Friday, January 28, 2005

Philip Johnson, 1906–2005 The death of Philip Johnson earlier this week at age 98 has been by now reported in dozens of papers worldwide. Most of the obituaries synopsize the well-documented career of this most famous and powerful of American architects — a protean personality variously described as "architecture's restless intellect," its "leading taste maker," and "aristocratic, often outrageous dean," to quote the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Chicago Tribune. The career was indeed extraordinary in both scope and duration. In the early 1930s, barely out of Harvard, Johnson was founding curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art and influential proponent of modern design (and co-author, with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, of The International Style); in the mid-'30s he fell deeply in with Fascists at home and abroad and tried seriously to launch a political career (half-joking to friends, according to biographer Franz Schulze, that he wished to become "Huey Long's Minister of Fine Arts"); in the early '40s, under suspicion by the FBI of spying for the Nazis, he abandoned politics for academe, returning to Harvard to get a degree in architecture; after graduation he returned triumphantly to MoMA, established a thriving practice in New York, and built his famous Glass House in New Canaan, Conn.; in the '70s and '80s, at an age when he might reasonably have retired to his transparent retreat, he achieved superstardom, first as the creator of high-rise icons (including Pennzoil Place in Houston, the IDS Center in Minneapolis, and most famously the AT+T (now Sony) Building in Manhattan), and then, even more spectacularly, as architecture's most visible and voluble impresario — the mercurial champion of postmodernism and then deconstructivism, the benevolent but demanding godfather to a younger generation of architects, the canny cultural politicker who wielded back-room power and commanded front-page attention. The more astute obituaries acknowledge, with appropriate eulogistic tact, that Johnson's chief importance was not as a designer. Some of his early houses, including his own, are elegant exercises in Miesian modernism (for a good overview, see The Houses of Philip Johnson); but few of his commercial or institutional buildings are much good, and some are god-awful (see, for instance, International Place in Boston, or the Crescent in Dallas, which the critic Charles Jencks has described as a project that ought to be "publicly destroyed by the Nuremberg Trials of Architecture"). But such charges of architectural high crimes and design misdemeanors seemed rarely to rattle Johnson, who disarmed his critics with sly preemptive candor: confronted by unadoring students who asked why his buildings were "facile," he reportedly answered, "Because I am a bad architect." Few architects have the self-confidence to be so openly self-critical (or to carry off this sort of disingenuous double-talk); in Johnson's case the confidence seemed to flow from a dynamic mix of native ability, fortunate circumstance, and endless energy. Rich and well-connected, intelligent and untiring, Johnson deftly straddled the worlds of architect and patron. Beyond the bounds of Trumpdom — the Donald was briefly one of Johnson's clients — money remains one of the few vaguely taboo topics in American conversation; but surely it was Johnson's personal wealth that made the difference. A perceptive critic and effective promoter of architecture, Johnson had more than the keen eye to identify talent; he had the means to underwrite it, the institutional and personal affiliations to sponsor it. By most accounts he relished his power. Certainly he seemed never to shrink from the limelight, and he kept himself in the thick of things by rarely hesitating to share the stage with others. This artful mix of shrewd self-interest and professional generosity brings to mind this week's other front-page celebrity death. Is it improbable to see parallels between the careers of Philip Johnson and Johnny Carson? Maybe . . . but I'll venture out (at least briefly) on that limb to suggest that Johnson's presence and power in architecture resembles Carson's in entertainment. Both men were essentially conveners, the unfailingly affable and discreetly controlling hosts of parties that lasted for decades. Carson held court on the set of the Tonight Show, Johnson at a corner table at the Four Seasons; Carson flattered his guests, Johnson mentored his protégés. Showcasing the talent of others, each managed to make himself indispensable. Carson, of course, was ringmaster to a much bigger circus; working under the big-top of broadcast TV, he drew an audience of many millions. Philip Johnson had to make do with the high-style sideshow of elite design. Probably he wished his reach were bigger . . . but that's show business. posted by nancylevinson @ 12:15 pm | Permanent link

Friday, January 21, 2005

No Free Gift Philanthropy is the refuge of rich people who wish to annoy their fellow creatures. —Oscar Wilde If you pony up practically half a billion bucks for an opera house, don't you at least get to pick the hammered 24-carat gold leaf for the ceiling of the grand auditorium? That question, along with others less crude, was raised in a provocative piece that ran recently in the New York Times. "High Drama at New Danish Opera House" recounts an architect-patron relationship that would seem to have gone seriously south. Apparently Henning Larsen, designer of the brand-new, multi-stage, 441,000-square-foot, $442-million performing arts complex, which occupies a prominent harbor-front site in Copenhagen across from the Amalienborg Palace, is dissatisfied with the building. Or rather, dissatisfied with those parts that reflect what the Times describes as the "dictatorial control over the entire construction" exerted by Maersk McKinney Moller, the multi-millionaire shipping and oil magnate who paid the project's bills. For it seems that McKinney Moller selected not only the auditorium's gold-leaf ceiling but also its lacquered maple paneling and smoked oak flooring. He decreed as well that the building's exterior would be clad in Jura limestone and its plaza paved in Chinese granite. Most notoriously he insisted that the glass walls of the harbor-side facade would not be left transparent, as in the architect's design, but would instead be covered with a grill of metal fins. And indeed, from the very start, the project — a gift to the Danish government — had come loaded with non-negotiables. McKinney Moller specified the project's waterfront site (on land he happened to own), and, waiving the competition process typical for major civic works, he handpicked the well-respected firm of Henning Larsens Tegnestue, with which he'd worked before (with, one assumes, less messy contention). So is this just a tempest in a Danish neo-modern teapot? Maybe . . . but I think that some vexing issues have here bubbled to the surface, issues that go well beyond the clashing aesthetics of one strong-willed architect and deep-pocketed patron, issues that circle around one of the central anxieties of the architectural career, which is that architects must depend upon clients in order to practice their art. Unlike the writer or painter, who needs nothing more capital-intensive than a laptop or canvas in order to create, the architect must convince someone with cash — preferably a big pile of it — to entrust him or her with the large responsibility of a construction project. More than is usually admitted, the history of the field has been determined not just by those who have the artistic talent to do the job but by those who have the marketing skill to get the job, and the persuasive power to control it. Frank Lloyd Wright's place in the annals of architecture owes to his genius; but his built legacy of more than 500 projects owes to his charismatic, even seductive self-confidence. Again and again he coaxed smitten clients to spend more than they'd intended on projects they hadn't quite expected. In the mid-'30s — to cite the spectacular example — the Pittsburgh businessman Edgar J. Kaufmann asked Wright to design a weekend retreat with a view of the waterfall at Bear Run, Penn., for a budget of $30,000; Wright ignored the request for the view and located the house right on top of the falls, and by the time Fallingwater was finished Kaufmann had spent more than $80,000 (though he did shut his checkbook when Wright declared his desire to coat the concrete parapets with gold leaf). In the case of the Copenhagen opera house the artistic discord was not between architect and client but between architect and donor. Which seems rather more disturbing. It is the client, after all, who will use the building and whose knowledge and needs should influence its design; the donor has no such mundane interest in the outcome. According to the Times, the 91-year-old McKinney Moller has been criticized in the Danish press as "an old-fashioned businessman who behaves like a king." But in this era of global corporate oligarchy, the patron's grasp of his prerogatives seems to me altogether up-to-date. In an interview on Danish television he put it succinctly: "I am the one who pays; I am the one who decides." None of this would much matter if the Copenhagen project were unusual; but of course it isn't. These are jittery days for non-profits: the redistributive forces of capitalism are working round-the-clock, and donors are ever more crucial, ever more influential. Certainly in the United States, most architectural projects for universities and museums and performance spaces and cultural complexes — for almost anything non-commercial — depend upon endless hours of fund-raising, years of delicate courting and lavish lunching. Philanthropy has never been pure or disinterested; but the potential to push the quid pro quo, to blur the lines of commerce and culture, has never been greater. Is it really alright for the businessman who bankrolled the new opera house to play architect as well? What if he'd wanted also to choose the singers for the opening night performance? And so it seems reasonable to wonder: how many strings can a donor attach to a gift before the beneficiaries turn into puppets? posted by nancylevinson @ 9:45 am | Permanent link

Friday, January 14, 2005

A Good Use for Hay Bales It's been weighing on me that my first post of the new year, with its rundown of misbegotten projects of the past year, was so gloomy. Put it down to post-holiday funk and cabin-fever weather. So now I'd like to turn up the dial on the light box and report on what seems to me an especially heartening development in the design world. I refer to the upswing of political activism, the rising interest in social responsibility. It's been at least a generation since this sort of activism was a strong presence in the field. I can remember, as an architecture student in the early '80s, having the sense that my classmates and I had landed in school just as the long and rollicking party of the '60s and '70s was winding down. From contemporary books and magazines, from the talk and style of our professors, it seemed clear that we'd missed out on an era of lively polemics and idealistic exploration — an era when architects were pioneering alternative energy, experimenting with off-the-grid living, publishing incautious manifestoes, rediscovering the city and setting up storefront studios to design decent housing for poor people. No doubt my retrospective view of the '60s was romantic. But back then, in the early years of the Reagan revolution, when arbitrageurs were replacing rock stars as cultural icons and architecture journals were rhapsodizing about corporate mausoleums like the AT+T Building, the backward glance, the images in the rearview of a different sort of revolution, looked pretty damn good. And to be sure, the activism never really ceased. Architects continued to explore energy-efficient technologies, to design low-cost housing, to argue for resistance to consumer culture. But for many years, through the '80s and most of the '90s, socially-conscious design dropped largely out of site: it wasn't much on the minds of leading designers, it didn't much influence the curricula of the major schools, it wasn't high on the editorial agenda of the mainstream press. What was on the rise and in the news in those years — you know this, of course — was the fabulous world of high-style design, the world of expansive lofts and rambling beach-front villas, of frequent-flying star designers and their Gulfstreaming patrons. I hope I don't sound (too) disapproving: it's too easy to set up obvious and ultimately useless polarities between high-priced design and high-serious politics. Surely the world of architecture is big enough to accommodate art and activism, the fabulous and the altruistic (and sometimes even in the same project). Perhaps this latest generation of idealists and activists will have the sticking power to prove the point. The outlook is promising. In the past couple of weeks, for instance, it's been hard not to register the presence of groups like Architecture for Humanity and Architects Without Borders. Founded by architect Cameron Sinclair and journalist Kate Stohr, AFH works to devise architectural solutions to global crises; in the past few years it's organized competitions to design transitional housing for Kosavar refugees and mobile medical units for AIDS patients in Africa. Started by Craig Williams, an architect in Northern California, the North American Chapter of AWB is part of a global network of volunteers that helps communities rebuild after disasters. Both AFH and AWB have been fast-responders to the appeal for post-tsunami relief. AFH has joined with World Changing, an online forum devoted to green building, to set up Project Re:Build; the goal is to raise $100,000 to help reconstruct villages and homes in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. And AWB, according to its web site, is affiliating with local agencies in Asia and working to coordinate the efforts of the many architects around the world who've volunteered to help. But you don't need to read the latest news to find evidence of architects' activism. In recent years a couple of organizations have managed to attract national attention by designing houses made of such non-standard materials as hay bales and surplus tires, and for such non-traditional clients as day laborers. I'm thinking of Design Corps, a non-profit architecture office in Raleigh, North Carolina, established in 1991 by Bryan Bell, which designs houses for migrant farm workers, and of Rural Studio, a design-build workshop at Auburn University founded by the late Samuel Mockbee. Before his death in 2001 from leukemia, Sam Mockbee became a legend in the field for taking his students out to Hale County, Alabama — one of the poorest places in the state, which decades earlier had inspired Walker Evans and James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men — and teaching them how to use cheap materials — those hay bales and old tires, not to mention salvaged carpet tiles — to make good houses for people who never expected to live in anything better than a shanty. The humanitarian groups and non-profit architects are only the start of the list. A reasonable accounting of design-world social responsibility would have to mention the growing influence of the U.S. Green Building Council, whose voluntary guidelines for sustainable construction are becoming so broadly accepted that they're quietly revolutionizing American design. And you'd also want to take a good look at Massive Change, the multi-media brainchild of the Toronto-based superstar designer Bruce Mau. It's a project of such gargantuan social, environmental, and technological ambition that it's hard to tease out the grandiose claim from the real deal; but the humanitarian impulse feels genuine. I'll write more about these projects, and similar efforts, in future posts. Now I'll just add the necessary caveat, which is that only the most inexhaustible optimist — or maybe an unreconstructed '60s idealist — would bet against the ongoing dominance of the major media and celebrity culture, which seem to have become more inseparably interdependent than ever. Big names and big budgets will continue to command the column inches of the national papers — as they did, for instance, in last weekend's New York Times, with its Arts + Leisure cover story by Nicolai Ouroussoff, in which the not-yet-built, multi-building, multi-million-dollar residential compound that Frank Gehry is designing for himself on a large lot in Venice, California, is put forward as a "new domestic paradigm." Tell that to the folks of Hale County. posted by nancylevinson @ 12:15 am | Permanent link

Friday, January 7, 2005

Yesterday and Today From what I could tell, up here in the wintry north, the end of 2004 didn't inspire much in the way of best-architecture-of-the-year compilations. Time's Richard Lacayo praised a few projects worth praising, including Rem Koolhaas's Seattle Public Library, Frank Gehry's Stata Center at MIT, and Yoshio Taniguchi's Museum of Modern Art expansion, and panned the egregiously banal World War II Memorial on the Washington Mall. The New York Times's Nicolai Ourousoff also liked the Seattle Library, and found two other buildings to applaud — Morphosis's Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in Los Angeles and Santiago Calatrava's Ground Zero transit terminal; and he optimistically speculated that civic buildings were becoming as stylish as private commissions. But the art-critical energy for annual retrospection seemed notably subdued. I suspect this was due in large part to the daily catalogue of misery and inequity that is the front page of the morning papers. Not just the unfolding disaster in Southeast Asia but also the hard-fought election here at home — with the return to power of a faux-populist president hell-bent on waging a war being fought by the sons and daughters of the working class, and even more determined to leave as legacy a feed-the-rich economy — made congratulatory chitchat about the pricey products of design maestros seem painfully beside the point. But even beyond the comparative measure of major news, even on its own terms, architecture has had a rough year, a year more dubious than distinguished. You don't have to dig too deeply into the clippings file to recall some of the more dispiriting stories of 2004. In the spring, for instance, word came from the West Coast that so much glare was glancing off the stainless steel curves of Disney Hall that neighbors of the downtown Los Angeles landmark, designed by Frank Gehry, were slow-roasting in their condos. A couple of months later came the dreadful news that part of a vaulted concrete concourse at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, designed by Paul Andreu, had collapsed, killing four travelers. Not unreasonably, this spurred nervous reexamination of the Chinese National Grand Theater, also designed by Andreu — one of the big and costly new Beijing projects, a 1.6-million-square-foot, $325-million bubble-like concoction clad in titanium and translucent glass, now under construction just west of Tiananmen Square. Perhaps it was just coincidence, but a few weeks later the Chinese authorities suspended work on the competition-winning Olympic Stadium designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, explaining that the huge and complex project — an 80,000-seat, $500-million-plus retractably-roofed arena whose walls are formed by curving, criss-crossing concrete beams — was proving too expensive. And all the while rumors cyber-circulated about the uncertain fate of the biggest and costliest Beijing project of all, the CCTV Tower, designed by Rem Koolhaas, with one Chinese newspaper speculating that the extraordinary mobius-like high-rise would cost upwards of a billion bucks, and Rem-watchers wondering whether the building would join the architect's growing portfolio of unbuilt designs, of works first hailed as visionary and then shelved by clients who apparently feared they were vainglorious. (The latest word: the project is proceeding.) No wonder that the Times, as part of its year-end roundup, featured a curiously diagnostic piece describing the post-occupancy glitches of some of the year's "best-reviewed" buildings. These include the aforementioned Seattle Library (a great success, mostly, but the city librarian says the organization can be confusing and some finishes are wearing thin) and Stata Center (the MIT community likes the building, even though it's sprung some leaks). But the most ignoble story of 2004 was — of course — the ongoing melodrama of Ground Zero, a zero-sum power game if there ever was one. Certainly the aspirational rhetoric of civic vision and national memory has curdled pretty quickly into a murk of insider politics, architectural hubris, petty squabbling, ill-founded litigation, and bottom-line-driven development, all followed avidly by a press that has seemed to relish the schadenfreude of it all. (Who could forget that cruelly descriptive headline in the Times: "The Incredible Shrinking Daniel Libeskind: How Ground Zero's Visionary Architect Went from Major Planner to Minor Player"?) Just business-as-usual New York City real estate development, maybe, but somehow the good gossip seems poor recompense for the predictable corporate tower and the bland memorial. Problematic projects, downscaled ambitions: these did seem to crowd the feature sections of the past year. So I hope it doesn't seem too gloomy to suggest that unexpected relief, of sorts, could be had by turning to the obituary pages — it was there you could read heartening tales of architectural success. The past year saw the deaths of four elder statesmen of American design. Daniel Kiley, Edward Larrabee Barnes, Max Abramovitz, and Pierre Koenig all belonged to the generation that reached professional maturity in prosperous postwar America. Each worked in the modernist idiom, on projects large and small, and each created works that have come to symbolize an era that seems, in popular retrospect, as assured as our own is anxious. What is especially remarkable about these designers, beyond any particular artistic achievement, is the sheer scope and amplitude of their careers. Dan Kiley was not just one of the best but also one of the busiest landscape architects of the past half century (one obituary claimed that his portfolio comprised more than 1,000 projects). Working from a small studio in northern Vermont (where he lived because he liked to ski), he managed to land some of the plummiest commissions of the day, including gardens and grounds for the St. Louis Arch, the National Gallery, the Kennedy Library, Rockefeller University, Lincoln Center, and, most influential of all, an exquisite private estate in Columbus, Indiana, the home of the great arts patron J. Irwin Miller (the Miller Garden is often cited as the most significant modern landscape in America). Like Kiley, Edward Larrabee Barnes was one of the A-list designers of the U.S. cultural elite. Well-heeled and well-schooled — and mentored by his Harvard professors Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer — he set up shop in Manhattan in 1949 and spent the next four decades designing hundreds of buildings at diverse scales, from private houses to art museums to corporate towers to college master plans. Among his best works are the Cowles House, in Wayzata, Minnesota, and the Haystack Mountain School of Arts and Crafts, in Deer Isle, Maine. Max Abramovitz, the son of working-class Rumanian immigrants, didn't enjoy the same advantages of birth; but he too made his mark as a shaper of mid-century American icons. Working often in partnership with Wallace Harrison, he helped create many of Midtown Manhattan's most high-profile projects, including the United Nations, Avery Fisher Hall, and the high-rise headquarters of Time-Life, Mobil, Exxon, and McGraw-Hill. Pierre Koenig created no corporate palazzos. But the many works of his Los Angeles office include one of the most famous houses in the world: the Stahl residence, better known as Case Study House No. 22, one of three dozen residences commissioned by the magazine Arts and Architecture, which published them as prototypes for California-style modern living. Constructed of glass and steel and still occupied by the original owners, No. 22 is most familiar from a 1960 photograph by Julius Shulman — a marvelous night shot showing two smartly dressed women seated in a glass-walled living room that seems to hover vertiginously above the Hollywood Hills, the lights of L.A. receding dreamily into the distance. These were bustling, indeed prodigious practices. (1,000 projects! When did Dan Kiley find time to ski?) The sort of practices that flourished in an era that seems increasingly remote, an era in which styles didn't cycle so speedily through the culture. Modernism in America endured and evolved from the forties to the seventies, providing (no matter how you view its influence and ideas) an extraordinarily stable artistic and professional framework, one in which designers were less burdened than they are now with the need to be new, to be endlessly innovative, ever on the lookout for the next big thing. These days design movements hardly catch hold before they are likely to be declared passé — thus the restless upheavals of recent years, the fast-shuffling from postmodernism to deconstructivism to neo-modernism and then to the blobs and pods of digitally-driven design. It's easy — maybe too easy — to set up yesterday against today. But it's hard not to conclude that the prolific mid-century architects, with their steady careers and extensive legacies, operated in a culture in which designers were less fashionable but more powerful. posted by nancylevinson @ 9:30 am | Permanent link