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.
On a weekend in north Texas centered around the Kimbell Art
Museum in Fort Worth, I was surprised to discover museum sprawl - a landscape
of the best institutions oil can build, in sprawling suburban arts districts (Dallas)
and cultural districts (Fort Worth).
Most of these pictures are from Dallas. We were lucky enough
to visit the Dallas Arts District throughout the magic hour, the time of
evening when the lights are visible inside and out. And most venues still had
seats available!
While many cities plan for arts and cultural districts, DFW actually has two. Planned, choreographed, implemented. And the result is surreal.
“The Dallas Arts District is the largest arts district in the nation, spanning 68 acres and 19 contiguous blocks.” (http://www.thedallasartsdistrict.org/district). Crikey! Dallas's Cultural District was like the heroic modernist version of San Francisco's Civic Center, but with San Francisco's unity replaced by diversity in Dallas, San Francisco’s chorus replaced by a dozen Texan soloists. The San Francisco Civic Center’s common architectural language, in its many dialects, replaced by a dozen personal languages, the languages of modern international architects, all collected in the district. Bold works by I.M. Pei, Lord Norman Foster, Renzo Piano, Allied Works, SOM, REX. The district is supported by lots of underground parking and not much else. Its main illness, like many districts, is that it is essentially single-use. The district sort of includes a small park atop a freeway. Lined with food trucks, the park was mobbed on weekend afternoons.
Get beyond the architectural cacophony to experience what these facilities house: great art collections, a top notch symphony, opera, dance, theatre. The City Performance Hall was purpose built, by the City, for smaller under-600 seat productions. The Dallas Art Museum, terribly planned and terribly dated, has a comprehensive collection like a miniature Met in New York City. Amongst many excellent pieces, the centerpiece of their American Art collection is Watch (below) from 1925 by Gerald Murphy, one of my favorite paintings by one of my favorite painters. This was the diamond amidst the semi-precious load.
Back in Fort Worth, a significant cultural district has
grown around the Kimbell Art Museum. Within a few blocks, numerous institutions
are sprinkled amongst lots of parking and wide roads. The Fort Work Cultural District
rivals Dallas’s in architectural horsepower (Kahn, Piano, Legorretta, Schwarz,
Johnson, Ando), but the works are generally more subdued, more relaxed and more
calm.Across the street from the Kimbell
is the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, an austere and spacious work in
concrete designed by Tadao Ando. The Ando building is finely clocked,
thoughtfully designed and carefully detailed, in many aspects an homage to
Kahn. Very expensive building, generously spaced artworks – all Texan in scale.
SFO v. DFW: Triumph of the District
DFW International Airport serves the Dallas- Fort Worth area, an area of continuous low-scale development, from Dallas west to Arlington west to Fort Worth. Much like the landscape of San Francisco’s peninsula, the towns have grown into each other, blending along endless arterial strips and intercity highways.
The District is the planner’s solution for locating buildings of the same type. Buildings that may not make great neighbors on their own are assigned to a district. Seattle has Pill Hill (hospitals) and the U District (University of Washington). San Francisco has Mission Bay (medical R&D and university) and the Civic Center. And many American cities have the dreaded CBD, the Central Business District of midrise towers, structured parking, and empty evenings.
We took a weekend in central Texas to make a long-imagined architectural pilgrimage to the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Designed by Louis Kahn, it was completed in 1972. We took lots of pictures, and even did some sketching. Over a three day weekend we went four times - the lighting was different each time: cloudy day, sunny day, magic hour, night time.
The Kimbell Museum is one of the last great works of modern architecture, both heroic and modest, designed by a man with the same characteristics, Louis I. Kahn. Kahn was an accomplished architect and teacher, of local renown, before 50. And yet we remember him for nothing he did before 50. After 50, he had a prolific 2 decades, designing some of the world's greatest buildings, and getting many, but not all, built.
I've seen most of Kahn's major mature work in the United States - the Salk Institute, the Richards Lab, the Yale buildings, the Bryn Mawr dorm. Exeter Library is the jewel, the ideal city. But the Kimbell requires a special trip, located in the center of Texas and off my natural and familial travel itineraries. One does not casually, accidentally visit the Kimbell while in the neighborhood.
Kahn is teachable, I think that's part of his staying power and enduring appeal to educators and eager young students. Kahn brough tthe discipline of his his beaux-arts education to the modern, majestic expression concrete and masonry space and form. Kahn's work, like Corbu's, can loosely be separated into wall buildings and column buildings, and some hybrids. The Kimbell is a column building, square columns in fact, with infill walls. The most carefully detailed building I have ever seen, with precision and material awareness. As my old boss Robert Frear would say, its "clocked". It has grids and systems and violations.
The Kimbell is monumental on the outside and almost intimately small on the inside. Like Exeter Library, the building is built of almost entirely real, natural materials. The only drywall used was on the planar walls holding up the paintings. Otherwise it was lots and lots of concrete, sheet steel, and limestone. And not much else. The museum is very small, with not all that much gallery space! But an exquisite collection. Beautiful, fine works, limited in number but exceptionally high in quality. Recent acquisitions include paintings by Michelangelo and Caravaggio and a building by Renzo Piano. A small, busy cafe, three exquisite courtyards, and no donor wall at all. Also a very good bookstore and lots of parking.
Here are some pictures: (Note: you can scroll through the slideshow below, on this website; or click below to see them bigger at Shutterfly.)
I read Deconstructing the Kimbell in about 1998, at a time when I yearned to connect contemporary architectural theory with a building that was designed following considerations of site, program, space, light, and tectonics. Over the next few years I learned that not all theories are operational, and analysis and synthesis are not necessarily complementary endeavours.
The Kimbell is stunning, rigid, austere, cold, and spacious. But in the end it is forever serene and sublime.
It was a great to finally experience the Kimbell @ 40.
A Drawing by Lebbeus Woods, at the SFMOMA Exhibition
The SFMOMA is currently hosting a retrospective exhibition of the work of architect Lebbeus Woods, who died in New York City last year during hurricane Sandy. This was one of the best exhibitions I've ever been to. There were loads of drawings and models, imaginative, speculative, fantastical, beautiful. This exhibit is a treat for anyone fond of architecture, illustration, sci-fi, movies and set design, and the politics of public space and urban post-war reconstruction. The drawings were big and plentiful, in pencil, ink, and mostly colored pencil, with a nearly air-brush quality.
His work was a predecessor to not only architectural movements like deconstruction, parametricism and topological design, but also to the animated forms and spaces of sci-fi cinema space, from Alien to Star Wars to 12 Monkeys. There were small sketches and big elaborate presentation drawings; some hard-line-drafted and some free-hand. Any ONE of these drawings was a world in itself, and could make a student or collector perfectly happy to stare at and contemplate for a good long while.
There are some drawings on the SFMOMA's related exhibition website (HERE) and many more on Google (HERE).
He was a classic paper architect who used drawing and design as a speculative exercise, to question existing orthodoxies, to dream, to propose alternate ways of occupying the world. He was a longtime teacher at Cooper Union in NYC, and as an architect executed a dozen installations and only one built project, an art type component within a larger project in China designed by American architect Steven Holl.
This exhibit on its own is reason enough to San Francisco.
In the last decade, Google Maps, Bing, and Mapquest have
brought aerial maps to every phone and computer, democratizing what was
previously the domain of governments. Aerial maps are endlessly fascinating,
and have incredible power - illustrating how we've changed the landscape, and
influencing how we might continue to do so, as discussed so eloquently in the
essay “Aerial Representation and the Making of Landscape” in Taking Measures
Across The American Landscape by James Corner and Alex S. Maclean.
The Postal Service is catching up with Internet. They have recently issued a
series of stamps called Earthscapes, containing aerial views of the country.
The views are divided into three types: rural, agricultural, and urban. The
photographs on the stamps are composed in such a way as to balance the beauty
of an abstract color composition with the literal pictorial representation of
the various earthscape scenes. The central-pivot irrigation in the Kansas
farmland looks like a new surface pattern design from Orla Kiley. The Manhattan
skyscraper appears like an intense textile pattern. The colors and patterns are
equally stunning in each of the three
categories.
From Upper left to lower right, the stamps depict:
The Bear Glacier of the Harding Icefield in the Kenai-Fjords National Park, Alaska.
The crater of the Mt. Saint Helens, Washington.
The Grand Prismatic Spring in the Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.
The Castle Butte in the Monument Valley, Arizona.
Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge on Maryland's Eastern Shore.
Salt/seawater evaporation ponds near San Francisco, California.
Log rafts made of harvested timber float toward a mill processor in Idaho.
Central Pivit irrigation, of Kansas farmland, "false-color" image.
A cherry orchard in Park Rapids, Michigan.
A cranberry bog in Massachusetts.
A suburban landscape in Nevada.
Towboats in Houston, Texas.
Locomotives turntable, Steamtown National Historic Site in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
An apartment complex in Manhattan, New York.
A view of Interstates 95 and 395 crossing in Miami, Florida.
A further description of each stamp, with some further
links, can be found here.
The new stamps reflect and acknowledge a growing
awareness of maps, mapping, and the contrasts of natural and developed land
patterns. They help illustrate the scope and vast scale of human intervention
across the landscape of the earth, and the very close and ongoing working
relationship we all have with the surface of the earth, whether or not our
dayjob involves tractors or computer terminals.
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