A Temple in Willard

Façade Sketch of South Elevation

There have always been temples. And Werner Seligmann's Willard Administration Building is a minor revelation, nothing less than a sublimely situated temple exactly as Vincent Scully would imagine it.

Southeast Corner

On a roadtrip traversing update New York by thruway, I knew that central New York was dotted with most of the few built works by the late former dean of Syracuse's School of Architecture, Werner Seligmann (1930-1998). So, in pursuit of modulor proportions, we took Exit 41 on the New York State thruway, south between Seneca Lake and Cayuga Lake, the two largest of the Finger Lakes. Passing beautiful dairy farms, orchards and vineyards, and then the Seneca Army Base, and heading west from Ovid, you soon come upon the grounds of the former New York State Willard Psychiatric Center, formerly the Asylum for the Chronic Insane. Driving onto its grounds, the Administration Building quickly comes into view from below, crowning a green hill overlooking Seneca Lake. 

Northwest Corner

The Administration Building is a perched sentinel, a white temple of an office building overlooking the lake, like a Greek temple might be set on a hillside terrace overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. It is two stories on its south entry side, and three stories on its north side, overlooking a gently sloping eleven acre lawn, bigger than Bryant Park. The building is a simple rectangular volume, perhaps 50' wide by 120' long, just two rooms deep separated by an access corridor. The upper two stories are clad in white metal panels. The basement level is sand-colored concrete.

South Façade at Entry

The south façade has a monumental 2-story square recess at the entry, and continuous horizontal windows, narrow to limit the effects of direct southern sunlight. The north faced is, conversely, open and almost continuously glazed. Windows are organized by two elements: first, a monumental 2-story square recessed porch mirroring the southern entry; and second, a glass curtain wall, a continuous glazed wall carefully set out from the building's rectangular shape in a projecting frame.

Northeast Corner

Today, just over 40 years after it was dedicated, it doesn't look very special, it's quiet and lonely.  The inside is a bit beige and needs some love. But the outside is looking pretty good, the panels have some oil-canning but seem to be holding up well, the windows and concrete have some patina.

South Façade Strip Windows

 

However, it's clear that this is a small building loaded with big ideas: how to site a building, how to  compose facades, how to design facades differently for north and south exposures, how to arrange the entry sequence from outside to inside. It has many of the same moves, in simpler form, as an early Richard Meier house or a very recent Richard Meier office building. This Willard building is a distillation of years of consideration of these principles. And you sense it was meant to be, ultimately, a tool for teaching, a precedent. This was a building Professor Seligmann could point to as the embodiment of the principles that he taught day to day, semester to semester, a building that was at first simple and diagrammatic but could sustain the levels of analysis that Wright and Le Corbusier could withstand but Mies could not.

North Facade

You can clearly see the hand of a skilled designer, approaching maturity - Seligmann was in his early 40's at the time - with the ability to distill a building program into a cohesive statement: the important proportional relationships, the regulating lines, the organization and hierarchy of facade components, the dynamism of major asymmetries and the delight of minor local symmetries, the careful expression of structure only where in doing so supported a higher design idea. The building is three stories when it could easily have been one. The parking lot is across the access road, allowing the building to be wrapped in a green setting. The sequence from the parking to the 2-story entry lobby - and floating concrete switchback stair - delivers an architectural promenade worthy of a mid-career Corbu. A little bit of drama coming into work in the morning, a pathway to lend pride and dignity and a sense of importance to the work to be conducted inside.

That a building of such nuance and design sophistication was delivered to remote Willard speaks to the reach that the New York State Administration, under Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller and Edward J. Logue, CEO of the Urban Development Corporation - had at the time, and the collective belief in modern architecture as a mechanism for delivering the good society.

I am eagerly awaiting Bruce Coleman's monograph on the work of Werner Seligmann, sure to be a best-seller in architectural circles upon its publication.

West Facade

South Façade

Entry Lobby

Miro in the Rain

Over Memorial Day weekend, we visited family in in the Pacific Northwest. Here is my postcard.

One of the lucky natural features of the Seattle area is the incredible amount of shoreline afforded by Puget Sound, Elliot Bay, and an extensive network of lakes and waterways. The landscape gives the impression that you are never far from the water, and you are almost always not far from a view of the water. I love this aspect of the area - it reminds me of the cities, towns and villages along the coastline of my native Rhodes Island.

Aerial view of Winslow on Bainbridge Island, looking east over Puget Sound back towards downtown Seattle, WA. 

It was a mostly gray weekend that included some pockets of sun and plenty of full-on rain. Prior to the rain, we took a day trip to Bainbridge Island, just a 30 minute ferry ride from the downtown Seattle waterfront but a world away.  The ferry ride was great - a big ferry for carrying cars - with unmatched panoramic views of the city skyline. 

 

On Bainbridge Island, we visited two tiny towns with short, bustling high streets - Winslow and Poulsbo. Winslow was a craft utopia, and we followed shopping with a pub lunch overlooking the harbor. My craft-brewed local hard apple cider was made with New York State apples, rather than Washington's local crop. This was crisp and bitter anomaly in the food production chain that I was willing to overlook! The Poulsbo high street was left crafty and more Norse, with architecture and shops themed on the Scandinavian heritage of the island.

When in Seattle, we took shelter from the rain at the SAM - the Seattle Art Museum. I've been visiting Seattle for 15 years but this was my first visit there. The museum reopened a few years ago after an expansion redesign by Portland's Allied Works. The SAM occupies the bottom 4 floors of a 20 story glass tower in downtown Seattle. 

 

We went to see an exhibit that wax about to close: "Miro: The Experience Of Seeing". This exhibition was focused on his last 2 decades of work, a balance of paintings and sculptures mostly from the Queen's National Museum in Madrid.  Juan Miro (1893-1983) started as a realist painter then moved to Paris in 1921, and developed his more abstract style into the 1930s. Since then, he has ceased to innovate (which is perfectly fine). Miro's work is on the edge of conceptualism, but like Picasso he never abandoned the subject components of genre painting: the human figure, objects, animals, landscapes. Unfortunately I think he seemed to have gotten trapped into being Miro, into producing "Miro's". For five decades he produced abstracted pieces that confirm the artist's value is primarily in the formal idea and much less in a work requiring skill, diligence, or a significant investment of time. Nevertheless Miro claims a place among modern artists between Pablo Picasso and Alexander Calder - and that's very good company indeed!

 

 

A high point of the SAM was seeing a painting by Kehinde Wiley (b.1977), a new acquisition interestingly hung in the European Renaissance / Mannerism / Baroque galleries, called "Anthony of Padua".