Along with a nearly inaccessible sunken courtyard adjacent to the Fogg Museum, these unrealized elements are Corbusier’s innovative failures: interstitial spaces that have been, for the most part, either forgotten or disused. It is here that Hughe’s work thrives, arresting and revealing the gaps in communication and visualization that come with the designing and realization of a commission—architectural and artistic. These are the disparities between what is and what might have been, the result of difficulties that arose out of even the most basic translations during construction between Corbusier’s use of metric measurements and their American equivalents.

In addition to Huyghe’s archaeology of these “missing pieces” is an “architectural extension” of the existing building to provide a new, if temporary social space. Emerging from the building’s unused courtyard is, a glowing, moss-covered polycarbonate theatre designed by a professor at the Graduate School of Design. It is, in itself, a powerful and sculptural meditation on the architectural innovations the Carpenter Center has witnessed over the previous 40 years. Perhaps the result of a seed brought by the little bird at Corbusier’s request or an element of the original design incubated beneath the building for the last 40 years, the plastic “egg” is trapped between the machine and the human: designed and output on sophisticated digital fabrication technologies, but painstakingly assembled by hand.

Coupled with the hand-crafted marionettes, the blobular form is a poignant analogue to Corbusier’s earlier fusion of organic forms and Modernist rigor in the Carpenter Center’s design—the result of the University’s mid-century hope that an increased presence of the arts would counter the increasingly mechanistic tenor of society.

At the premiere of the film this evening in the Carpenter Center’s theater, the project’s two curators, artist Pierre Huyghe, along with Corbusier’s little bird will all watch the screen as their marionette representations, now enlarged into life-size projections, move across the screen. Behind the puppets sits a scale model of the Carpenter Center—a set-piece and puppet at once—the whole event having been filmed within the building in which it is being screened.

“The work is incredibly reflexive,” says Norden. “The idea of the project is like a regression in the mirror, infinitely. The movie becomes a vehicle of that.”

While the layered references of scale in Huyghe’s film are at times dizzying (at one point even the puppets are wielding their own marionette puppets), Huyghe’s meta-narratives of realization may be the most compelling aspect of the project. In previous works—including his most famous, Third Memory, based on the 1975 Sidney Lumet film Dog Day Afternoon—Huyghe has utilized the cinematic device of the jump cut to fold into a linear whole quite disparate points in time and space.

Here at Harvard, Huyghe links contemporary events with those nearly half a century ago, filling gaps in the storyline by collapsing them onto and into themselves. While on the surface a puppet show, the film becomes a nuanced investigation into the artistic process, an intriguing consideration of Corbusier’s own thinking about how the building’s forms have evolved and mutated.

Huyghe succeeds in this undertaking thanks to his abilities as a skillful bricoleur and director, assembling and refashioning the forms, talents, and histories of others into his own vision. In the Carpenter Center project he adopts the techniques of commercial filmmaking, refocusing its purpose of creating desire in the viewer. Huyghe recognizes his role as an artist brought to the University to provide cultural prestige. As a result, he brings this “culture” very close to entertainment—perhaps too close for some at Harvard.

Given the medium (marionettes) and the class transgressions present Huyghe’s previous projects—employing forms that include adult Japanese graphic novels, fireworks, Walt Disney characters and figure skating in the service of high art—it is inevitable that snide references will be made to the other puppet-movie now playing in Harvard Square, the satirical Team America: World Police. Because Huyghe’s context is not just the academy, but no less Harvard, his challenge may be greater: as Princeton Professor Cornel R. West ’74 and University President Lawrence H. Summers well know, the clash of the low and high is particularly jarring when the worlds of mass-media and academia collide.

MR. HARVARD, DEAN OF DEANS

If anniversary celebrations mark the passage of time, Huyghe’s project provides the opportunity to look anew at the Carpenter Center’s position in the university—especially in terms of its role as the focus and birthplace for the instruction of the visual arts. In his filmed puppet show, Huyghe makes what may be one of the strongest statements in his presentation of a modern allegory of the artist and his institutional patron, bound by the strings of inflexible bureaucracy.

The artist’s frustrations may be the result not of the difficulties of patronage, but with Harvard’s long uneasiness with contemporary art. The University, Norden points out, is willing to consider in an historical context “works that were, in their own time, considered avant garde art.” At the same time, however, “Harvard has a tremendous discomfort with live art—work that has not already received critical approval and can be studied and considered in their periods.”

Again, the parallels between Huyghe’s project and Corbusier’s experience at Harvard are germane. The result of a good deal of friction between architect and institution, the Carpenter Center, along with several of Sert’s own projects such as the Science Center and Peabody Terrace, ruffled enough conservative feathers that the University has since become less willing to engage in high-profile commissions involving cutting-edge architecture. In Huyghe’s film, playing opposite to the cherubic features of and jointed arms of Corbusier and Huyghe’s marionette likenesses is a scaly, black foam apparition referred to as “Mr. Harvard, Dean of Deans,” who floats through a misty Harvard Yard. He—or it—is a representation of institutional bureaucracy, a collision between a praying mantis and Darth Vader.

While the artistic accomplishment of Huyghe’s work may become apparent when the film is premiered this evening, the narrative of its commission may constitute the project’s greatest success. Like Le Corbusier, Huyghe has succeeded in turning the University’s rigidity into creative impetus. For the sake of future generations of Harvard students, one hopes that it doesn’t take another 40 years before Harvard is bold enough to once again play the role of patron.