Mired in Meier--Part Two

The next thing that happened was that the Cooper-Hewitt Museum put up a brief mini-exhibition to celebrate Richard Meier's seventy-fifth birthday and his fiftieth year in the field. I considered the timing of this to be an extraordinary coincidence, because it was announced not much more than a week after I found out about the model gallery and went to see it.

I relished the opportunity to discuss Meier with the visitors for the three weeks or so that this show was on display. While the drawings Meier had donated to the museum's collection were great, I mostly discussed the three models, because I felt that the trio of them really encompassed the full range of the architect's career. They were the Smith House (1967), the Getty Center (1997), and the Jubilee Church (2003).

Smith House displays so wonderfully how Meier separates his houses into two distinct zones: the public zone, which is a glass box, and the private zone, which is a solid box.

--This and Jubilee photo courtesy the architect's website.

That's obviously the public side, with the living and dining areas overlooking the water. You enter the Smith House from the opposite side and cut through the private areas in front containing the bedrooms, bathrooms, and so on. It's just so exquisitely rational.

The Getty project is the ideal example of how he organizes his sites using a number of overlapping grids, based on adjacent streets, neighboring structures, shorelines, and so on. The forms of the structure are then carved out of those overlapping grids.

At the Getty the grids are aligned according to a ridge that runs along the top of the hill, the adjacent San Diego Freeway, and the street grid of downtown Los Angeles off in the distance.

Lastly, the Jubilee Church shows how Meier has applied the diametric approach used so minimally and rationally in the Smith House in ways that become much more symbolic.

The church is divided in half on two axes, forming a cross. To the west, vehicular entrance; to the east, pedestrian entrance. To the south, the sacred (nave); to the north, the secular (classrooms). A pool surrounding the nave refers to the use of water in baptism, and the three concentric shells symbolize the holy trinity.

The curators really couldn't have chosen three more perfect examples of this man's work. They provided such a concise and precise illustration of his methods and expression. It's just a shame the exhibition was only there for such a short time.

The event that really broke the camel's back in my decision to discuss Richard Meier is that he's giving a talk at the 92nd Street Y on the evening of Monday, February 8th. I've been consistently impressed with the 92Y's programming and am very excited about this one. It should be a great finale to this series of posts.

©2010, Ryan Witte

[some corny pun using the word "felt"]

I probably owe the Smithsonian a little something after so callously lamenting the injustice being perpetrated on the Hope Diamond, but I wanted to tell you about this anyway. I never did say much about the Fashioning Felt show at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Now I'm glad I didn't. Yesterday I had probably the best tour I've given the entire time I've been there. Not so much because I was so good, although I've gotten very comfortable with the material, I did very much feel on the ball, and I think everyone had a great time.

It was when we got to the installation by Janice Arnold in the conservatory (unfortunately, her website is under construction at the moment, but definitely bookmark it), which was commissioned for the show.

--Photo courtesy American Craft Magazine.

A yurt is a traditional Mongolian dwelling made of felt.

--Photo courtesy TrekEarth.

Arnold's piece, a palace yurt, is a sort of modern interpretation of a fancier dwelling that would've been used by the likes of Ghengis Khan. There are no actual palace yurts extant, so we don't really know exactly what they looked like. Well, I have everyone sitting around the conservatory, people are asking questions, and this woman pops her head around the corner of the entrance, saying "I think I might be able to answer technical questions." I didn't doubt it. It was Janice Arnold herself. Score!

It's not to say I don't have wonderful moments of kismet at Lincoln Center, like taking a group into the Koch Theater and all of a sudden, as if on queue, New York City Opera decides to launch into a full dress rehearsal of "Libiamo ne'lieti calici" from La Traviata, probably one of the most incredibly beautiful pieces of music ever composed.

That's Franco Zeffirelli's film of it (brilliant, and I adore the woman shoveling food into her face at 1:35). When that happened, I had to quickly conceal a tear before we left, and there was another gentleman obviously similarly moved. But there's just always so much going on at Lincoln Center, those moments happen practically every day. These kind of moments are so valuable at the museum.

It was also the fact that I had such a large group, my final count was somewhere around twenty-five people, which is somewhat large for a smaller museum with shows of relatively specialized interest. In other words, it wasn't like it was one of those days where I'm lucky if there are three people joining the tour.

She shook my hand, said I was doing a fantastic job--such a great compliment coming from an expert like her--and joined us to answer questions. Felting no doubt requires a lot of elbow grease, and I later joked that her handshake was surprisingly powerful.

She had such interesting things to say. She, Claudy Jongstra, and Kathryn Walter (who, coincidentally, worked with Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, supplying felt for Alice Tully Hall and has a piece in the show designed for the firm's offices) were the only three artists in the show we actually got to speak with, and the first time talking to Arnold had been pretty limited because she was working and so were we. It was fantastic to be able to talk to her at such greater length and ask all the in-depth questions that had come to me over the past few months. I told her, too: I almost wish this had happened sooner rather than three days before the show closes.

She basically went into all kinds of tales about her process and exactly how the piece was made. She told us a couple things that she said she'd not told anyone else, and some things I wish I'd known all along, like how the pattern of cloth on the west wall is based on a microscopic view of wood cells blown up to huge proportions. There were also a lot of ways I wasn't aware of that the piece conceptually refers to the culture of Mongolia, where she'd spent some time studying traditional felt-making techniques.

Then there was the fact that, due to condensation in the wintertime, the glass walls of the conservatory literally stream with water down to the benches around its perimeter. There's always pools of water all over the floor and everything. Arnold was concerned about it a bit, but discovered that the felt (which was undamaged, being a wet process in its creation) equalized the humidity and climate inside that room. It was all very fascinating, and those were some seriously lucky tourists.

There was this one guy who really got on my nerves, though. He was one of these old guys with a Question Machine Gun. I've dealt with these types many times before, and there were a couple of women doing the same thing on that tour, in fact. But basically they have some kind of comment or question for everything that comes out of your mouth, like you can see it on their face the whole time you're talking that they're just DYING to interject some juicy bit of goodness into the conversation. It's to the point where, unless I'm going to be rude about it, it's almost impossible to get a complete thought out or even stay on any kind of coherent track. They have this impeccable knack for interrupting me to ask something I was going to tell them anyway within the next thirty seconds, if they'd just calm down and listen that long.

I say at the very beginning of every single tour, felt is the oldest textile known to humankind, it's probably around 10,000 years old, and may be as old as 15,000 years old. Question Guy was there to hear that. Halfway through, he says to me, "so how old iiiisss this process," as if adding the phrase "this process" were going to somehow magically change the answer. I told him again.

Then, while we're talking to Arnold, he wants to know, yet a third time, "so how old iiisss this process." Arnold's answer was a bit more complete than mine, but essentially the same. She said we don't really know, that they're always finding older and older pieces of felt, and that the oldest found so far is around 9,000 years old. Right...as I said twice before. I'm thinking, "dude" (neither of us were wearing cowboy hats, but), "do you think I'm lying to you, or do you think I'm just making stuff up as I go along? Either way, you're wasting everyone else's time asking the same crap over and over again." Sigh.

The whole thing was being recorded on video, and--I'm kind of excited to see this--they were taking time-lapse photos of the space throughout the entire day so you can watch how it plays with the shifting sunlight. Both, as far as I understand, will be on Arnold's website. My voice may even end up in the final edit, so you can go and hear what very intelligent and charming things I have to say. She also said she's putting a book together all about the experience of doing this piece. When it's released, perhaps I'll make a small addendum to this post.

Labor Day, as I hinted above, is your last chance to see Fashioning Felt. I highly recommend coming to see it. I've found it immeasurably, surprisingly inspiring.

This seems as good a place as any to say what a truly wonderful place this is to work. For anyone who doesn't know, it's the Carnegie Mansion, designed by Babb, Cook & Willard and built in 1901:

Click for larger.

--All Carnegie Mansion and neighborhood photos ©2009, Ryan Witte.

It was much farther north than where most of the wealthy lived on Fifth Avenue, there was really nothing else up this far north at the time. They chose this site on purpose for that reason, because Carnegie's young wife, Louise, was a gardener, and they wanted to have ample room for this large private garden. That's also why there's a conservatory.

But more than that, the houses that were built in the neighborhood, afterwards known as "Carnegie Hill" as a result of this mansion, are incredible. I was standing outside one beautiful day and it just struck me all of a sudden. This was the house of Otto Kahn (who, coincidentally, was director of the Metropolitan Opera for a short time and was one of the early figures in the century-long saga of it arriving at Lincoln Center), built by J. Armstrong Stenhouse and C. P. H. Gilbert in 1918, which is now an elementary school, as far as I know:

This is the Burden Mansion by Warren & Wetmore, to the east of the Kahns', built in 1907 and now also part of the school:

And to the east of that, the Hammond Mansion by Carrere & Hastings, also from 1907 and now the Russian Consulate (by the way, there's practically always a big group of Russians lined up out the door, trying desperately to get out of the United States. I'm sure it was far longer when Bush was still in office):

While I was standing there looking at them, and especially the Burden house, which I think is an absolute masterpiece, something occurred to me. People visiting New York City from the back woods of Kansas or wherever never get to see things like this. I'm not saying that other parts of the country don't have stunning vernacular architecture. But American Colonial, even for the very wealthy, was typically so much more austere. We in this city, on the other hand, have it around us all the time, every day. Often I think we just walk right past without looking or giving this beauty a second thought. I obviously travel in aesthetically knowledgeable circles (I couldn't have it any other way), so it's not quite so bad. But I don't think it would be possible to appreciate our city's architecture too much.

©2009, 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