The Odyssey--Part 3

The morning of Friday the 13th, I woke up before the sun probably around 6AM. I knew the house was scheduled to pass by South Street Seaport sometime around 7:45. As soon as I heard that the house would be sailing up the East River, I knew exactly where I wanted to be to see it, and it wasn't there. I still don't know what kind of opportunity I missed by not going down there. I assume there were a number of architects gathered, including people I'd have loved to have met. It was a tough decision whether or not to go, but there were a number of reasons for me not to. 

Instead, I went over to Gantry State Park in Long Island City. One of the more pressing reasons was that, as soon as it had passed and was out of sight, I planned to immediately jump onto the Long Island Railroad and attempt to beat it out to Glen Cove, a race I wasn't sure I would win as it was. I arrived there around 7:30, not expecting the house to pass me until around 8:00 or 8:15, but there was no way I was going to risk missing it.

Though it wasn't the main Seaport event planned, with an appearance by Venturi himself, I still expected to find at least a small group of architecture buffs and curiosity seekers gathered at Gantry Park. There was no one. Every half hour or so, someone would circle behind me on their morning jog or walking their dog. 

On the pier just south of me was a pervert with an enormous telescope trained on the apartment buildings across the river. I was too far away to see if he had a camera attached to it. But if you live in one of those buildings with a view of Long Island City out your window and feel perfectly safe walking around naked in front of them, it's very possible you're now on some kind of High Society Candid Porn site. I'll give him this much, for a pervert, he certainly was dedicated. The telescope couldn't have been cheap, it was ridiculously cold, disturbingly early in the morning (he was there when I arrived), and he was there for at least an hour.

After all I went through, I was going to be extremely pissed off if some creepy peeping tom got photos of the Lieb House from there. He left some time before it passed, though. I was talking to a nice woman with her dog when it came by, but otherwise, the photos in this post are the only ones in existence from this particular location, the only ones that will ever exist.

I had on the warmest sweater I own and a thermal shirt underneath, another shirt over that, my leather pants, which allow through practically no cold air, and a bulky winter coat. I was still so freaking cold I had to keep dancing around to my iPod, running around the pier, and jogging in place to not go into hypothermia. It was awful. It was cold anyway, but also at that time of day--the coldest time of day--and the very last place you'd ever want to be on a bitter cold winter day? Right. On a pier sticking out into the East River.

On top of that, the house was late. I stood there waiting for it for nearly two hours freezing my buttocks off. I got there before the sun had officially come up over Queens from behind me, but at a certain point, I couldn't have been any happier about the location I'd chosen. Check this out:

Click images for larger views.

--All photos posted here ©2009, Ryan Witte.

Suddenly the whole skyline was bathed in the most heavenly, golden early-morning sunlight. If the house had appeared right at that moment, I'd have peed my pants. Instead I stood around for another hour waiting. Nonetheless, the light was still far better for me than it would have been from the Manhattan side where it'd have been glaring right into my face.

It got so late, in fact, that I had to call my mother--who had kindly consented to let me borrow her car--or she'd have gone to pick me up at the train station by her house only to find me nowhere in sight. I began to actually fear that the barge had been surprisingly early and had passed by before I even arrived at the park. There was really no one I could call to find out if that'd been the case, and I feared that while I waited there having already missed it, it was getting closer and closer to Glen Cove, and I'd miss it landing there, also. Big trouble.

At long last, the little house did appear making its way up the river. Here it is against Davis, Brody & Associates' wonderfully Brutalist Waterside Plaza (1974):

Davis and Brody's later partner, the immensely influential African-American architect Max Bond, just passed away only a couple of weeks ago. May he rest in peace.

But this is the real reason I chose this location, with the Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon, 1931) and the United Nations:

The Empire State, another incredibly Herculean task nonetheless completed during an economic disaster. These are immediately before and immediately after the photo I put into my introductory post:

But really, what could be a more beautifully poetic visual description of how important an event this was? Two absolutely epic architectural tales, one resulting in one of the grandest International Style Modernist monuments in the world by arguably the movement's biggest star, Le Corbusier (et al); the other, a tiny little house all but completely dwarfed on the river. But the reason this image is possible at all is that--despite its diminutive size--the Lieb House was on this journey so that a monument to the birth of Postmodern Architecture could be saved and was. David, meet Goliath.

And then it was gone, heading for the dangerous waters of Hell Gate. Here with Hugh Stubbins' Citicorp Center (1978):

It was 9:30 at the earliest, and I didn't know how quickly I could get to Glen Cove, or how quickly a house on a barge could get there, so I made a brisk pace to the train station. This chapter of the tale next time. Stay tuned for Part 4.

©2009, Ryan Witte

The Odyssey--Part 2

The saga of Robert Venturi's Lieb House has very seriously been one of the single most important events I've had the pleasure to witness in my entire lifetime. As I said to Andrew Sarnoff, the brother of the new owner who was extremely nice and helpful to me throughout the process, I consider it to be like the opposite side of the same coin as the World Trade Center attacks.

I was standing outside a TGIFridays on Broadway with a TV in their front window when the first tower fell. My stranded coworker and I had settled into some too-early-in-the-morning but we-can't-believe-this-is-actually-happening consolatory cocktails at Ellen's Stardust Diner a few blocks south when we saw the second tower fall on their large screen TV. As for most New Yorkers, I will never forget that until the day I die.

The move of the Lieb House was about preservation rather than destruction. It's a terribly humble little shack rather than a towering colossus to world finance. But both events, to me, are representative of how our architecture symbolizes our American sensibilities and the incredible lengths to which people will go to acknowledge that.

As mentioned elsewhere, my approach to the Arts for many years has been linguistic, by way of Semiotics. I believe one of the last remaining things that can tie together such disparate cultural phenomena as, say, a John Deere tractor by Henry Dreyfuss and a Stravinsky violin sonata is that each, in their own distinct language, is a form of communication.

This is why I consider Robert Venturi to be such a profound legend. I consider his contribution every bit as significant as the alpha/omega of Minimalist painting I've discussed elsewhere, which, coincidentally, was going on around the same time. For countless thousands of years, architecture concerned itself first and foremost with providing shelter, making sure structures stood and stayed standing, and not long after, infusing those structures with some aesthetic philosophy. Simply put: post and beam, wall and roof, and the attempt to make the whole of it "beautiful" by some criteria or another.

Venturi, almost single-handedly, divorced the forms of architecture from their utilitarian use, and by so doing, transformed architecture from an applied art into a sophisticated formal language. One linguistic theory says that if a system is to be considered a "language," it must have the capacity to lie (one reason the communicative limitations of Music are so hotly debated). Venturi lied. The best example, and one which I've had heated arguments over its legitimacy, is in his Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery in London:

--Photo courtesy Public Lettering.

The arches may at first glance appear to perform a structural purpose, but then, one of them is positioned over an interior window, meaning it can't possibly serve any utilitarian function. With one simple maneuver, by using it to lie, Venturi has turned that arch into nothing more than a architectural symbol, what maybe I should dub an "architeme." He'd been doing things like this from the very beginning, as with the stairway to nowhere in his mother's house.

One may argue that Mannerist architecture had already accomplished this 400 years earlier. I submit, though, that the Mannerists were first of all subverting only the formal rules of Classicism--even poking some fun at them--and secondly, creating a sense of folly, mystery, fantasy, and wonderment with their architectural shenanigans. Essentially, it was still merely a matter of aesthetics. The revolutions in linguistic theory didn't really start to appear until the middle of the last century, anyway, and would have been unavailable to them. Furthermore, Venturi much more completely took on the idea of architecture as an entire structural/visual system.

I can only imagine how the folks directly involved must feel; for me, it was a long and completely exhausting experience. For that reason, I'd like to break up this story into a series of smaller posts.

I'd been watching the architectural press on the event from the beginning, but my first real entrance into it was the celebratory talk at the Storefront for Art & Architecture on Kenmare Street. Gathered there were Venturi and his wife and partner Denise Scott Brown; their son and documentary filmmaker Jim Venturi; the Ellmans, who lived in the house for the past thirty years; and the new owners, Robert Gotkin and Deborah Sarnoff.

Storefront isn't a huge gallery, anyway, and the place was absolutely packed full of people, not all that surprisingly. I unfortunately got stuck all the way in the back, creeping forward inch by inch as individual people intermittently left.

With the door opening and closing to street noise right next to me, it was difficult to hear everything being said at the front of the room, especially and distressingly what Robert Venturi himself was saying. Sheila Ellman told some amusing stories about having known of and admired Venturi but not that the house she'd bought was designed by him. She spoke about finding out that it was a Venturi house and being told no doubt incorrectly by "someone" at his offices that blueprints no longer existed (Venturi asked her who'd said that, but she refused to rat him out, saying that's not her style). Then about all the people who'd come to see the house over the years, including Philip Johnson, who'd remarked somewhat comically on the prominent location of the washer and dryer.

Deborah Sarnoff talked about how she'd had her eyes on the incredible Glen Cove property for years, had become obsessed by it and the Venturi-designed house on it, and missed the opportunity to purchase it not once but twice. She said that when she was phoned and asked about the prospect of purchasing the Lieb House and moving it to her property, she'd thought it was a joke.

In response to an audience question, Scott Brown discussed her contributions to the team, saying she's comfortable in the knowledge that she and her husband have differing skills and talents. She said she believed her great asset to the firm was foremost conceptual, giving birth to various projects. She also conceded that some of the firm's works were mostly Venturi's, without much of her input, while others were products of predominantly her own brain.

I'd have loved to have gone up front and spoken to some of the people involved, but as I said, it was ridiculously crowded, so I hoped the opportunities would come later and returned home. The Storefront event was merely an appetizer for what was to come. I left filled with a sense of excitement and a little anxiety about what I'd face the following morning.

Stay tuned for Part 3.

©2009, Ryan Witte

The Odyssey--Part 1

Harrison, Abramovitz, Corbusier, Niemeyer...Venturi.

Click to enlarge.

--©2009, Ryan Witte

To be continued...