Collages for Los Angeles

Two collages made following a weekend in Los Angeles, with visits to the James Turrell exhibition at the LACMA and the Huntington Art Gallery and Library.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!!

Newport at Full Scale

Newport , RI, is one in the oldest cities in the country, and no doubt one of its most beautiful. Founded in 1639, it has the country's oldest synagogue and its first free black church. For almost 300 years it has been a summertime destination for east coast families. Boating, turn of the century mansions, recreation and partying - this is what Newport is known for.

It's original colonial era street pattern, public buildings and private dwellings have lasting appeal. Fine classical works include the Touro Synagogue, the Redwood Library (one if the oldest lending libraries in America) and the Brick Market.  

Besides its collection of narrow streets, downtown Newport has two important public spaces, Washington Square and Queen Anne Square. Civic buildings surround Washington Square, the city’s original public space – including the brick market (now a Newport History Museum), the Colony House, and the Courthouse, as well as a group of banks, hotels and a theatre. Queen Anne Square emerged more recently, in the 1970’s at the behest of Doris Duke. The square is anchored by Trinity Church, whose current building dates from 1726. Built in a classical design, it closely models in wood the masonry designs that Englishman Christopher Wren built around London in the late 17th century. Queen Anne Square has recently been refurbished and reopened this year also had some modest garden wall elements designed by Maya Lin, who famously designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as a college student.

 

Bellevue Avenue extends west and south from Newport's historic downtown, and it is along this street that wealthy old families built their summer cottages, mansions designed by top New York architects, displaying all they had learned at the Ecole des Beaux-Artes in Paris. 

As the 20th century dawned, Newport was well into its decision to forego industry and commerce and embrace pleasure and recreation as its raison d'être. The city is preserved like few others, not a relic but a living, breathing place - casual but not exactly thriving - where the form, shape, and character of America’s earliest settlements is preserved, at full scale. It is a fascinating place to experience, again and again. I grew up near Newport, but didn't fully appreciate it until moving away, to upstate New York for college. Since then, since studying Newport for a class on American Town Planning taught by Professor Anne Munly at Syracuse University, I've been fascinated with the design of Newport for almost two decades - a lasting affection.

Form, Light and Forms Assembled in Light

Inspiration is everywhere.

One of my favorite aspects of living in New York City was that inspiration was everywhere. It was not on demand, but was easy to find. You could consistently replenish you creative juices with visits to the Met, the MOMA, the Cloisters, PS1, Shakespeare in the Park, or Shakespeare in the Parking Lot. Inspiration was omnipresent and usually affordable. That was a decade ago. Last weekend I learned that nothing has changed. In one weekend we saw a group of blockbuster museum and gallery shows of depth and the highest quality.

 

FORM

At the Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea, we saw an amazing installation, "Fragments", on the work of Italian architect Renzo Piano. Twenty-four projects were presented on a grid of square tables, with  drawings, mock-ups, animations, and wood models so exquisite they were like the works of skilled master craftsmen. Then we walked the High Line and got hot and iced coffees, respectively, and reflected on Piano's work, career, and broad geographical coverage.  We've been lucky enough to see many of the works showcased in "Fragments". Ultimately Piano's work consists of a legion of one-off creations, careful tectonic expressions, balancing engineered determinism with an intrinsic Italianate humanism that a century of modernism can't fully suppress.

 

 

LIGHT

The next day we saw the work of James Turrell at the Guggenheim Museum, a series of prints and magisterial installations. The rotunda installation is, and will be regarded as, a cultural event. The installation, called "Aten Reign" completely envelopes the rotunda with an inner scaffold of translucent oval scrims, receding as they rise to the oculus. Color-changing LEDs provide an dynamic aura of color tinting, wonderful blues, purples, reds, oranges. Custom-built inclined benches at the ground level allow for prolonged gazing up into the light. On upper floors, there were 4 more installations, each carefully composed with cerebral precision.

 

 

FORMS ASSEMBLED IN LIGHT

Le Corbusier said that "architecture is the skillful, correct and magnificent play of forms assembled in light" (this is one of many translations of this saying). To complete a trinity of modern masters, we went to "Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes" at the Museum of Modern Art.  Make no mistake: this is an epic retrospective on the work of Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), a classic modern fox (per Isaiah Berlin). Le Corbusier was prolifically productive and industrious over a very long career. His career traversed many great disciplines, those pursued by Palladio and Michelangelo and Leonardo - all together. Architecture, painting, sculpture, writing, publishing, teaching, lecturing, urbanism, photography, film-making, furniture, installation, visual evangelism. He was also a word traveler, avid sportsman and swimmer, man about town and smart dresser. He did not waste a day. The exhibition, across half of the MoMA's sixth floor special exhibitions rooms, was vast, with rooms full of original models, oil paintings, architectural plans, sketches, watercolors. He was a global architect a half century before it was feasible. His oeuvre was vast but not as vast as it could have been. His career was truly a patient search, a personal search, through the urban, pastoral, and mountainous landscapes that his life traversed.  

 

Taken as a group, these three exhibitions are worth the cost of a flight to New York City, from anywhere in the world.

 

Hey Utah!

Last month I visited Utah for the first time while attending a conference in the capital, Salt Lake City. I imagine Salt Lake City as being in middle America, but in fact the flight was only 75 minutes, closer to San Francisco than Seattle.  A light rail line connects you from the airport directly to downtown destinations, for only $2.50, leaving every 10 minutes.

The City is set at the southeast corner of Great Salt Lake, very much like San Jose is set at the southeast end of San Francisco Bay. Neither city is quite on the waterfront, but you're aware of the proximity. The city is sited at the northern, uphill side of a long, low, flat plane - Salt Lake Valley - which sits at the base of the steep Wasatch and Oquirrh mountain ranges on the eastern and western sides, respectively. Salt Lake City is a place that gets very hot and very cold - it's not for the timid.

The city is laid out according to the "Plat of Zion," a peculiar planning pattern that includes 660' x 660' blocks - that's 10 acres each - and very wide streets with 132' rights-of-way. Over 500 settlements were established according to this pattern. There is a modestly sized downtown area, something of the CBD (central business district) found in so many cities west of the Appalachian mountains. This area has the tall buildings, the sporting venues, the 10-story parking garages, the Mormon facilities, the pubs (now open to all), and a few residents. Once you leave the downtown area, the city gets very un-dense very quickly. The surrounding neighborhoods are mostly made with one and two story single family houses.  A coffee shop, restaurant, and flower shop surrounding an intersection forms a local neighborhood center.

Pictures from my weekend in Salt Lake City are here:

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=2AZsW7hs4ctWL9

The Culture of the City

Salt Lake City is like the Vatican of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, referred to locally as the LDS, known internationally as the Mormons. The Mormon sites feature a distinctive kind or architecture - a bit depression-modern, a bit colonial-fascist, a bit corporate-communist. All in all, difficult to categorize, but you know it when you see it. Founded in 1847 by a group led by Brigham Young, today the city has almost 200,000 residents, about half Mormons. Touring around the city - by foot, by bike, by street car - you immediately notice that most adults are white, but most children are brown. Even the city of Joseph Smith cannot buck national trends towards diversification.

 

My conference was held at the Grand America Hotel, a luxurious 2002 Olympics era hotel, built in a bombastic classical style, evoking a Mitt Romney embrace of wholesome Americana. The conference, the 22nd annual held for the Congress of New Urbanism, was a lively event where I reconnected with old friends, made new ones, and wistfully thought of those skipping the event this year. The topics, like the participants, spanned practice and policy, local and global, humanists and technocrats. There were numerous and lengthy sessions on urban farming, China urbanization, digital technologies for public feedback, safe streets, great American grids, playing, and not-so-big-ness.

 

After the conference, we rode public bikes from the downtown Mormon Sites into the surrounding neighborhoods. We met lots of friendly residents, out on a warm late spring weekend afternoon. They were curious about our green bikes, which had been all over the papers in the lead up to their launch. Despite the active role played by the Mormon church in helping to enact California's Prop 8 prohibiting gay marriage, Salt lake City seemed to be a very gay-friendly place. The weekend I was there, a huge Pride parade was held downtown. It felt like home!

 
 

The SFMOMA and the deYoung: Two American Planning Traditions

 

SFMOMA, Composite Drawing

 

At the end of Memorial Day weekend, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art officially closed its doors for a 3 year renovation and expansion, estimated at $300m - $500m.  Living downtown, I've always felt the SFMOMA to be my local museum. It's a 15 minute walk from my building. It's the museum I joined when I moved here, much like I joined New York City's MoMA when I moved there after college.

The closure was announced over a year ago, as it became clear that the museum would able to successfully raise half a billion dollars for the project in mid-recession. With the impending closure of my local, I knew I'd need to look elsewhere for a high-culture fix. So I joined the deYoung museum, which has a co-membership with the Legion of Honor - together they operate as the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.  Both of these art museums have mediocre permanent collections but host excellent touring exhibitions, usually including one fashion-oriented blockbuster per year.

With the SFMOMA about to close, it is worth considering these two museums at this moment in time. For years I've thought that the SFMOMA was a much better building than the de Young Museum. Actually they're both excellent buildings, and I realized that their architecture is intrinsically and inextricably linked to their locations. And their architectural design and site planning exemplify two long-standing traditions of architecture and planning, in the Western tradition and in the American tradition.

Locating the Institutions

The SFMOMA, completed in 1994, is located in downtown San Francisco on 3rd Street between Mission and Howard Streets, in the South-of Market, or SOMA, area. The building is footsteps from Market Street, from hotels, and from multi-modal transit facilities including city and intercity bus, street car, trolley car, and BART. Access to this museum couldn't be easier - there are even a few multi-story parking garages within a block for those who like to drive to downtown destinations. SOMA is a flat area of the city planned in the mid/later 19th century with large urban blocks and wide streets, thought to facilitate business and industry. In contrast, the deYoung, completed in 2005, is located in the middle of San Francisco's Golden Gate park, a 1000-acre public park on the west side of the city - a park 20% bigger than New York's Central Park and planned by William Hammond Hall John McLaren. The deYoung forms the north/western side of classical public esplanade grounds - the music concourse, centered on a bandshell, with the newly reopened California Academy of Sciences forming the south/eastern side. There is some underground parking for those going in cars. Otherwise the public transit gets tricky, with a few bus lines going somewhat close to the general area of the park where the museum is located.

Site Planning: On the Street and In the Park

Two things can make a building specific for a place: the site planning and the architectural design. In their site panning, these two museums exemplify two long-standing traditions of planning in the Western humanist tradition: the civil urban neighbor and the independent expressive ranger. Or, the chorus and the soloist.
The SFMOMA was planned to anchor an arts centered redevelopment area in downtown San Francisco. Currently set amidst hotel and condo towers, ground floor retail shops, and other institutions, the museum is placed along the street, at that back of the sidewalk, so that its façade forms part of a street wall that now includes, along its block, the St. Regis and W Hotels. The street frontage includes the main entry, the design store gift shop, and Café Museo. Sitting under a loggia, these are perfectly suited for their highly-trafficked location. The SFMOMA is a good urban building. The deYoung, on the other hand, is a rural building. Although part of a larger ensemble, it is essentially a giant folly in a lush green park. Once you get beyond the planar façade facing the concourse, the building's awkward massing and obtuse programmatic distribution make the relationship with its site an afterthought. The gift shop is half buried, the café half inside and half outside, and the galleries are disorientating at every turn. While some clever devices are used to bring landscape into the building, it reads as artificial and contrived. The building could just as easily be spun around 180 degrees, or moved to Napa or to San Diego's Balboa Park.

Designing For Place

Architectural design can also make a building specific for a place, whether the site planning is complementary or resistant. A building can be built using local materials, or it can use forms and configurations that have found fluency in the region. In design, a new building can include the familiar, either through quotation or interpretation.

We may wonder if a piece or architecture should be specific to its place. Is this a valued quality? What are the merits of building in a way that is locally informed? Are the local patterns worth repeating or even referencing? And haven't the building cultures of most places been influenced by other places? After all, renaissance classicism and mid-war European modernism became the two most widespread and interpreted languages across the globe. They can be at once local and international.
The value of a place-specific building must rest in the value of the place. For all its diversity, the City of San Francisco has a young but conservative building culture, and pan-economic interests have emphasized the ongoing civic, cultural, and economic value of the character of the city, of its buildings and its neighborhoods, and how they relate to the hills and to the waterfront. The building culture here privilege continuity over change, refinement over reinvention. In a place like San Francisco, place-specific design matters. It’s important for the site planning, and it’s important for the architecture.

Facades for Galleries: Skin-deep Brick and Dimpled Copper

The SFMOMA and the deYoung Museum are very similar in program. Both institutions present themselves, and their collections, in a series of white-walled galleries, with supporting spaces - café, gift shop, auditorium. Both museums are organized around a grand stair hall, with gallery sequences that bring you back to the stair hall.

The deYoung has features of historic museums and civic buildings - features also of the museum that it replaced - like a tower, a courtyard, a grand arrival hall, and formal gardens. In the case of the deYoung, each of these elements is exquisitely done, a special event, a singular piece unrelated to the others. The dramatically twisting tower is almost detached from the museum. The sealed museum is, in turn, not allowed to interact with the surrounding gardens. The courtyard is a bleak space, intimate in scale yet cold and desolate. One wonders, with so much rich material available for inspiration, for interpretation, for dialogue and contradistinction, why would this museum be configured in such a way that is so alien to this place? Why would a dimpled copper facade, wrapping all sides of the building so that it appears windowless, alien, and unwelcoming, be an appropriate design idea, or design solution, for San Francisco's city-scaled garden on the Pacific? The museum makes bold statements about site, context, program and place; but are these lessons worth repeating? Bay Area architects are unsure is this building reinforced the trend of subpar performance by out-of-town and international architects, or if the deYoung finally ended the long dreary run.

More optimistically, I think San Francisco has received some truly fine pieces of architecture from talented guest practitioners, beginning a century ago with the Panama Pacific Exposition of 1915 and the construction of the Civic Center. The trajectory includes the dazzling Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Mary by Pietro Belluschi, the Performing Arts Center at Yerba Buena by James Stuart Polshek, and the Gap Building and the Federal Building, fine office buildings by Robert A.M. Stern and Morphosis, respectively.

And the SFMOMA fits in this latter tradition of very fine buildings. The building works at an urban level, the massing is civic and monumental in scale, using large rectangular forms to define a street wall. The program is correctly distributed for its site, with the most public spaces offered to the visitor: the iconic stair hall is a living room for the city, with events and art installations and people from all over.  The ground level café, gift shop and auditorium keep the space animated. And the architecture of the building articulates and reinforces the institution's civic role and civil manners. The exterior walls are made if a thin layer of bricks which add a fine texture to the otherwise plain and windowless urban walls. Special attention is given to the corners and floor levels. The building steps back at the upper levels, providing space for skylights and modest areas for roof decks, and allowing the giant cylinder drum of the stair hall to be exposed and legible on the skyline. This feature is first visible on approach from the gardens across the street, and then is recognized as you move into the building and through the sunlight-filter atrium. The drum reemerges when, after visiting the galleries, you cross the truss bridge near the top of the sliced drum, and emerge on an outdoor terrace overlooking the garden where you started. The visual sequence is complete, the journey is legible. The metaphorical quest - emerging from the garden to be enlightened though the artifacts of civic culture - has come full circle.

Nature, the Swiss and the City

The deYoung Museum is a sophisticated piece of architecture, set within sumptuous grounds, set within a giant urban park. The museum responds to nature with a simultaneous embrace and withdrawal. The courtyard and vitrines capture nature but treat it like an exhibit. While any place will do, Golden Gate Park will do just fine as a location for this big box with exquisite cladding.
The SFMOMA offers another take on designing for a specific place. It is at once a foreground and background building. The SFMOMA is monumental yet humane, and surprisingly porous for a vessel of fragile objects. The building makes a virtue out of what could be seen as obvious, expected, and proper. The building allows its role in contributing to making a place in the city stand on equal ground with its role as the address of the foremost modern art museum west of the Hudson River.

These two buildings, designed by gifted Swiss architects at the height of their careers, offer valuable lessons about architecture, site planning, and the challenges of designing - in the park, and in the city. 

 

Seattle University Chapel

Today in Seattle, rain sun wind chills warmth. We drove all around and eventually came to the chapel at Seattle University, a small Jesuit college just east of downtown and I-5. The chapel was designed by new york city architect Steven Holl, whose work I've admired for two decades. I've seen bigger works by Holl at Cranbrook, in Helsinki, and in Bellevue, WA. But this small chapel is my favorite. In plan, It is a simple rectangle. The drama is in the roofscape, where seven sculpted, curving skylights redirect seattle's hazy sunlight into the chapel, into alcoves, niches, and behind the alter.
It was my third visit to the chapel. The first time was on my first visit to Seattle about 12 years ago. I sketched it then. The second time, 6 years ago, when we thought it would make a great wedding location. However it's only available for SU students and alumni. As a consolation, we had our wedding reception in the Steven Holl-designed Bellevue Art Museum. Today there was a wedding going on, so we didn't interrupt the sacrament.
The chapel sits along a main pedestrian thoroughfare on campus, between the quad and a lower parking area. It's limited grounds include iconic features of religious architecture, like a bell tower and a shallow reflecting pool and forecourt leading to a pair of heavy wooden doors, one smaller for ordinary use, one larger and ceremonial. Inside, the skylights allow wondrous colored light into the intimate spaces, and Beautifully crafted furniture and glasswork complete the ensemble.