News

Photo courtesy New York Times.

Just a couple of things I wanted to mention before returning to the big stories. First of all, the New York Times did a really fantastic piece to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Mies van der Rohe's Lafayette Park townhouses. They interviewed a bunch of residents on what the architecture meant (or didn't mean) to them. I don't happen to share Noam Chomsky's extreme distaste for the paper, likely because I don't grasp world politics nearly as vividly as he. Whatever your opinion of the Times, I thought it was a wonderful story.

Also, my Art & Architecture tour of Lincoln Center recently got a small mention in the San Francisco Examiner. The author unfortunately didn't go into very much detail about it, or even if she liked it, for that matter. But it was nice to see that.

Photo courtesy Interior Design Magazine.

Much more exciting is that I've now had the honor of meeting all three of the principals of Diller, Scofidio + Renfro. This past week I had a VIP group of ridiculously wealthy people from the Museum of Modern Art. At the end of it, Charles Renfro was there to tell them about what the firm has done to Alice Tully Hall.

He and I sort of did a combo tour, but I figured I should keep my mouth shut and let him talk. He was very cool and it was interesting to hear the story from the horse's mouth.

One thing he said that I hadn't heard in any of the hundreds of interviews or anything was that they were inspired for the inside of the hall by phosphorescent sea creatures. I always thought that the twisting wooden slats in the lobby looked a little bit like fish gills, but I just figured that I was imagining things. I wish I'd had an opportunity to speak with him at greater length, but there were twenty-five other people there, and he said he had to go to the gym.

Chance Encounters

A couple of Sundays back, I had one of my dreams fulfilled. I was taking a small group of the general public (as opposed to a school group, etc.) around Lincoln Center. One of my guests had specifically requested to see Alice Tully Hall, which was fine. Sunday afternoons really are often the best day to come, because we have almost everything available and wide open. I discovered later that he's an architect working on a new hall dedicated to chamber music for the Ordway Center for Performing Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota. I always love having architects on my tour and immediately switched over to include more of that information, although I fear I was boring the other guests to tears.


Anyhow, we walk into the front of Tully, I look up, and standing on the balcony right above my head is Liz Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and their colleague, whose name I can't remember (not Charles Renfro). I turned to this architect on my tour and said "that's her, isn't it?"

--Photo courtesy Egodesign.
But we both knew it was. I couldn't believe my good fortune.

I explained the transformation of Sixty-Fifth Street and the new openness of the front of the hall, showed the portrait of Alice Tully and went through her biography (and that of her little white dog, Sophie), and up to the Patron's Lounge.

Diller and Scofidio were still out on the balcony, and saw me, so I smiled. My heart was beating a mile a minute.

What I usually talk about there is how great a choice DS+R were for the renovation of a performing arts complex. Here's one great example of why: in Mies van der Rohe's landmark Seagram Building are two restaurants, the Four Seasons and the Brasserie, both with original interiors by Philip Johnson, who also designed the Koch Theater at LC, of course. By some weird coincidence, Patina Restaurant Group also runs the Brasserie 8 1/2 in the Solow Building by Gordon Bunshaft, who designed the Library for the Performing Arts at LC. Connections, connections. The Brasserie was destroyed by fire in 1995 and now has a new interior design by DS+R. It looks like a very groovy, space age airport lounge or something.

--Photos courtesy AEWorldmap.

You walk in the front door of this restaurant, and a camera automatically takes a picture of your face, putting your face on a television monitor above the bar in the dining room. For every person who comes in after you, it bumps you down one screen until there are no screens left. It's all about seeing and being seen as a diner in this restaurant, and a lot of their work does this. It blurs the distinctions between "who is the performer?" and "who is the spectator?"

The grandstand at the front of Tully is the perfect example.

It doesn't look out at New York City, but rather looks into the cafe, into Lincoln Center. For someone sitting on the grandstand, the people having sandwiches in the cafe become a kind of natural performance. A lot of their interventions around Lincoln Center have played with this idea, and I think it's perfect.

Halfway through my spiel, they came back in from the balcony. I said "hello, I was just telling them about the Brasserie," but I don't think I finished that thought. I introduced myself and told her that it's been a dream of mine to meet her for so long. She introduced Ricardo Scofidio, and I was like "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you" and shook his hand also. I probably made a bit of a fool of myself, but I was a little starstruck. It was almost as awesome as getting to meet Robert Venturi, but for somewhat different reasons.

I asked her if the hyperbolic paraboloid roof of the restaurant across the street had been a nod to Eduardo Catalano, who had assisted Pietro Belluschi on the Juilliard building (and was also mostly responsible for the Laguardia School building right across Amsterdam Avenue).

--Photo courtesy NC State University.
She confirmed that, indeed, one reason was the Catalano House in Raleigh, North Carolina, but a number of other reasons, also. The shape makes the green roof appear like a softly rolling hill, it will also make for a dramatic curving wooden ceiling in the restaurant underneath. I pointed out that they sometimes drain the water out of the reflecting pool and will have a classical guitarist or someone playing music there in the summertime. The downward slope on the southwest corner will make for a great place for audiences to sit for impromptu performances.

By the way, I also recently asked one of the construction workers how they're ever going to mow the grass up there. He said it will be a groundskeeper with a hand-pushed lawnmower, who will be tethered to the top edge of the roof because some parts of the slope are rather steep. That should be interesting to see.

Ms. Diller also talked a little bit about Dan Kiley's landscape architecture. She said they found the public space somewhat cold and sparse, but in talking to the preservation people, there was this idea that grand public spaces like that should be desolate. I wasn't sure exactly why they'd say such a thing--maybe in the interests of a kind of aesthetic purity? But she said they agreed and disagreed with that concept for different reasons.

They had to leave after a few minutes, but it was so very gracious of them to stop and speak with my group like that, I was really grateful, and honestly my luck couldn't have been any better that day. Had the one gentleman not requested to see Tully, I might not have gone there at all.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Alice's Facelift and Other Sounds

It looks like I will soon be giving tours at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, in addition to giving them at Lincoln Center. I'm very excited to be a part of their team and will likely start appearing there in March. I'm particularly excited about their new show, Fashioning Felt, all about the history of and new design work with...felt. It will also be wonderful to be able to work in a place as stunningly beautiful as Andrew Carnegie's mansion.

Speaking of Lincoln Center, I finally got over to see inside the new Alice Tully Hall.

--Photo courtesy the NYTimes.

It really is absolutely gorgeous. I had my camera with me, but I was fairly certain I'd be forcibly booted out the door if I dared take any pictures. It's coming along great, but there's still a lot of construction work being done in the lobby itself--that is, saws and workbenches and things in there--and it will need to just be cleaned up a lot before February 22nd. Nevertheless, I am just as impressed as everyone else with what Diller Scofidio + Renfro has done with it. The smooth, sensual shapes of the auditorium are wonderful. The backstage amenities are evidently drastically improved. They had run out of money the first time around, so it was a little bit cramped down there. For the renovations they actually blasted away a bunch of bedrock to enlarge the underground facilities.

I also got to see them tuning up the panels on the sides of the stage enclosure. They turn 180° to reveal a felt surface--coincidentally a project that will allegedly be on display at the Cooper-Hewitt--that will improve the acoustics for amplified sound as for film screenings. I heard no music, but I did my own little resonance test with a couple hand claps. It's a smooth drop and a good long dissipation time, maybe around a second and a half or a little longer, lovely for chamber music. 

[By the way, this woman is patently an idiot who doesn't understand the first thing about acoustics and obviously thinks she's very, very sassy for nit-picking every last stupid detail. Of course they've still got bugs to work out. You couldn't possibly do something like this without a little fine-tuning after the fact. Unknowns are the Siamese twin of Innovation.]

Of concern to me is the fate of a couple of the artworks there. A coworker told me about it ahead of time, and I did in fact find the alcove for the portrait of Tully, herself. With the newly wide open glass walls of the lobby, they needed to do something to protect it from the glaring sun, so it's recessed quite a few feet back. Not the prominent position it once had, but entirely acceptable under the new circumstances.

It's Alice Bigelow Tully and her little dog, too, and was painted by Thomas Buechner in 1987.

Tully (1902-1993) was a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol during WWII, which I think is very cool. Women weren't really pilots all that often back then. I actually had to look at their family tree to figure this all out, thanks very much to the nice folks at the Corning Glass Archives. For anyone who doesn't know, she was the granddaughter of Amory Houghton, Jr. ("hoten"), whose father founded Corning Glass Works...i.e. buttloads of money. Amory, Jr.'s neice was the Suffragette Katherine Martha Hepburn, who started Planned Parenthood, and her daughter was, of course, Katherine Hepburn, the actor. That makes actor Katherine Hepburn Alice Tully's second cousin or something like that; I can't quite be sure of what you'd call that relation. Amory, Jr.'s grandson, Tully's first cousin, Arthur Houghton, Jr. was vice-president of Lincoln Center.

Wait, it keeps going.

Under the guidance of Arthur, Jr., Harrison & Abromovitz, architects of the Metropolitan Opera and Avery Fisher Hall respectively, designed the Corning Glass Building (1959). It was said to be the most advanced use of a glass curtain wall at the time, appropriately enough, and the first glass skyscraper to go up on Fifth Avenue.

--Photo courtesy New York Architecture Images, and coincidentally, right behind it you can see the AT&T Building by Philip Johnson, who did the third of the central theaters of Lincoln Center, the New York State/ David H. Koch Theater.

Buechner (b. 1926) was the first director of the Corning Museum of Glass. In 1972, he was made president of the Museum, president of the Corning Glass Works Foundation, and president of Steuben Glass. He was later vice-president of Corning Glass. I can't imagine how he and Tully ever crossed paths! He wrote a book about Norman Rockwell in 1971. The subjects in his own portraits, Tully included, seem to have this sly little twinkle in their eye. It strikes me as sort of a cross between Rockwell and one of my all-time favorite portraitists, Franz Hals:

--The Laughing Cavalier (1624)

--Image courtesy AP Art History.

Tully had also gifted a bust, Beethoven a la Colonne (1910) by Émile-Antoine Bourdelle for which it shouldn't be too difficult to find a spot.  Bourdelle (1861-1929) was a student of Auguste Rodin and was obsessed by Beethoven. This was one of twenty imaginary portraits of the composer he created to explore the nature of Genius. There's another one of them, The Tragic Mask of Beethoven (1901), at the east end of the promenade level of Avery Fisher Hall. Édouard Colonne (1838-1910) was first violinist at the Paris Opéra for almost a decade and later became a well-known conductor. 

The one piece I'm maybe most worried about is the Yaacov Agam sculpture, Three X Three Interplay (1971):

--Really beautiful photo by Bernard Ente.

Most of you will remember it in its prominent spot at the top of the stairs heading to the old entrance to Juilliard, which...well...doesn't exist anymore. Lincoln Center is narrowing the traffic lanes and widening the sidewalks along Sixty-Fifth Street, so I insist there will be plenty of places where this one could go. Three has a crank at the base so the viewer can actually interact with it and turn the three stainless steel zig-zags around into different positions. Security guard's nightmare? Fiddlesticks. I very much hope, if they reinstall this, that they grease up the gears so it can be easily operated again. The fact that it can be manipulated by the viewer is the very thing that makes the piece such a clever addition to the Lincoln Center campus. I won't bore you with all my theories on why; regardless, it's important, and furthermore what the artist intended.

Agam was commissioned in 1985 to do a mural in the Port Authority Bus Terminal, but I've never been able to determine if it's still there or not. I don't really spend a whole lot of my free time wandering around Port Authority, though.

The piece I'm most hoping will return to Alice Tully Hall has such a delicious story behind it that I'm not going to tell it now, until I know for sure it's back on the wall again. You'll just have to come on my tour to hear it.

I also have a rant. I'm getting really sick of everybody jumping right onto the pissy bandwagon by using the phrase "acoustically challenged" before every mention of Avery Fisher Hall. Fisher is not acoustically challenged, and New York needs to just come to grips with it already. When the absolute master of his profession, acoustician Cyril Harris gutted and redesigned the auditorium in 1976, it became one of the best halls of its kind in the world. Irresponsible journalists who continue to perpetuate this misinformation are simply flinging around silly catch-phrases that have no basis in reality.

I refer you to an article by New York Times author, Will Crutchfield, presumably an unbiased listener. Not only did Crutchfield hear the same orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic, playing at both Carnegie Hall and Fisher, but he also heard both Vienna and the New York Philharmonic playing the same piece, Sibelius' Fifth Symphony, at Fisher. This allowed him a great opportunity to triangulate the qualities of each hall, and overall he found Fisher's acoustics to be superior. Even the musicians agree. 

So some say it's not absolutely ideal for vocal performances. It was never intended to be. If you want to hear opera in the perfect venue, go to the Met; that's what the Met was designed for. Fisher was designed for instrumental music, and it's excellent for that. Not that vocalists sound bad, but that shouldn't even be under discussion in the first place. The blind, thoughtless worshipping of Carnegie--heavenly though it may be--and equally baseless condemnation of Fisher needs to stop now.

I was reminded of the talks there'd been to renovate Fisher, yet again, with designs by the great Sir Norman Foster, but the reasons for that weren't acoustic. It was because they'd been playing around with the idea to bring the stage out into the middle of the house, as their temporary set-up in summer has done. Some people preferred this arrangement because it brings everyone closer to the stage for a more intimate experience. I feel it's unnecessary and a waste of money. Tully has that intimacy, for those kinds of smaller performances of Mostly Mozart and so on. Fisher is about the grandeur of a huge symphony orchestra in all its glory, and it performs that role admirably.

©2009, Ryan Witte