architextures

GET LOST: A New York Tour Guide's Guide to New York #2

2012-01-25T13:26:00.000-05:00

2. LEAVE YOUR ATTITUDE AT HOME

There's a certain type of tourist I encounter now and then that makes my job less than satisfying and enjoyable. Often they're teenagers--who come with their own hormonal issues, to be fair--but adults are sometimes guilty of it, also. They've come to my city with a chip on their shoulder.

People from very small, rural towns already know cities like this one are bigger, faster, and crazier than where they come from (and I place no value judgments on that). They're often so flabbergasted and overwhelmed that they don't particularly have time to cop an attitude. People from other large cities sometimes have a "seen it all before" face, which can be annoying (and I do sometimes encounter the rivalry with Los Angeles, but not often). For the most part, however, these folks seem to feel a sort of urban kinship with New York and can simply appreciate how things may be different here, if not any more or less impressive than in their home city.

The attitude seems to appear most often in people from a town of a size in between these two. Their home town is large enough to have its own cultural identity, but not big enough to compete with a place like New York, Berlin, Tokyo, etc. New York has been way too hyped up for them, and in a way, they don't want to like it here. If they do, in their minds, it means there's something lacking, something wrong with the place they come from, and they would be insulting themselves by admitting it. In my own opinion, I think there is a great deal to be said for a place where life moves more slowly, people know one another, and nature is pristine and easily accessed. These are all things that we miss in New York. Visitors from places like that perhaps think that we're ignorant of these differences and believe New York has it all. Not all of us are, but it's the best explanation I've been able to devise.

The European attitude is a bit different. It can often be much more condescending. This attitude is not as much determined to be unimpressed, but gives the impression they think everything and everyone here is just very ridiculous. Yes, I know, the city you come from is 1500 years old and you have cultural history oozing from your every orifice. I respectfully marvel at the beauty of your European cities for that very reason. Oddly, this is not the attitude I get from visitors from Asia or the Middle East, who have all of us in the west far surpassed in that regard. I am fully aware that New York doesn't have the long, historical background that other places do, but we love it here despite that and, in some cases, because of it.

This city came of age in the past century. If you can't respect a city that was the pinnacle of everything that defines the twentieth century in the western world, kindly stay home. Whatever it may lack otherwise, New York celebrates technology and newness. We have gorgeous, gleaming skyscrapers and some of the most important, innovative buildings ever built during the peak of its development (around mid-century). We were the birthplace for numerous forms of music beloved throughout the world. I'll be the first to admit we may now have lost it, but from around the 1940s to at least the late-1980s, New York led the world in art, culture, and perhaps fashion. I'm not saying that's necessarily a good thing or bad. For one thing, I'd like to apologize to the planet for my country littering it with McDonald's restaurants. All I ask is that we collectively agree that the places we live and love all have something that makes them great. Visit here looking for that. Don't come here looking for things to piss on.

A bad attitude toward me and other people who live here will give you exactly the reaction you're expecting. People will be rude, unfriendly, unhelpful, and annoyed. I can assure you that the guests I encounter who are open-minded, willing to talk to me, and share my enthusiasm for my city get infinitely more out of their visit than the people who aren't. I go out of my way to show them the coolest stuff I can, because I can tell they'll be receptive and enjoy it. That's exactly the mindset I'm going to bring with me if I visit the place where you live. I'm going to want to see all the best it has to offer, especially if it's different from life here.

I just want to be rid of the people with bad attitudes. While I am never anything but completely professional with everyone, of course, these types get the barest minimum out of me. It only reinforces for them the "this place isn't so great" opinion they had before they even arrived. Would you walk into a person's house who has graciously invited you to be a guest and say, "your house isn't so great. I've seen better?" Maybe if you were raised by wolves. Most people recognize that as the very height of bad manners: a lousy guest. Well, that's exactly how it looks when you arrive here and act like my city bores you. You're insulting my home. As far as I'm concerned, you can take your attitude and get on the next plane out of here. Everyone else is completely welcome here.

©2012, Ryan Witte

3. Eye Contact

GET LOST: A New York Tour Guide's Guide to New York #1

2012-01-23T10:07:00.004-05:00

1. FRIENDLIER THAN YOU THINK

This subheading may seem odd considering the title of these posts, but that will be explained later on. Back in the 1970s, before I got here, the city was a much different place. In the shadows of the two tallest buildings in the world--and probably two of the most expensive ever built at the time--lay a city crumbling into poverty and crime. Adding insult to injury, President Ford refused to help, as famously headlined by the Daily News: Drop Dead.

From most accounts I've heard, the city was mean and dangerous and, in a way, justifiably so. New Yorkers were pissed off, miserable, and struggling. This decade was also extremely culturally vibrant, perhaps ironically, perhaps not. It included the emergence and/or further development of Conceptual Art, Hip-Hop, Art Rock, Disco, Electronica, and House. But this was a city visitors needed bravery and a lot of street smarts to survive. Things are very different now, for better or for worse. New York has lost a lot of its creativity and individuality, but also a lot of its crime and bad attitude. When asking, "it's friendlier here than you were expecting, isn't it?" I have always gotten a "yes."

Only a day prior to this posting, without me even asking the question specifically, a visitor from London was telling me how surprised she'd been at how friendly a city this is. She and her companion would be studying their map, and people would go out of their way to approach and ask if they needed any help. I hardly think this is an isolated occurrence. I've done it myself.

These days, I'm always shocked to learn a visitor had a nasty experience with someone on the street who they presumed to be a native New Yorker. Shocked, that is, until I learn it was, say, around South Street Seaport. Very few of us were actually born and raised in Manhattan. Those who were are a somewhat quirky bunch in my experience. The people crowding the streets around South Street Seaport are not New Yorkers, unless they work in that area. You can usually tell the difference, or at least, I can.

Your experience asking someone for directions or advice would likely fall into three categories. Another tourist is unlikely to know the answer to your question, but should be relatively friendly about it. At most, they might be simply freaked out about a stranger in a strange land approaching them without warning. What may seem like rudeness may instead be caution. A real New Yorker, unless late for some important meeting, will very likely give you the twenty seconds to offer help with a smile.

The third person, who responds rudely to a polite, innocent question, would likely be from the surrounding suburbs. I don't mean to insult anyone from New York suburbs or imply that all or even most of them would behave this way, but allow me to explain. This person lives close enough to the city to know quite a bit about it. They want to appear native, and may actually think of themselves as New Yorkers. They may have lived here twenty-five years ago. They don't know enough about life here, though, to realize that nastiness is not a ubiquitous New York characteristic as perhaps it once was. On top of it all, being an outsider but only just barely, they have something to prove.

Just like any place, there are some people here who are dangerous or dishonest or both. Some are insane, others are just desperate and starving. The majority of people are none of the above. My advice is to be on your guard, but assume people have benign intentions unless they demonstrate otherwise. You'll know early enough if they're trying to get something from you that you don't want to give up, be it time, money, or property.

You get out of a place what you put into it. If you're terrified that everyone here is going to mug you or treat you like dirt, you're going to have a miserable time. On the other hand, if you're willing to talk to people who live here and interact with them, your experience will have much more personality to it than just a lot of photos in a photo album.

Yes, there are a lot of people here, and some of them want to scam you. But it's important to remember that, up to a certain point, people = safety. Unless we're talking about a cattle-herd density crowd, the more people there are around you on the street, the less likely someone is going to risk grabbing your wallet or pocketbook. The chances are just too high that when you yell out, some Good Samaritan is going to tackle them as they try to escape. This doesn't mean that an empty street late at night is necessarily dangerous in contrast. In all cases you merely need to remain consciously aware of your surroundings.

If, despite all this, you do find yourself being mugged, just give the mugger your stuff. If this person is willing to commit a crime for it, obviously they need the money more than you do. And stuff can be replaced, your life cannot. A whole day wasted at your country's embassy or wherever to replace IDs and so on is a hell of a lot better than spending the rest of your trip in the hospital with a knife wound. Hand over your stuff, say "that's all I have," and get out of there.

©2012, Ryan Witte

2. Leave Your Attitude at Home

GET LOST: A New York Tour Guide's Guide to New York

2012-01-20T10:52:00.004-05:00

INTRODUCTION

In my job, I've had the opportunity and (dis)pleasure to be an ambassador to New York City for countless thousands of people. During my experiences, there have been a lot of things I've wanted to tell people (and sometimes have), to help them or out of my own frustration. Most often there isn't enough time, it would seem odd to offer unsolicited, or it would be downright inappropriate. So I thought I'd share them here.

The particular circumstances of my job put me in a somewhat unique position. A city tour guide who spends several days to several weeks with a single group of people will unquestionably get to know those folks better than I ever would. In contrast, I spend that time meeting group after group after group, that is, a much larger number of people in total.

Unlike a destination that's purely for entertainment value (like Radio City Music Hall, for instance), I work in an entertainment destination which is generally seen as having a higher degree of educational value, as well. As a result, I get a lot of captive audiences who apparently would much rather be gauging out their own eyeballs than listening to me. Therefore, it's imperative that I know who they are on at least a superficial level, to make my life easier.

Also, since there are indeed educational aspects to what I do and on multiple different levels and subjects, it is much more in my best interest to familiarize myself with the background knowledge of my groups in order to connect with them best and provide them with information that will be of use to them. For obvious reasons, a group of girls from a ballet school in an upper-middle-class suburb will get a completely different tour from me than senior citizens involved with their local Midwestern community theater, or high school students from the Bronx who have never heard Classical music before. I have to know who they are up front and occasionally in more depth as the time passes, in case I need to switch strategy or tone.

The purpose of this series of posts is to provide the reader with a few basic tools of survival for visiting this city, things one gets to know by spending a lot of time here, but which for some odd reason are not often explained by touristy guide books. There's always the possibility that it would make a good book, in fact. Writing out enough of it to be worthwhile on paper is time consuming and furthermore, there's no time like the present. If other New Yorkers would like to contribute installments to this, I welcome them.

Many people either don't realize that they look like tourists, or don't care that they do. Appearing as if you belong in a place has a number of benefits, however. It's safer, for one. There is not a lot of crime here anymore. In fact, cities as unexpected as Little Rock, Arkansas are far more dangerous per person than New York. But the fact is that for whatever criminal element remains, obvious tourists have a bit of a bull's eye on their backs.

Joining the flow of the city is a kinder, gentler experience. Although the major cities of the world have plenty in common, every one of them has its own rhythms and protocols. Sailing along with these currents rather than trying to row against them means you'll have an easier time. People won't be pissed off and confront you with unpleasant interactions.

This relates also to the global community we're beginning to see emerging on the internet. I'm reminded how wonderful this is every time I am able to chat with a person from the opposite side of the earth. I've come to know people who, no more than thirty years ago, I could have lived a million lifetimes and never met them. The flip side of our new electronic communications culture, though, is that diverse parts of the world are becoming increasingly alike. In a way, it has a very homogenizing effect on our various cities. So while the places where we live still retain some of the individual characteristics that make them unique, we should go out of our way to learn and celebrate them. If you don't, you may as well just stay home.

On a deeper level, your interactions with people here will be a bit more honest, less staged. On the rare occasions that I do visit sites mostly frequented by tourists, there's a sort of mask of formal courtesy that drops noticeably when an employee learns I'm a New Yorker. From the other side, while I treat everyone with equal humor, my comfort level is somehow higher with people who I know live here (or some place very much like it), who know what this is all about. In sum, if you go about your business like a New Yorker, you're much more likely to be treated like one. That is very much a good thing. Suddenly, you're an insider, not an outsider.

©2012, Ryan Witte

1. Friendlier Than You Think
2. Leave Your Attitude at Home

Crossing the Line

2012-01-02T13:50:00.006-05:00

I had a concept for my present wrappings this year. It wasn't as comical or goofy as "Ugliest Presents Ever." And I decided against trying to stage an Ugly Present Wrapping Contest. Wrapping my presents like that two years in a row would have been weird. So I'm back to what I hope are truly beautiful gifts. My theme this year was Stripes. Admittedly I was inspired in part by Gene Davis and also by the David Smith show going on at the Whitney at the moment.

Since I knew precisely what I was looking for, instead of the place where I normally get my wrappings (an art supply store on West Fifty-Seventh Street, the name of which escapes me), I thought my best chance would be Kate's Paperie. Unfortunately, they have moved to a much smaller space and don't have as comprehensive a selection as I'd remembered. In addition, by the time I got there, the whole store had mostly been picked clean by the Christmas Jackals. Luckily, there remained a wrapping paper that was almost exactly what I needed. The only problem was that the stripes were on the diagonal. So what you see here is the result of some very tricky geometry with the byproduct of a lot of different sizes of triangular scraps left over.

The arrangement under the tree was a later bit of inspiration, in response to the normally haphazard pile of presents one normally finds there. At the edge of the jumble, with the rough edge facing the rest, I wanted to form a sharp line, a border on the edge of the present pile. The ribbons color-coded each gift according to its importance, and the placement of them was the order in which I planned for them to be opened, with the first present (a bottle of Port because its obvious shape made it not a very big surprise) at the top. The bottle was actually the most difficult to get lined up with stripes. I had to match the stripe of the paper with the bottle's label and tape it into place before rolling it up.

Displaying my sort of craftiness with the tools of present wrapping again is no more or less related to the visual arts than Ugliest Presents was last year, I suppose. I did kind of make fun of the twisted way this holiday has evolved in the United States. [I've become more cognizant lately of saying "United States" rather than "America," to exempt from my criticism the Mexicans and Canadians. We in the middle of the continent are the ones who are the most screwed up.] Last year's critique was really not meant to offend anyone. I more meant to suggest in a tongue-in-cheek way that if one is going to celebrate this holiday and ignore its ancient mythological, pagan, and astrological roots, then one might at least celebrate what it was meant to celebrate: a great and kind political philosopher and perhaps prophet who preached love, acceptance, and forgiveness before being condemned to die for it. This is not to mention his admonishment of money changers in the temple, which is almost precisely what Christmas has become in an abstract sense.

This year, I'd like to discuss something almost entirely unrelated to the arts, but which follows the other line of pursuit on this blog, social justice. It's something of which I was only vaguely aware of hearing murmurs in the past few years. It was more acutely brought to my attention recently. It's the patently ridiculous and imaginary phenomenon known as The War on Christmas. Only in a place like the United States could anyone actually complain about something like this without being laughed right out of the room. I mean that this is a country populated overwhelmingly by Christians, but who also are in forced contact with people of an extremely wide diversity of different ethnicities and religions. It's sort of like a white person lamenting that there is a "war on white people" in this country. A lot of crackpots do say that, in fact, but anyone who knows anything at all about the world instantly recognizes this as utter crackpottery.

Much of the "war" seems to revolve around the scandalous practice of referring to the pagan, Viking symbol of a pine tree as a "Holiday Tree." One commenter on an article made an excellent point to someone from Britain who was confused about this. It was that no one in this country today would ever look at a pine tree with lights on it and associate it with anything other than Christmas, no matter what you might choose to name it to avoid alienating Americans who practice a different religion.

For those readers living in other parts of the world, I think it's important to emphasize just how ubiquitous this holiday is. I live in the one city in the United States--with a huge population of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus, etc.--where it might be most possible to avoid the complete cultural saturation of Christmas in the month of December. But even in New York City, it is practically impossible. In the parts of the country where the dominant residents are fundamentalist Christian (the people who imagine there to be a war on, presumably), it must be far, far worse.

I touched on this briefly in last year's, ahem, "holiday" post, but a great illustration is found in the music. We have a radio station here called 1067LiteFM. The station appeals to stores without their own custom soundtracks because it plays mostly upbeat, pleasant Light Rock and Pop inoffensive to the point of occasional dullness. They play LiteFM in the elevators of my apartment building. The small grocery down the street, the laundromat, and the liquor store all play it. I can literally shop at a number of different stores and hear the beginning, middle, and end of a single song in different locations. Halfway through November, LiteFM starts playing Christmas carols and nothing but Christmas carols until well after Christmas itself. I had to hear "White Christmas" on a day that was over sixty degrees outside. One day doing my laundry, I had to hear not one, not two, but three different versions of "Sleigh Ride." Granted, "Sleigh Ride" is mostly a secular song, but it connotes nothing whatsoever if not the Christmas season.

According to the poll, only slightly over half of U.S. residents even know what Ramadan is. Much as I might trust the poll, I'm actually quite certain the true percentage is much lower than that. For one thing, the question that was reportedly asked, "Ramadan is...Muslim...Buddhist...or Hindu?" in a poll about religion is a very different question than, say, "What is the Muslim holy month called?" and even more so, "What is Ramadan?" asked outside of a religious context. I suspect far fewer white (non-Canadian) Americans know what Diwali is. In fact, I'm sorry to admit I only learned about Diwali relatively recently in exploring the idea of visiting India. I was even speaking recently to a young Indian-American guy who didn't know what Diwali was, although granted, he's a Christian born in the United States.

[Edited to add: Whether or to what extent Christmas is acknowledged in India, Hanukkah in Indonesia, or Ramadan in Sweden or whether people of varying faiths are found in large enough numbers there to warrant discussing it are subjects for other people's blogs. Since I live in the United States, I can only have an opinion about my experiences here.]

If there is a "war" being waged--and there isn't--I think it's fairly obvious to anyone who isn't completely insane who is winning that war. And it is not the person who respectfully says "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" to someone of whose religious background they're uncertain.

And this is part of a bigger problem, as well, a conservative backlash to ethnic integration that I'll call Religious Privilege. It's like how many white people in this country seem to believe the dominant culture should reflect their (white, Western European) sensibilities merely because it has been traditionally that way since we murdered off the Native Americans and/ or stole their land. Similarly, hardcore Christians have the "privilege" of not knowing the slightest thing about any other religious beliefs. People brought here from Africa in the slave trade mostly had their religious traditions stripped away or possibly even banned. Others were no doubt proselytised by missionary zealots. But beyond that, most every other ethnic group that immigrated here were discriminated against despite their adherence to Judao-Christian beliefs. We now have a large and growing number of full-fledged and patriotic U.S. citizens who are not just a different color, not just a different branch of Abrahamic religion, but of an entirely different religious and cultural background altogether.

Perhaps subconsciously, my multicolored gifts, all lined up in a single monolithic arrangement under the tree was metaphorically related to what I'd discuss here. Although I considered not posting this rant at all. Especially now that both Christmas and New Year's Eve are behind us, it seemed a bit unnecessarily serious a topic. But I'd like to believe that despite our occasional bigoted setbacks, the overall trend in this country over the long term is toward acceptance and inclusion of all people who might choose to come here. A tiny droplet of respect and concession toward people of different beliefs amid the drowning tidal wave of Christianity that floods through this country every November and December is something I think we could all consider a healthy step toward the future. Being insulted by the idea of including all people in a season of joy is immature, arrogant, and not in the slightest bit "Christ-like."

In looking back over the past year, I noticed things had gotten a little slow here. To be fair, many of my stories required extensive travel, research, and organization. These are the ones that have historically been the most popular, but they are time consuming. One of my New Year's Resolutions for 2012, for anyone who might welcome it, is to post much more frequently to this blog. A very Happy New Year to all my readers, and thank you for following!

©2012, Ryan Witte

Island in the Stream

2011-12-02T16:32:00.007-05:00

My latest excursion was a trip to see something really unique in New York. I'd been there I think only once before. This time I saw much more of it and looked much more closely. It's accessed by an unusual form of transportation that I think most people would be shocked to find in this city: a tram that was intended as a temporary measure and quickly became iconic. I'm talking about Roosevelt Island.

This was another event planned by the folks at DOCOMOMO New York Tri-State, and it was incredibly impressive. The best thing was the people they arranged to have speak to us, all of whom were so integral to the project. First to speak was Theodore Liebman, who was Chief Architect of the New York State Development Corporation that built up Roosevelt Island. Next was Lo-Yi Chan, who worked for I. M. Pei and designed the tram stations on both the Roosevelt and Manhattan sides of the river. And then there was Ashok Bhavnani, who I mentioned in a previous story. Finally, a well-spoken resident of the island since 1981, Marianne Russem.

There are a ton of interesting things about Roosevelt Island. One of them does not seem to be its nightlife. There are a few restaurants that look fairly nice, although I didn't have an opportunity to look at any menus. Other than that, there are a lot of empty storefronts. From some of the residents' reports, it sounds as if, after hours, it becomes a bit of a ghost town.

Getting in and out of Manhattan for an evening's entertainment sounds like a bit of a chore. The tram can stop running as early as 2AM. Cabbing it back to the outer boroughs for anyone who lives close enough to bother will generally cost around fifteen to twenty dollars, which seems even more worth it if you can share the ride with a friend. But keep in mind that, although it's geographically closer, a cab from Manhattan has to go over the Queensboro Bridge, make a U-turn, and cross back over another bridge to get to this island. It's served by only one subway line, the F train. If the F isn't running, you're $#!+ outta luck, and I wouldn't call the F the most reliable train. I think it would take a somewhat particular kind of person to want to live there, but that's still evidently a lot of people. The waiting list for an apartment there is estimated to take twenty years to turn over.

The uniqueness of Roosevelt Island stems from a few facts. It was a parcel of available land on which to build extremely late in the game, yet extremely close to the island of Manhattan. Although there are swaths of green at its northern end, the entire island of Manhattan had been more or less completely covered with development since the 1930s or '40s at the very latest. By the early-1970s, housing developments that would require the displacement and demolition of existing neighborhoods were almost universally seen as the most sinister of urban evils. Housing projects had promised so much and delivered so little, often making worse the very problems they had proposed to solve. It was the great, ironic, and miserable failure of the tower in a park ideal that had guided urban planning for forty-some years.

Despite the fact that many valuable lessons had been learned the hard way about this type of large-scale residential design and construction, it was all but impossible to put any of the new philosophies into practice. Grassroots neighborhood organizations had become much too vocal, much too savvy, and much too powerful to ever permit the wholesale destruction of urban areas again. And there was nowhere left to build on a large scale, except on Roosevelt Island. So what can be seen on the island is rare: large-scale, high-density, early-1970s residential architecture. What was built there was essentially a brand new town, built from the ground up, and built on late twentieth-century principles of urban space. The only comparison in scale might be gated, suburban housing tracts, but the fundamental differences are too obvious to bother discussing here.

A sort of side-effect of all this is the fact that Roosevelt Island's architecture by Johansen & Bhavnani is vaguely Brutalist, but displays a wonderfully domestic, sometimes even homey character, especially as it relates to the main street. One of the things I noticed on my first trip out many years ago was how modern the forms were, but yet seemed scaled almost like traditional row houses at times. Of course there are many towers to be found as well, but I think their proportions are sensitively handled.

It was originally called Hog Island when purchased from the Canarsie natives, then Manning's Island (1666), Blackwell Island (1686), and Welfare Island (1921), but was named for former New York State Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1973. The Blackwell House is the oldest building on the island and one of the oldest buildings in New York. It was finished in 1804 and restored in 1973.

Around the Blackwell House and here to its north is a nice little green area and fountain designed by landscape architect, Dan Kiley.

Mostly Roosevelt Island was used for the sequestering of people nobody wanted to have to deal with in Manhattan: criminals, the insane, the diseased, and the disabled. It's been home to prisons, asylums, and hospitals for the treatment of smallpox and polio. The focal point of the asylum was the Octagon (with the clever address "888," Alexander Jackson Davis, 1839), which is now the lobby of a high-end apartment building converted in 2006. Why anyone would want to live in an insane asylum I'm not sure, but it does look like a pretty fancy building now.

The Smallpox Hospital (1856), designed by the architect of St. Patrick's Cathedral, James Renwick, is probably the best known building on the island, especially amongst people who have never visited the island itself. It's lit up at night and quite visible from Manhattan. It's an extremely beautiful building and would have to be the absolute greatest place in all of New York City to have a Halloween party. I'm sure they'd never allow that. I've been wanting to see it in person for years, but I'll have an opportunity to do so soon, as I discuss below.

This gorgeously eery photograph courtesy Too Much Glass.

It's appropriate that the island should be named for a president who happened to suffer from polio, considering a hospital dedicated to the illness was located there. As many of you may know, Louis Kahn designed a monument to Roosevelt which was intended to be built at the southern tip of the island around the time of its redevelopment. Almost thirty years later, Four Freedoms Park will finally be built there, just south of the Renwick Ruin. It will be this city's only work by Kahn, sadly (who designed the incredible Salk Institute and, for my South Asian readers, built this in Bangladesh, which must be absolutely astonishing in person). Although there are a few of his works in the tri-state area that will eventually be discussed on this blog at some point. It was pointed out that a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt stands at the United Nations directly across the river, so now husband and wife will be able to "talk" to one another.

Speaking of polio and the wheelchair-bound patients of the hospitals, it was decided from the start that all of the new construction, the entire island in fact, should be fully accessible by wheelchair. The planning was begun by Philip Johnson and John Burgee in 1969, and most of the major construction was complete by 1974, '75, and '76. But the point is that the Americans with Disabilities Act, which states that all new construction and alterations to any building accessible to the general public must be equally accessible to persons with different types of mobility, didn't go into effect until 1992, over twenty years later. In the early-'70s, it was as pioneering an idea as it was socially conscious and socially conscientious. Most of the ramps and similar features are well integrated into the design as a whole. These buildings could be a fantastic model for the seamless incorporation of equality in accessibility even today.

Another very interesting thing you likely would never know unless you lived there is that the island's waste is collected by a pneumatic garbage disposal system. It's the only residential community in the country to use such a system. We went to see the garbage plant and look in the window, but you can't really see much from outside. There's been a short documentary produced about it, which is surprisingly fascinating and fairly funny.

Nature Abhors a Vacuum from gregory whitmore on Vimeo.

Although it hints at it in calling attention to the narrow streets, the film doesn't mention that originally cars were banned on the island. Residents and visitors would drive over the bridge which led directly into the huge parking garage--called "Motorgate," in delightfully 1960s fashion--and just leave their cars there. Transportation around the island was (and is) supplied by electric buses. It's remarkably futuristic, if you think about it. But at one point I said aloud, "wait a minute...there are cars here." It must tell us something about our automobile culture that I'd already been on the island for a couple of hours before I noticed there were cars where there were not supposed to be. Even if (electric) garbage trucks had been allowed along with the buses from the beginning, the only other vehicles on the roads being garbage trucks would have been singularly unattractive.

The parking garage I think is a fantastic building. It was designed by the architects of Boston's wildly controversial City Hall, Kallman & McKinnell, and finished in 1974. The island resident, Marianne Russem, was able to half-heartedly agree that it's an aesthetically interesting structure. But she said most of the residents hate it because it's especially dirty and practically impossible to keep clean. Although photographs I saw of the interior looked pretty spectacular, I didn't have time to go inside it on this trip.

Roosevelt Island's school system was also a bit unconventional. All the residential buildings had small classroom wings incorporated into their designs. So from one year to the next, students would move from building to building to attend school in a different place. Russem said there were problems with this because the arrangement provided no centralized spaces like a gym or auditorium to accommodate school-wide functions. A main public school was built in 1992.

For anyone who might not know, New York City has an interesting public school system where, after their eighth year, students can choose and apply to attend any of the other public schools in the system regardless of location. As far as I know, the admissions process is similar to college applications, and many of the schools are specialized toward a certain field like science, technology, or the arts. My point being that after year eight, students from Roosevelt Island could choose to study elsewhere anyway.

In discussing the experience of her own school-aged children, Russem touched on a topic of relevance on this blog. Because this was a state project, it was required to house residents of a variety of economic levels. This would all seem perfectly great except that, as she pointed out, residents of different economic levels were divided up into separate buildings. She said it "created slums," not at all unexpectedly.

She was fully against the practice, as well, and likely her children's experience only amplified this. "Oohhh, you're from Rivercross..." other kids would say to hers, referring to the only co-op building in the bunch. Although all the buildings were built with swimming pools, the one at Rivercross is the only one that remains operational. Furthermore, it's extremely well maintained. The other pools sit dry, cracking, and unusable, which I found quite sad. I'm going to risk sounding naïve by saying I'd like to think this policy would be implemented differently--better, and with more integration--today.

It was during our stop at Rivercross for refreshments that Mr. Bhavnani spoke to the group, along with Ms. Russem. The enthusiasm for this project, the whole concept of this island, was palpable from all the speakers involved.

Knowing that this post was in the works, I recently went also to see Bhavnani's Kaufman Center Building (1978), on West Sixty-Seventh Street, which is of course very close to where I work. But it was substantially (though respectfully) redesigned by Robert A. M. Stern in 2008.

A few things became apparent inside Rivercross. One was that all the buildings are vividly color coded, as can be seen in the tile-clad elevator lobbies and the ornamental ventilation tubes.

The tubes, by the way, are a wonderful industrial detail, vaguely nautical in tone for the riverside site but without being too obvious about it.

Another was the way the interior spaces are interconnected with an amazing progression both horizontally and vertically. Hallways provide long vistas with distinct volumes cut out, brightly colored, and bathed in sections of natural light.

I had the idea in my head that we were going to see one of the apartment interiors and we didn't, but what we did go up to see was pretty cool. It was a tiny moment of futurism from Archigram that links two wings of the building. The tower it leads to feels surprisingly domestic, shows how much individual personality was possible in each unit, and can be accessed only through these tubes. It would never hold up under fire safety laws today. The tubes need to be replaced and for various reasons, namely that maintenance staff needs to access the top of them, sadly, they need to be reinstalled with roofs.

These may be some of the last images of the tubes in their original form.

This had actually been the official end of the event, but many of us continued along with Russem, who kindly offered her time to tell us more and answer additional questions. We walked north and discussed the school, I asked her about the wheelchair-bound residents and other questions about life on the island. We saw Motorgate and the turbine house for the garbage system. Finally we ended at the Octagon, where photos were not allowed inside. Most everyone opted to take the bus back, which was there as if on cue and I believe costs only fifty cents. It was a really beautiful day, so I decided to walk back, instead. Strangely, I still made it back in time to ride the tram with a couple of the people from the DOCOMOMO tour.

I had considered walking down to see the Renwick Ruin, but at that point I was a bit tired, it was getting late, and most importantly I was losing sunlight fast. I'll return when the Roosevelt Memorial is completed. In the meantime, I feel as if yet another corner of this city is within my conceptual grasp, and hopefully...yours, too!

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte, except where noted.

The Original Suburban American House

2011-11-13T12:01:00.014-05:00

This post is dedicated to one of the most important structures in the entire United States. In a way, the numbing banality of what's in these photographs should, ironically, make it less shocking that I say that. In other words, saying that this is the most important structure in the United States is too easy, and also could be easily debated. It would be a rather interesting debate, in fact.

But the subject of this post is possibly among the top ten most important buildings in the country for the very reason that it looks like nothing, or...everything. It's the last remaining unaltered Cape Cod House in Levittown, Long Island. It was financed by Abraham Levitt, designed by his son Alfred Levitt, and built and sold by Abe's other son William Levitt. It was likely completed around 1947 or 1948. Alfred had actually apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright, although whether that stamp of legitimacy would stick to this is questionable.

In order to explain why this utterly forgettable little house is so terribly important, I'd like to tell a story, beginning with an imaginary person named John Smith.

John is born to a Polish father and Italian mother on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1923, when "John" is the most popular American name for baby boys. He barely remembers the crash of the stock market, being only six years old at the time. But the initial panic could be felt by just about everyone, at any age. From that point onward, the slow, excruciating advance of sadness, desperation, frustration, and anger among the adults around him becomes a part of his daily life. Dealing so much with the failing economy robs his childhood of many of its innocent joys. While his parents insist on keeping him in school, most of his free time is spent working at a local cleaners to bring in whatever miniscule coins he can to help his family keep food on the table.

Following a brief romantic career of sordid hand-holding and a few stolen kisses, John meets a girl who makes him positively flip his wig. Her name is Mary--the most popular name for girls his age, seventeen. He'd known her from the neighborhood, but they start going steady. A sinister rumble can be faintly heard from that far off, distant land called "Europe." But here the new cars and trains are shiny and streamlined, this guy called Buckminster Fuller is doing some wacky new stuff, all the new technology is terribly exciting. Women are joining the work force like never before. The Works Progress Administration has a whole lot of projects running; John's uncle is working on one of them, paving roads. There's a light appearing at the end of the Depression Tunnel. Things look hopeful for John and Mary, their young love affair blossoming.

Then, at the tender age of eighteen and still his mama's boy, John is drafted into the war and shipped off to France. At first, he's mostly so terrified all the time that his adrenaline-soaked brain simply goes onto autopilot. As time goes by, his shell hardens and he learns to cope with the horrors of every new day. Thinking about his home life is a powerful coping mechanism, a "safe place." As the real memories of struggling through the Great Depression fade, they're slowly replaced by an idealized version of what home life had been like, full of hot apple pies, stick-ball on the street on late summer afternoons, and mom's hugs. Sitting in a trench freezing and crusted with mud, one bombshell away from having no arms or legs, it's a version much more comforting than the real memories were.

Growing into his early-twenties, he gets more used to the mature but crass conversations about love and sex, girls and women with his fellow soldiers (some of them older and wiser). A nervous trip to a French brothel awkwardly shoves him one step further into adulthood. Mary writes him at least once a week like always, but their correspondence has matured accordingly. She tells him about her work at the factory making wheel struts for bomber planes and the girls she's befriended there. She tells him the neighborhood gossip and which boys have come home wounded. She ends every letter with "I'm true to you always and count the days until you return home."

As the war appears to be nearing its bloody conclusion, slowly the figure of Mom in John's fantasy home life becomes replaced by Mary. He's no longer looking back to his past life in the States, but toward the future he'll find when he goes home again. Aside from that appearance by Betty Grable at the United Service Organization show--leading to the Military Masturbation Epidemic of April 1944--John thinks only of Mary. Increasingly, the only thing keeping him going--keeping him alive, even--is thoughts of her and the tears of joy she'll shed when he first throws his arms around her. After one uncommonly honest and sincere conversation with a close army buddy about their sweethearts back in the States, John decides that as soon as he's again on home soil, he is going to ask Mary to marry him.

Finally, V-Day. On the one hand, John is now an adult man with the cruel, real-life experiences of someone twice his age. He's killed. He's been forced to be self-sufficient both practically and emotionally. He's endured hunger and cold and hardships he never could have imagined. On the other hand, and in a way because this has been his way of life for the past four years, he's still just a child. The time normally spent to smoothly, healthily grow into adulthood has been completely arrested by the war. Behind his sometimes cold, steely eyes and manly, stoic, hardened demeanor lies the heart of a fragile, hopeful, idealistic little boy.

Mary looks different, but more beautiful than ever. She says "YES!" A year later, they're hitched. A few months after that, she's in the family way. The Lower East Side is appearing to be less and less a place one would want to raise a child. There are few trees and practically no grass. It's dirty, smelly, and dangerous. The schools are not great. "If we're going to set up house and home," Mary says, "we should do it right."

They buy this little house in Levittown, Long Island for around $8000. It's got a yard with real grass. It's a nice, friendly neighborhood where everyone looks like everyone else (white) and everyone knows everyone else. Not only do all the people look the same, but all their houses look the same. It's the very portrait of conformity, normality, consistency, and safety, and in sharp contrast to the sudden deployment of an army regiment in a firestorm of whizzing bullets, whistling bombshells, and growling German tanks.

Floor plan courtesy of Peter Bacon Hales

A sign of how childlike and idealistic this picture was is to be found in the architectural character of the house. If you asked a three-year-old to draw a picture of a house, this is exactly what she or he would give you. The cute little chimney sticking up out of the middle of the pitched roof, the door in the middle with a window on each side, the teeny-tiny little lantern fixture above the door--it's almost like a cartoon simplification of a real house. The odd little rectangular frames just under the roof line appear to have been additional windows. Although it would be difficult to argue the benefit of more light, and they must have been great for regulating temperature, most of the houses have them boarded over. It's possible they were difficult to keep clean and/ or wouldn't accommodate screens.

To put the $8000 price tag into perspective, one of the most expensive regular-production automobiles, the Cadillac Coupe DeVille convertible, sold for just under $3500 in 1949. The Levitts were able to drastically reduce costs by employing techniques used to build barracks during the war. The houses were built as if on an assembly line, so characteristic of U.S. industry. Sadly, the provision that no Levittown house could be owned or occupied by a person of color was written (IN UPPERCASE, no less) right into the lease.

This IS Leave it to Beaver. This IS The Donna Reed Show. No country in the world has suburbs like the United States. Certainly it would never have been possible at this time in the economic devastation and war-torn land surrounding Europe's great cities, where nazi occupation was felt so much more acutely, not to mention the psychological repercussions of entire families murdered off and orphaned children everywhere. And no American city has suburbs like New York. The flight out of urban centers was endemic, but New York was and is the largest urban center from which to fly. Here it was also exacerbated by Robert Moses, who made the suburban exodus not only easier, but virtually unstoppable.

The house shown here, the Ranch House, is right around the corner from the unaltered Cape Cod. It's extremely close to being intact. According to the person I spoke to at the Levittown Historical Society, the kitchens were extremely small, so almost immediately, most of them had extensions added to double the size of their kitchens. This Levittown Ranch has an extension at the rear on the left (likely expanding the living room) and a covered porch on the right. The man who rents it with his wife and kids said of altering what was an almost intact original house, "I need a home, not a museum."

Yes, I know one can make the suburb argument easily for Los Angeles. But L.A. is one big suburb. L.A. really has no urban to subordinate the suburban. New York in 1950 far better characterizes the true American urban/ suburban dichotomy because of the fact that the city is still vibrant, crowded, commercial, fast-paced, dirty, smoky, and diverse. Its suburbs therefore can truly be its opposite: quiet, sparsely populated, leisurely, clean, pastoral, and demographically homogeneous. John and his (male) neighbors work in New York City. They settle in Levittown.

In 1949, John and Mary's first daughter is born and named the most common name for baby girls in that year (strangely), Linda. Her brother would be named James.

Over the first seven or eight years of Linda's life, a new paradigm of American society is firmly cemented into place. Morals, protocol, ethics, manners, fashions, gender and race relations, child-rearing practices, the nature of marriage, everything becomes codified, agreed upon by a new white suburban middle-class. Commercial consumption of highly branded products becomes synonymous with personal identity to be manipulated by media, advertising, and the television and automobile culture. It's a naïve, idealized, at times almost Victorian simulation of what Community is supposed to be. These communities created the myth of the American Dream (which does not exist, by the way, for any readers who have never been here for any extended period of time). This house is the very epicenter of the American Dream's emergence.

The first cracks in the pretty picture start to show in 1955. The Douglas Sirk melodrama All That Heaven Allows, Picnic, Rebel Without a Cause, and The Seven Year Itch and public consciousness of the marital problem its title describe all appear in 1955. Even The Trouble With Harry from that year would seem an apt metaphor for the ways that a community's dark, scandalous truths are hidden beneath a thin pretense of conservative social conventions.

John's secretary is possibly too flirtatious for his mid-life crisis to withstand. Mary, alone all day and under the influence of "mother's little helper," might find the new young, fit mailman's smile a bit too irresistible. But outward appearances usurp anything else in the white middle-class suburb, because its foundation had rested so heavily on appearances from the very beginning. "They seemed so happy--the perfect family, really," friends would later say of John and Mary Smith.

By the time Linda reaches her eighteenth birthday in 1966, the world is an entirely different place. It's no longer possible to ignore hard reality like her parents had. First of all, the world is just moving far too fast. And why would you want to, anyway? There's about to be an exhiliarating revolution in science and technology, plastics and chemistry, information processing, space travel, medicine, and of course society, itself. What's more, it would be entirely irresponsible to ignore it and not try to change it, as she and her friends discuss more and more, considering the way their parents messed everything up.

Fueling the fires, they're at the age where all people in any era must, for their own growth and development, question and reject what they've been brought up to believe. They have to forge their own way. For the first time in history, the millions of them are becoming a very real demographic, identified (mostly by marketing executives bent on exploiting it for profit) as a "youth culture." Linda and her parents can barely understand one another anymore. Linda, at least, is losing interest in trying to make them understand.

The Levittowns of this country--John and Mary's white middle-class suburban American Dream of the 1950s--had been the soil. Into that soil was planted a new generation, Linda's, which began to bear fruit around 1967. In art, music, film, theater, design, architecture, commerce, technology, politics, religion, philosophy, theoretical methodologies, social mores, gender relations, sexuality, parenting, race relations, the very nature of human identity, the entire western cultural landscape undergoes one of the most important revolutions in human history. From that point forward, some vague moment in 1968 or 1969, nothing would ever be the same again. One look at the upheavals of the early-1970s and we might be tempted to suggest the world that gave birth to the Cape Cod House in Levittown had been completely turned upside-down.

Looked at in this way, this charming little house represents so much more than it could ever hope to handle. In some bizarre way, I consider it a monument in the strictest sense to some elusive quality instrumental to the evolution of our culture. In the interests of completion, Linda's hypothetical son, most commonly named Michael in the early 1970s, is of the generation that produced writers like myself who would write about the last unaltered Levittown house in these terms. Obviously, I didn't live through any of the events described here. My perspective is a chronologically outsider's one. Social anthropologists live their subjects, however, historians very seldom do.

Dis Connecticut--Part Three

2011-11-01T09:01:00.005-04:00

Over lunch, we discussed our plans for the remainder of the day. I think by the time we finished up in Litchfield, it was already around two o'clock, perhaps later. I had actually made a list of a number of different sites we might see, too many, not knowing how long everything would take and wanting to make the most of the day. The original plan was to head west from here--to see what, I'll let be a surprise for later--and then head back south toward home. Since it was getting a bit late in the day, we decided to head south and see something different, instead. So after bombing out at the Daniel Libeskind house, we headed for Stamford. This worked out quite well because we ended up so much closer to home that, after we had dinner and exhausted ourselves, we wouldn't have such a long drive ahead of us. And what we saw there was absolutely magical.

First I wanted to show this picture I took at the New Milford Hospital. Not to make light of terminal illnesses, or offend anyone with loved ones who've passed, or to suggest that the hospital is not a perfectly good one, but I thought this was really funny...or at least an unfortunate coincidence: a hospital with a cemetery directly across the street. I also decided it really needed to be made into a macro.

Our destination was the First Presbyterian Church of Stamford (FPC) by Wallace Harrison, completed in 1958. Harrison said it was the most satisfying project he'd ever worked on.

The first thing you see, though, well before you ever see the church building itself, is the astonishing Maguire Memorial Carillon Tower, which was finished in 1968.

The sculptural presence of this tower on the property strikes me as a similar gesture to the water tower announcing the entrance to Saarinen's Bell Telephone Labs.

Even with creative math, looking at Harrison's biography, I'm unable to determine how tall this is. It's probably 255-feet tall (78m) but could be as high as 380-feet tall (116m), depending on how you want to read it. The problem is that Harrison's biographer, Victoria Newhouse, says the four corner posts rise 255 feet up and then she discusses the spire separately. Measuring the spire by eye from the top of 255-foot-high corner posts, it would be at least 125 feet above that. Sources online say 260 feet (79m), but I'm always wary of that. In any case, it's tall. The stainless steel pinnacle of the spire had to be lowered into place by helicopter, which evidently saved money over the scaffolding that would have been required to get it up there.

It's named after Walter Maguire, a prominent member of the congregation who donated considerable money to the church, and was among the youngest to ever graduate from Yale Law School. He worked fairly closely with Harrison on the new church building.

For anyone who doesn't know, a carillon is basically a keyboard that mechanically rings bells in a bell tower like a piano. They can have as few as twenty-three bells. FPC's has fifty-six, the largest of which, called the bourdon, weighs 6830 pounds (3100kg). The eleven largest bells are in the lower space, the remaining bells in the upper, with the keyboard--properly called the console--in the enclosure between them. I was very excited to discover a video showing not only the interior of the console chamber, but a carilloneur playing this very carillon. Here's carilloneur Ellen Dickinson playing the Maguire Carillon:

Harrison's first tower would have been a tight web of structural beams rising in a cylinder. Then he was shown a photograph of a sculpture in brass and copper wire by Richard Lippold called Primordial Figure (1948). Inspired by the sculpture, he opened up his tower structurally to what we see today. I could find no images of it online, but the similarities to Lippold's sculpture are obvious, especially in the wooden frame of the tower's staircase.

There was one thing I found very interesting about the carillon tower's construction. From anywhere besides right next to it, veining in the corner posts make it appear to be made of marble, or perhaps that it's cracking or weathered. When I was right underneath it, I suddenly noticed that they are, in fact, made of concrete. The "veins" are actually lines made by fingertip while the concrete was still wet, no doubt specified for aesthetic reasons. I should have gotten my finger in the shot to show scale, but perhaps the texture in the concrete goes some way toward indicating the lines are the exact width and shape of a fingertip.

When we arrived, there was a band called The SuBourbons setting up on the grounds to do a little outdoor concert, but they hadn't started yet.

They played this song, and the camera shows the crowd (bigger than when we were there), so I thought it would be very funny if I were in this video, but this is from a year earlier on not as sunny of a day.

The church is shaped like a fish and so has been nicknamed "The Fish Church." FPC has embraced the nickname; in fact, it's their web address. Taking on a cross shape, but looking vaguely like some ancient symbol for Christianity that I can't quite pinpoint, the wonderfully sculptural entrance is at the crook between the body of the fish to the left and the tail to the right.

We went to see the inside of the church first before exploring around the outside. Walking out of the bright sunlight into this dark space was a little disappointing, because you couldn't really see much. Most of the lights were off and as you can see from the outside, it doesn't really have any normal windows. I decided to take a look at the sanctuary, anyway.

This is what I saw when I first walked into the space.

I just stood there in the doorway with my mouth gaping open. I think I literally could not breathe for about thirty seconds. My mom came in behind me and later said she "choked" when she first saw it. I'm a spiritual though not particularly religious person, but it's at times like these that you're tempted to believe God is right there in the room with you. I also believe that only the most truly talented architects in history were really able to do this, and far less so when it concerns church architecture after around 1915. Furthermore, the real magic of this is something you could never see on paper, certainly not in a blueprint. It transcends the reality of what it is, materially speaking.

The extreme difference in character between this project and so many of the other things Harrison did is truly remarkable. Certainly he had isolated sculptural moments--the auditorium at Rockefeller University, the Met's grand staircase, the "Egg" in Empire State Plaza, or the UN's General Assembly (which, granted, could just as easily be attributed to Corbusier or Niemeier)--but this church, in its entire conception, is something else altogether. The view from the altar end shown here, sunlit in a direction the camera much preferred, shows better the sight seen with eyes adjusted to the darkness. Also the shape of it, almost identical to the altar end, is seen more clearly to intentionally resemble two hands pressed together in prayer. Also quite apparent are the similarities between the character of light here and the inside of the Hall of Science at the 1964 World's Fair, also by Harrison & Abramovitz.

The sanctuary is different in practically every possible way from the surrounding building: cool grey and deep blue, sculptural, iconic, contemplative, enclosed, somber yet awe-inspiring, irregular yet coherent and orderly, and entirely sublime. The surrounding facilities, on the other hand, are restrained corridors, earthly in appearance and materials, domestically scaled, almost entirely walled with glass in warm wooden frames, punctuated by rusticated stone and the slate shingles.

Having explored more of the church facilities, better yet getting to know them as well as the ongoing congregation surely has, the sanctuary becomes even more an entirely different world. The sanctuary, like the inner contemplations in the souls of the pious, is a private, enclosed space. The surrounding facilities serving church practicalities are as transparent as the Protestant Reformation demanded of religious institutions and as visually accessible as the printing press made the dissemination and secular understanding of the bible, so fundamental to the principles of the Reformation.

At the end of this lovely coat rack corridor is a small wing that I'm ninety-nine percent certain contains the pastor's offices. I got a few shots of that façade from the outside, but the shadows were remarkably dim. And since it's likely never seen by anyone, it wasn't as meticulously maintained as the front.

The coat corridor, pastor's offices, and the end of the classroom wing enclose a small grassy courtyard. On the other side of the corridor leading to the classrooms is a much larger courtyard, open on its one long side. I'm not sure why there's a sunspot where it appears in the photo, since the sun is clearly shining in the opposite direction. So I'm going to say that that's the Holy Spirit, captured for the first time ever in a photograph.

Here's the entrance to the classrooms and likely the pastor's residence on the opposite side of the courtyard, wonderfully domesticated as well, in a decidedly late-1950s kind of way. Very nice detailing of the doors with cross-shaped windows.

Fortunately, this whole wing was bathed in sunlight as it was no doubt intended to be in the mornings. One of the most brilliant things about the siting of the church was its relationship to the sunlight.

It occurred to me that this building would be most glorious, most functionally successful in the morning hours, when most churches have at least one of their services, if not their most prominent ones. At this time of day, mid- to late-afternoon, the western façades for obvious reasons were the most illuminated and picturesque. This particular angle I think shows maybe more than any other how Harrison was borrowing forms very carefully from the medieval canon and making them not only entirely Modern but also, in their own distinctive way, suburban New England.

On a sunny Sunday morning, on the other hand, the entire entrance façade (facing east), the courtyard, classroom corridors, and pastor's residence all benefit from direct sunlight. Here's the entrance facade, as seen here cast in shadow in the afternoon hours, but of course no less sculpturally striking.

And the entrance proper, at the crux of the body and tail of the "fish." The use of slate tiles as a cladding material is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it renders the entire enclosure a roof. In other words, there are no walls of any conventional material like masonry. A building's walls--especially in the modern era where they mostly serve to reveal--can no longer be read as protective in any strict sense. But going back into antiquity even, the roof was the primary protecting feature of a building where the elements were concerned. Walls merely served to structurally support it.

At the southern end of the fish, it all comes together perfectly. Applied as shingles on a façade simplified into a sort of forced-perspective of a traditional, gabled New England farm house or barn, the shingles look surprisingly contextual. Appropriately, while the rest of the building essentially opens up onto its own grounds, this façade is the one that would be visible from the main road. Who knows if those slotted window openings have any practical purpose on the interior, or if they ever did. On the inside, it appears not. But one might guess ventilation for a room with apparently no operable windows otherwise.

What I'm assuming is the pastor's residence, although connected to the rest of the building, very smartly reads as its own independent structure. Much like the mostly unseen wing containing the pastor's offices at the other end, it has this very Brady Bunch, late-'50s suburban domestic style to its architecture.

If I'm correct that that enormous, pointed front glass wall opens into a living/ dining space, it must be a truly spectacular interior, like some great futuristic hunting lodge. The use of seemingly randomly-located panes of colored glass is a very interesting detail. It hints subtly at the shocking use of stained glass in the sanctuary next door and also vaguely calls to mind Harrison's Mondrian-esque window mullion pattern on the front of the Metropolitan Opera.

I'd like to point out that the garden in front grows foodstuffs that the church dedicates to humanitarian purposes. I thought to call attention, because I think it's such a wonderful (and very Green) idea.

That concludes this excursion into Connecticut. I hope you enjoyed the journey as much as I did. The state has so much great Modern architecture, somewhat ironically, that there will be a few more stories from there in the future, to be sure. One of them, unfortunately, will not be the Daniel Libeskind House. My request was denied to see it. If the owners of the house or any friends of theirs are reading this, I would still really love to see it!

Just a little post-script on this story, I got a picture of the now completed Trump Parc (2010) by Costas Kondylis with the Lessard Group. I recognized it immediately from the exposé I wrote about Donald Trump. We passed directly underneath it, so here's the photo I likely would have included in my story had I had it in my files at the time.

Dis Connecticut--Part Two

2011-10-24T19:09:00.007-04:00

Normally, I might lament the fact that other projects needed to take priority over this story for a while. In this case, it actually worked out quite fortunately. While this part of the series remained under construction, I got the opportunity to meet the architect of this building in person, purely by accident. I'm not referring to John Johansen, but his partner, Ashok Bhavnani. Johansen's mentor was Breuer, Bhavnani's was Richard Neutra; I can imagine few marriages of architectural lineage with such potential for greatness. How I came to meet Mr. Bhavnani is for a future post, but he told me he was heavily involved with the design of this building. It's the Intermediate School (1968), right up the road from Litchfield High School.

There are three entrances to the building, a new one on the north side (right), that one on the west (above), and one on the south. We first came upon the new one on the north façade, a redesign by the same firm that renovated the high school. They chose to employ brightly-colored corrugated metal as a nod to some of Johansen's later work.

In honor of this post, I decided to finish a book I'd begun a while ago but for some reason never finished. I think it was not quite meaty enough for me, which I'll explain in a second. It's Johansen's Nanoarchitecture--A New Species of Architecture.

A new species it is, but you have to look for it. It's a small book and the majority of it is photographs of models, computer renderings, and drawings, not text. It's a collection of hypothetical projects of Johansen's that he worked on to push boundaries and explore new directions architecture might take as a result of new and emerging technologies. Most of them are extremely interesting conceptually, but I'm tempted to believe most of the conceptual breakthroughs, or at least most of the lines of inquiry that could lead to them, were mapped out by Archigram in the late-1960s. Coincidentally, there are traces of Archigram to be found in Johansen's own Mummers Theater (1970) in Oklahoma City.

The models also come off as being rather homemade. I'm not saying I have any skills whatsoever in taking an Exacto knife to balsa wood and foamcore. But computer renderings that are becoming increasingly indistinguishable from actual photographs these days I think have left me somewhat spoiled.

The last few projects in the book, a discourse on the title subject, and the epilogue are all mind boggling, however. What he calls "molecular engineering" is something I've thought about for years. To oversimplify, the "blueprint" for the house is basically a human-engineered DNA sequence. The organism that results has all the functionality and structure of a house. Nature does pretty much everything a house would need to do, and much more, except for perhaps the ability to connect to communications technology. A single redwood tree represents more mass and structure than most people's houses. Nature can create electricity and light, convert organic waste into energy, moderate temperature. You could even conceivably grow a television or computer monitor by carefully ordering DNA. Once computers start getting more powerful and can be used to analyze genetic code faster and with more precision, I don't think this will sound all that far-fetched.

The epilogue covers what I'd expected more of the book would have, the use of nanotechnology in building. Much faster than a tree, nanobots could be programmed to "grow" a house in much the same way as our organic programming. To me it would seem there are benefits to both. If both genetic engineering and nanotechnology were used together, it's even more incredible to think what could be accomplished. This would have all the capabilities of computer technology and electronics, with all the efficient expenditure of resources and sustainability of the natural world. Certainly people will still want to put up their own structures like they always have. Beyond that, the entire idea of what Architecture even is will change so drastically and in such fundamental ways, it will barely look like the same profession anymore. I'm not sure I can say with any confidence that I will be around to see it happen in my lifetime, but I can only hope.

Back to the Intermediate School, this was a designation I was unfamiliar with and had to ask someone there. "Intermediate" is years four through six. I could find no photographs of what this building originally looked like by Googling around, but it appears that it very much turned itself inward, with the exception of the central entrance.

At the central façade, seen in the first photo above, windows punch dramatically outwards to meet the street. The addition on the north looks to have broken through a solid masonry wall with its aluminum(?)-framed glass box opening it up. The upper story, like the wing to the south, has no fenestration, although that doesn't necessarily mean there were no windows or doorways on the ground floor.

Subtracting the addition, the main building reads as a transparent glass volume in the center, framed by massive concrete and masonry construction, with a solid, opaque concrete and masonry volume on either side of it. Almost entirely imperceptible in person is the fact that the two side wings are turned outward at the very slightest angles from the central section. The effect is more subconscious than anything.

At the junction of the north and central sections is the first hint that this building is truly a work of art. The first thing to notice is the illusion that these are two separate buildings due to the corridor connecting them being on the ground floor. About a third of it is below grade as seen from the front. Whatever is above grade is hidden by plantings. The other thing, which becomes clearer at the junction between the central section and the southern one, is how the views have been so carefully composed. The two sections have been pulled apart to here reveal a chimney, only very fleetingly, which stands in the courtyard like an ancient obelisk.

The central section does something very interesting with (a)symmetry that reminded me of Breuer's work. The volumes that project outward display a conspicuous, rigid symmetry, while the recessed volume underneath is very much asymmetrical. It's as if the building wants to project a sense of formality to the outside world, but takes a more casual tone for its interior. As I was talking about this, I was evidently being overheard by one of the faculty members, who stared at us out that window in the center until we were out of sight again. I know I'm very interesting to listen to, but it was a little bit weird.

The next junction I found extremely interesting on a number of different levels. First, the two wings are way too close together. In other words, they're so close that they ought to be simply brought together into a single structure. If they were to be separated, they really ought to be further apart from each other. As it is, it frames the view of the obelisk chimney even more specifically than the opening to the north. The corridor that connects the two wings is concealed from view at most angles, amplifying the illusion that these are two separate structures.

Next, a pathway leads straight toward that opening, but then forces a sharp ninety-degree turn to access the doorway it serves. The space between the two buildings, while too narrow for compositional reasons, is just wide enough to appear to be a passageway, probably around four feet wide. But the passage through it is decidedly blocked by a shrub.

Finally, framing this opening--which, all told, must be there only to control views--are two massive, monolithic masonry walls. Beyond the opening, what it reveals is an enclosure with glass on three sides, allowing you to see all the way to the back of the courtyard through first one glass wall and then the second. The contrast this creates between enclosures of opacity and transparency is extremely powerful.

The south entrance is turned at an angle from the great southern volume. Just enough to be perceptible, but not much more.

Around to the right, it's revealed that the wall has been extended out from the enclosure, to call attention to its qualities as a wall, but also drawing attention to the strong, yet false symmetry of the entrance facade. This is further amplified by the fact that it is obviously at an angle from the larger volume behind it that it accesses.

From this point forward, the building completely changes its character about once every yard (meter) you walk.

The first thing you see is this great composition of brick volumes clustered together. The sense of walking into an ancient Roman village is unmistakable and had to have been intentional. Perhaps Brutalism was at its finest at these moments when its Modernism was transitioning into Postmodernism, and recalling our architectural past to create moods.

This one little doorway was especially remarkable. Its masonry frame is easily a mere canopy, but it's deep enough to be surprisingly intimate, while retaining a sense of the monumental at the same time. It also means that from all angles save directly in front of it, the vistas of pure masonry volumes are uninterrupted.

A raised walkway finished in roughly textured concrete prevents the courtyard from coming into view too suddenly, but rather reveals it slowly and carefully.

Once past the walkway, the courtyard is a gorgeous space and truly the heart of this building. The façades on the east and west of the courtyard are the most glazed of any on the building, as I mentioned, turning the building inwards.

The one on the west, while similar to the entrance façade on the opposite side, has an entirely glazed ground floor. In a careful balancing act, these two façades present larger expanses of glass to the courtyard, but are still clearly framed by concrete structure.

To the north and south, glass boxes pop out of the corridors connecting the seemingly separate wings of the building. While smaller in surface area, the structural concrete framing is gone, allowing them to dematerialize more than the fenestration of the east and west walls. The other side of the glass box here, by the way, is the one that can be seen through the strangely narrow opening between the two structures from the front, discussed above.

With most especially these two façades, the architects managed to create something monumental but with intimate moments, as well, formal but not stuffy, somehow ancient yet totally futuristic. There is no doubt a lot of Breuer in this, but it is a fantastic building unto itself. I never did get around to see the east side of the building. It appeared inaccessible, although I suspect it could be accessed around from the north. There were a lot of other things to see that day, and I was getting hungry.

We had a nice lunch in the quaint town center of Litchfield. Only about fifteen minutes from there and out in the middle of nowhere was our next stop, a complete bust. It was Daniel Libeskind's 18.36.54 House.

Photo by Nicolas Koenig courtesy architect's website.

Just looking at the photos of it makes me want to weep at how breathtakingly genius this is. I should have known that a state like Connecticut would never allow something like this to be visible from the road. But that's a complete understatement here. I mean, you can't see anything. It's all the more ridiculous if you can imagine the most rural possible road this is on, it's almost surprising that it's paved with actual asphalt. My point being, if this were visible from the road, probably no more than about ten people would even see it on any given day, and at least one of those ten would be a mail carrier.

Nonetheless, what you see from the road is a fancy motorized gate, not even connected to a fence, and a lonely call box on a stand. Behind that, a cliff rises up about 300 feet (100 meters) at practically a sixty-degree angle, with a driveway snaking up it like Lombard Street. You would not want to try this after even the most minor snowstorm. In fact, I'm surprised there's no staircase up the hill just so they could park at the foot of it and walk up on foot in the case it got icy. Maybe the driveway is heated, I don't know.

In any case, I was not going to let this go so quickly. We turned around, I rehearsed a little speech along the lines of "I write an architecture blog and was hoping, if it's not a terrible intrusion, that I could maybe get a few photos of the outside of your house," worked up some courage, and pulled up to the gate. I pressed the button on the call box. It rang and rang, and rang...and rang. No answer. The thought did cross my mind that, if there were no one home, we could probably just climb the hill on foot and walk around. Who would know? But all along I was aware that just because there was no answer to an unexpected ring at the gate didn't necessarily mean there was no one up there. And ending up in jail for trespassing probably would have ruined the day.

Drat.

Eventually I would really like to go back up to see it. The problem is that I've now already seen everything even remotely close to that house, so it seems almost silly to drive so far just for that one building (Litchfield took about three hours from the city). I have been in contact with Libeskind's studio about getting in contact with the owners, but the fact remains (as I knew) that this is a private residence. If my experience with another private home I've been wanting to profile is any indication, it may be prohibitively difficult. Cross your fingers.

Stay tuned for Part Three.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte, unless noted.

Dis Connecticut--Part One

2011-09-12T12:53:00.233-04:00

After my incredible experience at Bronx Community College, I was very excited to see another work by Marcel Breuer. A great opportunity arose a couple weeks ago, so I went to see his Litchfield High School (1956) in Litchfield, Connecticut.

Ironically, despite the architect, it feels like a bit of neglect to the directions begun by my posts discussing equality to be visiting a state that is almost eighty percent white/ non-hispanic. To be fair, Connecticut's population of people of color is larger than I would have thought. I fear that too many of them are to be found in urban areas without the scenic beauty or New England charm of towns like Litchfield.

This trip was the most perfect evidence of how the universe decides what path one is meant to follow, greases wheels in some directions, and erects insurmountable walls in others. It also proves how flexibility and spontaneity are requisites for getting the most out of what the universe wants you to experience. So many things in our lives are arguably in the hands of fate, anyway.

I had discussed the unfortunate incompetence of Google Maps where it concerns driving directions before, but had they been perfectly accurate, we never would have passed by our destination and discovered the lovely center of the town of Litchfield where we ended up finding a very nice restaurant at which to have lunch.

We were discussing how all of Connecticut's school districts are regional. Students are bussed to enormous centralized high schools from very long distances. Perhaps this wasn't in the works in the mid-1950s when Litchfield High was constructed, it isn't a terribly large building. But if the state's educational system was undergoing reform or gearing up to do so, it would make sense that a new school building would've been commissioned. As much as Connecticut adores its (gorgeous) traditional architecture at the expense of anything new or innovative, I must commend them for choosing Breuer. I'm calling this a "high school" because it originally housed years nine through twelve. It now has years seven through twelve, and although it was expanded, I'll have to say it's an extremely small building for that amount of student ages.

The people at the school, namely the secretary, Ms. Johnson, and her coworker (Ms. Fox or Ms. Ream, I didn't see her name plaque), couldn't have been nicer, more helpful, or more accommodating. It turns out her first name is Kathleen, but I think it's much funnier to keep calling her "Ms. Johnson," since that's what all the students would be calling her. Strangely, they were really the only two souls we encountered during our hour and a half or so visit there. I heard voices down hallways a few times, but saw no other faces. The school's administrative offices are now inside the main entrance seen here. This is all new construction from 2007. The architects did their level best to restore as much of Breuer's intent after a very unfortunate renovation in the mid-1970s nearly destroyed the design entirely. The original main entrance to the school was around to the northwest, which I'll get to below.

It was fortunate that the opportunity arose to see this before the school year had begun, when likely keeping students out of my camera's lens even on a Sunday would have been very difficult. I also don't know if Litchfield has any summer school or summer programs, but there was no one there at this time of August. We were given free rein to explore pretty much the entire building. We didn't try to really access any classrooms or anything, I felt that would be taking unnecessary advantage of their hospitality. The design of the school is such, however, that everything is so opened with interior windows and glass doors that we could examine most of it by sight anyway.

The best thing about Litchfield High is how banal it would appear in its construction at first glance, and on the other hand, how intriguing and masterful is its design, in spite of that. One might even say that this building is the flip-side to Robert Venturi's Guild House, because the school was made intriguing despite the fact that its origin as a state-funded project might encourage banality, whereas Guild House was made to appear ordinary despite its deeper complexity.

The most frustrating thing about the building is that it's practically impossible to get any clear impression of what of it is actually Marcel Breuer's. So much has been added to this building, so much of a presumably different character, and so much that obscures the evident clarity of the original structure. Even studying and comparing the various photographs of the building, as I have for probably hours now, it's a complete mind game trying to make sense of what is what. As different materials, images, and information have come in, I've had to revise this story a number of times.

Another problem is that this building is very far below anyone's radar. There's a very disturbing pattern of events appearing as this post is being written. Litchfield High is an obscure work, of which few people apparently take notice. No one seems to care about the Bronx Community College buildings and fewer people seem to know anything about them. The Whitney Museum is callously abandoning their iconic Breuer building to move downtown, leaving it in the hands of the Metropolitan Museum, as if it were some bit of random leftovers to be dumped in the trash.

As I've told numerous visitors to New York, the Whitney is my favorite museum here, in large part because of the magic of their Breuer building, which is both a work of art in and of itself and a brilliant space in which to display modern art. For crying out loud, some of the works in the Biennial very smartly and poignantly responded to the specific design of the building where it appeared. I'm sure their new facility will be remarkable. I'm also sure that the Met knows how to handle a twentieth-century masterpiece like the Whitney building on Madison. This is hardly the point. How can a Modern master be so flagrantly and routinely dismissed in this day and age? The same question can be asked about I. M. Pei, with equal chagrin.

While Litchfield High was no doubt a lovely bit of 1950s architecture in its way, and perhaps even sophisticated on some levels, it's anything but a monumental example of Breuer's work. It's been so altered that it hardly counts as something you'd want to attribute to him anymore, as I mentioned above. Syracuse University holds the majority of the Breuer archives, but it was going to take FBI training, a century or two, and a magic wand for me to get copies of the floor plans that I needed. As it is, this post has taken far longer to finish than I ever would have hoped. Looking around on the internet unearthed practically nothing about this project. As unprofessional as it feels, my last resort is to make my best guesses as to what happened when.

Litchfield High tells a story with its façades, of which no two are alike and which change continuously around the building. My narrative plan was to go around the outside, around the outside, but a couple of spaces won't really translate to the outer façades because they're in the center of the building. One thing I liked a lot was the central courtyard, which truly does fill the hallways with natural light. This would seem to be a signature of mid-century architecture, as much as it was a staple for ancient Greek domestic architecture. The mid-century architects loved carving these glass boxes into the interiors of their buildings. I'm not convinced it's a feature that needed to go away, either.

For some reason I was drawn to the Home Economics classroom, which is now called a "Food Lab." It just looked so warm and inviting. I'm not convinced that "Home Economics" is necessarily an outdated name for the subject, except that presumably this course is more about the art of cooking than it is about the financial management of a household. I still can't help but wonder why cooking isn't packaged differently in schools, first of all as a true tool of survival, health, and fitness, but also as an art form bursting with fascinating chemistry. The first time I experienced how simple syrup (half water, half sugar) behaves, doing such completely different things at different temperatures of boiling, I instantly became fascinated. All the other staple ingredients are like that, too.

Litchfield High unfolds in a particularly linear way because, with what one might consider the exception of the two-story-high gymnasium, it's all on one level. That whole wall at the gymnasium's upright end wall, as Breuer designed it, was entirely glass. The 1970s crime removed the entire glass wall and covered it over. There was concern about having a glass wall in a room designed for projectiles to be flying through the air, and the glare from the sun was so bad that, at a certain time of day, you couldn't even see the basketball hoop in that direction. Luckily the architects were permitted in 2007 to restore at least the top half of that wall to its original glass, but not without a fight.

The new main entrance now faces the southeast. To the east of this is a pavilion housing the cafeteria, which I believe was one of the additions made in the 1970s. I'm baffled as to where students ate lunch before this, as the original layout seems to include no space large enough aside from the gymnasium. Presumably the wing of the building behind this was originally a cafeteria and was divided into smaller classrooms, including the one now housing the Food Lab.

The original structure is built almost entirely of simple concrete blocks painted white. While looking around inside, I sort of half lamented that Breuer was forced, likely by budgetary constraints, to use such a mundane building material. I also immediately recognized that it's this very fact that makes this such a fascinating project. It's one thing to see the flights of ingenuity possible when an architect has all the access to funding and new building technologies at her or his disposal, like Saarinen did working for all the biggest corporations in the country. It's quite another to see how a great architect would approach something as commonplace as concrete block and low-cost and, I suspect, highly-standardized building techniques. In this first pavilion, it is already apparent that this is not going to be your typical run-of-the-mill concrete block school building.

First, almost all the windows are recessed to protect the interiors from the direct glare of sunlight. Visually, it gives the façades a real depth, formal power, and drama. Now, it's possible that the bays that contained doorways were stretched by the addition of an entrance just wide enough that they'd be structurally unsound. But the point is that here cylindrical columns support the cross beam, rather than stacks of concrete block or some other solution. With their very subtle, pared-down nod to the classical colonnade, they give the entrances a sense of formality. It's simple, but having noticed Breuer's often exuberant attention to entrances in other projects, I have to believe this was conscious.

Another thing to bear in mind is the wedge-shaped roof providing a clerestory that bathes the cafeteria below in natural light. Only a tiny triangle of it is visible on the top left of the photo above. There's also a much more striking example of this, which I'll discuss below. Ms. Johnson said the cafeteria might look a bit of a mess since all the tables were folded up, but I thought it looked clean and fine. The natural light really does flatter the interior and likely those occupying it. I was surprised to notice that the cafeteria was rather small. Doing some rough math, figuring on maybe three lunch periods, I can't imagine the school has a roster of more than around 300 students, which is really not very big, only 50 students per grade.

Around the corner from this is another moment which would seem to confirm the symbolism used for the entrances, but first is what happens at the corner. Unlike the sort of buttress at the opposite end, this carved-out corner of the building serves no purpose but a sculptural one, to both emphasize the massing of the façade to the left and to mark the corner of the building with a bit of (pragmatically unnecessary) artistry. It seems to lighten the mass of the building to some degree, as well.

Traveling around to the northeast façade, things are a bit more industrial and not as scenic, but it was here that I began to see how every part of this building was going to be different than all the others. First is what is mostly likely a service entrance to the cafeteria up a small stair. Since it is an entrance, it's punctuated by a single cylindrical column.

Immediately to the right of this is a loading dock supplying the cafeteria with chicken nuggets, foot long hot dogs, and vanilla physedibles, whatever the heck that is.

This section and the one to follow I also believe were added in the '70s. At the corner of this wall are two small window alcoves. Then there are these two wedge-shaped window bays, unique to this façade of the building. We are pretty much full on into Brutalism at this point. By about 1976 and beyond, Postmodernism had mostly taken over new construction (for better or worse). Perhaps not amongst less adventuresome architecture firms. In any case, in adding to a 1950s Modernist structure, besides Brutalism there was really no other style to draw from besides the highly geometrically complex late-late-Modernism that would eventually lead to Deconstructivism.

Breuer most certainly would have coaxed these into his signature isosceles trapezoid had the concrete block construction allowed it, but I'm somewhat impressed that they got fairly close. The choice of pairs for both the alcoves and the wedges is interesting first because two is not enough to create a rhythm. For that you would need three or more. In fact, there's something very conscious about when and where a rhythm would be allowed to bust out in the design. Because they're not rhythmic, these windows instead become singularly ornamental in character. The other thing that's great about the wedged ones is that, as only two together, they desperately want to be symmetrical with each other, but the directional form of them makes this impossible.

Then another entrance with its tell-tale cylindrical columns. This entrance is unique on the building because, much like the adjacent window bays, it's the only one that is decidedly asymmetrical, but more prominently so because the columns are so symmetrically placed under the crossbeam. In addition to that, rather than leading straight into the entrance, the path makes an ostentatious turn from the direct center of the columns to the off-center doorway. It's as if the placement of the columns is asking for one thing, and the location of the doorway is asking for the opposite.

There was an entrance here in Breuer's original plan. Had these additions been designed by him, I'd love it. The unfortunate thing is that one must question the brilliance of the architect from the '70s who clearly had so little respect for this building. In the hands of a master, this is quite interesting. In the hands of a less talented practitioner, one is forced to ask if it were merely a bad design decision.

Happily enough, the footprint for the next addition happens to be Breuer's favorite shape, an isosceles trapezoid. It's a small shallow wing that juts out to the north which I assume was also constructed in the 1970s. Due to its plan, the next two corner angles are both obtuse. A surprising level of artistry in the construction is displayed at these corners if you consider that each of the rectangular (and hollow) concrete blocks up at the roof line would necessarily have to have been cut on a not-very-imprecise angle to fit together that way and form a seamless line between the adjacent walls.

The building here opens up into a wonderful, large, grassy courtyard, which was the school's original main entrance. Breuer characteristically planned the approach to his building very carefully, straight in from the northeast from Bantam Road, rather than from the southeast off Plumb Hill Road, as it is now. The remnants of this roadway can still be seen, now overgrowing with weeds and shrubs. Why they decided to change the entry to essentially the back of the building is unclear. I very much suspect it was for traffic reasons, especially since the stretch of Constitution Way that delivers buses to Plumb Hill is conspicuously widened to four lanes, while the surrounding roads remain mostly at two. Buses would come in at an angle pointing right onto the main entrance canopy. The shallow V-shape of the courtyard's southern facades would greet arriving students like open arms or an open book.

The centerpiece is an entrance easily as significant as the new main entrance at the front, if not more so. The metal columns which help support the canopy are practically invisible in comparison to the cylindrical concrete ones used elsewhere (and I suspect were intended to visually dematerialize). Clearly the apparent floating of the canopy, or at least the impression that its principle support is the horizontal beam in front, was the main emphasis here.

This one opens up onto a large sort of student lounge area with couches and chairs at the junction of a number of hallways which would have to be one of the "hearts" of the school when filled with students. This space is also pleasingly bathed in light thanks to the large windows on either side of the entrance.

I was here drawn for some bizarre reason to the lockers. They appeared as if they might have been the original lockers. They're from a company called Republic Steel Corporation, which has been around since the turn of the twentieth century. This model, though, called the "Designer" line, was in production from 1970 to 2005, so likely they went in during the 1970s renovation. The spooky thing about my attraction to them was that the locker toward which I gravitated was locker A1: the very FIRST locker.

Back outside to the courtyard is what makes the incredible contrast with the main entrance. Perhaps it was programmatic rather than stylistic, but I still think this feature could as easily have been located around to the rear. I suspect this would have been the more obvious choice made by an architect with less vision. It's a small garden on the north side of the main entry court that I'm fairly certain is purposely located off the science classrooms. It's mostly hidden behind a cement block wall.

It looks a bit overgrown. I kind of want to get in there, clean it up, and actually landscape it with all kinds of interesting, educational, and edible plants carved through with nice field stone walkways. This could be linked up so advantageously with the Food Lab. All those carnivorous plants would be so cool, although I don't think we have the right climate for them. Same thing with those crazy desert plants that store gallons and gallons of water in huge tank-like forms. Anyway, the point is that in contrast to the main entrance, this garden has the most domestic quality to it. The greenhouse I think I heard was part of the mid-1970s renovation, perhaps also the diminutive doorway access on the right. If you saw this photograph out of context, for sure you'd think it was the backyard of some modernist house.

This wing juts out to the northeast of the main structure. The walkway leading to it (from which the greenhouse protrudes) marked the northern end of the main structure and this wing extended just a bit further north. From what I can determine, the entrance here and the end wing were added in the '70s, along with a sizable extension of the main building behind it. The windowless cement walls form a relatively unfriendly barricade and must provide somewhat grim interiors. It's a bit confusing that there'd be no glass, especially considering they are I believe also science classrooms, the rooms that have the most potential to require ventilation. Stylistically, the end of this wing is not bothering me at all. Because the building reads in such a strictly linear fashion, these windowless masses form a very strong punctuation mark at the end of the long, complex northeast façade. Around this corner, the character of the building changes drastically from public to private.

The whole northwest façade--the extensions of the science wing and the northern end of the main structure--is more or less bland and unfortunate. Coming around to the southwest of the building is a view that it's quite a shame so few people will ever see it. The border of the school's property, lined with trees and shrubs, rides so close to the building itself that it's obviously not intended to be used as a route to or from anywhere on foot, except for grounds maintenance staff. But at the end of a long, regular stretch of window bays appears--in my opinion--the building's most incredible feature: the library.

Appropriate for an institution of learning, perhaps, that aside from the gymnasium, the building's most sculptural moment would be the library. This was also not Breuer's work, from what I can tell, but extremely well done.

The extension made the library twice as large and added a clerestory and a row of four windows canted off axis. The geometry of these various intersecting planes is relatively complex, and responds beautifully to the plan of the building proper.

Breuer's main building was essentially Y-shaped in plan, with the top left arm of the Y bent in the middle and the science wing extending off the foot. All these 120-degree angles are most notable on the inside of the building. Although squeezing auxiliary offices and facilities into oddly-shaped corners could have easily produced some awkward lines, the hallways and various circulation routes are prevented by these angles from ever being monotonous. Moral of the story, the design of the library extension was very smart for manifesting Breuer's 120-degree angle as an ornamental bit of architectural sculpture at this joint in the building.

The interior of the library was equally wonderful, bathed in natural light. It was one of the only rooms we entered aside from the cafeteria. But seeing it through the glass doors, I just could not resist.

The four columns clustered in the center create an interesting centerpiece to the room and frame a ramp leading down to a slightly lower level.

Past this is a stretch of this wing--the top right of the Y--which remains as Breuer intended. Past the concrete wall that juts out in the middle of this length of façade is another extension added in the mid-70s. The treatment of the southern façade of this branch (around the corner at the far end of this wall) shows the same forms as the front of the cafeteria extension, though more asymmetrical.

Further on, at a slightly different angle to this, is one of the additions from 2007. This one is far easier to distinguish from the earlier work, because the firm clad their structures in corrugated metal siding to set it apart.

Where this wing meets the older structure was something I found very strange. It was these oddly sculpted metal end caps on the firewalls. It seemed a very out-of-place, almost postmodern gesture on the building that I didn't quite understand. Evidently this had been a huge fight between the 2007 architecture firm and their contractor, who would only fix his mistake for an additional fee. It also goes to show how very quasi-traditional most construction must be in this part of the country, that a contractor would even consider doing such a thing on an otherwise so modern building. But the other problem is that as a bit of ornamentation, if intentional, it's not even executed well. It looks like the guy cut the metal sheets with a chain saw.

The opposite side of this is back around the new front entrance again and the incredible gymnasium.

As originally conceived, the gym was not actually attached to the building, but accessed by a covered walkway. It would have been the sculptural equivalent at Litchfield to Begrisch Hall in the Bronx.

Photo source unknown.

Adding to the gym's character as a sculptural adornment on an otherwise rather sedate building was a another sculpted volume providing a doorway on its northern end, where the new entrance and administrative offices have now filled in that courtyard.

There's my visit to Marcel Breuer's Litchfield High School. I'm actually not finished with Litchfield or Connecticut, but I'll let the suspense build for my next post.

Photo source unknown.

All the Park's a Stage

2011-08-06T12:16:00.016-04:00

I'm sort of ashamed to admit that this was my first time visiting this site, not only because it's by the architects responsible for the transformation of Lincoln Center, about which I should have benefit of the utmost implicit understanding, but also because it's one of the most extraordinary things to be built in New York in recent years. I knew that before even seeing it in person. And while something very similar to this was built in Paris which I have not had the pleasure to see, I'm willing to test the limits of my credibility to suggest that it might very well be one of the most amazing things to be built in any city. The reason I say that is both that it's so unique and that it's been so uniquely successful. Something like this could only have happened in a place like New York, because the possibility for it to exist relies so intimately on New York's very particular history and evolution, as it must have in Paris. It did what the greatest moments of genius have always done, it took a shortcoming and turned it into an advantage. This project is like Marilyn Monroe's quivery-lipped smile.

All my regular readers and anyone even remotely tapped in to the pulse of New York architecture know, of course, that I'm talking about the High Line Park by Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (2011).

In another sense, I'm sort of glad that I chose this moment to go to see it, because the second phase, from Twentieth to Thirtieth Streets, was only just completed. I suspect I got a much more full impression of what this project is all about because there was more of it to become acquainted with for me than if I'd gone last summer.

My companion for the day was actually my mom. We've discovered that the cultural events we enjoy seeing together are not limited to performances at Lincoln Center or museum shows, and include things like this. She's been open to the topic of architecture and design through my devotion to the subjects and, for instance, was nearly as transfixed by the writings of Ada Louise Huxtable as I was when I lent her the book. But this is not her main area of interest. Like me, she is a sponge for learning and information, and where our expertise overlaps I think is in communication and language. Only I've been applying them to the visual arts and especially architecture. She's a great person with whom to have discussions about architecture and design for the very reason that her experience with it and opinions are not shaped by the blinders of an "insider's" view, if that's what you'd call me. In a way, they're much more pure and less elitist or overly academic.

The true triumph of the High Line is that in our own separate ways, and in many other ways that intersected, we both thought it was glorious and wonderful.

Speaking of museums, our day actually started out trying to get into the Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Metropolitan museum. That just wasn't meant to happen. I won't go into it, but at a certain point I realized our luck was not going our way at the Met and we should just leave and forget it. That will need to be a later post.

I was glad to have my camera in the vicinity of this first building, because I think it's so cool. It's the Westyard Distribution Center (1970), by Davis, Brody & Associates.

It's just so massive and imposing. The way it narrows toward the top hints at something ancient, namely a pyramid, but it also has the effect of making the building appear taller than it is. One small detail I never noticed before was at the corner piers. If you look closely, the two perpendicular walls are cracked open by the tiniest sliver. So while, from afar, they look heavy and strong, when you get up close, they turn paper thin.

We started our journey at the northern end of the High Line at Thirtieth Street and walked south.

I wanted to look at the very northern end and noticed that it turns west toward the river, what could potentially be an incredible approach to the Hudson river if they decide to continue it. I assume that this would transport materials from barges on the river to the factories and warehouses in the Meat Packing District and back again. I tried to determine if the small amount of building materials piled up on the other side of the chain link fence were reminiscent of the ones used for the new park and indicating that they do intend to continue northward, but it was difficult to tell.

We were talking about how, if they do continue northward, it would make the perfect junction with what has been discussed as incredible new development over the west side rail yards, something west Midtown has been sorely needing for years.

The High Line's plantings are really remarkable. Having the not-yet-renovated section at the north to use in comparison is great. You can see how the new flora very much appears as if it grew there by chance, but more beautifully than were they mere weeds.

A coworker was telling me about some friends whose apartment overlooks the High Line. One of them writes little plays and then they perform them out their windows for people who happen to be passing by. First of all, only in New York. Secondly, what an absolutely fantastic idea. Thirdly, I think it only goes to prove what a work of genius and transcendental success this park has been, that it was not only highly creative in conception and execution, but that it has given rise to further bursts of creativity. I wonder if this building is where my coworker's friends live.

One minor problem I noticed in this northern section is the width of the path. The fact that it would be so easy to correct if they chose to do so is another wonderful thing about the design. Now that I'm thinking about it, however, I believe it was intentional. What I'm talking about is how the path is just not quite wide enough for two pairs of people to walk side by side in opposite directions without one of them needing to step out of the way. The measurements for that would be so easy to determine, and must be entirely ingrained in the minds of DS+R, whose work so often rejoices in the pedestrian. Giving them the benefit of the doubt, I'll need to conclude that forcing visitors to mingle in this way encourages a sense of community that the city below often makes it all too easy to avoid.

The furnishings are also extremely well-designed. And that I can say they are designed--in fact, designed into the very fabric of the park--is one of the things that makes this whole project a true work of art. I really loved the warm, dark tone of the wood against the cool grey stone and the greenery. Further south in the older section, it becomes apparent that the wood will weather to a grayish color, as well, making for less of a contrast but blending into the stone quite nicely: a change of material without a change in color.

Starting at Twenty-Seventh Street, the path rises up above the level of the plantings and remains over it all the way down to mid-block south of Twenty-Fifth. Further expression of what this has accomplished is in that there are smaller gravel paths accessing the plantings but are restricted to maintenance staff.

It's as if DS+R wanted to completely remove all human interference with the natural landscape from this section of the park, to allow it to grow unfettered and undisturbed, something that happens virtually nowhere else I can think of on the island of Manhattan and in probably not anywhere in Brooklyn or Queens, either. Looking over the edge, I noticed that they were planted rather sparsely. I was curious if this was intended to grow in naturally over time to completely fill in, and perhaps also other plants that happen to find their seeds there by chance. I love that idea and actually have an "orphan plants" garden on my fire escape where I nurture whatever plants happen to pop up in my pots (unless they're bad weeds).

In the middle of the raised section is another very interesting moment. It was the first of many occasions I found to observe what I'll call "the theater of urban life," something for which DS+R should be famous if they aren't already. Lincoln Center is just chock full of them (come on my tour and ask me, I'll show them all to you). On the other side of this wooden bench, which faces the footpath, is another bench facing the opposite direction that looks out onto Twenty-Sixth Street. It's essentially inviting you to just sit and watch the city.

Even more interesting, though, are these arms that branch off in seemingly random directions. One of them looks back onto those wooden benches and, although somewhat obscured by greenery, focuses your attention again on the other visitors to the park. Another one I found particularly indicative of their concept because of at what it encourages you to look...or more precisely, what it doesn't. This protruding balcony invites you to step out to the end of it, but only to show you something perfectly ordinary, a plain gray warehouse building now presumably offices for some graphic design firm or similar. It's as if DS+R are asking you to look more closely at the banal details of a city which so often reeks of the tacky spectacular.

Now we arrive at the first of the crazy new buildings to go up because of the High Line that one discovers when traveling south. This one is 245 Tenth Avenue (2009) by Della Valle + Bernheimer, who have since split into two firms. Taken in and of itself, this is a pretty cool building. The unfortunate thing about it is that the two things it has going for it--namely its unusual angularity and its random pattern of windows--were both accomplished much better and more suavely by two other buildings in its immediate vicinity that I'll get to below.

And they come at you rapid-fire after this. The whole neighborhood has been stuffed full of unusual buildings. The next is the one that I think pretty decidedly carries its angularity with more strength. Not only that, but the way it expresses its engineering in response to its profile is fascinating. This one has gotten quite a lot of press so many of you probably know that it's HL23 (2010) by Neil Denari.

Immediately next door to this is another one, High Line 519 (which I sort of by accident pronounced the way I think it's supposed to be: "High Line Five-One-Nine") by Lindy Roy. I had already looked into Roy, because she designed the new art gallery at the Metropolitan Opera House. I'm sure that guy sticking his head out the window with I guess his daughter? thought I was taking a picture of him, not realizing they'd be nothing more than a blurry dot in the image.

Down a little way from those is a group of tiered platforms that have a sort of amphitheater (of urban life) feeling to them. It's the same wood, presumably, as the benches that will similarly weather to a lighter gray. While it's most likely constructed with a frame of steel or some other metal underneath, I really liked how at the edges, it's made to look like wooden planks stacked up as if in a lumberyard. It's a great little detail that celebrates the industrial history of this neighborhood.

Next is a section maybe around 150- to 200-feet long where the plantings are much higher and form two walls of greenery on either side of the footpath. When these grow in even further, I think it may give the sensation of suddenly encountering a jungle. In fact, it almost gets a bit claustrophobic, but you aren't in it for long before it opens back up again. You can also notice how in this section, the railroad tracks were left in place.

Just past this are two wonderful sculptures, one on each side of the path, by Sarah Sze called Still Life with Landscape (Model for a Habitat). They basically look like the surrounding neighborhood, with little buildings in a kind of forced perspective and perched on a silvery metal lattice. But the little houses may actually work as birdhouses, and it also has little trays filled with birdseed and others with water. There didn't seem to be any birds even remotely interested in utilizing the facilities, certainly because there were too many people around. It seems kind of a shame, and perhaps it should have been located further from the path or extended up high enough that visitors couldn't disturb the birds. It may get more birds in the morning hours when not as many people are there.

This has nothing really to do with the High Line since it's been there since 1904. I thought I'd include the General Theological Seminary anyway because I've always thought it was such a beautiful building. The architect was C. C. Haight, and most New Yorkers will know that it has an incredible and rather large walled garden in the middle of the block that I assume is closed off to the general public.

Next is another cluster of the new buildings that went up at least peripherally because of the neighborhood rejuvenation caused by the High Line. First is Jean Nouvel's 100 Eleventh Avenue (2010). I've been intending to go get a nice long look at this one ever since it was completed but just haven't had the chance. It remains an unfortunate side note in this story. My mom even said in a rather funny matter-of-fact way, "I don't think we're seeing the best view of that building." We had sort of discussed getting a better look at it on our walk back uptown, but at that point all we really wanted was a glass of wine. This view does in any case show the randomized window patterns I mentioned above in regard to 245 Tenth. More on this one in a future post.

Right across the street from Nouvel's is Frank Gehry's IAC Building, which I won't bother to discuss here since I already wrote a whole post dedicated to it.

Since then, next door to the Gehry have been built the rather bland-looking 520 West Chelsea by Annabelle Selldorf, which didn't particularly need to be built, and the equally bland Metal Shutter Houses in between them. But the Shutter Houses are by Shigeru Ban and should not be underestimated. The shutters refer to giant garage doors that open up residents' entire wall to the outside. Absolutely astonishing when you think about it. I am curious, as one article pointed out, as to whether winds would ever be calm enough blowing in off the river--not to mention at the right temperature--for residents to take advantage of the shutters.

The bends in tracks allowed for a few moments of wide-open space which, in comparison to the mostly narrow path the rest of the way, gives a bit of room to breathe and stretch out. While the railroad tracks curved, the elevated structure was built more simply in straight lines. So if you think about the geometry of that, there would be a lot of extra space in the corners. In this first one, they built a kind of trellis with climbing plants winding up through them which neither my mom nor I recognized, but were very interesting botanical choices. When they grow in more fully, the shade will be wonderful here, and more than that, like sitting in a living room (read "living ROOM," not "LIVing room").

Opposite this are a beautiful old red-brick tenement building and two of the newer additions to the neighborhood. Nearest the High Line is another project by Della Valle + Bernheimer, 459 West Eighteenth Street (2009). This one was said by at least one critic to be more successful than the one above. I'm not all that convinced. The black and white marking off of two very distinct blocks in the massing is a little bit too obvious for my taste. If it were me, I'd use a more subtle difference in texture or something along those lines. In its defense, the slanted windows in the top three floors are very cool, and evidently at a certain time of day, sunlight streams into one of those windows and back out the other side.

The one further from the park is the Chelsea Modern (2008) by Audrey Matlock. Although I think she's done more striking work than this, it's quite a fine building. What you'd never notice from this far away is how the zigzagging bands of glass intersect one another at tiny junctions. It's just one small detail that helps to elevate the building to a higher level of artistry.

Just past this is another "theater of urban life" moment, this one most specifically in the shape of an amphitheater. This one is interesting because it looks like it should descend to an actual stage but ends instead at windows, like three television monitors showing the traffic passing by below. It also can be descended by ramp, meaning it's wheelchair-accessible, which is very nice.

Here we arrive at the very heart of the High Line. While the entire length of it is filled with follies and interesting things to see, here we discover a whole bunch of amenities and clever features all clustered together. There are public restrooms tucked into one of the neighboring buildings. My mom decided to take advantage of them, so I sat on one of the benches to wait. While I was sitting there, a man took a drink from the water fountain next to me. It started talking. I can't remember what it said, some sort of strange poetry. When my mom returned, I told her about it, and she said the entire bathroom was talking to her. One the voices was saying "you can do it, you can do it, you can do it," which I think is absolutely hilarious. One blogger I noticed said she hates the talking water fountains. I think this is ridiculous. It's such a wonderful idea that wouldn't have occurred to many firms without DS+R's experience with multimedia work. I also love how the waste water runs down off the side in a channel, although I suspect this is why they can't be used in freezing temperatures.

There's a cluster of people selling gift items under the shade of a building, food stands, and a sandwich shop. Then, one of the most genius features of the whole park, a stretch of walkway with a sheet of cool water running over it to wet your feet. There were actually a ton of people with sandals and flip-flops removed, cooling their feet. I'm surprised I was able to get a shot with no one in it except at the very end of the view.

There are innumerable details making this park exquisite. In fact, I'm tempted to say I've seen very little work in recent years that has been so attentive to details. One of them I particularly liked was all the unique ways that the stone and plantings interweave with the existing railroad tracks (which were numbered, removed, and then reinstalled, it sounds like).

At last, we arrive at our final building, The Standard Hotel by Polshek Partnership. Although the grayish hue it gives off is a bit bland, I do rather like this building. Part of it for me is its distinctly 1960s flavor. But this façade is interesting because of the way Polshek has emphasized the framing of the two wings. Not only do they drop the frames down below the glazing, but also at different heights, and again at the top. You're obviously being asked to take notice of them. They become like two giant pictures on display above the park.

The underside of the building is appropriately sculptural since it's one of only three structures that remain over the pathway of the Highline, and the only one not part of its original functioning (as with buildings that would load materials on and off of cargo trains).

The hotel has a towering balcony arrogantly visible to passersby on the High Line, but not open to the public and only available for no doubt ridiculously expensive private events. This was the first of many signs that this hotel is utterly inhospitable and snotty. Fantastically fabulous though it may be, I would not recommend it to anyone. We weren't even offered an opportunity to look at this space, despite the fact that they were merely setting up for the evening's event. So much for us being potentially wealthy enough to rent this space for a party. I certainly wouldn't now. One of the women did recommend we go and take a look at the roof, which is open to the public.

The interior design of this place is absolutely sick. The elevators are perfectly black with video monitors on (I think) two sides, playing video collages mashed from scenes from highly stylized and gorgeously cinematographed movies. The two I recognized were Fellini Satyricon and Dune, two films I love most especially for their visual lushness. This must no doubt have been due to the involvement of Hollywood set designer Shawn Hausman in the hotel's design. Here is the elevator lobby on the top floor. I realize you can't see much, but the abstract quality of this image only serves to amplify the otherworldly quality it had in abundance.

The hallway leading into the bar was out of control. The walls are paneled in upholstered shiny cream-colored vinyl. Rows of faceted mirrors are right out of the 1930s. And the geometrically sculpted brass door is, appropriately, right out of Dune. The bar itself is the perfect combination of 1930s nightclub, early-1970s bachelor pad, and science fiction movie.

Gratefully, the one hostess recommended that we look at the restrooms. I'm glad she did because they truly are astonishing. There's a large number of individual little rooms off a branching, angular hallway. The ones on the inside are completely black with only the dimmest vertical bar of red light at a couple of their corners. They have to be impossible to photograph well. Even with a tripod and a long exposure time, I think the quality of the (lack of) light would be distorted at best.

Photo by Ginny Raffa.

The ones out at the window line, on the other hand, are nothing if not a full exercise in exhibitionism. One entire wall is completely glass, from below the floor all the way up to the ceiling and practically beyond; the ceilings are at least ten-feet tall. The toilet faces the window, so women have no choice but to look out, shy men luck out most of the time unless they need to do you-know-what. Then, on the floor closest to the window line is a grille that you can see through, almost like you're standing precariously over the edge of the building. The toilet is so close to the window that, if you're sitting on it, half of your feet is dangling out over this ledge.

A lot of restrooms that play with these ideas of modesty and exposure will employ glass that automatically frosts over when the door is locked or the lights are turned on. It's possible these windows do that, but I don't think so. It's possible that the light inside is so dim that even after dark, you'll see not much more than a reflection on the glass from the outside; New York never gets very dark, anyway, except in a blackout. If nothing can be seen from outside, it's more just an effect for the guest using the restroom. I was reminded of the public restroom I'd heard about in Times Square but never got a chance to see. It was inside a box of one-way mirrored glass. Doing your business, you could see out, but no one could see you. Evidently the challenge to one's sense of modesty was still quite powerful.

While the plays performed by people in apartments overlooking the High Line are presumably more or less legitimate, if avant-garde, the funny thing here is that the performances going on inside the Standard's room windows have evidently been more along the lines of amateur erotica. There have been sightings of various sex acts being put on display at times. In the bar's restrooms, this is practically enforced.

At this point, there's only one building even remotely close enough to the Standard to see anything, it's not completed yet, and appears possibly to be offices, not residences. I have a feeling, though, that any residences there or in future buildings to go up will be absolute paradise for perverts with telescopes. It makes it all the more ironic that for whatever reason, they have a problem with seeing men's legs, which I'll get to below.

In any case, they are some of the most incredible interiors I've seen in a very long time. It's the work of Roman and Williams. It starts with Modernism from the early-twentieth century, when the High Line was built, at the ground floor. The inspirations move forward in time as you rise to the top of the building. Their inspiration for the bar was Warren Platner, a designer of prominence in the 1960s and '70s, who also worked with Eero Saarinen, I. M. Pei, and Raymond Loewy.

This makes it all the more disappointing, especially considering my great respect for the design, that the attitude was overpowering. Attention Boutique Hotels. You want something other than a derisive warning to Stay Away from (with all humility) savvy and knowledgeable writers like myself? Instruct your employees on this very important fact, of which we've been reminded time and time again where I work: you never know who it is you're encountering. For all they knew, I was the multi-billionaire best friend of the hotel owner's son being treated like an interloper.

I was wearing shorts. It was about ninety-five degrees outside, for crying out loud. I wouldn't say the hostesses and security were "condescending," but they were about as unaccommodating and unwelcoming as they could possibly have been without descending fully into condescension. They have a dress code: No Shorts. Despite the fact that they were not open, there were no patrons to be seen anywhere, and they were quite obviously still merely setting up for the evening's crowd, I was permitted only the most fleeting glance at the bar proper, and not without a quickly-diffused admonishment from one of the security guards.

As I started to discuss quietly at the time, I've become very disgusted by dress codes. They are almost across the board racist, sexist, classist, heterosexist, or an ugly combination of the above.

Racist because they very often are designed to keep out an element perceived as troublesome: the "thug" element, which usually refers to Black men. "No Sneakers," for instance: this makes no concession whatsoever to whether the sneakers in question happen to be a $30 pair from K-Mart or one-of-a-kind Nike prototypes worth thousands of dollars.

Sexist because men are required to be covered from head-to-toe, but women, and most prominently the hostesses themselves, I have absolutely no doubt can be wearing the tiniest miniskirts and enter unimpeded to adorn the space like furniture in all their sexually objectified splendor. If the Standard has a "no thong showing in your ass crack above low-rider jeans" dress code, I'll give you a billion dollars. While this next statement is unfortunately tinged by male privilege, I'll also add that women may therefore dress appropriately for the summer temperatures, while we men must be overdressed and uncomfortable. They didn't mention my sleeveless shirt, but I can imagine they probably don't allow tank-tops, either.

Classist because these codes are so often based in what is typically a white middle-class assessment of what garments are appropriate or inappropriate in a given environment. This is a cultural construct with opposing alternatives. Ironically, it's not aristocratic. Many of the unusual, avant-garde garments found at the highest price points would be frowned-upon, also (and were with me, at the 21 Club. We ate elsewhere).

Heterosexist because in the more conservative venues they would in no way account for the many varied ways individuals choose to express their gender identities. How would the bigoted host of an expensive old-school restaurant apply their "dress code" to a woman with short-cropped hair wearing a man's tailored suit, for instance?

While I'll be the first to invite anyone to enjoy the fun of dressing up sharp for the pure pleasure of doing so on a special night out, I call for the boycott of any business strictly employing dress codes to enforce their outdated and disgraceful discrimination. This kind of thing has no place in a city as diverse and multicultural as New York. I want no part of it at all.

We did go up to the roof, which was pretty spectacular, if smaller than I'd have imagined. There was surprisingly little space to sit to enjoy a cocktail, even less that was in shade. We didn't. The best thing about it, aside from the mind-boggling views, was the round water bed cushions. I never would have known, but my mom felt one of them. Such a fantastic idea. There was also a really nice guest hanging out up there--much nicer than the hotel employees--who offered to take a picture of my mom and me.

The end point of the High Line (traveling south) is surprisingly anti-climactic. Nothing particularly punctuates it, there's no exit stair so there need not be any through traffic, there's no folly or striking detail, it's a diminutive space with most of its views blocked by high bushes. None of the regulars who know the layout of the park will bother to go there, since they know there's no exit. I think all this can add up to only one thing: romance. This is the spot where a couple, having strolled the length of the High Line and enjoyed a lovely afternoon together, end here and become engaged to marry.

We ended our day with a big pitcher of sangria and a little food at another one of my favorite buildings in New York, the National Maritime Union Building (now the Maritime Hotel, 1966), by Albert C. Ledner.

It's maybe interesting to contrast my adoration for this building with my criticism of Michael Graves' project for Donald Trump. But the obviousness of the porthole windows here works so much better because of its 1960s context. For Pop, the more obvious a symbol was, the more successful it could be to accomplish what was needed in this time of questioning and transition. Furthermore, it's a warm and kind gesture considering that the original guests would have been presumably ship captains and the like, as if in an attempt to help them feel more at home away from home.

Although the windows are a bit unfortunately small for the building's present use, it's still a very groovy hotel. Right after it opened, it hosted in its ballroom a legendary Halloween party that attracted nearly 4000 people, many of them celebrities, and which was DJed beautifully by yours truly.

I never saw the inside of this building when it first opened before I was born. In fact, very likely the only people who did were members of the Maritime Union. But I was impressed to notice things about the interior that led me to believe it's mostly either original furnishings, or historically accurate recreations of the original interiors. It's in these various minor details about the design of it. It's forms that would have seemed right in 1966, somehow, but which a designer today wouldn't necessarily think of in an attempt to create a retro 1960s look for an interior; they're too obscure.

There's also a bit of wear and tear that could never have occurred in the short time this has been in use as a hotel, and which it would make no sense to employ as a sort of false aging technique, especially since most 1960s interiors work was so slick and glossy. I really hope their fireplace is still operational. What a delightful place to hang out on a cold winter's night.

Over dinner, I was talking about how I'll be interested to see the High Line again after it's settled in to itself, so to speak. It's too new now, and hasn't found its rhythm. There are too many tourists, too many people going to see it for the first time (and of course, I was guilty of that myself), it's too novel for too many of its visitors. It will be interesting to see how, when the buzz dies down, how it will be used by its regulars. The other thing is that Central Park, in comparison, has not only a century-old rhythm in place, but it's also much larger. The amount of tourists who visit Central Park could never be enough to dilute the rhythms of its local regular users (and I've often been surprised by how many tourists do go, if only to sit and eat lunch--I mean, most of these people come from places where there's a forest out their backyard, and the rest of them from places that also have parks). The High Line, on the other hand, feels inundated at the moment, overwhelmed. I'll be pleased to see how it grows into the landscape of the city over time.

So there's my visit to the High Line Park. As an added side note, if you're interested in learning more, 92Y is hosting a talk by Liz Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and Charles Renfro at 8PM on October 4th. It appears they'll be discussing the park and also Lincoln Center, which I'm very excited to hear, although I already know just about everything there is to know about that.

The End of an Eero

2011-07-17T18:12:00.003-04:00

My latest excursion was unfortunately a bit of a bust. I'm not sorry I went, for a few reasons I'll get to below. But this won't be the kind of exhaustive story that I might have liked it to be. I've had bad luck with very few other buildings. One of my favorite buildings in New York has eluded me. On a recent trip to see it, we arrived literally one minute after they locked the doors, and the weather chose that very moment in an otherwise perfectly sunny day to send an enormous cloud across the sky. With the exception of the CBS Headquarters, I'm pretty sure this is the last Saarinen building I'll be likely to cover here until I'm able to get down to D.C. again. [Good news, everyone: I actually have two more.]

The good thing about having all my routes entered into Google Maps is that it was immediately apparent that I would pass right by another stop I'd been hoping to make ever since I heard about it a year or two ago. It was so close, in fact, that I was able to get to it in only five minutes to and from the highway. It's what's been nicknamed the "Boat Graveyard" in Staten Island. It's a bunch of very old rusty boats, mostly resting on the river's floor, sitting in this sort of bay.

The unfortunate thing about this stop is that the Google Maps view there is far better than any photo I could have taken. As I suspected before I even arrived, there really is no way to get up very close to it, unless you happen to be in a boat yourself. This website appears to have some pretty nice images of it.

What made this worth the detour for me, though, was that the business that appears to be most closely associated with the old boats is a company called Donjon Marine Co., which was founded by a man named Arnold Witte. In fact, the sign on their building read "Witte Donjon Marine Salvage" or whatever. I really should have taken a picture of it, but didn't think of it at the time. As I've said elsewhere, ours is not a terribly common name. And it appears that pretty much the whole Witte family, John, Thomas, Paul, Matthew, and James, when not busy being Jesus' apostles, all help to run the business.

I walked into their sort of scrapyard or whatever you'd call it and approached one of the guys working there. I asked him if there were any way to get up close to see the old boats. He said "not really," but told me there's a small clearing about a mile down the road to the east where some of them could be seen. He was really very nice and I appreciated his help. I've said elsewhere that I've noticed you can tell how obnoxious an employer is to work for by the attitudes of their employees. If this guy was any indication, the Wittes are great to work for (I'm not surprised). I said "I thought I ought to show you..." pulling out my driver's license and showing it to him, "...my name." "Ryan...oh, Witte, right," and he pronounced it the same as my family does, "witty." "They're the owners of the company, are you related to them?" he asked me. "No, not that I know of," I said, "that is, I'm sure we must be back hundreds of years ago."

In any case, if you're looking for marine salvage services in the New York area, I must highly recommend Donjon. With a name like Witte behind it, I am certain they are the ones to trust.

Unfortunately, the clearing the guy told me about offered only the most limited views and only of a couple of the boats off to the side, not the main cluster of them.

It's possible that if I had driven around to the other side of the river, I might have found a view of the big cluster of rusty boats, but I would have been even further away from them than this. It didn't seem worth it to try, when it might have been as limited a view or as difficult to access as this one. I asked a guy in this auto body shop across from this clearing if he knew of any way to get a better look at the boats, but he didn't seem to think so. I used the restroom at the car wash next door and continued on to my principle destination, Eero Saarinen's Bell Telephone Laboratories Building (first phase 1962, remainder 1967).

I missed my opportunity to get onto the Garden State Parkway, but luckily the road I was on, US Route 9--although very likely slower--took me in more or less the same direction. The essay I'm on at the moment in my reading is a brilliant piece by Michael Stanton, talking about the transition between the urban, the suburban, and the exurban. He has such a clear and deep understanding of the American landscape that I found it incredible he hasn't written more. But it was apropos for me to be in New Jersey, which is pretty much just one giant strip-mall. Route 9 is miles-long stretches of strip malls and big-box retail stores punctuated by cloverleaf turn-arounds, what struck me as being a disturbing waste of the rural geography and a perfect metaphor for the overblown supremacy of the automobile in this country. My Zipcar that day was a Prius, coincidentally. From the moment I picked it up until I dropped it off again, I swear the fuel gauge didn't even seem to budge.

I ended up needing to stop for directions twice, first at a gas station and then at a little motel. I asked the woman at the motel desk if she could help me find the Bell Labs building in Holmdel, which I said is evidently on something called Crawfords Corner Road. She said "oh, that must be the AT&T building." She was close. They actually had a printed list of directions to various different sites in the area that she gave me. AT&T was the listing just above Bell Labs. Bell was listed as "Lucent Technologies," though. Not realizing that Lucent (now Alcatel-Lucent) is the umbrella corporation over Bell Labs, I asked "oh, so Lucent is the company that most recently owned the building?" She said "yeah, it's been called other things, but we call it Lucent around here 'cause we're old school." LOL

Now I haven't been aware of Bell Labs for as long as I'd like to admit, but now that I am, I'm becoming as fascinated by it as I am by 3M or DuPont, the two other research powerhouses that come to mind. I actually learned about Bell in the research I did for Lincoln Center. Harrison & Abramovitz designed the Bell Telephone Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair and a scientist from Bell, Manfred Schroeder, provided data for the acoustic analysis of Avery Fisher Hall to help determine what was wrong with its acoustics before its 1976 renovation. Bell Labs was in some integral way involved with the invention of the transistor, the solar cell, the laser, the touch-tone telephone, and the launch of the first communications satellite, Telstar. No way should Lucent get credit for all that.

The welcome mat I discovered were a bunch of tiny No Trespassing signs. The entrance is about a mile away from the actual building itself. I could see it, but barely.

I contemplated hiding the car and walking in, but it was so far away! I decided to take my chances. It didn't even look like there was anyone in there. I tried my best to find out beforehand who or what organization owns the building now, someone who I might be able to ask permission (they most probably wouldn't have granted me permission anyway, because of what you'll see below). For anyone who might be reading this who'd have some legal objection to this post, I'll offer you the following protests. I love Saarinen's work implicitly. The building is magic. I spent $70 to rent a car to drive out and see this building alone. I spent over an hour of my time getting there just to see it. This entire blog I think is proof enough that my interest and devotion to the architecture of this building is legitimate. If you still want to press trespassing charges, then I say go right ahead, and for the record, karma is a bitch.

To be fair, I could totally understand why they wouldn't want anyone taking pictures of it. It really is a shame what has happened to this place. It's starting to look like a wildlife refuge.

That isn't the best shot of the geese, but I thought the Heliport sign was so cool. When I first drove in, a deer came out of the woods back by the water tower. I thought I'd snapped a photo of him, but I don't see him in my long shots.

No doubt there was a moment in between when the building was first completed and today, when the plantings had grown in, softening the hard sharpness of the building's modernism, but hadn't turned to weeds. It must have been truly spectacular. But part of the problem, I think, is that Saarinen's landscaping was so rigid and strict. The grounds maintenance must have required an entire army of gardeners. Unlike the more rambling PepsiCo grounds, which I suspect might overgrow somewhat pleasantly if left unattended, the style of Bell Labs' landscaping would demand constant attention to retain its full glory.

The building is truly mammoth, as I discovered when I could see its full expanse. The lake had hundreds of fountains curving through it and also served for air conditioning and a water source in case of fire. Some of those bushes appear to have been allowed to grow unchecked for at least five years. It was at this point that I noticed there were actually vehicles parked in front of the building. For a building this huge, it was sort of spooky to think that there were probably only about ten people inside it. Who knows what they were doing there. But for that reason, I didn't dare get much closer to the building than this. Instead I just drove around the oval ring road, stopping occasionally, getting out and taking a picture. I'm still torn as to whether I would have had better luck going on a Sunday. Likely there wouldn't have been anyone there at all to catch me trespassing. On the other hand, since I couldn't determine who owns the building now, there was much more likelihood of being able to see the inside of it by going on a weekday when there would be people there.

Photo by Cervin Robinson, Yale University Library.

I do really wish it had been possible to see the inside of it. Its atrium looks unbelievably spectacular. It was supposedly the first atrium of its kind ever employed in a corporate building, and was inspiration for the one at the Ford Foundation Building by Saarinen's successor, Kevin Roche.

As sad as it is, I will say that it is an exquisite modern ruin, much like Philip Johnson's New York State Pavilion. And this was another reason I was glad that I went. Seeing the condition it's in now, imagining the exorbitant cost to bring it back to pristine condition, I very much fear for the fate of this building. I have a sinking feeling in my heart that it may not remain standing for very much longer. The good thing about it is that it's probably way too large to go at it with a wrecking ball. What would be the point, anyway? To build something ugly in its place? But if no corporation big enough to handle it finds it appealing, it may just sit there for the next fifty years, crumbling into the ground, lonely, forgotten, and uninhabited, like a giant fossil from a past age.

While I prefer perfectly clear skies whenever possible, the few passing clouds were actually perfect for capturing this building. Without them, the mirroring of the glass would be much less obvious. This glass was allegedly invented specifically for this building and was one of the things that was praised so highly about it. It also reflected the majority of the sunlight, cutting down on costs.

After one time around the loop, my heart racing, figuring I'd be arrested, I decided to go in a little closer to at least get a shot of the building's cladding and front entrance.

As I'm taking this last shot, I see a guy coming out of the building and getting into a little white security truck. I knew he was coming for me, so I jumped back in the car to get the hell out of there. I had all these lies running through my head of the "By the time I saw the signs, I was already inside," or "I just came in to turn around," varieties. After a couple more of those, my conscience kicked in and I got back around to my normal "honesty as best policy" mindset. I decided I would tell him what I said above, how I'd driven so far just to see it that I wasn't about to simply turn around and go home because of a couple of little No Trespassing signs. What harm had I done, anyway?

I passed right by his truck and made the right turn to exit the grounds, watching the rear view mirror with bated breath. He paused at the intersection, I suppose to be sure I truly was leaving, and turned to drive back to the building. How do you spell relief? I took one last shot of the water tower and headed for home.

It had taken me far less time than building visits of yore for obvious reasons. I could be much less exhaustive and I could get no really good looks at the building's finer details. I tried to wrack my brain to think of some other building I could visit with the extra time I had on the Zipcar. I ended up hitting a ton of traffic on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. I had just enough time to find the building I was looking for, drive past it, but not enough time to actually park the car and get pictures of it. That building is extremely easy for me to get to by subway, though, which I will do sometime soon. I'll let that be a surprise. The good news is that, for once, I managed to get the Zipcar back to the garage about five minutes before it was due and without sweat running down my face from racing to get it back on time.

One more thing I'd like to mention is this route into New York from New Jersey. Having approached the city from many different directions, I'm struck by how the views are planned. I'm tempted to wonder, as many criticisms as one might be able to fling at Robert Moses, if he didn't do this on purpose. The first one is at the top of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (Othmar Ammann, 1964) from across New York Harbor. Of course I couldn't get a good look at that one without getting into a car accident, but it's really spectacular. The second one is even better, and I remember it quite clearly from living in Brooklyn and driving in to go clubbing.

The BQE is sunk below grade up to this point, and then all of a sudden, it rises up under the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, you come around a corner, pass a large building, and BAM there's the great mountain of the lower Manhattan skyline.

I was able to take that picture while still watching the road, don't worry. With a short Google, I couldn't find a photo of what the skyline looked like in 1961, when the BQE first opened, but it must have been breathtaking. I also can't even begin to imagine what the scene was like in this part of the expressway on the morning of September 11th. But for certain those who took this route to commute into the city before and after that day would have had this view as an awful reminder of what is now missing for months afterward. I'm not really prone to all that "greatest country on earth" nonsense of which many Americans are guilty (most of whom have never even left their home state). But every time I saw that view in those first years of living in New York, and I saw it quite a lot of times, it never failed to make me think to myself, "I'm in the center of the universe." The Trade Center Towers helped, as did a setting sun and the buildings lit up after dark, but it still impresses.

Bittersweetly, this marks the end of Saarinen in the tri-state area.

Not to fret, we still have plenty more incredible architects to get through!

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte, unless noted.

Dying to See You

2011-07-04T12:36:00.007-04:00

A couple of months ago, the conservator of Lincoln Center's artworks collaborated with me on a sort of VIP Art & Architecture tour, so I got a chance beforehand to chat with him. I asked him about this painting, and he said it likely won't be returning. He also said the Yaacov Agam sculpture, Three X Three Interplay (1971), probably won't be coming back either, which I also find very disappointing. He said the Agam sculpture is very large and there really is no place for it anymore. I really think they should have created a new spot for it. For the painting this post discusses, there does happen to be a perfect spot, at the western end of Alice Tully Hall's lobby, in a curved alcove that I believe contains doorways to back offices. He said that there was some resistance on the part of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro to reintroducing this painting in the space for some reason.

As much as I think I've made clear the enormous respect I have for this trio of architects, I have to say, shame on you. Part of my defense of this painting is selfish, because I would LOVE the opportunity to tell this wonderfully disturbing story to the snotty, uninterested high school kids with whom I often have to contend. But the other part is that I think it's a brilliant piece, suited very well to the space. The third argument I'll make is that the painting was a gift from the artist to Lincoln Center. To just callously throw it away as a useless addition to the building is kind of a slap in the face of this gracious gesture. And the point remains that there is a perfect place to re-hang it, so there is no excuse.

I do feel justified in calling for this painting to be hung once again in Alice Tully Hall. At this point, I suspect it never will be. I hinted at this before, but since I probably won't have the opportunity to ever tell this story on one of my tours, I thought I'd share with you the (here revised) essay I wrote about it in creating the Art & Architecture Tour for Lincoln Center.

The piece I'm referring to is Black Dahlia (acrylic on canvas, 1971) by Gene Davis.

"What? THIS is the piece you're defending?" Yes, this is the piece.

First of all, Gene Davis (1920-1985) was from the Washington Color School of painters from D.C. along with Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and others. He started out as a sports journalist. As a writer he also covered the Roosevelt and Truman presidential administrations and often played poker with Harry Truman. He worked predominantly in acrylic.

Vertical lines fascinated Davis because he felt that they're conceptually infinite. His pieces therefore draw a contrast between the limits of the physical painting and the conceptual limitlessness of the lines in them. They aren't canvases dissected by lines. They're lines represented on the canvas that theoretically extend beyond its borders. He pushed this idea to its extremes in both directions of scale. In 1972, his Niagara, painted at a parking lot in Lewiston, New York, was the largest painting ever created at 43,680 square feet (4058 square meters). His smallest works were as tiny as three eighths of an inch square (a .95 centimeter square). Likewise, Tully is the venue in the complex dedicated to the smallest of the classical music performance types, Chamber Music, a question of scale.

Davis' works also often have musical themes: Banjo, Black Grey Beat, Solar Beat, Sonata, Sun Sonata, Yukon Sonata, etc. The vertical bars of color form obviously rhythmic patterns across the canvases. The connection may be that, like his paintings, music is orderly and restricted in form yet expansive and expressive in concept and meaning.

There are some deep reddish-purple dahlias said to be "black" like their counterparts in the rose and tulip families. The secondary level of signification no doubt appealed to Davis, but this botanist reference is so uncommon as to make the following explanation infinitely more probable. Many of you, especially from the West Coast, already know where I'm going. Surprisingly, considering my fascination with True Crime and anything disturbing, I'd not ever heard this story before I began to research this painting. The "Black Dahlia" was Elizabeth Short (1924-1947).

Little is known about her life, except that she moved around the country quite frequently as a teenager and had relationships with quite a few military men, leading some to speculate that she was a prostitute. This was later refuted by grand jury reports. A telegram sent by Short places her in Washington, D.C. around 1944. Although he was still only fourteen, there remains the possibility that Davis knew her, or at the very least, that he believed he might have met her. She was found dead in a vacant lot in Leimert Park, Los Angeles, at the age of twenty-three.

Her body was horribly mutilated. She was cut in half at the mid-section, all the blood had been drained from her body, and her face had been cut from the sides of her mouth all the way to her ears, what's known as a "Glasgow Smile." Because she liked to dress in all black, possibly she was nicknamed "The Black Dahlia" at a Long Beach drugstore where she hung out, as a play on the title of the currently-running film The Blue Dahlia (1946), starring Alad Ladd and Veronica Lake. In other accounts, newspaper reporters covering the murder coined the nickname.

At the time, it was the largest murder investigation ever conducted by the Los Angeles Police Department. Hundreds of people were considered suspects and were questioned. Around sixty people falsely confessed to the crime. In his book, Black Dahlia Avenger, published in 2003, Los Angeles police officer Steve Hodel claimed that his father, psychiatrist George Hodel, had murdered Short. The claim was never substantiated. Surrealist photographer Man Ray, who was very close with Hodel, has also been suggested as the killer. The crime remains unsolved to this day.

In their 2006 book, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder, authors Mark Nelson and Sarah Bayliss put forth a fascinating theory. Numerous details about the way Short's body was found, with her arms posed above her head and the ways that her body was mutilated, have direct correlations with specific works by surrealist artists. They therefore propose that Short's killer was well acquainted with the work of the surrealists (as was Hodel), and that the murder itself had been an extremely twisted work of surrealist art. The book's title comes from the parlor game played by the surrealists wherein each participant writes one word on a folded piece of paper, so that when unfolded, a nonsensical sentence has been composed. The authors go on to suggest the possibility that, similarly, Short's body had been passed around amongst a whole group of people, each of whom performed some disturbing act of surrealist-inspired mutilation to her cadaver.

Marcel Duchamp's final work, Étant donnés (probably NSFW, unless you work in an art gallery), installed posthumously at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, is suspiciously and eerily similar to Short's crime scene.

In a brief and pleasant email correspondence with Nelson, he revealed to me the possible Washington, D.C. connection with Davis. The day I received my copy of Exquisite Corpse in the mail, my curiosity took hold and I began reading. I literally could not put it back down again, and finished the entire book that evening, something I never, ever do. For anyone interested in Art History and especially surrealism, the macabre or disturbing, or True Crime, I must highly recommend this brilliant and fascinating read. Although maybe something for the weak of constitution to avoid, the photos are illustrative but (purposely) not particularly the most graphic or vomit-inducing.

I'd also like to add a brief discussion of this crime from a Feminist perspective. I won't delve deeply, I think that's better handled by someone more informed than myself. But I think what this violent act says about both the Hollywood system and the Art World is quite poignant. It's how the female body in this case was viewed as a purely aesthetic object to it's most horrifying conclusion. Short's body was the artwork, and it had to be devoured, destroyed in order to be so. In fact, the very destruction of her body was the work's most defining feature.

In our day and age, we've seen how the mutilation of one's body falls fairly easily into the category of Art. Tattoos and piercings are great examples, not to mention of course cosmetic surgery of any kind, but especially the most extreme cases. Note Jocelyn Wildenstein. In some cases, indeed the very act of mutilating one's body as it might be in a work of Performance Art clearly takes the name.

From the other direction, most serial killers consider what they do to be a cathartic, precise, sick sort of art form. Ed Gein was, to be far too generous, a fashion and furniture designer (as were some of the nazis). But to my mind, only in the case of the Black Dahlia murder do all these troublesome qualities come together to make one powerful, shocking statement about American popular culture's view of and attitudes toward the Female Body. It alone speaks perhaps more than any other psychotic act of how and to what extent our cultural machine feels the Female Body should be (allows it to be) used and consumed, at least how it did in the 1940s.

On a much lighter note, due to the unbelievably morbid subject of this Gene Davis painting, one might be inclined to suggest that Davis was almost playing a practical joke on Lincoln Center, and that those in charge of curating the artworks were and still are unaware of this explanation (not even the published author of the book on LC's artworks had any idea about it when I mentioned it to him).

Davis is clearly saying something very specific about the piece by giving it such a provocative title. It may be proposed that the physicality of the stretched canvas is deliberate and very consciously considered. Its proportions necessarily cut the vertical lines into particular lengths, a key element in the artistic expression of the piece. At the same time, to cut the canvas into specific proportions may be akin to "murdering" the lines, in that it robs them of the infinity Davis praised them for having. In this sense, representing the lines in a painting becomes murder with an artistic purpose, much like the above theories surrounding the fate of Elizabeth Short.

Although no one who could make the final decision will likely ever read this, I do hope I've made my case for the reintroduction of Black Dahlia to the beautifully-renovated Alice Tully Hall. Perhaps I should get a petition going.

[EDIT: I found it. Black Dahlia is now hanging in a hallway on the ninth floor of the Rose Building at the northwest corner of the campus. It's the floor containing Lincoln Center administrative offices and conference rooms. I discovered it there purely by accident: "wait a minute, that's the Gene Davis painting!" Memorizing the exact colors, widths, and arrangement of the lines to compare with the image above was not easy, but luckily I'm a visual thinker.]

©2010, Ryan Witte

Being and Breuer in the Bronx

2011-06-24T12:54:00.001-04:00

My trip to see Marcel Breuer's buildings at the New York University Heights Campus in the Bronx was a much deeper experience than I was expecting. Consciously, I thought that I had a beautiful sunny day to see another work by a modern master that was close enough (accessible enough by public transportation) that I wouldn't need to spend the money on renting a car again. Perhaps the reading I've been doing lately (at the moment: White Papers, Black Marks--Architecture, Race, Culture)--and my interest in the intersection of architecture and issues of race, gender, and so on--subconsciously made the name "Bronx" shine a little more brightly than usual on my Trips map. But for certain I didn't consciously expect University Heights to necessarily be a neighborhood inhabited predominantly by people of color. The Bronx is a big borough, after all, and I really don't know it all that well.

In some weird way, I appreciated being one of the only white faces on the street. I know this is an experience that many people of color have every day of their lives, so I wanted to pay attention to it. But the reason it made me uncomfortable (the emotion I was examining, and honestly, it was not strong) I found very interesting. It wasn't because of some stupid "these are not my people" sensation, and of course no one made me feel even slightly unwelcome. Rather the discomfort came from the fear that I was intruding, that my very presence would be seen as offensive in some way. What I mean is, I imagine many of the residents of this neighborhood, in their day-to-day lives, have to deal with entitled white people all day long who have no clue what "entitlement" even means. Their own neighborhood, therefore, I would think becomes an escape from that. For me to just waltz down the street, invading their retreat, their safe zone(?), felt intrusive on my part, like I was invading something sacred to the long-time residents and off-limits to me.

And that's where another conflict arises. No matter where I am, I always make the point to be comfortable in my own skin. While in Montreal, for instance, it worked; at least four or five people asked me for directions, assuming I lived there, that I belonged there. Certainly being in any urban area with the look of "I'm lost and confused! Where am I?" all over your face (or having a big-ass camera hanging around your neck) is a great invitation for a questionable character to try to scam you...or worse. And I don't think there was any question that I'm not a resident of University Heights, not just because I'm white, but a whole lot of other things, the simplest of which being that I'd never been there before, had never been seen before in a neighborhood of presumably familiar faces.

Maybe I'm projecting my own issues, but a lot of the looks I got seemed to say not "what is he doing here?" but at the very least, "oh, there's a white guy here." But the reason that pun--"in my own skin"--is available to me in this discussion is precisely the problem. I have no doubt that what enables me to feel at ease in an unfamiliar urban environment are my privileges as a white man that, historically speaking, "entitle" me to go with impunity wherever I choose to go.

The question this uncovers is this: Where is the middle ground between a respectful acknowledgement of not belonging in an environment carved out, commanded, and valued as a retreat (merely my empathetic assumption) by people of color, and comfortably inhabiting one's own (white) body in that environment so as not to appear naïve and out-of-place? From the other direction, I almost feel like most any reasons I might have to feel uncomfortable in a neighborhood that's largely Black and Hispanic would have to have racist roots. So how much of my comfort level do I gain from my white privilege, and how much do I get from my devotion to anti-racism? Is it possible to determine what kind of "comfort" one is feeling? I was unable to get a grasp on the answer during this brief excursion.

I'd like to add the disclaimer that my ideas about the racialization of the urban, architectural environment are immaterial in a discussion that is best had by the people of color who shape and inhabit those environments. My hope is no more than that another voice in the mix might help to shed added and helpful light on a subject that should concern all of us in the twenty-first century, despite the fact that my voice is a white male one. I mean only to be an ally, not a colonialist. Take them or leave them, as is everyone's prerogative.

Across the board, my interactions with people on this trip were remarkably pleasant. Perhaps too pleasant, and I do hope my experience wasn't glossed over with an insincere veneer. I was diligently studying the map of the campus to try and figure out which buildings I was looking for when I suddenly realized there was a cute couple of Hispanic kids behind me looking at it also. I quickly stepped aside and apologized for blocking their view. They were trying to find their bearings, so I pointed out to them where on the map I suspected we were.

Finding the buildings by name was not at all easy because the names have changed. The original campus is by McKim, Mead & White, not surprisingly, and is beautiful, if staid. I looked fairly closely at the original buildings but won't include them here, which I'll explain below. Breuer's buildings started to appear in the 1960s and are otherworldly. Because of the financial crisis New York faced in the early-1970s, which also affected its many institutions, NYU was forced to sell their Bronx campus to the City University of New York in 1973. It then became Bronx Community College (BCC). Finding Breuer's work by sight was not difficult at all. I just needed to know where to walk. The first one I found was Technology I & II (1972), now called Meister Hall for Dr. Morris Meister, BCC's first president.

When you see it in person, it looks entirely 1972. But something about the two-dimensionality of the photographic image allows me to see something more. Meister is H-shaped in plan. The front wing (the left side of the H), which houses classrooms and seminar rooms, has proportions that are a bit too unusual, and its piers too Corbusian. The tower behind it housing laboratories and offices, on the other hand, reads like an updated version of a typical turn-of-the-century office building. In fact, I'm seeing shadows of Louis Sullivan in it.

A sign of Breuer's genius is what he does with the entrance here. And one might be tempted to say that no mid-twentieth-century master could do a building entrance as dramatic as Breuer. Wright's, Mies', and Johnson's were all pretty straightforward. Corbusier, Saarinen, Rudolph, Pei, and Gehry mostly allow(ed) their building's ideological conception and sculptural expressionism to all but swallow them whole. Kahn seemed more concerned with arrival than with entrance, and Meier more with circulation. One always knows exactly where and how to enter a Breuer building, but more than that, doing so is an event.

The front of Meister is mostly uniform, with the regular piers along the bottom with a four-window bay above each. The entrance is perfectly visible between those third and fourth piers, but is tucked away behind them. Instead of something stuck onto the front of the building and disrupting its horizontal mass, a sheer, asymmetrical brick tower rises up behind it to announce the entrance.

Seeing this image in a thumbnail size in order to load it, there's something about the forms that appear vaguely Italianate or perhaps even Collegiate Gothic to me. Okay, very vaguely. But squinting or unfocusing your eyes maybe you can tell me I'm not crazy?

At the eastern end, the horizontal front volume pronounces itself by standing on its piers with just parking underneath. At the western end, the glass-enclosed lobby space continues out to the edge. Because the land slopes downward, at eye level here the underside of the building opens up revealing the contrast between the solid concrete structure and the bright, seemingly weightless glass enclosure.

Back around to the east, a gradual progression begins, in between the two wings of the H, toward a more muscular, purely geometric Brutalism. Notice how the windows now are nothing more than tiny slits in their deep, inverted pyramidal recesses. The sun at this angle also happily helps to amplify the strength of the geometry.

Windows are permitted to interrupt the massive brick and concrete forms in only the most reluctant slivers, in between them and mostly recessed out of sight.

When I came around this corner and the southern façade came into full view, I could barely breathe enough to whisper to myself "Oh. My. God."

I honestly think this has to be one of the most brilliant moments in all of twentieth-century architecture (one of many, of course). This entire façade of the building is nothing more than one enormous entrance. The texture is pure architectural sculpture, a wall, a great dramatic play of light and shadow. I can't say what it would be like to work in a building with no windows on one whole side (although I suspect this side may be the laboratories).

The terrace at the back seems to be a mildly unfriendly place to gather, as many of the great works of landscaping were up to this time, for better or for worse. It may have only looked so barren because of the very fact that there were no students using it at the time. Visually speaking, I think it is one of the most stunning places I have ever been.

And to be fair, there is a group of shade pavilions in the center that I would be very surprised people didn't enjoy using to have their lunches.

After that experience, I was very excited for what I would find next. Unfortunately, it was a bit of a let-down.

In fact, when I first came upon the Gould Hall of Technology, now called Carl Polowczyk Hall, I thought to myself, "that can't really be one of the Breuer buildings, can it?" And as much as I have (hopefully successfully) defended a lot of buildings on this blog that people hate(d), I think I can safely say I find this building ugly. This and the rest of the Breuer work to follow was completed in 1964, except for the last building at the end.

Never one to condemn the work of someone with this much talent in such ultimate terms, I'd like to try to defend him. I have a very hard time believing that the corrugated metal nonsense on the top was ever Breuer's idea. In fact, I suspect that floor wasn't even in his original plans. Why anyone would put a prefabricated farm machinery storage shed on the top of this building is beyond me. Without question the college should employ a uniform type and color of window blind (I'm going to presume I understand what Breuer was doing here and suggest a light grayish-blue). That might require a maddeningly fascist co-op board in a residential building, but this isn't even a residence hall. It's classrooms for math, physics, and medical technology. There is really no excuse for it to look like they hung brown paper bags in the windows.

Buildings from this time period suffer from an unfortunate circumstance which I also discussed in regard to Harrison & Abramovitz' buildings at Rockefeller University. It's the continued Modernist use of relatively strict, regular horizontal bands of cladding materials on buildings built when central air conditioning was not yet seen as a basic necessity. Possibly Polowczyk employs electric radiators precluding the possibility of incorporating air conditioning into a centralized duct system. Nonetheless, I have no doubt that individual units could have been installed by a conscientious contractor that would have been far less visible on the outside. Assuming cost was the major controlling factor, at the very, very least, those visible units should have been all exactly the same brand and size (many are, too many others are clearly not) and installed at precise, uniform intervals. As it looks now, it's just a disaster that quite conspicuously helps to ruin what might be not an altogether awful building otherwise.

No one, not even a professor I was transferred to on the phone, could tell me anything at all about why there are cannons on the grounds. The best I could piece together from his cryptic explanation is that perhaps top-secret military research was being conducted here during World War I and there needed to be some kind of artillery protection. But he also said, "no, I don't think it was to protect the property," so who knows. Then he suggested I would need to ask someone in Washington, D.C., as if they'd ever tell me anything.

I was also a little bit disturbed by the yellow brick. But I quickly noticed that the original McKim, Mead & White buildings were built of similar brick. While his results might have been a bit questionable in this case, it was actually rather smart of Breuer to take this material and frame it in modern concrete construction as a way to relate contextually to the rest of the campus. One section of this eastern façade with a pattern of flower-pot-shaped openings in it was the first little hint that this was indeed a work by Breuer. That shape, the isosceles trapezoid, is also reflected in other forms, the plan of Begrisch Hall and the plaza around the Community Hall for two examples discussed below. It was clearly one of Breuer's favorite and signature shapes.

Cementing this (pun intended) as a work by Breuer was-- surprise--the entrance. The soaring, sculptural canopy screaming expressively up into the sky is so spectacular it almost makes up for the numbing banality of the building it adorns. As much as I would love to be able to just dismiss this building outright, the entrance canopy makes it entirely impossible.

On the western side of the building, it all starts to make sense. Here we find an incredible piece of architectural sculpture, the Begrisch Lecture Hall.

Although connected by a suspended walkway rather than being a sculptural adornment like the entrance canopy, it's not difficult to imagine how brilliantly this was conceived. Polowczyk Hall, tight, rigidly ordered, stacked horizontal bands of warm concrete, cold aluminum-framed glass, and traditional gold brick, punctuated by three intriguing and unique sculptural moments: entrance canopy, trapezoid orifice wall, and this lecture hall. I'm convinced that in a simple water-color rendering, this would have seemed the very highest form of the art of architecture on a 1964 par with contemporary Zaha Hadid.

Begrisch is a concrete sculpture that just happens to be large enough to contain an inhabitable interior space. The way it teeters so perfectly and precariously on only two legs is the most incredible feat of engineering prowess and speaks of incredible balance and precision.

Unfortunately some idiot decided it was necessary to dig a hole and put in some lame addition with a shingled roof and a metal fence around it? One would expect CUNY, as a whole, to have enough architectural historians on their payroll to throw a tantrum over something like that. Where were the professors of Architecture when this crime was being perpetrated?

In any case, thankfully, with some rustic stone walls, Begrisch still retains some of the qualities of, like, aliens landing on earth and creating Stonehenge. The contrast between the ancient form of the stone wall and the Space-Age concrete sculpture hovering above it is magical. This is what Architecture is all about, in my humble opinion. It's a tour de force.

Behind this is the Community Hall. On this lower level, it has the forms of a modest 1950s residence, which caused another small epiphany for me. The neglect and misguided uses of this part of the campus I found a bit disturbing, however. It's as if a collective agreement has been made to turn this wonderful, homey, almost domestic-looking enclave into something useless and unappealing.

Three lonely wood-plank boxes planted with random crops of indeterminate purpose that no one really cares to maintain. Weeds growing up around everything. An upside-down trash can. Some random potted plant as if forgotten sitting on the stone wall. A broken window replaced with what appears to be translucent Plexiglass? Walkway fieldstones completely surrounded by weeds, part of it replaced with asphalt, and then back to cement like some kind of sad patchwork quilt. A desk chair holding the door open, and why? The inner door is still closed. A garden hose someone couldn't be bothered to coil back up after using it. And last but certainly not least, that awful oversized plastic day-care-center picnic table.

I refuse to accept that no contract furniture company is making inexpensive versions of something along the lines of Harry Bertoia's patio furniture from the 1950s that would compliment the architecture here in the most delightful way.

The long, narrow terrace around to the left of this entrance, although accessed more directly from the far end, would be the loveliest cool, shady spot to sit around at little cafe tables on hot summer afternoons, but is riddled with weeds and pools of water too large to step over and no doubt festering with mosquitoes. I find the whole scene very unfortunate.

None of this was able to ruin my enjoyment of what Breuer accomplished to the west of this. My mouth just hung open when I came around that corner.

He swings back and forth between a familiar 1950s Modern aesthetic and these moments that were easily 1969. These raised walkways, as much as Begrisch, must have seemed incredibly futuristic and so groovy when the building was completed in 1961. This westernmost building was originally Silver Hall and is now called Colston Hall, named for Dr. James Colston, the college's second president. It's a residence hall, but the BCC website hints that it now also contains some classrooms and labs. This shallow U-shaped plan looks suspiciously similar to Breuer's UNESCO Headquarters in Paris, which also happens to have a sculptural entrance canopy very similar to Polowczyk.

Colston evidently towers up over Fort George to the west quite majestically, but for me to walk all the way around the campus to Segdwick Avenue on the other side probably would have taken me another hour and a half. Here's the beautifully modernist top level of the Community Hall with Colston behind it, what I first saw coming around the corner from Polowczyk.

My story unfortunately ends abruptly here. My camera chose exactly the wrong moment to run out of memory. I mean exactly wrong because if it had run out not much more than five to ten photos earlier, I almost certainly would have left the campus, bought a new memory card, and returned to finish taking pictures. But as it was, I only would have taken around five or so pictures after this. It really wasn't worth it for me to walk all the way back over here for so few additional images. Still, I left feeling a little bit frustrated that I wasn't able to capture my visit to full completion.

I walked around a bit more to check out the original buildings (which, as I mentioned above, I'm unable to include here) and left the campus. At one intersection I asked a woman if she'd ever spotted an electronics or camera store in the neighborhood. I quickly realized she was on some type of drug. To me it seemed like some kind of sedative, maybe drunk, but a little different than that. There was just something kind of unstable and hazy about her behavior. She said she thought there was such a store back down Burnside Avenue, where I'd come from the subway. She was headed in that direction and offered to show me herself. She was walking extremely slowly, though, so I asked her what side of the street she thought it was on, thanked her, and continued on my way.

It wasn't on that side of the street. What I found was a cellphone store that happened to carry the memory card I needed. Even though I was finished with BCC, I was going to need a new card anyway. But I also had a second Breuer stop to make before returning home. I also went to see his Shuster Hall and Fine Arts Building at Lehman College a few subway stops north. What I never could have known is that it was Lehman College's graduation ceremony that day. As incredibly irritating as it is to have to deal with graduations every day for weeks on end at Lincoln Center, I had to choose this day to visit Lehman. So the first issue was that the entire Lehman campus was absolutely lousy with graduates, professors, family members, events, picnics, bands, balloons, and festivities. It was a mess. Had I gone only a week later, I could have gotten pristine photos without so much as a single human in sight.

The other thing is that the one wing of the building has been altered beyond all recognition with a new black glass cladding, and the other wing that remains as Breuer designed it is not nearly as impressive as BCC, especially since it no longer has a matching wing to mirror it. On top of this, one of the best things about the buildings is how the interiors were constructed with sort of upside-down umbrella-shaped structures, not visible on the outside obviously, and badly lit and very difficult to photograph properly on the inside. So I snapped a couple photos I won't bother to include here and returned home.

Nevertheless, seeing BCC and the revelations about Marcel Breuer it caused in my brain made this trip anything at all but a bust. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte.

I Can Can

2011-06-21T17:54:00.011-04:00

After visiting IBM, I went to see Gordon Bunshaft's American Can Company Headquarters (1970) in Greenwich, Connecticut. To be perfectly honest, I wouldn't even have known about this building if it weren't for Ada Louise Huxtable, and I'm grateful to her for making it known to me. It was magical.

There are a couple of things I find very ironic about this building. The first is that the very things that the town of Greenwich demanded in allowing this to be built there--namely that it not be over forty feet tall and that parking be as concealed as possible--are the very things that made it cause such an enormous impact on the land. Basically, the conservative residents surrounding this building didn't want to see it, period. Bunshaft's (very smart) solution was to bury probably a third of it underground, meaning far more earth would have to be excavated and disturbed.

The second is that the reason Huxtable praises this building as being considerate to its rural site is the very same reason it would be condemned as such today: that the building is essentially a dam interrupting the flow of a stream through the ravine and creating a man-made lake on the property. With today's attitudes, it might have been forgiven, even praised, if hydroelectric turbines provided all the necessary power to the building, but no. It just got plopped down and completely altered the existing ecosystem.

In the building's defense, times have changed. In the context of the late-1960s and its rampant abuse of and disregard for Mother Nature, this was a highly sensitive and monumental improvement. In any case, it would always be unfair to judge a work of art by present standards--evaluate, of course, but not judge. And whatever its ironies, it is an incredible building that was every bit a rival for Saarinen's IBM for me, believe it or not.

With this building, Bunshaft--head of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the absolute masters of the curtain wall--has effectively turned the conventional building form completely inside-out. With the conventional curtain wall, the structure was on the inside of the building, with the steel and glass "curtain" hanging from it on the outside. It had a gradual evolutionary progression, which I started to discuss in terms of his bank at JFK, but at American Can it comes into full bloom. Not only has he separated the structure from the enclosure, but he's made the structure into an expressive element of the building. This is a sort of quirky Brutalism, it's also a form of structural expressionism as per Saarinen, but Bunshaft made it something quite unique to himself that defies categorization.

From what appears to be the main public entrance, one would have absolutely no concept of the scale or character of this building. Truth be told, although beautiful, the front entrance doesn't seem to differ terribly much from any other suburban office complex.

The astonishing side façades were actively, purposely concealed from view, making one's experience of the building a true journey of discovery. These three stories are all you can really see from the front, although there is a hint with a carefully controlled view of the luscious landscaping that there is much more to this building.

The front faces the southwest, so I got back in the car and first drove around to the east. My first shock was the dramatic entrance to the parking garage built into the building's base.

I probably gasped. Even I had no idea the building was this huge. A curving lane feeds each of two parking levels. The base of the building looks like a medieval fortress, strong and imposing.

At this point, I was kind of stuck. I'm thinking, "how am I going to get a look at the back of the building?" I got back into the car and continued in the same direction I was going. But I had to actually exit the entire office complex. My idea was to continue around the outside and keep making left turns until I got around to the other side of it. Before too long, I realized this wasn't going to work because I'd passed over a highway cutting off the building's grounds from where I was headed. I found myself in this really ritzy Connecticut neighborhood. The only way I would have been able to see American Can from there would have been to walk onto and through someone's property, which probably would have gotten me arrested. But the other thing is that the whole point of the siting of this building was that none of the neighboring residents would be able to see it. Very likely it's entirely concealed from view from any property nearby.

I retraced my route past the front of the building and instead went around to the west. This turned out to be another vehicular route to the back of the building which I should have tried first. I ended up not losing too much time. This was another astonishing discovery. A bridge crosses over the tip of the triangular pond formed by the building. This is what one sees from the bridge:

Unbelievable. And as monumental and majestic as that looks, the rear of the building, which I presumed to be the employees' entrance, is quite modestly scaled, especially the way it interacts with the landscaping.

Behind the main building is a much smaller one-story structure which evidently originally housed the executive offices. Here's where I got my first suspicious looks of the day for exploring the building. I got up close to the front doors, and was looking into the building at how a square courtyard was carved out of the middle of it, Bunshaft's signature. Eventually, I realized the receptionist was peering out at me with this snotty look on her face like, "and just what exactly do you think you're doing?"

It continues to baffle me how people can work every day in a building as gorgeous as this one and really not be able to grasp the concept that someone might want to look at it. It's a testament to the shameful fact that architecture is not legible to the vast majority of people. I might even venture to propose that most good architecture has greater potential to disappear from public sight than bad. When a building works, its users don't need to think about why it works. When a building is ugly, it's called an "eyesore." For something to make your eyes sore, you have to be seeing it. If the architecture causes you inconvenience by being awkwardly planned, you're aware of your interaction with the architecture. Helping make (good) architecture visible to those not indoctrinated in its forms is why I do what I do, on this blog and at work. These looks and the other reaction I describe below are exactly why it's so sorely needed.

I ignored the suspicious receptionist. You can see that the beams on this building have rather conspicuous hardware at the ends. I found this very strange, and I can only think they must be merely ornamental or they most certainly would have been necessary on the beams of the much larger building, which no doubt have a heftier structural job to do. That may have been precisely the point, though. Since this building is so much more petite, the needless strength of the beams and posts was already going to be conspicuous. Rather smart of Bunshaft to emphasize that even more.

The smaller building also gave me a better chance to get a nice close look at the details shared by both structures. The contrast between the relatively rough, muscular concrete engineering and the sleek, shiny black glass is really delightful.

Another thing I liked a lot was how a few of the rock outcroppings were (apparently) left where they were, and used to kind of punctuate the building in interesting ways. The larger of them worked very well with the smaller executive building behind it, emphasizing its diminutive size, this time in relationship to a natural element rather than an architectural one.

Another one interrupted a row a hedges lining the northeastern façade of the main building.

I was pretty much finished, and it was getting very close to the time I needed to head back home so as not to return the Zipcar late. My last stop was the beautifully landscaped employees' entrance, down a grand staircase to a terrace, which I believe was cantilevered over the pond.

When I got to the terrace, some tool in a dumpy brown t-shirt and a baseball cap was coming out the door. He sort of asked if I was headed into the building so he could hold the door for me (polite enough, but wait). I said "no, no, I'm fine, thanks." And went around into this little corner behind the entrance to get my last photo. When I turn back around, Dork is standing there glaring at me and says, "excuse me, what are you taking pictures of?" I said, "the building." "For what?" "I write an architecture blog." "Well, I work here and I can't let you do that. Yeah, you can't be taking pictures here."

Oh, yeah? And why not, Baseball Cap? It's a freaking movie studio now. It's not the FBI headquarters. Hell, it's not even a major international airport. What I should have said is, "oh, really? On whose authority will you 'not allow it?'" But I'm not generally a trouble-maker and the last thing I needed at that point was a spontaneous trip to the office of the building's head of security. I needed to get the car back.

I am called upon to forbid photography at work, too, but that's inside the buildings, where there are many very good reasons it can't be permitted. No one would even pretend to try to forbid it outside; it would be laughable. The best thing about Photo Policeman's little performance of being so very, very important is that I might have snapped another picture or two, but basically I had been there for around an hour and was already entirely finished taking photos. It was an unfortunately sour ending to a wonderful trip out of the city, too wonderful to be ruined by one person's delusions of grandeur.

And there you have Gordon Bunshaft's American Can Company Headquarters.

Deep Blue Watson

2011-06-03T16:54:00.005-04:00

Our next story is about my trip to yet another Saarinen building, his IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center (TJW, 1960) in Yorktown, New York. When I looked out my window that morning, Tuesday, I said to myself, "that there's picture-takin' weather," and reserved a Zipcar. Can you ever really have too much Eero Saarinen? I think not.

I got very lucky with this trip. Quite by accident, I stumbled onto a webpage that mentioned sort of in passing that the complex is not open to the general public. I called to check on that up front, and I'm glad I did. I was prepared to drive all the way up there and attempt to just waltz through the front gates when, in fact, one needs permission not only to enter, but also to take photographs.

I spoke to someone in communications who said she'd have to find someone to call me back and took my phone number. An hour or so later I got a call back from a person by the name of Darren McAuliffe. He said he'd be happy to help me, but that I would need to be chaperoned at all times while on the property. He later explained that since offices can be seen through the windows from the outside, this was an information security issue. There was definitely the risk that I could have come home with the ability to create the next computer capable of beating top-winning Jeopardy contestants.

Google Maps View

I bought a sandwich, picked up the car (a Mazda 3: accelerates energetically), and got on the road. I'll have to say, I really love Google Maps, but as far as driving directions go? It seriously sucks. It has all the wrong names for every highway and exit you're supposed to be taking. I did get a little lost at one point, but luckily I was able to find my way there eventually without too many U-turns. Getting onto the property was pretty breezy with permission up front.

I announced myself at the reception desk, asked for McAuliffe, and looked around a bit. From behind me, I heard, "Ryan?" When I turned around, there was this, like, sixteen-year-old kid standing there. It was McAuliffe. I'm kidding him. He's probably more like nineteen, and a summer intern there, but he was way younger than I was expecting. He was very nice and I enjoyed talking to him while we walked around. He said he's planning to study computer science and both his parents work at IBM, although his father at a different facility. He's interning with the communications department, he told me, because no matter how good your ideas are, if you can't communicate them to people, they won't go anywhere. I agree.

I asked him if he were from upstate New York. He said "no, I live about ten minutes from here." Rich kid. I'm thinking, "ummm, yeah, that's what I meant?" For me, if I can drive along a road for fifteen minutes and see nothing whatsoever besides trees, that's "upstate." Having lived in a suburb as densely packed as Nassau County, I just can't get my mind to think of someplace as rural as Yorktown as being a "suburb." But evidently "upstate New York" doesn't really exist, it's just anyplace north of where you are. Truthfully, he defined it as anything north of Albany.

As you can see, TJW is a huge arc curving from the east down around to the south. In the lobby, there was a really nice diagram of the offices that shows how the office floors are laid out, not in wheel spokes parallel to the outside edge of the curve, but arranged in sections with groups of interior walls parallel to one another separated by intermittent wedges.

I was happy to see a "building map" link on the TJW website, until I clicked it. There may as well be a hangman-game-style stick figure of me with a smiley face and an arrow saying "Ryan" pointing to it. Really not helpful.

I said since I'd come in from the north, we should head south. The northwestern façade, as you can see in the first photo above, is extremely monolithic and imposing. In fact, there are very few details to break up the monotony. One, of course, is the main entrance canopy, very sculptural and expressionistic in Saarinen's way, but hardly large enough to compete with the wide unforgiving glass expanse of the front façade. The stone piers supporting it are also quite sculptural, and a wonderfully rugged take on forms that recall the TWA Flight Center--appropriately so, considering this far more rural site.

Saarinen knew, of course, that the scale of the canopy would be dwarfed by the building mass, but there was no practical, weather-related reason for it to be larger than this. So to add to its formal impact, he extended the stone walls off to both sides, curved them back up again, and added sculptures like punctuation marks at each end. They're Seymour Lipton pieces, Argonaut I and II, from 1961.

I told McAuliffe we have a Seymour Lipton at Lincoln Center (Archangel), and he confessed that, if I wanted to know about the sculptures, I was talking to the wrong person. So I thought I'd share with him what I knew, although I feared I was boring him. Lipton trained as a dentist. He used a material called Monel as the backdrop for his sculptures. It's an alloy extremely resistant to corrosion, but it's very difficult to work with because it hardens instantly and can withstand extremely high temperatures. For this reason, it lent itself perfectly to Lipton's technique of spot-welding softer metals, usually bronze, onto the Monel to achieve his expressionistic textures. As I've said elsewhere, Lipton's work explores the contrast of positive and negative space, in the sense that he makes individual forms both positive and negative at the same time, by twisting them in, around, and through other forms. "Argonaut" was a great title for here. It's an ancient Greek group of explorers, a really bizarre octopus, a class of submarine from the late-1800s, and an obscure, high-luxury American automobile that supposedly attracted some press around the time these sculptures were being created.

He also told me he had considered going into architecture in college, but that the schools wanted to see actual drawings, and his skills with that are somewhat limited. I confessed that the reason I didn't go into it is because my math skills are similarly limited. With computer technology, I'm not sure either of those failings would be obstacles for us now. Oh, well.

The second thing I noticed interrupting the lines of the front is the cafeteria terrace. A beautiful place to eat lunch, it overlooks a valley of marshland that must remain untouched. [Bad IBM employees, leaving your trays and silverware out there on the tables.]

The only thing remaining to see on this end was a doorway and a little staircase which I can't really imagine anyone using all that often, aside from a computer scientist strolling around the grounds to mull over his or her next experiment in Artificial Intelligence.

At this end is just mechanical structures and a loading dock, no access to the back of the building (the inside of the arc), so we heading back in the other direction.

At the eastern end of the arc, I found one of the first truly exquisite details of this building. It's where the glass curtain wall wraps around the corner and then meets this strong, rugged stone.

The contrast of how powerfully monolithic the glass appears from the front, in comparison to how it seems to dematerialize in relationship to the stone is absolutely magical. There's also an amazing contrast between the obviously machined, prefabricated, industrial quality of the curtain wall and the obviously hand-masoned, natural look of the stone wall. I think this is the perfect analogy for what goes on inside the building, as well. The most sophisticated products of our rapidly-accelerating Information Age nonetheless produced by the thoughts and ideas of regular human beings. Does Modernist architecture get any better?

The inside of the arc is truly remarkable. I'm surprised that I'd never seen photos of it before (although, to be fair, I really need to get one of the monographs dedicated to Saarinen and read it cover to cover--I have a couple on my Amazon Wish List). It's a long, massive stone wall, wrapping around you like an embrace. It looks like a massive stone fortress, which McAuliffe remarked seems appropriate considering the secrecy of what happens inside it. It's lushly landscaped with a meandering path and picnic tables. I got the strange feeling that it's not really used all that much by employees sitting around having their lunches. I hope I'm wrong because it's a really pleasing space.

Window openings interrupt the length of it from the ground up to the full height of the wall. It's somehow more powerful than had Saarinen allowed the wall to frame the windows on four sides. It would have disturbed the apparent strength of the stone walls. Instead, the walls stand without perforations.

I didn't actually notice this until studying my photos at home, but there's one interesting moment where the stone masonry stops and starts again at a seam. I'm not sure if this was structural or not. If it was cosmetic, it's a very interesting way to call attention to the textures, and the stone also appears to change to a slightly darker color.

Bridges lead from the massive parking lot in the rear to the top floor of the building, with entrances also on the ground floor.

The second-to-southernmost bridge is entered by a vaguely Richard-Neutra-like pavilion at the parking lot and is enclosed in glass.

We took this bridge back into the building, which McAuliffe suggested would be better than walking all the way back around it.

I had seen the lobby from the ground floor, but I think I might actually have gasped when we entered it from above. It's breathtaking, and I told McAuliffe, such an incredible intersection of the 1950s and the 1960s. It's the combination of the rugged stone walls, rough-cut stone floors of the landing, and wood accents from the '50s with the graceful curves, stark black and white, but especially that super-glossy white from the '60s. Even had I not known when this was built, I probably could have guessed this was on the cusp of those two decades.

I love "THINK," and the suspended clocks are a great detail.

Opposite "THINK" is a bust of Thomas J. Watson, himself, by Jacques Lipchitz.

So there you have my visit to Saarinen's Watson Research Center. Much thanks to Darren McAuliffe for his time, his help, and his friendly conversation. I actually visited another incredible building on this same trip. But I'll let that be a surprise.

Jumble on the East Side

2011-05-25T08:34:00.012-04:00

Yesterday I had to take my laptop in to hopefully recover all the countless thousands of hours of music I've put on it over the past year or so after it decided to crash, and maybe repair it. I'd even thought a day earlier that I needed to back-up my music to my external hard-drive, but it's also being annoying lately. Please cross your fingers for me. I realized afterwards that I was in the neighborhood of a building I've been wanting to see and had the afternoon free to do so.

I asked the doorman of a high-rise apartment building, who was no help. Finally I realized I'd need to call Information for the address. I tried a wonky payphone that stole my 50 cents. I'm one of the last five people on the planet who doesn't own a cell phone. Sue me. I went into this tacky-ass accessories store that looked like it was selling bracelets for twelve-year-olds at the mall to ask for change for a dollar. The salesperson said no and was pretty much just nasty about it. She grumbled at me, "I can't open the register without a sale." "Oh, this sale is already finished?" I asked, pointing to the customer with her wallet out and poised to hand over money. "Yes." Mmhmm.

Next I tried this tea shop. The salesperson was more than happy to change my dollar for quarters. Since she was so helpful, I thought to just ask her if she'd ever spotted this foundation I was looking for. She hadn't, but offered to look it up for me on the computer. She also offered me a free sample of their spicy black tea, which was extremely delicious. As I told her, I'm much more of a coffee drinker, but I do enjoy a nice cup of tea now and then. The store was Kusmi Tea at Third Avenue and Sixty-First Street. I'm no connoisseur, but for the tea drinkers out there, I highly recommend it. The whole place smelled delicious and the tea was great.

So, business owners, here's how this works. Your employees treat people like crap, and you get called "tacky" and "nasty." Your salespeople are friendly, helpful, nice, and offer free samples, and you get a free plug on blogs like this one. Whether you buy tea leaves from them or not, definitely check out Kusmi Tea if you're in that neighborhood.

She found me the address.

First I just have to mention how bizarre this whole block is. First there's one of the most awkard, ugliest brownstones I've ever spotted in New York. How this disaster was ever allowed to remain standing in an uber-wealthy neighborhood like this I have no idea (one of the other, more conventional brownstones was being lusciously renovated in marble and mahogany as I passed by it). What were they thinking? It doesn't help that it's falling apart, but those bay windows look like an architect from 1930 traveled to 1970 and saw all the worst buildings on the planet to bring back in time.

Next to this is a building which, without knowing up front, I knew had to be Edward Durell Stone just by looking at it, and it is: 130 East Sixty-Fourth Street, "The Corcoran" (1956).

Then there's Martin Scorcese's house, which looks like a Tudor mansion squashed weirdly into the footprint of a New York City rowhouse.

Evidently Steven Spielberg and Zsa Zsa Gabor [LOL] both live on this block, also. [EDIT: My coworker informed me that Spielberg has since moved to a different building.] I'd LOVE to hear some of the impromptu conversations that arise on the way to the corner store around here.

There's the vaguely Georgian townhouse and all the regular but beautiful brownstones on this block, and then we find my intended destination, Philip Johnson's Asia House (1959).

It's such an exquisitely styled Modernist building. But what really impresses me is how Johnson was able to make Modernism feel Asian in some vague way. It's something about the white-painted window surrounds. It works so beautifully. It's something that hints at, say, a black lacquer box or cabinet. The interior of the New York State Theater has a kind of Asian sensibility to it that I also can't quite identify. Both buildings had sculptures by Yasuhide Kobashi: the State has the gold sculptures on the main stairs, Asia House had a piece called The Village, which was the largest terra cotta sculpture crafted since the Etruscan era. I've been trying to find out if the Asia Society still owns it (they've moved to the west side), but I've contacted them about seventeen times and have not been able to get an answer.

Asia House responds so beautifully to the light. The stark black and white of the façade changes its character in so many different ways. Much of the interior has been altered, from what I could tell, by the current owner, the Russell Sage Foundation, which conducts research in the social sciences. There is what looks like a delightful garden out the back end of the building. I was not permitted to go there. The receptionist was very nice, and talkative, but she wouldn't let me go anywhere. She gave me the contact information for their marketing person, but I'm not sure it's worth it to contact her. The furnishings they've chosen for their lobby look mostly like budget motel, so I wouldn't have much grander expectations for the upper floors. The main staircase would have seemed freshly sparse and minimal at the time, but now looks a bit pedestrian, having not been accented properly. In other words, they've chosen to decorate in a way that feels "homey" but it sabotages the interior architecture by making it look industrial in comparison.

Investing in the Past

2011-04-04T11:15:00.000-04:00

This time of year, I always get incredibly busy and think I'm going to lose my mind. I asked my manager at Lincoln Center if he's trying to kill me. He's not the homicidal type, but I do give him a hard time when I have the opportunity. Of course I still always give a kick ass tour, but spring is pretty hardcore. It's also been a bad year for road trips. We've had some beautiful, crystal clear, sunny days, but with the temperatures we've had this winter, the thought of walking around the rural/ suburban campus of some twentieth-century architectural masterpiece gives me psychosomatic frostbite just thinking about it.

But I'm not going to drop the ball, so here are some photos I got of the Manufacturer's Trust Company Bank Building (MTCB, 1954) by Gordon Bunshaft for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.

I did talk about this building in my post about Bunshaft long ago. I also mentioned it in comparison to their little bank at JFK. This is a remarkable building. It's already been put at great risk because the people who bought it wanted to gut it and turn it into some disgustingly lame retail store. As it is, they removed the Harry Bertoia screen that helped define the interior. But the good news is that the interior has gotten landmark status. It's very difficult to landmark an interior. I think that's a shame because I might even venture to say that interiors define our eras even better than the exteriors of buildings. They're very often more exuberant in their expression of style. I suspect the folks at DOCOMOMO were instrumental in the endeavor to get it landmarked and I applaud them, although I was unable to attend the hearing.

With MTCB, the exterior and interior are one and the same commodity. The very fact that the interior is so plainly visible from out on the street is exactly what makes this building so revolutionary. The way the bottom stories dematerialize make the volume of the top two floors hover as if by magic. That the mezzanine level floats above the ground floor is directly dependent on it being visibly distinct construction from the steel and glass curtain wall. The escalator lifting customers to the mezzanine not only amplified this sense of floating, but also cut through the raised slab in a delightfully modern, technological way. The ground floor has since been unfortunately chopped up.

I've discussed the bank vault elsewhere. It really is the most genius moment of this building. That it is in such prominent display to the street is its most revolutionary quality. It being the work of the legendary Industrial Designer, Henry Dreyfuss, makes it all the more valuable as the recipient of preservation and protection.

This building has so few defining moments and each one of them a singularly exquisite piece of twentieth-century artistry and design. To say that the interior deserves any less honor or recognition than the exterior is to completely misunderstand Bunshaft's monumental achievement here. I've heard it said that the three main buildings in Lincoln Center present a mostly glass façade to Robertson Plaza specifically because of the MTCB. Max Abramovitz' first drawings for Philharmonic (Avery Fisher) Hall show a striking resemblance to it (the drawing from 1958 that I have in my head didn't come up in a Google search). The MTCB was wildly influential in many ways, but remains sadly underrated, especially by the heartless, artless, undignified investors who buy and sell and destroy our culture, against our will and without remorse or accountability. An architecture professor I spoke to recently from California Polytechnic called it "remarkable," and he was taking his students to see it. Let us all hope the Bertoia screen gets returned and the new owners respect the glory of this twentieth-century work of art.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte.

The Revitalization Project

2011-03-17T11:58:00.005-04:00

The Changes

I'd like to take a post and talk a little about focus. This won't really inaugurate a change in direction for Architextures, but maybe rather a raising of awareness. I've had the great honor of associating with people who care about these things, and who care to talk to me about them. One major force has been the great friend of mine who showed me around Philadelphia, who's very intimately involved with issues of social justice. For sure little traces of it have crept into my posts over the years, but I think it's about time that I faced more of my responsibilities, universally speaking.

What I hope for the future of this blog is to gravitate more toward a conversation about the ways that topics of art, architecture, and design intersect with issues of the marginalization of certain groups in society. Architecture, most especially, has long been and continues to be a suspiciously white male profession. Why is that? How does that impact the way that our spaces define a certain prototype of interaction we have with the built environment? I think it's long past due that we start examining these things. Most certainly women and people of color have been thinking about it all along, but I'd like to enter the dialogue in as much as I remain able to recognize when to shut my mouth and just listen.

One thing I've noticed in my own work at Lincoln Center is that, almost across the board, when I even begin to touch on the topic of architecture, the eyes of young women I address begin to glaze over with boredom so strikingly more and so much more quickly than the young men. I've been overjoyed by the opportunity more recently, with the appearance of Liz Diller, to be able to use female pronouns. With all of the greatest respect to Ricardo Scofidio and Charles Renfro, the difference in the interest level amongst many of the young women I deal with when I use those female pronouns has been subtle but quite noticeable. I lament the fact that Davis, Brody & Associates had not yet welcomed in the late African-American architect Max Bond when they designed LC's Rose Building; there is a connection, but it's not nearly as direct and is more difficult to work into the story.

The Non-Profit

I want to discuss here the non-profit organization that has been brewing in my mind for many years now. The idea springs from two things. First, that many low-income neighborhoods have absolutely beautiful old architecture that its citizens are unprepared to appreciate (as most people are, actually, who aren't architects or artists), and have neither the resources nor, most importantly, the privilege to step back and fall in love with it. The other is that I have always felt that those who accurately, faithfully restore and protect the products of their cultural heritage--old cars, old houses, motorcycles, paintings--are involved in the most noble of pursuits. All of the greatest of our achievements as human beings might crumble into dust if not for the efforts of these people.

1014 East Hoffman

What I would love to do is to form an organization that could go into beautiful old urban neighborhoods, purchase houses for fair market price that are completely boarded up and dilapidated, and restore them to the glory of when they were first built, from around 1870 to 1920 or so. Keep in mind that the picture I have in my mind is this typical, five-story, red-brick row-house found especially in Philly, DC, and Maryland, in New Haven maybe with a prominent front porch, in the Bronx maybe built of brownstone, but it's a distinctly urban type of building. That's not to say that similar neighborhoods all over the country couldn't benefit from this kind of attention. For one thing, I myself have spotted countless Victorian farmhouses of immeasurable charm across the countryside with trees growing out the windows.

In looking for images for this post, I was surprised to discover one city that seems overwhelmingly plagued by this kind of unfortunate situation. Google searches time and again brought up examples from Baltimore. Maybe my having spent so much time there is the reason this imagery is so seared in my mind.

American Brew

You'd be hard-pressed to find a city whose architecture is as exquisitely beautiful as it is tragically neglected. Please don't misunderstand me, in no way do I believe that the people of that city are in any way to blame for the state of things. I'm absolutely certain that there are much deeper, systemic and economic causes far more complicated than I could hope to summarize here.

Catherine Street

Quite the contrary, it was in Baltimore that I found someone who appears to love the architecture of his city as much as I love the architecture in mine. I regret not being able to connect with someone like this from Cairo. Kevin Mueller said he isn't a professional photographer. In fact, he confessed =) to me that he's a Roman Catholic priest. But he has an incredible eye and has documented the city where he has lived for fifty-one years with such obvious love and respect. His images resonated most for me, I think, because he embarked on his journey to photograph Baltimore for reasons very similar to why I write this post, realizing so much about the city he loves was falling into disrepair and being lost forever. All the images in this post are of Baltimore and are the work and property of Kevin Mueller.

The Plan

To fund this project, I'd love to find people from these neighborhoods who have earned a crazy amount of money by their hard work, skills, and great talent. There are so many of them who triumphed over insurmountable poverty, and many of them are prominent faces in culture who might be smiled upon by a great many people for giving back to the communities that helped form them. Possibly as many as half of the wealthiest African-Americans turn out to be from Chicago or surrounding areas (and we all know the person at the top of the list is). I doubt it would be too difficult to start there.

1900 Block West North Avenue 3

Next, I'd like to recruit workers from the neighborhood where the buildings are located, maybe from within a few blocks, depending on the density of the neighborhood and potentially, hard-working people who've found themselves undeservedly out of a job. The best thing would be to bring in experts in accurate historical architectural restoration and train these workers in the skills needed to both reconstruct a building built from the 1890s (or whatever), but also give them a skill that will be entirely marketable in the workforce. This would not only give them a pride in the effort to revitalize their own neighborhood, but also the pride of a new skill gained for themselves. Great care could be taken to both recycle every building material and reclaim materials for subsequent projects to minimize waste and ultimately cut down on costs. These homes could be rebuilt in a way that not only celebrates their historical architectural integrity, but also makes them as self-sustaining and green as possible.

2400 Block Druid Hill Avenue

Though greenery is limited in these row-house neighborhoods, landscape is crucial, as well. It's the public presence that a home on streets like these present, the most crucial to the inherent social nature of the street. The porches and stoops made them so very vital and also safe from crime and mischief, and resistant to neglect and uninvited litter.

In terms of a bigger picture, I suspect that the appearance of one or two or three perfectly pristine houses and lawns with a few nice flowers on a forgotten street could do everything to encourage a sense of pride that other residents might see as a sort of call to competition that could revitalize the beauty of a block. In other words "we care about our block, maybe you should, too." I've seen neighborhoods in Brooklyn where the residents each take great pride in having the most beautiful, glorious flowers possible in front of their houses. That sense of competition has produced the greatest outpouring of beauty and care. The very care I believe--and maybe this is naive--encourages an upward spiral of respect for one's community. Anyone might toss a used soda can onto an overgrown, weed-riddled, badly-maintained brown lawn. Only a very ill-bred, badly raised individual--of which I think there are actually very few in any community--would do so to a nicely-kept, proudly-maintained yard of one of his or her neighbors. Self-respect begets respect from others.

2500 Hollins Street

Then, I'd like to find a family from the same neighborhood and offer them a residence of appropriate size for their needs in these newly remodeled homes at the same rent they're currently paying. Their monthly payments could be applied to a sort of mortgage in the same way. Perhaps community organization to assist with the move would grease the wheels a little. At first, of course, this would be a losing proposition, which is where conscientious investors would come in. But with enough units consistently earning rent and feeding into the system, eventually it would be enough to support the costs of each new building restoration.

At this point, newly restored houses could be traded evenly with neighboring homeowners, their broken down residence for this newly restored, pristine one (landlords need not apply, for obvious reasons). Their old home could become the subject of the next restoration, and so on.

710 East 21st Street

The point would be, though, to not encourage a bunch of yuppie, white, middle-class folks to take over the neighborhood and yet again force people of color or lower-income residents to relocate elsewhere, but to leave it in the hands of those who have molded those neighborhoods in the first place. Allow them to regain the pride in their space that they deserve and make it theirs.

The Case Study

I found one block in Baltimore to be particularly haunting: Perlman Place. I stared at these photos for a very long time and couldn't seem to get the imagery out of my head. House after house after house, just...dead.

Perlman Place 16

Patterson Park Avenue 2

First a few basics. Perlman is one block running north to south between Sinclair Lane and East North Avenue. An around one-hundred-foot snippet continues on the other side of E. N. Ave, but the avenue is a rather large barrier, so Perlman is effectively only a single block long. To the west, North Collington Avenue runs parallel to Perlman with an alley in between, to the east, North Patterson Park Avenue with an alley between. At the Sinclair Ave. end is the active Laurence G. Paquin public school which, oddly, appears to accommodate students from pre-kindergarten to twelfth grade. There's a huge high school to the north of Paquin, and what appears to be a public pool to its west. This means that these houses were perfect for families on the one hand, and that Perlman should have been teeming with vibrant street life on the other.

I use the past tense because pretty much the entire block has been razed since these photos were taken. Residents of the area were understandably uncomfortable with the idea of school-age kids walking up and down this ghostly street every day with potential hazards on the street and lurking inside the buildings. My solutions for Perlman Place, therefore, will forever remain a lost opportunity. Nevertheless, I think they could be applied to plenty of other similar streets.

Perlman Place 17

If it weren't for the fact that this one block is so long, I'd suggest banning vehicular traffic altogether. As it is, dropping off passengers and larger items to all these buildings exclusively through the alleys would be unrealistic. In any case, I would ban parking (not stopping) on Perlman completely and be sure to allow for ample parking opportunities on the alleys, particularly for the residents and the occasional visitor. If long stretches of the buildings' rooftops were converted to accessible gardens and terraces, the loss of a few backyards for parking would be less troublesome. I'd also make Perlman a one-way street if it weren't already, repave it, and install speed bumps at regular intervals. If the street were not already so narrow, I'd widen the sidewalks (although maybe a foot or two could be gained), but the rather narrow sidewalks would be less problematic anyway if vehicles were drastically impeded. For sure I'd repave the sidewalks, perhaps even with patterned brick, install benches, trees, plantings, and more ample and attractive lighting fixtures. Some of the more attractive flowering plants that have naturally taken root there--and are therefore relatively indigenous and hearty--could simply be replanted in better spots. If there isn't already a bus stop at the end of this block, I'd petition the city to add one until I lost my mind.

Next, N. Collington is interrupted by two cross streets, Cliftwood Avenue and East 20th Street. I'd do everything possible to demolish the buildings on Collington, Perlman, and Patterson Park on axis with these two streets (perhaps offering those tenants/building owners newly restored homes in return), and create nice landscaped pedestrian pathways through the blocks west-to-east. This way, pedestrians coming from every possible direction would have reason to use Perlman, rather than it being this long, isolated stretch of street. Openings for large windows or doors would be broken through all the now-exposed party-walls to look out onto the pedestrian walkways, and residents adjacent would be encouraged to keep all views unobstructed by trees or bushes in order to discourage mischief. The pathways would also make parking on the alleyways more realistically accessible.

Perlman Place 14

As for the buildings themselves, I don't believe I have some superhuman powers of imagination that are allowing me to see just how wonderful and charming these little houses were when pristine. Looking at various views, you can take a remaining door pediment from one, the frieze from another, and the cornice from yet another and piece them back together again fairly easily, in my opinion. And please use your imagination to remove that horrid fake stone facing. Why anyone would cover such lovely red brick with fake stone made out of plastic or whatever the hell that is, I have no idea, but I suspect the 1960s are to blame. But look at the first floor window. It's huge. It must be practically the entire floor-to-ceiling height of the front room. Imagine beautiful multi-paned double-hinged windows opening up to the fresh air and sunshine, curtains blowing in a soft spring breeze, flowers in a box attached to the sill underneath.

Patterson Park Avenue 1

I'd like to create a multitude of variety here. While the architecture of Perlman might seem a little bland or monotonous compared to the exuberance of some of Baltimore's other streets, its uniformity actually allows for a great deal more possibilities. The ground floors of all the corner buildings--including on the pedestrian pathways--and a couple in the middle of the block would be dedicated to businesses. Little stores of different kinds, a laundry, grocery, internet cafe, maybe a small pharmacy, day-care center, ice-cream parlor, newsstand, a restaurant or two. For a larger business like a restaurant, the ground floor of two adjacent buildings could be combined to create one large space. In those buildings with ground-floor businesses, second floor apartments would be entered through the back from the alleyway. This would also add more pedestrian activity to the alley making it busier and therefore safer. They could be studio apartments, or the second floor of two adjacent buildings could be combined together. Two entire houses could also be combined without any businesses to create double-sized homes. All in all, a diverse street for people with various different incomes and households of many different sizes.

I'd love to think that the businesses could all be co-ops, operated and staffed by residents of the neighborhood. This would accomplish so many different things. Mostly it would fully glue the community together. They could be social gathering spaces where many different interactions could take place. Because space would be rather limited in the storefronts, it would allow them to stock exactly what people in the community want and need without waste, and would ensure that residents had no reason to drive to some big generic store across town. Dollars would stay inside the community. Residents could work full time or share shifts with their neighbors to add a little income to that from an outside job. Retirees with unsurpassed skills in the kitchen could work a couple of days at the restaurants, staying active and making sure the younger folks are eating right. Plus, I've met a few grandmothers in my day who wouldn't let a teenager get away with any nonsense whatsoever. You know the grandmothers I mean.

With all the businesses, this could have great educational benefits as well. The high school kids could learn how to manage a small business, bake a perfect cake from scratch, or make some extra cash watching kids at the day-care center, which they might have had to do for free for their younger siblings after school, anyway. I suspect they'd be less disgruntled to work, for instance, at the internet cafe on the block than they might elsewhere, because they'd essentially be getting paid to hang out where all their friends and neighbors are. Even something requiring more qualifications, like pharmacy or dentistry could be combined with a local community college program to offer training to the neighborhood's young adults, earning them valuable credits.

The Disclaimers

Eventually it would be nice to just pass the non-profit over entirely to a person (of color) who has lived in a neighborhood like these, so the whole organization could be by and for the benefit of the people affected and not me, a relatively fortunate white guy. As a white man living in America, I fear I may be stepping over a line in discussing this at all. To sort of paraphrase things Tim Wise has said, people of color have done just fine without my help for centuries and made remarkable achievements in a culture of oppression and will continue to do so without me. At the same time, it goes without saying that much damage has been done over that time in the interests of further marginalizing certain groups of people. So I don't see this as "charity" but rather doing what is Right to make this the world that I would like to live in: a world where people help one another, regardless of their differences.

I think I do know a few people who would be eager to help with an endeavor like this. They're the people who I respect the most in my universe. But if anyone else reading this has anything else to offer, please do comment. I'm not convinced that I'm strong enough to undertake it, and certainly not alone, but I would love to make it a reality.

In thanks to Kevin Mueller for the use of his photographs, here are some of his own favorites.

Poplar Grove from the North

Fulton Avenue 4

His favorite building in Baltimore, he told me, is the Baltimore Trust Building (1929, now Bank of America) by Taylor & Fisher.

Fulton Street 7

For the People of Egypt

2011-02-22T19:50:00.004-05:00

When I saw the New York Times headline staring at me from the computer screen the morning of Saturday the 12th, my heart was immediately filled with joy. Partly, I think, it was because Mubarak's response only a day earlier was so incredibly frustrating and disappointing that his sudden reversal was all the more remarkable. At the same time, I'm not Egyptian, nor have I had the pleasure to visit your country (yet). These events are unlikely to affect my life in any direct way. So I was somewhat confused as to why I would be so deeply affected by the news that he had finally obeyed the wishes of the Egyptian people.

I believe I can explain it in a few different ways. On some universal human level, your bravery, perseverance, and passion was incredibly inspiring. I thank you for that. I also know how it feels--to a much lesser degree, to be sure--to despise the person running my country without my consent and seemingly without any power to change it (the one before Obama). Maybe most importantly, my country was founded on a revolution that freed us from our tyrants. Perhaps as an American, I have a somehow ingrained reverence for revolution. I'm filled with joy at the idea that ordinary women and men like myself might triumph in such a righteous and promising victory because of their strength of character. Cairo is named just right: "Victorious." My warmest congratulations to you.

Clearly, I wasn't the only one to be inspired by these events. They've had repercussions in countries across the globe. Let's hope the military does right by the citizens it's charged with protecting.

In your honor, I'd like talk a bit about the architecture of Egypt. I think more than enough lip service has been paid to the great monuments over the years. It would almost seem redundant to bother. What more could I say about the pyramids that hasn't already been said or that archeologists with four PhDs and decades spent studying them are still searching to say? This is a moment in history about the future of Egypt. Uncovering noteworthy newer buildings from all the rivers of information about Egypt's ancient past proved somewhat difficult. I did seek out the assistance of some of Cairo's prominent professors of architecture who might be able to give me some advice, but unfortunately I got no responses. Perhaps this post will invite some comments with other great new buildings.

The first one exists and though not in Cairo, is entirely deserving of praise. I still remember reading about it when it first opened in 2002 and I think it remains a remarkable building, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina by Snøhetta.

Photo courtesy TripShake.

This and following photo courtesy Aga Khan Award.

What makes this such a great building is that it does employ interesting symbolism for a monument to education and learning, but it never descends into obvious clichés. It makes due nods to ancient history, but without resort to insipid decorative frills.

The inside of the main reading room is truly spectacular. Complex and fascinating geometries frame a great expanse of tiers. While an indubitably modern structure, it has every bit of the sense of monumentality that this building deserves.

More recently are two buildings on the American University of Cairo campus that I think are remarkable: first, the University Library by Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer (2008, the firm has since split in three, by the way).

Even more impressive, I think, is the Campus Center by Legorreta + Legorreta (2009) right next door.

Photo courtesy xinecj.

Both of these projects would appear to mesh nicely into the architectural fabric of Cairo, but without really copying anything specific, which would feel cheap. This is great new architecture in my opinion. Perhaps it's a bit of cheating for an American (me) to praise the American University. These projects were clearly inspired, contextually appropriately, by the regional architecture where they stand. The real compliment then, in my view, is that Egypt's architectural character has the power to inspire even great new, modern work.

For me, the most exciting things are the two projects proposed by Zaha Hadid. Let it be known that the USA has only one building by this genius, and my city, New York, has nothing. Granted, we do have two Gehry buildings, one by Thom Mayne of Morphosis, and of course many of the masters of twentieth-century modernism, but Hadid has alluded us so far. I suspect that New York is too difficult a place these days to build really astonishing buildings, counter to what you might think (hence the infuriating opposition faced by Jean Nouvel on 53rd Street). But you, Cairo, may potentially get two of them. I'll have to admit, I'm very, very jealous.

The first is Stone Towers.

Image courtesy Bustler.

This is not just the future of Egypt or the future of architecture, this is the future of human culture. On the one hand, the fact that she is a fellow Arab is a testament to the greatness of your culture, not only in ages past, but in the ages to come. The fact that she is a woman, I believe (as a Feminist) proves that the freedom earned by all Egyptians that day in Tahrir Square--by and for males and females alike--could usher in a new era, a cultural revolution to match the political one you've achieved.

Even more exciting for me is Expo City. Hadid outdid herself. It's entirely astonishing work.

The world had never seen anything like the Pyramids before or since. The world will stand in awe of this, also, its beauty, its technology, its artistry, its futurism, its innovation, its impeccable style.

Image courtesy Future is Now.

We've entered the era where computer technology has freed architecture once and for all from the confines of rigid rectilinearity. To an extent never possible before, architects can explore a personal, sculptural expression with considerably less of the restrictions of engineering and construction technologies once thought insurmountable. Hadid, more than most, has used these new tools to create great works of art and creativity. I think it's an apt metaphor for what Egypt might accomplish culturally, freed of the confines of a corrupt and tyrannical leader. I'm sure many considered that insurmountable, but we all saw that it was not. Tomorrow is a new day and with it comes hope and promise. We should all be thankful and make the most of it.

Yours,
Ryan Witte

Here, Loeb

2011-01-07T18:46:00.006-05:00

I suppose it may seem as if I'm on a Harrison & Abramovitz kick lately. It's true that, like I said, I've been trying to see all the buildings by Lincoln Center's architects in the tri-state area that I can. But really it was just by chance that I got around to seeing this one. It's directly adjacent to Kips Bay Plaza, so I figured the day I went there would be a great opportunity to see this one.

I asked the DOCOMOMO folks if they knew where it was, because I had tried to look it up myself and it was surprisingly difficult to figure it out. Much like Philip Johnson's East Wing of the MoMA, this building is not as much on the radar of works by H&A in New York. In fact, I'm not even sure I could tell you how I knew it was there. I feel like someone mentioned it to me at some point, but I have no idea why it would have come up. It's small, for one thing, and it's also sort of hidden in the huge complex of NYU's Langone Medical Center. I just got the Victoria Newhouse book about Harrison in the mail. I had read most of it back when I worked at Rockefeller Center, but I never owned a copy myself. I'm very much looking forward to reading it cover-to-cover. It barely mentions this building at all.

Built in 1957, stylistically, it's sort of halfway between the United Nations and the Metropolitan Opera House. It was originally called the Loeb Student Center and is now evidently called Alumni Hall.

Yes, I know the United Nations includes a roster of architects far greater than Wallace Harrison, but there are some similarities that can't be ignored that I'll get to below. It's a wonderful modestly-sized mid-century building--in fact, not much larger than a very large house. Fortunately, since I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, as soon as I walked into the hospital's front lobby, it was immediately obvious that this was the work of H&A.

Newhouse attributes this solely to Abramovitz. I'm quite sure the author knew what she was talking about. I'm just always a bit reluctant to attribute the work of a firm to any one, single practitioner in it. It may very well have been predominantly his responsibility, but the idea that Abramovitz created this building start to finish without even the slightest input from Harrison just doesn't fly with me, somehow. We do say the same about Avery Fisher Hall, myself for the sake of simplicity more than anything, but to me that's even less plausible because it was so much larger of a project. Granted, Harrison was probably busy pulling out his last remaining hairs trying to deal with Rudolph Bing, the Met's General Manager at the time, and was happy to leave the majority of Fisher (and this little project) in Abramovitz' hands.

Like the United Nations tower, Alumni Hall has two transparent (long) walls and two solid (short) walls.

I'm going to ignore the large window on the north wall for the time being. I don't believe the masonry wall is supporting much, which I'll also get to below, but it gives this building and the others like it by them an extremely primary form. It's as if the entire structure is nothing more than two posts and a beam, stretched out deep enough to form an enclosure. It's simple, but in the best and most straightforward possible way. By separating them so sharply, it also amplifies the two aspects of building, one as old as architecture itself--the masonry wall--the other not much more than a generation old--the steel and glass curtain wall.

It's nice to see the window mullions at this early stage, also. They're not quite as evolved as they would become in later projects. But they still beg questions. Why bother to include them at all? They're obviously not supporting much more than perhaps the glass itself; you can see the columns supporting the roof right inside the window line--also the reason the masonry end walls don't exactly work as posts. And why have the mullions protruding outward? Most buildings using this technology did their best to emphasize the shiny sleekness of the glass in perfectly flat planes (as with Lever House). And one might be inclined to suggest it would be appropriate here to conceal the mullions, to create further contrast with the masonry. One might even use rusticated stone instead of brick to take this to the next level, but that was Richard Neutra's business, here I think they were going for something a little different.

The mullions accomplish the same thing here that they do at Greene Hall, but in a more polar way. On one axis, the building is wide open, from the other, it reads as a solid block. Also similar here is how the prominent mullions emphasize the verticality of a building only two stories high, quite short.

They also employed the same strategy that Eero Saarinen would with the CBS Headquarters, "Black Rock." Instead of lowering Alumni Hall down below grade like Saarinen, H&A built up the surrounding ground a few steps. The effect is the same, though, that the base of the building is concealed from view. You don't notice where it starts, just where it goes, that is, up. I'll have to admit I think the lion statues are completely bizarre. They seem utterly out of place and I really can't imagine H&A specifying them, especially considering how much great works of Modern Art they used in other projects.

So let's go back to that window on the north wall. First of all, why is there a window there at all? It seems like it's deadening the impact of solid versus transparent that they appear to be exploiting in the building overall.

But there's something purposeful about it. It's not just a bare opening of glass in an otherwise solid brick wall. Its frame is fairly thin, but the fact remains that it does have a frame. Although very minimal, the window frame is a conspicuous bit of ornamentation on an otherwise modern building. Clearly, this window was intended to accomplish something specific. It was given weight.

The other thing about it is where it's located. The location of this window on that wall is almost...strange. One might easily guess that it opens onto the second floor, but even that isn't exactly clear, especially considering that the lobby space around to the right is full-height. Beyond that, it seems to defy its nature as a window, because it doesn't give any indication of having a relationship to the interior of the building, what windows are generally supposed to do. In other words, it's not really large enough or in the right proportions to allow you to see much of the interior. It's not one of a regular pattern of bays next to it. It isn't paired with an identical window on the first floor directly below it. It feels very alone somehow, but at the same time, it's just large enough to be sufficient by itself on that wall. In fact, one might argue that this wall didn't want any more windows.

By having some weight but not accomplishing the things that windows normally do on the exterior of a building, this window becomes a purely compositional element on the façade. It becomes a purely architectural gesture in the design of the building. I see some parallels with the prominent balconies of Greene Hall, and if I wanted to extrapolate, I might suggest that the entire arched portico of the Metropolitan Opera is an evolution of this same idea, coerced into shape by the exigencies of the Lincoln Center campus.

The interiors of Alumni Hall I found really quite lovely in a pared-down 1950s sort of way. The floating staircases mirroring each other at either end and the overhanging balcony are elegant in their simplicity. The formality of their arrangement is pleasing in response to their diminutive size.

The palette of materials is also vibrant yet restrained, and has a luxurious feeling without being overly formal. The wood paneling framed in aluminum looks strikingly contemporary to me. I also think mosaic was a fantastic choice that gives the wall surface a tactile, hand-crafted sort of texture, offsetting perhaps the other cold, hard surfaces.

And there you have my visit to Alumni Hall. Another H&A project down, many more to go.

Contrary Wise

2011-01-03T16:44:00.015-05:00

Happy New Year everyone! To ring in 2011, I'm going to discuss something outside of New York. I didn't end up spending New Year's here, but instead I went down to Philadelphia to hang out with my good friend, Kathrin. On the train I realized I was headed in the right direction. The trains headed toward New York at 5PM on New Year's Eve have to be the most irritating experience on the planet, I'm guessing. A tin can stuffed with loud, drunken fools running up and down the aisles, shouting and barfing everywhere. No, thanks! The train I was on was practically empty and quite pleasant.

New Year's Day we went on a little adventure to see some buildings. I'm very grateful since Kathrin's main area of interest isn't architecture, but we were able to find things that we were each interested in seeing for different reasons. I'll have to say that I was quite impressed by Philadelphia's twentieth-century architecture. On my previous trip, I ended up seeing a lot of the older historic buildings, which of course are wonderful. But this time, hanging out with someone who's lived there, I saw a lot of things I probably wouldn't have as a tourist.

Perhaps I'll discuss the other things we saw a in a separate post. This post I'd like to dedicate to one of the most important buildings in Philadelphia, arguably one of the greatest works of Postmodernism on the entire east coast, and probably the most important thing built in Philly by Venturi, Scott, Brown & Associates (VSBA). It's Guild House.

There are a number of different years of completion to be found, but VSBA says 1966, and they ought to know. I told my friend she was probably going to laugh when she saw it and think to herself, "THIS is the building you wanted to see???" At first glance, it looks extremely ordinary. At second glance, it looks downright mediocre. And of course, that was the whole point. There's so much more to this building than I realized before seeing it in person.

Dominating the front façade is obviously the sign, announcing what this building is, like a giant Pop advertisement. While I was taking that first picture, Kathrin was talking to the receptionist, who said it's a historic landmark, which I was very happy to hear. Actually, the entire central section is a sign or, more properly speaking, a group of signs. But what I mean is how VSBA makes this a "decorated shed."

The white brick at the bottom is quite clearly only one brick deep and stops at the first corner instead of continuing around the building. So already you have the sensation that this wall has been slapped onto the front of the building.

This is then contrasted at the top, where a very thin stripe of white bricks, starting one brick behind the front wall, wraps around the sides of the building. Notice, too, that although the windows are a number of different shapes and sizes, every single one of them breaks the white stripe. In other words, that white stripe isn't located in between floors where it would remain unbroken, but is allowed the complexity (grin) of discontinuity. As for the many different types of windows, I have complained previously about the "too many windows" problem as you'd normally see it in McMansion architecture. What VSBA does, though, is use that variety with purpose, to give the building rhythm and intrigue.

There are also breaks in the masonry forming recessed lines that appear to demarcate the individual floors. This may be the case, but it also forces the impression that the windows are positioned right up at the ceiling on the interior, with no room for even a window frame. This happens again with the main window on the front, which I'll get to below.

Back to the front wall, at that first corner, you can see that the wall extends upward--needlessly--above the roof line. If all of the walls are higher than the actually roof plane to control the drainage of water or whatever, this one is clearly higher. It's thicker than a single brick deep, likely for structural reasons, but yet again, the planar quality of the wall is being emphasized. And if that weren't enough, slots have been cut out at the top corners, so that you can actually see the shallow depth of this wall, even from directly in front of the building.

The other great thing about this building, which my friend and I spoke about a little bit, is how beautifully awkward the whole thing is. I was really quite disturbed that the enormous television antenna is no longer there, smack in the middle of the top of the front façade. You can see a sort of pipe or something sticking up where it should be. Guild House was, and is, senior housing, now operated by Friends' Housing for the Elderly. The large room behind that arched window is the common area, lounge, recreation room, whatever they call it. What VSBA was saying, basically, is that all elderly people do is sit around and watch television all day long. The antenna was completely irreverent, very funny, and somewhat controversial, which is probably why it was taken down. Only a firm like this one would ever dare do something like that, and I think they proved their genius with that one very small gesture. For very similar reasons, they also composed the posts of the chain link fence in the front, which I wish I'd noticed at the time.

In my opinion, in the interests of preserving the architectural integrity, I think they should have DirecTV come in and install a big, fat satellite dish right on that spot. In fact, with recognizable hardware up there, they'd probably give Guild House free installation and satellite service indefinitely. "It would be so unattractive," my friend said. But that's exactly what VSBA was doing, taking something completely ordinary and using it as ornamentation, every bit as much as Andy Warhol was taking ordinary objects and images and making them "Art." Evidently VSBA came in and completely renovated Guild House in 2008. I'm very surprised they didn't try to do something about the missing antenna.

But the awkwardness remains with that window despite the removal of the antenna above it. The first thing to notice, and VSBA did this a lot, is that it slips right up under the top edge of the wall like the windows on the side wings. It's way too close for comfort to the top of the building. This makes the slots on either side even more brilliant, because it totally contradicts them (grin). Obviously it's not open behind the full width of this wall, you can see right into that window that there's an interior space there. In a sense, the building is "lying" to you, something I discussed earlier about the brilliance of VSBA. The slots are telling you there's nothing behind the top few feet of that wall, the window is telling you the opposite.

Structurally speaking, this gets even more interesting. The arch, historically, is a structural form. That was its principal function. But although it's in the shape of an arch, this window opening is quite clearly not even supporting itself, because there's a pillar right in the center of it (obscured by the window dressings). Then, because the window is so large, you can see into it and see the three support columns in the space behind it, extending up from the balcony framing. The load being carried out to the ends of the arch is also obviously being supported in some other way, because directly underneath the arch, on the floors below, is a window bay. The whole structural purpose of the arch is completely canceled out.

The main entrance is equally as awkward, for sort of opposite reasons.

There didn't really need to be a column there, we've all seen much larger cantilevers than that tiny little balcony. But okay, there's a column. So you have the central spine and the first floor balcony hanging out over the entrance. To increase the impact of this, the group of balconies all the way to the top is framed by a big sectioned box, in different colors and materials, to give it added visual weight. Possibly the column is truly supporting all of that above it. But the column is gigantic, far, far bigger than it would ever need to be to hold up the front of the building, and it appears to be a solid block of granite. Clearly the doors are positioned on either side of it, but still, you can't just walk straight into the building. Instead you have to walk around that column. You have to physically engage with the architecture of the building in order to enter it.

And there's more. The column is lying, also, and it's quite obvious about it. The front half of the granite cylinder is sticking out from the front wall plane. That half of the column therefore can't possibly be serving any structural function. If that weren't clear enough, in another delightful little detail, the top of the column is stepped up at the back where the balcony rests on it, further emphasizing its being divided in two halves. In one perfect, cylindrical shape, the column has two distinctly different natures. In a sense, I think this might be quite a bit less transcendent had the column been fluted. Fluting would have been visually distracting from the purity of this. At the back--if it is, in fact, supporting anything, and that's debatable--it is what a column is supposed to be, structural support. At the front, it's a sculpture of a column. It's merely the architectural symbol, "column," divorced from function, what I elsewhere called an "architeme." It accomplishes exactly the same thing as the arched window; it makes architecture into a visual language.

Behind the column, the slanting white brick walls are in complete contradiction with the outer edges of the front façade. At the edges, as pointed out above, the white brick reads as a single flat plane, whereas the angled walls leading to the doors make the center of the building read as three-dimensional volumes. These slanted walls also cut out under the ends of the balconies on either side, providing no support at all, despite the fact that the columns visible inside the window at the top are significant precisely because they appear to be adding the needed support that the arch has been rendered unable to provide.

If I weren't already a huge fan of VSBA and absolutely certain of their genius in so many ways, I definitely would be after seeing this building with my own eyes. The singular focus of their vision and the way that very similar and primary contradictions are expressed in such a wide variety of different architectural statements reminds me of what I was able to say about Hans Hofmann and Barnett Newman. I think it's entirely worth noting that this building is more or less concurrent with some of the best work by those two painters. If a little later, then at least we must allow for the fact that a building is a much bigger commitment than a painting.

More from Philadelphia to come.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte

X-Mas Presence

2010-12-25T09:53:00.002-05:00

This isn't all that appropriate for this blog, but I suppose it's still "visual." For any of you who happen to live in other parts of the world, here in America on this day every year we celebrate what's called "Christmas." Around 2000 years ago, a man named "Santa Claus" was born. He's also gone by the name "Chris Cringle," hence the holiday, "Christmas."

To celebrate Christmas in America, we start about two months earlier. We spend those months listening to the same twenty or twenty-five songs over and over and over again on all our radio stations and in stores and in elevators and everywhere that music is played.

There's also a sort of pre-Christmas holiday called Black Friday. Since we Americans love to shop, we celebrate Black Friday by waiting on lines starting around 5AM and aggressively waddling our morbidly obese selves into stores like Walmart, starting riots, and beating people to death in a competition to see who can buy the most stuff. The people who leave the store having maimed the most other shoppers and forced the most sought-after products out of their bloodied hands are said to be "Christmas Winners."

For the next month after that, we spend the entire time mocking the poverty and strife of people in other parts of the world by whining and begging and harassing our loved-ones about all the many, many gadgets and toys and baubles and products we don't have and need to have, most of them useless and disgustingly overpriced. American children learn this skill very early and are quite good at it.

Then on Christmas, Santa Claus--or perhaps it's the ghost of Santa--on a single night mind you, visits all of the approximately two billion homes of people who "believe" in him, enters their houses, and leaves gifts behind. The next morning Americans celebrate a festival of greed and consumption where they ravenously tear open every present in sight, creating millions of tons of garbage in the process that our country has no idea what to do with, and grumble to themselves about how the gifts were not precisely what they wanted, despite the fact that millions of people starve to death on this planet every year. It's a wonderful, wonderful time.

So I have gifts for my loved ones!

I actually think that I enjoy wrapping the presents more than I like choosing them. I used to sometimes make gifts for people, create paintings for them and other hand-made things. But who has the time for that anymore? Buying the gifts takes thought, to be sure, if you don't want to get the person something they'll hate. But the gift is something someone else made, probably in China somewhere, although my gifts were a little bit more local this year. So wrapping them is how I get creative. It's a lot of fun. In years past, I've not had any sort of concept. I just tried to have the most beautifully-wrapped gifts under the tree. This year, I had a theme.

Ugliest Presents Ever.

I'll have to tell you, wrapping a present badly is not as easy as it sounds. Wrapping paper, ribbon, bows, everything is pretty much designed so that you can easily wrap a gift and have it look relatively good. We all know the techniques for folding paper around a box properly, like we know how to make a bed with hospital corners. Trying to do it wrong just seems to defy all common sense.

Anyway, I wanted to show my horrible wrappings this year. I think they came out perfectly awful and I was totally cracking myself up with this. I love them. I think they're hilarious. I probably should have looked around for some tackier, more obnoxious wrapping paper, but this one was pretty cheesy.

Next year I'm thinking maybe I should have an Ugly Present Wrapping Contest. With two winners, so each winner gets the ugly present of the other winner as a prize. Of course, I'd probably get only one contestant and then the whole thing would be a bust.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

Love,
Ryan