Witold Rybczynski's Blog, page 18

SPUMONI IN THE FOGG

Harvard’s Fogg Museum, a Colonial Revival building at 32 Quincy Street, reopened five years ago after Renzo Piano’s major expansion, or “reboot” as The Guardian called it. The other day I had a free hour and I spent it in the Calderwood Courtyard of the old/new building. The architect of the original museum, Charles Coolidge of Coolidge, Shepley, Bulfinch and Abbot (H.H. Richardson’s successor firm), modeled the cloister-like arcades on the loggia of a sixteenth-century canon’s house in Montepulciano, designed by Antonio da Sangallo the Elder. Admittedly, the modeling is very loose, more like a stylized memory, and has a kind of American crispness in execution that is very different from the origonal. Piano added two stories on top of the arcade making a sort of spumoni—modern above, Renaissance below. The modernist layer is thin fare; Piano’s work, with its fussy greenhouse roof, looks provisional, like a temporary addition. I came to the conclusion that there were three chief reasons. 1) Steel and glass are simply not as engaging as travertine. 2) The orders of the arcades play with scale; the anonymous minimalist addition is more like utilitarian engineering—nothing but the facts ma’am. 3) The modeled arcades are defined by sharp shadows; Piano’s addition, which is mostly glass, contains no shadows. If architecture is indeed the “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light,” then the addition is not architecture at all. In the old arcades, our glance is caught by the details of the Ionic and Doric capitals; in the new addition there are no details (except for the lighting fixtures), and we quickly loose interest. Almost 400 years separate Coolidge’s work from that of Sangallo; less than 90 years later, Piano comes along and and it’s all gone.

IT OUGHT TO BE GOTHICK

The organizers of the  competition to design a replacement spire for Notre Dame Cathedral, “even more beautiful than before” in President Macron’s words, might take a lesson from an incident that happened more than 300 years ago. In 1681 the architect Christopher Wren was commissioned to build a  bell tower for the quadrangle of Christ Church College in Oxford. The original tower had never been completed. The college had been founded by Cardinal Wolsey 150 years earlier, and had been built  in the  castellated Late Gothic style that was then popular but which was now long out of fashion. Wren was the country’s leading classicist. What did he do?  As he succinctly explained, the tower “ought to be Gothick to agree with the Founder’s worke.” Enough said.

FIRE IN THE CATHEDRAL

The heart-wrenching sight of Notre Dame de Paris in flames was a reminder that fire is the great enemy of architecture. So are earthquakes. The third enemy, ever since 1687 when the Venetians destroyed the Parthenon, is wartime bombardment.  The Paris fire is also a reminder of what a weird hybrid structure Gothic cathedrals really are. The ancient Romans roofed their basilicas and baths with concrete vaults (the Pantheon with a dome), and the Byzantines used thin domes and vaults of brick. Over time, builders lost these skills and Romanesque cathedrals were roofed with exposed timber rafters like big barns. This made the buildings highly susceptible to fire, often caused by lightning strikes. The solution, pioneered at Durham Cathedral in the 11th century, was to build a lightweight ribbed stone vault over the nave. The timber roof remained, so the vault had no structural function (except to support itself) but it separated the interior from the flammable roof above. This was largely effective as the April 15 fire shows. However, news reports mention two “holes” in Notre Dame’s vaulted ceiling. This is misleading. As photographs (above) show, two large sections of the vaulted ceiling collapsed, unable to bear the weight of the falling debris. These will have to be repaired. I expect a debate when it comes to rebuilding the roof itself. No doubt metal will be substituted for the original lead roofing, but what about the (concealed) supporting rafters? Should they be “authentic” timber or “modern”   steel? I vote for fire-protected steel.

LA LA LAND

I have written crtically in Zócalo of LACMA’s decision to demolish its old museum. “Why does Los Angeles, which has little enough history, feel the need to keep reinventing its surroundings?” I asked. That was almost five years ago. Now we read that the LA county board of supervisors has finally given its approval and the new building will go ahead. I am not a fan of Peter Zumthor’s design. Apart from its rather simple-minded concept it does not look like it will be a sympathetic place to look at art. LACMA has not released any plans, but the views of the interior give the impression  of an office lobby where the art is simply background wallpaper. Surely after Mies van der Rohe’s disastrous National Gallery in Berlin, we have learned that a glass-walled room is not a good setting for art? The rationale seems to be that old chestnut, flexibility. LACMA director Michael Govan is quoted by the New York Times as saying that the new museum will create spaces that are “good for different kinds of art.” Looking at the slow evolution of Zumthor’s design, now black now white, now blobby now zigzaggy, I am reminded of a comment that the landscape architect Laurie Olin made to me during an interview about Apple Park, Apple’s new HQ in Cupertino. “There are some architecture firms that could do a project of this size but not as refined, and there are firms that could produce as refined a design but could not handle the scale, but there are very few firms in the world that can do both.” Zumthor’s firm is not one of them.

THE TRANSPARENCY TRAP

Boston’s Copley Square with Richardson’s Trinity Church and Pei Cobb Freed’s John Hancock Tower

Blair Kamin, the architecture critic of the Chicago Tribune, recently made this wise observation about the latest crop of urban buildings: “Glass usually works best when it operates in counterpoint to richly articulated walls of masonry. When glass becomes the context, it often struggles to match the quality and character of limestone, granite, brick and terra cotta.” In other words, the first generation of all-glass buildings benefitted from their masonry neighbors (Pei’s John Hancock Tower, across from Richardson’s Trinity Church comes to mind). Today, not so much. Our downtowns are dominated by all-glass boxes, even cities like Washington, D.C. (once marble and limestone) and Philadelphia (once brick and limestone). Le Corbusier described (modernist) architecture as “the masterly, correct and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light.” Corbusier used glass but he never designed all-glass buildings. Neither did Mies; he added superfluous I-beams to his facades (which also had substantial spandrels). The problem with transparent glass is that it doesn’t hold a shadow, and without a shadow there can be no “play of volumes.” Since minimalist modernist architecture doesn’t offer decoration or ornament, that doesn’t leave much to look at.

ROCK CENTER REDUX

There have been a number of articles about the new Hudson Yards project in New York: Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, Michael J. Lewis in the Wall Street Journal, Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker. Schwartz is forthright: “what Hudson Yards really feels like is a nice airport terminal, with the High Line as its moving walkway.” Lewis likes the observation deck of the tallest skyscraper. Kimmelman doesn’t say much about the architecture but like Lewis he points out the paucity of urban design in the master plan, and both compare it unfavorably to Rockefeller Center. Fred Bernstein in Metropolis has some interesting views on why this might be so. But none of the critics talks about how downright ugly this assemblage of high-rise buildings is on the city’s skyline. (Is that why they generally avoid mentioning the individual architects? They are: Numbers 10 & 30, KPF; 15, Diller Scofidio + Renfro; 35, SOM; 50, Foster + Partners; 55, KPF and Roche Dinkeloo.) The buildings are all-glass, of course. Some of the buildings are odd-shaped, some are rectangular, some tops are flat, some are angular, but the whole thing adds up to—well, nothing, really. These buildings are like a group of self-engrossed millennials, posturing, taking selfies, ignoring each other and their surroundings. Poor New York.

WHY THE FRENCH LIKE MODERN DESIGN

Watching the French television political drama Marseille—and anything with Gérard Depardieu can’t be all bad—I was struck, again, by how much the French like modern design. The furniture in the scenes was inevitably modernist, more so than would be the case in Madame Secretary, say. Then it struck me that while the furniture was aggressively modern, most of the background architecture was not. The Marseille city hall, for example, is a beautiful nineteenth-century building, so is Depardieu’s villa (he plays the mayor, of course). In one episode, a hospital room filled with the latest medical gadgetry in a private clinic, is actually a paneled tall-ceilinged, fin-de-siècle salon. I guess you want something new when you have something old to put it in. Incidentally, the most noticeable modern buildings in Marseille are the faceless apartment slabs in the low-cost housing projects. They are cleaner and better maintained than their American counterparts, but otherwise, as the story makes clear, they are just as dehumanizing.

THE GEHRY TOUCH

Last October the Philadelphia Museum of Art re-opened its restaurant. It is designed by Frank Gehry, whose firm is doing a major do-over of the museum. I thought I should take a look and we went there for lunch. The small (75 seats) restaurant, somewhat mysteriously titled Stir, is inauspiciously located behind a frosted glass wall off a banal corridor—hardly an elegant setting. The PMA describes the restaurant decor as having an “ebullient Gehry touch.” I suppose that is a reference to the heavy trellis made of curved laminated Douglas fir beams that is suspended in the middle of the room like some sort of woodsy Calder mobile. There is not much evidence of ebullience elsewhere. The walls and ceiling are paneled in Douglas fir plywood, the floor is red oak. Wood is generally considered to be warm, but the way Gehry handles it, without detail or indeed any sign of human craft, is curiously utilitarian, and the overall effect is more like a high-school cafeteria than a museum dining room. Incidentally, all those hard surfaces, as well as the open kitchen (I can’t wait for that fad to pass) make for a very noisy room. Lack of ambience aside, we had a nice lunch. The service was shaky, but that may be opening jitters. The food was excellent.

FRUITCAKE

What is it with Americans and fruitcakes? For many years we used to throw an annual midday New Year’s Day party. Bloody Marys, big buffet table, Niman Ranch ham, stuff like that. People seemed to enjoy the food, but we noticed that there was usually leftover fruitcake. We were puzzled why there were so few takers, because we had gone to a lot of trouble to order this particular confection from Vermont. Perhaps because we came from Canada, where fruitcake—dark, moist, and rich—is a Christmas tradition, we didn’t know that to Americans fruitcake was associated with a different tradition. According to Wiki, “the fruitcake had been a butt of jokes on television programs such as Father Knows Best and The Donna Reed Show . . . and appears to have first become a vilified confection in the early 20th century, as evidenced by Warner Brothers cartoons.” According to Wiki again, there is a town in Colorado that hosts something called the Great Fruitcake Toss on the first Saturday of every January, using recycled—that is, uneaten—fruitcakes. No wonder so many of our guests gave our fruitcake a pass. We stuck to our guns and continued to serve fruitcake (with cheese, a Yorkshire custom) but we didn’t make many converts. 

LOOKING NORTH

I attended McGill University, which is sometimes described as “the Harvard of the North.” After reading Ross Douthat’s column on the Ivy League in today’s New York Times, it’s evident that it really isn’t—or at least wasn’t when I was there. One difference is that Canadian students didn’t “go away to college,” they simply attended whatever university was near to where they lived. Thus, most of my architecture classmates—all men—were Montrealers. Unlike Ivy League campuses today, which are awash with monogrammed sweatshirts and caps, we didn’t show off our affiliation—actually we didn’t wear sweat shirts, rather jackets and ties, and in the 1960s the annoying fashion for baseball caps had not yet taken hold. Another difference was that Canadian university tuition was not exorbitantly high. (The very wealthy had the option of sending their kids to the US.) Thus, my classmates were resolutely middle-class, mostly WASPs, a handful of Jewish Montrealers, a sprinkling of immigrant kids like myself, and a token French Canadian (they tended to go to the Université de Montréal). Did I drink? Yes, a lot, at least in the early years; late nights in the architecture studio eventually put a  crimp into that activity. McGill had fraternities, and a few of my friends belonged—I was rushed but dropped out—I am not a big joiner. Few if any of my classmates attended the Canadian equivalent of American prep schools; perhaps preppies weren’t attracted to architecture? I went to a private Jesuit boys school in Montreal, but Loyola was hardly a prep school. Its chief clientele, English-speaking Montreal Catholics,  tended to be of Irish or Italian heritage, the descendants of blue-collar workers (rich WASP kids went to Lower Canada College or Bishop’s), and the richest Loyola boys I recall were from the Dominican Republic and South America.