Dis Connecticut--Part Three

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.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte.

Bodies at Rest

I don't normally discuss the performing arts here. I suppose I have too many interests; I just love all the arts. The diversity of topics is what keeps this blog interesting for me, keeps me posting to it, but I guess I figure I have to limit it at least somewhat or...what wouldn't I be discussing on it?

Still, I feel the need to pay my respects to Merce Cunningham. The best connection I can make is I believe dance to be sculpture in motion.

--Photo courtesy New York Times.

Truly he was one of the greatest figures in the entire history of dance. But most pertinently, he was a terribly important thread in a grand web of people, many of whom I would never hesitate to discuss here. Mostly through association with Black Mountain College--an institution that fascinates me every bit as much as the Bauhaus--his circle included some of the greatest luminaries of creative thought of the entire century. John Cage, first of all, whose 4'33" is arguably the most important piece of music ever composed; Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, Philip Johnson onto Mies van der Rohe and presumably countless other great minds who met for afternoon tea at the Glass House; by Cage through Richard Lippold to Walter Gropius; Buckminster Fuller, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, the Immortal Brian Eno. And all of them on top of Graham, Tharp, Robbins, Balanchine, Baryshnikov, and all the other obvious cast members.

I'm tempted to wonder if the New York scene will ever be like that again. In his own way he was a crucial hub in that vast network.

It almost seems a little spooky to me that Cunningham had only so recently settled his estate. Loved ones had in his last few days had the chance to visit and bid him farewell. Clearly he knew the end was near. He was still choreographing, at least in his mind.

For me, from a linguistic vantage point, I've often been fascinated by the way dance is notated, particularly where it might concern Rudolf Laban, who I'd love to read if his out-of-print writings weren't $400 a used copy--I'll just have to suck it up and visit the library. It's probably the most fleeting and ethereal of all the art forms. So I was quite fascinated by a trial version of DanceForms, the choreography software Cunningham helped to develop. I played around with it for a short while to get a handle on how it works, but I've got way too many other things to worry about to create a revolution in dance at this point. I've got a lot of it in my head, though. Like I said: too many interests.

The creative world has lost one of its brightest stars. I do hope there will be Cunningham retrospectives from all the great dance companies in the coming year.

Merce Cunningham

1919-2009

R.I.P.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Re-Installation

I recently had the great opportunity to talk with the head of the Richard Lippold Foundation, who is restoring the brilliant sculpture in Walter Gropius' Pan Am Building.  I wasn't sure if it was even still there, but he said they would remove it "over his dead body."  It's really an incredible piece, and what occurred to me is that Lippold was really doing Installation Art before there even was such a thing.  Lippold's pieces weren't sculptures created for a certain application, they were fully determined by and designed around the architectural spaces where they would be placed.  No one was doing work like this in the 1950s.

The Pan Am piece is occasionally rumored to have started out titled The World, but this is incorrect.  It was only ever known as Flight, and it's beautiful, but it's gotten extremely dusty over the years.  The golden sphere at its center got fully blackened by patina and environmental circumstances in as little as five years.  They're meticulously cleaning it up to restore it to its glorious original beauty, and hopefully improving the lighting to showcase it to its best advantage.

His The Sun was the first piece by a living artist ever commissioned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1956.

 

When you look at it in the context of the ancient Middle-Eastern rug designs in the room where it was intended to hang, it appears to be even more brilliant: capturing the same geometric precision and complexity, but in three dimensions.  

In around 1976, it was taken down to the National Air & Space Museum in DC, where I'm fairly certain I may have seen it as a young kid.  I do distinctly remember visiting that museum, but I was probably so overwhelmed in general that I have no specific memory of this piece.  In any case, it's also being completely restored according to Lippold's original drawings and plans, and will eventually be reinstalled at the Met, allegedly.

I'm actually kind of surprised that more people don't talk about Lippold, because his work was really astonishing in a lot of ways, but evidently he rejected the commercialism of the art world in his time and the fame that might accompany it.  That attitude may have contributed to his not being more widely discussed.

I also got to see one of New York's truly hidden treasures.  It's a Lippold piece called Winged Gamma inside the Park Avenue Atrium.  

The building is somewhat bland unfortunately, but got an overhaul by Edward Durrell Stone in 1981, when the piece was installed.  Stone carved a cavernous atrium out of the center of the building, what was originally an air shaft.  In this atrium hangs this sculpture, which is twenty stories high.  It's absolutely astonishing.

I still need to see the Lippold piece hanging over the bar in Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagrams Building, but that's for another post.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Fly Like an Eagle

A very good friend of mine happens to be a virtual encyclopedia of the history of air travel.  Last week, she and I went on a bit of a field trip.

Our first stop was the Pan Am (MetLife) Building by Walter Gropius with Pietro Belluschi, completed in 1963.

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--Photo courtesy Postdlf.

I was really surprised to realize that I had never seen the inside of this building.  One of the most immediately iconic fixtures of the NYC skyline, by one of the absolute godfathers of Modernist architecture, a member of one of the greatest artists' communes of the 20th Century, the Bauhaus, and a controversial and an entirely problematic project from start to finish.

One thing I noticed going to the foot of it, as sleek and glassy as it might appear from afar, it's deeply textured up close.  You almost don't see the glass from the foot of it.

The reasons I wanted to go were that first of all, Belluschi designed both the Juilliard building and the Laguardia School (they're going to live forever), and also because the lobby at one point included a sculpture first titled The World, later changed to Flight, by Richard Lippold, who's responsible for the sculptures of Orpheus & Apollo that hang in the front of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.  

--Richard Lippold, Flight (1962); photo courtesy this site.

Lippold, by the way, was a good friend of John Cage.  They were neighbors in the Village.  Lippold had an old hearse he used to transport his sculptures around, and he would give Cage rides in it.  Cage dedicated some important compositions to him.

We met up right under the clock in the center of the great hall of Warren & Wetmore's Grand Central Station, which is indubitably one of the most majestic spaces in all of New York.

Well, all I can say is, the lobby areas of Gropius' building had all kinds of 1960s fabulousness when the building was built, and I don't know when they were renovated or by whom, but they couldn't possibly be any more bland and boring now.  It's extremely disturbing, in fact.  They have some enormous paintings by Julian Schnabel that are mildly interesting, though I'm not sure how I feel about him, anyway.  Other than that, it looks like a bunch of stupid, artless, mind-numbingly boring investment bankers with not the slightest bit of creativity in their number-rattled little brains got hold of a building by an architectural genius and had their miserable, perverted way with it.

Next we went out to JFK Airport.  I loved the whole idea of this excursion because I don't think anyone really ever just goes to JFK to look at the airport.  But we did.  The other thing is, this is the first time I've ever taken the train to the airport.  The last time I made an international trip, the Air Train didn't even exist.  The only way we knew to get to JFK was by cab.  I'm actually really surprised it took them so long to build the stupid thing.  I will say that the ride is a lot faster and hassle-free than I ever would have expected; I think we took the E train, and it was probably not much more than a half-hour to get there.

But I have problems with it.  The trip to and fro is so UGLY.  I mean, the Air Train is new and very smooth, but it's extremely utilitarian, and it will age very badly.  They made absolutely NO effort to make this entrance into the greatest American city GRAND in any way.  I think it's unforgivable.  I really think NYC should roll out the red carpet, and they have done just the opposite.

On the ride out, I did get a great view of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's still incredibly stunning First National City Bank (1959).  Not even the SOM website has images of this building, which is a shame because it's really beautiful.

--Photo courtesy Airliners.net.

The first major building we saw was the Pan American Terminal (1960) by Tibbets, Abbett, McCarthy, Stratton.  It's really stunning.  The canopy saucer was originally broad enough to provide cover for boarding planes by stair, and was intended to have parking on the roof.

  

--Photo courtesy Suleyman Yusuf.

This proved impossible, no doubt for unsurprising structural reasons. [Edit: I received a nice email from a reader who provided a much better explanation. The rooftop parking did exist on the 1973 extension building for this terminal. In fact, in the Google Maps view, you can see the vehicular ramps leading up to it. It was later closed for security reasons. It's possible that rooftop parking had been suggested also for the saucer, but I suspect not.]

It was also brought to my attention that the original American Airlines Terminal (1960) had a gorgeous mosaic by Hector Bernabó all across the front of it (which I'm fairly certain I remember), which has been disgracefully just ripped out with no concern whatsoever.

--Photo Yang Shen

Our most important destination was Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal (1963).  My friend had heard that Jet Blue had finished it and that it was open.  Their terminal is open, but they haven't finished the TWA terminal yet, unfortunately.  It's unbelievably gorgeous, and wonderful to see in person, and the good news is that with all the new circulation routes, there are all these new ways to see the building from vantages that were never possible before.

It really does need help, though.  The two side wings, which by the way, very much look like airplane wings in the most awesome way, have stalactites hanging off them, likely from the eroded concrete.  We were talking about how for a very short time, it was being used as an art gallery.  I thought that was such a beautiful idea, but my friend said people completely abused the honor of being inside this masterpiece, did their best to wreck the building, and even busted through locked doors and started running around out on the tarmac.  I think it's a disgrace, to be honest.

--Image courtesy Naked Airport.

Then we went over to I. M. Pei's National Airlines Terminal (1971), now also run by Jet Blue.  Evidently, it caused a complete revolution in airport architecture, being the first terminal to present sheer walls of glass under a large span of interior space.  The building is a complete wreck.  I almost asked for a ladder to start cleaning the windows myself.  They are so disgusting and brown from decades of cigarette smoke and airplane fumes, you can practically smell it.  We were hoping that after completing their giant new terminal and renovating Saarinen's, they'd close Pei's and give it a complete overhaul.  They really have to.

--Photo courtesy SOM.

SOM also did the new International Arrivals Building, which is very nice, if not iconic in the slightest.  I have the utmost respect for SOM, but this building in the hands of Santiago Calatrava would have been a breathtaking masterpiece.

--Photo courtesy Daylife.

Then there's the British Overseas Airways Terminal (1970) by Gollins, Melvin, Ward & Partners, now British Airways.  This was the one I think I appreciated most, for the reason that I'd never noticed it before, but it really is beautiful.  Like a truncated pyramid flipped upside-down, it has a gorgeous geometric monumentality to it, and it reaches for the skies, like an airline terminal should.  Granted, it looks a little bit grimy after all these years, but its sharp lines are holding up remarkably well.  It just needs someone to give it a hug with some cleanser and some rags.

But really, you need to see the unbelievably stunning landscape architecture that graced this portal into the United States of the 1970s, with pinnacles of monumental architectural perfection like glimmering jewels on an expanse of suburban land.  It was so heavenly in its conception, so majestic an introduction to the City of New York.

Now?  Pathetic.  It's a complete disaster.  The skyline of the airport is like a garbage dump for forgotten architectural tours de force and artless engineering feats of practicality.  The colossal hangars, which are per se utterly impressive, look bland and utilitarian and ugly.  It's a vast wasteland of structures, disconnected, uncelebrated, dilapidated, unappreciated, and unworthy.

The biggest tragedy of JFK Airport is that, to make it what it should be, what it was always intended to be: a monumental, aesthetically stunning port of entry, would require literally billions and billions of dollars to repair and the vision of a Michaelangelo, Palladio, Lutyens, Wright, or Corbusier.  There's only one person who could accomplish something like that financially: the utterly psychotic Robert Moses.  There will never be another Moses, and heaven help us if there ever is.  He very nearly destroyed this city with his auto-centric insanity.  But in the absence of him, or the possibility for someone like him to ever exist again, JFK rots in pathetic indecision and aesthetic anarchy.  It surely will continue to, until such time as New York becomes a port of interstellar travel or something of that import, I fear.

©2008, Ryan Witte