end,” an intermediate station from here to “no where” that can be “here” and “now.” Matta transforms a term that stands for the lack of orientation into a two-way street or roundabout via a gesture of Joycean word-splitting. Yet by the same wordplay, “nowhere” becomes coterminous with a career path in architecture, which Matta encourages his son to follow. The entire letter reads as a roadmap for a trip to “nowhere,” wrapped as a father’s gift and sent in response to one of Gordon’s own New Year’s resolutions.

While admonishing his son for his “senseless driving,” Matta contemplates that architecture might put an “end” to his destructive habits, implying that architecture training can perform as a corrective mechanism to steer the senseless driver, who would turn nineteen later that year, towards a more “meaningful” career trajectory. Indeed, Gordon often got into trouble behind the wheel, but evidently architecture school did not fix this problem. Less than a year after he matriculated at Cornell, a grave car accident prompted an escape to Paris and an unrealized plan to enroll in film school; yet, following a brief internship in an architecture office in Rome in the summer of 1964, the rebellious student returned to Ithaca to resume his architectural studies, and eventually graduated from Cornell four years later.¹

Patrimony and patronage are almost identical in this case. Matta, the pioneer of Surrealist architecture, former apprentice of Le Corbusier, collaborator with Gropius and Moholy-Nagy, friend of Alvar Aalto, and then artist who essentially renounced architecture in the first decade of his career, now makes an oblique return via the career path of his son.

Matta liked baptisms: he held parties to name his paintings. Apparently, he would do the same several times with his living offspring. If Duchamp’s wife Teeny was indeed Gordon’s godmother as an infant, then Breuer, Johnson, and Kiesler, Matta’s New York architect friends mentioned in this letter, are the designated godfathers launching Gordon’s career as an/architect in his adult life. Little did these avuncular figures know that their protégé would devote his later practice to eroding the very foundations on which his decision to commit to architecture had originated.

Even if Gordon had not “dilapidate[d] the money” Matta claims to have sent for his return ticket to the patrimonial abode that year, the artist’s son would later on methodically demolish, slice, and subvert the institutional basis of his father’s original vocation and reinvent its operation as a process of continuous expenditure. The destination of anarchitecture was perhaps not mapped in the directions Matta drafted in his New Year’s letter to his offspring; it was instead Gordon’s own addition of a bypass to architecture’s bifurcating path to “nowhere.”