Tag Archive - Architecture

Sonic Artist Bruce Odland: Money Makes Noise, A Water Tank Creates Art

March 21, 2013 in Events, Performance, Sounds, Spaces with 1 Comment

 

The Tank at night (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

The Tank in Rangely, Colorado, is considered one of the sonic marvels of the world within a certain circle of composers and sound artists. (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

 

Is there a connection between noise and money?  Which sounds are healing to us as humans, and which are damaging? And what does an abandoned water tank in Colorado have in common with the Taj Mahal or a Gothic cathedral?

These are questions that sound artist and composer Bruce Odland has been pondering for decades. While Odland began his career in the traditional music world—one that emphasized Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—Odland discovered that his academic training didn’t correspond with his own experiences in the American landscape. While traveling in the mountains out West, he began to invent a new musical language—one based on the random sounds of nature instead of the repeated sounds and rhythms found in both Western music and in man-made machines.

 

Composer Bruce Odland recording at The Tank in Rangely, Colorado (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

Composer Bruce Odland recording inside the abandoned water tank in Rangely, Colorado (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

 

 

Bruce Odland-Switzerland 1

Bruce Odland making recordings for Hearing View, a project involving the oldest mental hospital in Switzerland. The project is a collaboration with Sam Auinger. (Photo courtesy Bruce Odland)

 

 

Blue Moon at the World Financial Center in New York City (Photo courtesy Bruce Odland)

For Blue Moon, O + A (Sam Auinger and Bruce Odland) created an installation that transformed the environment of the World Financial Center Plaza in New York City into an ambient soundscape activated by the rising tides of the river, docking commuter ferries, helicopter and jet traffic, car horns, waves, bird song, and breezes off the Hudson. (Photo courtesy Bruce Odland)

 

Odland is known for his large-scale, public space sound installations which transform city noise into harmony, realtime. In 2004 he and collaborator Sam Auinger altered the harmonic mix of the World Financial Center Plaza in New York City, using the moon, tides, harmonic tuning tubes, and cement loudspeakers. Together they have changed the sonic character of many public spaces around the world. His most recent project with Auinger involves transforming Switzerland’s oldest mental hospital into a space filled with healing sounds. Odland has also worked with artists like Laurie Anderson, Dan Graham, Andre Gregory, Wally Shawn, Peter Sellars, and the Wooster Group.

Bruce recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money to save an abandoned water tank in Colorado. The Tank is considered one of the sonic marvels of the world within a certain circle of composers and sound artists. The group, called Friends of the Tank, has started a nonprofit to preserve the unique structure as a space for community gatherings, music events, and recording sessions. The group needs to raise $42,000 in order to preserve the space, and they won’t receive any donations if they don’t meet their goal by March 31st.

 

 

 

A glimpse inside The Tank (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

A glimpse inside The Tank (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

 

 

The Tank in Colorado (Photo courtesy of Friends of the Tank)

The Tank in Rangely, Colorado is in danger of being lost. (Photo courtesy of Friends of the Tank)

 

 

Light inside The Tank (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

Light inside The Tank (Photo courtesy Friends of the Tank)

 

A few weeks ago Bruce and I had an in-depth conversation about the Tank, sonic space, and the political and personal implications of the sounds we encounter each day.

As Bruce explained during our interview, “We won’t understand ourselves as a culture until we also understand the sounds we make.”

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Why Design Matters: Imagining the Future of the Rockaway Waterfront

February 28, 2013 in Design, Images, Spaces with 0 Comments

 

The wreckage of Rockaway Boardwalk, after Sandy (Image via CNN.com)

The wreckage of Rockaway Boardwalk after Sandy (Image via CNN.com)

 

A few months ago I shared Eve Mosher’s piece, High Water Line, a public art project in Manhattan and Brooklyn that brought the topic of climate change directly to the city’s residents.

Mosher’s inventive project showed what might happen if an historic storm ever struck the coast of New York, but Hurricane Sandy made this nightmarish, what-if scenario a reality.

The storm was a wake-up call and raised an important question: what is the role of art in this fragile, post-Sandy ecology? When it comes to inventive solutions for environmental problems, what do artists bring to the table?

This week I was happy to see MoMA PS1 and MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design turning their attention to this very issue. The central question: How can we create a sustainable waterfront in the Rockaways—a waterfront that will meet the needs of the community, but also resist the destructive forces of weather and a rising sea level?

 

A Rockaway home destroyed in Hurricane Sandy

A Rockaway home destroyed in Hurricane Sandy

 

Now that a portion of New York has been exposed as the flood plain that it is, where will we go? How will we build? As singer and Rockaway resident Patti Smith says in the below video, we need to “redefine what it means to live in conjunction with nature.”

While scientists can evaluate the state of the environment, it is the role of artists, architects, and designers to imagine potential solutions. Imagination will be just as important as scientific research in the decades ahead, as will collaborations between artists and scientists.

As Joshua David and Robert Hammond learned when they created The High Line park in Manhattan, this early, visionary stage of anything-goes is essential.

We continue to produce the same tired designs and developments not because they are best solutions, but because they are the easiest. Cheap, high-density housing, to use one example, is the “low-hanging fruit” of the real estate world, one that generates money quickly not only for the developer, but also for cities and towns in the form of tax revenue. Designs that rely on common, cheap building materials that can be easily purchased from Home Depot, Lowe’s, and other suppliers only perpetuate the soul-numbing cycle of mediocrity. To make effective use of interesting, locally-sourced materials, architects and builders need a rich knowledge of their community’s resources.

 

nyc wetlands MoMA

In 2010 MoMA asked five architects to come up with a redesign of lower Manhattan that would prevent damage in the event of major flooding. Architecture Research Office and dlandstudio proposed creating wetlands around the edges of Manhattan. They also suggested replacing asphalt streets with a perforated cast-concrete surface that could absorb rainwater. (Photo courtesy of MoMA and Architizer)

 

Rising Currents-Click to Purchase

 

Hurricane Sandy is an unprecedented opportunity: a chance to re-imagine and create new “low-hanging fruit” on the waterfront. This is an opportunity to create a viable model for other oceanfront communities–one that is designed thoughtfully with quality of life and our changing ecology at its core.

What do coastal communities like the Rockaways need most as they rebuild? Public space? Quality food shopping options? Pockets of nature for relaxation and gardening? Small businesses that will fulfill local need and provide jobs? Attractive, energy efficient housing in a range of prices? A safe-haven from future storms?

All of the above, I suspect. But it is up to city planners, designers, developers, and community members to ask the right questions if we’re going to transition from cookie-cutter architecture to a more thoughtful, innovative way of living.

 

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Envisioning the Future with Yo La Tengo, R. Buckminster Fuller, & Sam Green

January 23, 2013 in Events, Images, Performance, Sounds with 2 Comments

 

Sam Green narrating his live documentary The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison)

 

“I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing—a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.”

–R. Buckminster Fuller

 

 

In 1927 designer, architect, and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller was contemplating suicide on the shore of Lake Michigan, when he had an epiphany:

“The thought then came that my impulse to commit suicide was a consequence of my being expressly overconcerned with ‘me’ and ‘my pains,’ and that doing so would mean that I would be making the supremely selfish mistake of possibly losing forever some evolutionary information link essential to the ultimately realization of the as-yet-to-be-known human function in Universe.”

According to legend, Fuller decided to “throw away” his “personal ego” instead of committing suicide, and use himself “as a scientific `guinea pig’… on behalf of all humanity.” He resolved to “make the world work for one hundred percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

At least that is the story as Fuller told it.

Although he grew up in an elite New England family, he flunked out of Harvard (twice), worked as a meatpacker, and served in the Navy before reinventing himself as a philosopher, engineer, writer, inventor, and lecturer. Never content to work in only one field, Fuller, or “Bucky” as his friends called him, embraced an interdisciplinary approach to global problems like poverty, shelter, transportation, education, energy, and ecological destruction. By the time of his death in 1983, Fuller held 28 patents, had authored 28 books, and received 47 honorary degrees.

 

F. Buckminster Fuller has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities. (Photo by Roger Stroller)

 

 

Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, Sam Green’s “live documentary,” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, was like no other film screening I’ve been to. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

But neither Fuller’s biography, nor his legacy are simple.

“If you really look for the details of his life at the time, it’s easy to see that the suicide story was a creation,” Stanford historian Barry Katz told the New York Times in 2008.

“There was nothing even remotely in the archives suggesting feelings on the scale he later described” in 1927, he said…

Mr. Katz said he found instead signs of depression and anxiety stretching from the time…[Fuller's] first daughter, Alexandra, died in 1922, through his financial failures and, finally, the collapse of a torrid extramarital romance in 1931. Still, he said, the suicide story seemed to serve a purpose.

“That’s why I now call it a myth,” [said Katz,] “but it was an effective myth. It gave a trajectory to his career. The story was constructed after the fact to show how he suddenly developed these new ideas. I think he came to believe the story himself…”

In recurrent dark periods Fuller was not trying only to persuade others his ideas were important, but to persuade himself that he mattered….

Supporting that view is [the late] Evelyn Schwartz Nef. “Those days were really quite exciting because he was so convincing that he was trying to save the world,” she said in an interview…“The question I had is whether he was as convinced as we were. He was trying to reassure himself that he was something.”

 

Buckminster Fuller in his Black Mountain College studio (Photo courtesy of SFMoMA)

 

 

Sam Green and Yo La Tengo performing the “live documentary” The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller at the ICA in Boston (Photo by Sam Allison. Click to Enlarge)

 

As James Sterngold writes in the New York Times, “by conventional measures…[Fuller] accomplished little. The efforts to mass-produce his houses, though written about widely, failed. His project to develop his efficient three-wheeled autos collapsed after an accident killed the driver of one. His soaring geodesic domes, built with a distinctive pattern of triangles, have been used — memorably for the United States pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal — but never for the large-scale projects he envisioned.”

Mention Fuller’s name to a group of artists and architects and you’re likely to be bombarded with passionate responses from both supporters and detractors.

Philip Johnson once called Fuller a “lousy architect,” and Fuller’s vision for Manhattan provoked this response from one architect I know: “Fuller envisioned covering mid-town Manhattan by an enormous climate-controlled bubble. How in the world is that an environmental improvement? It would have consumed enormous amounts of energy, contributing immensely to air pollution and global warming. And the prospect of enclosing city dwellers in a bubble, cut off from wind and rain and sun and the play of the elements, is something that I find horrifying…I’m very suspicious of big universal theories, like those of Fuller, when it comes to architecture.”

But Fuller’s impact can’t be discounted. He has influenced everyone from Pritzker Prize–winning architect Thom Mayne to Stewart Brand, creator of The Whole Earth Catalog and The WELL, one of the oldest virtual communities.

 

“Bucky…looked at the world big-scale, in terms of the number of people who didn’t have enough to eat,” architect Nicholas Grimshaw says. “He talked about the really big issues, like food and water and shelter. And that’s really just coming home to roost. Everything he wrote then he could have written right now.”

 

 

The Dymaxion House as presented by Buckminster Fuller in Fortune magazine in July of 1932 (Click to Enlarge)

 

 

Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao Dome Over Manhattan, 1960. Black-and-white photograph mounted on board, 13 3/4 x 18 3/8″ Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

 

As K. Michael Hays, Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, explained to me via email, focusing too much attention on Fuller’s popularization of the geodesic dome or his idea to shroud the city of Manhattan in a bubble misses the point. According to Hayes, Fuller made other contributions that are still relevant today, if we can look past the outdated designs and cultural critique:

The current generation of artists and architects who rediscover Buckminster Fuller will not be inspired by his structural inventions or cultural critique but by his spatial modeling of a globalized system of pattern and contingency, organization and change, temporary stability and constant renewal. That is his legacy.

“Bucky…looked at the world big-scale, in terms of the number of people who didn’t have enough to eat,” architect Nicholas Grimshaw says. “He talked about the really big issues, like food and water and shelter. And that’s really just coming home to roost. Everything he wrote then he could have written right now.”

“Fuller was the original systems thinker, with regards to the ecology of a building and its relationship to the environment,” explains artist, designer, and engineer Chuck Hoberman:

When he asked, ‘How much does your building weigh?’ it immediately put it into the realm of material usage and embodied energy, all of which are now very hot topics of discussion—not driven by stylistic concern, but simply by the need to make buildings more sustainable. His work framed a lot of those issues very early on…

I think he’s been highly influential as an iconoclastic spirit, who never accepted that the boundaries between disciplines were anything other than something to be climbed over or circumvented in some way. To me that’s not so much a heroic stance as much as a very practical way to proceed in the world today.

 

Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right. (Photo by Sam Allison)

 

 

Fuller’s sketch of a Three-Frequency Geodesic Sphere. Felt-tip pen and graphite on paper, 8 1/2 x 10 1/4 in. Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries (Photograph by Ben Blackwell courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller)

 

 

“At many other points in history…people had high hopes and a great imagintion for the future. You remember: we’d all be living in space, or flying around using jetpacks, or robots would be doing all the work for us. Today, it seems to me that most people don’t look at the future with fancy or hope or a great imagination.” (Photo by Sam Allison)

 

We live in a dystopian age—one more interested in zombies from The Walking Dead and Cormac McCarthy’s grim, apocalyptic vision than in slick, futuristic fantasies about jet-packs and cars that drive themselves. “There are too many of us who wonder whether civilization is going to make it or not,” former Vice-President Al Gore commented in a recent interview. “When people flirt with despair about the future, they are less likely to take the actions necessary to safeguard it.”

In marked contrast, R. Buckminster Fuller believed that cooperation, not competition, was the key to a better life, and he remained optimistic about humanity’s future. ”It no longer has to be you or me,” Fuller wrote in Critical Path. “Selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable.”

Whether R. Buckminster Fuller was visionary or naive in his beliefs is one of the subjects that interests Sam Green, a genre-bending artist in his own right.

It’s fitting that a multi-media artist like Green should tackle an enigma like Fuller, while accompanied by the live music of a critically-acclaimed, three-piece band that also defies categorization. Part TED Talk, part travelogue, and part Japanese benshi, The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller was like no other film screening I’ve been to, with Green narrating a special cut of his film (created for his Boston audience), while the intoxicating sounds of Yo La Tengo pulsed through the glass-walled auditorium. As writer Rebecca Solnit described the experience, it’s like “a movie being born as you see it and hear it, as alive as music.”

 

“It’s really exciting to perform this way,” Yo La Tengo band member Georgia Hubley told me via email. “You feel like you are a piece of something bigger and doing your part. It is different than presenting yourself as a band with songs etc., which is more personal.” (Yo La Tengo photo by Ed Dittenhoefer courtesy Sam Green)

 

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Tatzu Nishi Builds Christopher Columbus a Living Room in the Sky: Exclusive Photos

September 21, 2012 in Events, Images, Spaces with 1 Comment

 

Tatzu Nishi’s public art installation, Discovering Columbus, opened in Manhattan on Thursday. Here Nishi is pictured with Gaetano Russo’s 1892 sculpture. (Photo by Tom Powel courtesy the Public Art Fund, NY)

 

Last week I featured Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus on my Don’t Miss List for September. Two New Hampshire friends, who were on their way to Manhattan this weekend, asked me to recommend the one thing they shouldn’t miss during their trip. My response: Discovering Columbus, which finally opened yesterday.

Since no interior photos of the installation were available last week, a few readers were clearly baffled by the project when it appeared on my list. Trying to explain the project in person proved to be no easier:

Me raving with enthusiasm: “It’s Christopher Columbus…inside a room!”

Skeptical friends starting at me with pity and suspicion: “Hmm. Right. Sounds interesting. But what exactly is it again?”

Tatzu Nishi, a Japanese artist who lives in Berlin, Germany, and Tokyo, Japan, is known for his unconventional, site-specific public art projects, which transform historical monuments by placing them in domestic settings. The idea is to place public monuments, which are so often invisible and taken for granted, into a new context. After all, how often are we allowed to get up close and personal with a 13-foot statue with Christopher Columbus?

To better understand the Columbus project, it’s useful to look back at some of Nishi’s earlier projects. In 2002 the artist created Villa Victoria, a temporary functioning hotel around a statue of Queen Victoria for the Liverpool Biennial, and in 2011 the artist built a temporary hotel suite around Singapore’s iconic Merlion fountain for the Singapore Biennial. As these photos show, Nishi’s invented domestic spaces are surprising, highly original, as well as intimate.

 

In 2002 Nishi created Villa Victoria, a temporary functioning hotel around a statue of Queen Victoria for the Liverpool Biennial (Photo © Tatzu Nishi 2011 via tatzunishi.net. Click to Enlarge)

 

 

People sit next to Nishi’s installation surrounding the monument of former Guatemalan President Justo Rufino Barrios during an art biennial in Guatemala City on April 19, 2010. (Photo by Rodrigo Abd via the AP. Click to Enlarge)

 

 

Tatzu Nishi, War and peace and in between, 2009-10. One of two spaces Nishi built around equestrian sculptures at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in association with Kaldor Public Art Projects (Photo © Tatzu Nishi. Click to Enlarge)

 

Until yesterday, the interior of Nishi’s latest installation, Discovering Columbus, was a secret. But on Thursday the public art project, a living room that hovers six stories above Columbus Circle, officially opened. Luckily, artist Amy Jenkins was one of the first in line to attend the opening and sent these exclusive photos to Gwarlingo.

“I was certainly transfixed,” Jenkins told me in an email. “It was a truly magical experience and reminded me of why I love New York.”

Perched on top of six flights of stairs and metal scaffolding, Nishi has cleverly placed Gaetano Russo’s 1892 sculpture of Christopher Columbus inside of an airy living room.  The 13-foot marble statue sits on top of a coffee table in a space that measures 30 feet by 27 feet. The ceilings are 16-feet high in order to accommodate this oversized, coffee-table “knickknack.”

Magazines and books are scattered on the table beside the statue. Guests hang out on the couch as though they were watching the game at a friend’s house (conveniently, a working flat-screen television is nearby, but sadly, is tuned to CNN). The pink wallpaper, which depicts pop culture icons like Elvis, McDonald’s Malcom X, and Marilyn Monroe, is another special detail designed by Nishi.

 

A first glimpse of the finished interior of Tatzu Nishi’s Discovering Columbus (Photo by Tom Powel courtesy the Public Art Fund, NY. Click to Enlarge)

 

 

Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi (on right) discusses his installation during Thursday’s opening. He also designed the pink wallpaper seen behind him.  (Photo © Amy Jenkins)

 

 

A close-up of Nishi’s pink wallpaper (Photo © Amy Jenkins)

 

 

Exterior scaffolding and a six-story stairwell support a 30-foot by 27-foot living room in Columbus Square. (Photo © Amy Jenkins)

 

 

Russo’s statue of Columbus before Tatzu Nishi’s installation (Photo by Jesse Hamerman courtesy the Public Art Fund, NY)

 

 

Tatzu Nishi and Columbus. (Photo by Tom Powel courtesy Public Art Fund, NY via Papermag)

 

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Re-Branding the Barnes: Has a 25-Billion-Dollar Art Collection Been Disneyfied?

June 13, 2012 in Design, Images, News, Spaces with 3 Comments

 

A wall in the new Barnes Foundation museum describes Albert Barnes' educational philosophy (Photo by M. Edlow for GPTMC courtesy Visit Philly)

 

A New Museum Mile?

Rush hour is still two hours away, but a swarm of cars is buzzing by me on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. As I parallel park in front of the new Barnes Foundation museum and feed money into the parking kiosk, an over-sized tour bus, only a quarter full, is herding tourists down the divided highway. The overly enthusiastic guide shouts through the crackly loudspeaker like an annoying uncle belting through a cardboard, wrapping-paper tube at Christmas.

The mile-long, landscaped, auto-friendly Benjamin Franklin Parkway, which connects Philadelphia’s City Hall to Fairmount Park, is one of the earliest examples of urban renewal in the United States. Designed by French urban planner Jacques Gréber in 1917 the boulevard was modeled after the Champs-Élysées in Paris. As Ken Finkel observes, “planners envisioned the Parkway cutting across the city’s northwest quadrant to accommodate schools, hospitals, libraries, museums, cathedrals, courthouses, administrative headquarters for schools and agencies, and even a hall for conventions. If it served the public, it belonged on the Parkway.”

This month the controversial new Barnes Foundation museum opened its doors, taking its place beside the Philadelphia Free Library and Rodin Museum on this historic road.

 

The view of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway from the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (Photo by Michelle Aldredge)

 

 

The new Barnes was a rare opportunity to engage the city's foot traffic. Unfortunately, the architects failed to put down the welcome mat. (Photo © Michael Moran courtesy of Architectural Record)

 

 

Paul Gauguin, "Mr. Loulou (Louis Le Ray), 1890. Oil on canvas, 21 3/4 x 18 1/4 in. (55.2 x 46.4 cm). (Photo © 2012 The Barnes Foundation)

Back in 1917, while the city was busy knocking down houses and constructing a highway for the common good, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, who made his fortune by co-developing an early anti-gonorrhea drug, had his hands full assembling one of the world’s most important collections of post-impressionist and early modern paintings. In his lifetime, Barnes grew his collection to include 69 Cézannes—more than in all the museums in Paris—44 Picassos, 60 Matisses, and an astonishing 181 Renoirs. The 2,500 items in the collection include major works by Modigliani, Soutine, Gaughin, Seurat, Degas, Rousseau, and van Gogh, Asian prints, African sculpture, medieval manuscripts, decorative metalwork, as well as Old Master paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, El Greco, and Titian.

A self-made man who put himself through college by tutoring, boxing, and playing semi-professional baseball, Barnes despised the art establishment and old Philadelphia money. His hatred of the establishment was partly the result of a 1923 show at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts featuring 75 paintings from Barnes’ collection. The work was too avant-garde for prevailing tastes, and art critics ridiculed the works, calling them “trash,” “incomprehensible masses of paint, and an “infectious scourge.”

Barnes wrote a series of fiery letters in reply. He said the Philadelphia Museum of Art was a “house of artistic and intellectual prostitution” and claimed that the main function of museums “has been to serve as a pedestal upon which a clique of socialites pose as patrons of the arts.” As James Panero of Philanthropy magazine observes, “Barnes was a conflicted figure, a man of titanic intelligence, unflinching will, and self-destructive pride.”

 

During his lifetime, Barnes maintained tight control over access to the collection, requiring visitors to write and request appointments and giving preference to students and the working class over members of Philadelphia society. Writers James A. Michener and T.S. Eliot were among the visitors personally rejected by Barnes. (Photo courtesy The Barnes Foundation)

 

 

The original Barnes Foundation building in Merion sits seven minutes away from the new Barnes museum.

In 1925, the same year that the Insurance Company of North America opened its headquarters at 16th and the Parkway, Albert Barnes dedicated a new home for his collection designed by Philadelphia-based French architect Paul Cret in nearby Merion. It’s mission, “the promotion of the advancement of education and the appreciation of the fine arts.” Eager to avoid the city’s cultural elite, Barnes built his innovative school, called the Barnes Foundation, seven minutes from downtown on a twelve-acre arboretum insulated from the new parkway and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Barnes’ primary passion was educating the underprivileged. As Panero details, Barnes was “deeply impressed by John Dewey’s Democracy and Education” and “believed that the development of cognitive skills, rather than the memorization of facts, was the key to education…In arranging his art on the wall, Barnes…dispensed with labels, period rooms, chronological order, and the solemnity of your typical white-walled gallery. Instead, with his art hanging floor to ceiling, Barnes let the harmony of shapes and forms sing for itself. He wanted his collection to enliven the eye, not confound it with facts. He believed his students would be able to see the visual connections between disparate works, styles, and periods, and learn from those associations without the benefit of words.”

 

"In arranging his art on the wall, Barnes...dispensed with labels, period rooms, chronological order, and the solemnity of your typical white-walled gallery." (Photo: Room 18, east wall © 2012 The Barnes Foundation)

 

 

When the Philadelphia art establishment ridiculed Barnes' collection, he wrote a series of fiery letters in reply. Barnes wrote that the Philadelphia Museum of Art was a “house of artistic and intellectual prostitution” and claimed that the main function of museums “has been to serve as a pedestal upon which a clique of socialites pose as patrons of the arts.” (Photo © The Barnes Foundation)

During his lifetime, Barnes maintained tight control over access to the collection, requiring visitors to write and request appointments and giving preference to students and the working class over members of Philadelphia society. Writers James A. Michener and T.S. Eliot were among the visitors personally rejected by Barnes. In 1928, The New Yorker noted, “In order to get the honest reaction of a simple mind to art…[Barnes] called in a negro truck-driver who was delivering coal, plumped him down in front of a Cézanne, and asked for an opinion.”

Barnes had witnessed the Philadelphia Museum of Art take control of the collection of his late lawyer, John Johnson, and tried to prevent the same from happening to his own collection. The Foundation’s Indenture of Trust and other documents stated that the Barnes Foundation was to remain an educational institution, open to the public only two to three days a week. His art collection was to stay on the walls of the foundation in exactly the places the works were at the time of his death and could never be loaned or sold.

Until the very end, Barnes was true to his stubborn, self-destructive reputation. Panero vividly describes Barnes’ unexpected death:

“It was sunny and hot on July 24, 1951, and Barnes seemed distracted after his Sunday dinner at Ker-Feal, his country farm. Barnes decided to return to Merion. He loaded his dog, Fidèle, into his Packard and began the 25-mile drive. There was a stop sign on Route 29, near Phoenixville—Barnes had objected to its installation and refused to observe it. He blasted through the intersection and barreled directly into a 10-ton trailer truck. The 79-year-old’s body was thrown 40 feet from the car. Fidèle, near dead herself, would not allow state troopers near her crumpled master. She had to be shot.”

According to Panero, although Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller were much wealthier than Albert Barnes during their lifetimes, today the value of the art assets of the Barnes Foundation are 10 to 20 times greater than either the Carnegie Corporation or the Rockefeller Corporation.

Now, sixty-one years after Barnes’ death, Philadelphia’s politicians are once again banking on the Parkway to revive the city’s reputation and economy. The Benjamin Franklin Parkway, originally named the Fairmount Parkway, is now being dubbed the “Museum Mile,” and the 25-billion dollar Barnes collection–the very collection Barnes insisted remain in Merion–is the latest bait.

 

One cannot simply plunk a new building along a parkway and expect it to turn a bland strip into a dynamic destination capable of rejuvenating Philadelphia's creative economy. (Aerial view from the Benjamin Franklin Parkway and 20th Street. Photo by Tom Crane © The Barnes Foundation)

 

 

You’ll forgive me if I remain skeptical of the hyperbolic PR spin surrounding the Barnes. Everything about this project reeks of commercial repackaging–of the unfortunate trend of “museum as theme park.” (Looking south east at the new Barnes Foundation. Photo © 2012 Tom Crane)

 

Art for the People

During the collection’s controversial move to the Parkway, the city and foundation’s PR machine has been quick to emphasize the egalitarianism of moving the Barnes seven minutes down the road to the “Museum Mile.” Art for the people has been the ongoing mantra. Art for the people is a cause that is easy to rally behind, though no one involved in this controversial project has been able to agree on the best way to realize this goal. Is it through educational classes like the ones taught for decades in Merion? Is it through increased access and public programming? Do you bring the people to the art or the art to the people?

If you wade through the hyperbole—the political rhetoric, the rants of angry citizens and neighbors unhappy about the collection’s relocation, the foundation’s PR spin, and the conspiracy theories proposed in the fascinating documentary The Art of the Steal—if you can ignore this hype, certain things are clear.

The foundation could have been revitalized in its original location if the right people had been so inclined. There were valuable paintings in Barnes’ personal collection (not the foundation’s) that could have raised much needed funds for building repairs, new programming, and the endowment. And there are plenty of examples of outlying architectural and cultural gems who manage to serve their missions without taking the radical step of dismantling a collection or relocating. It’s true that Barnes’ restrictions needed to be loosened in some capacity, but to move the collection in its entirely was to take the most radical step of all.

Why not partner with a nearby institution, like the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and shuttle visitors from one museum to the other? During the short ride, visitors could be educated about Barnes, his collection, the architecture, and his educational philosophy. I’m sure plenty of museum visitors would have welcomed the fresh air and gardens of Merion. One day, as we all become increasingly overwhelmed by the constant assault of noise, commercialism, and technology, I suspect that the cloistered retreat offered by the foundation’s original location in Merion will be in high demand. Unfortunately, the foundation has traded one of its most valuable resources–the refuge and uniqueness of its collection set amongst historic grounds, buildings, and gardens–for the glamor of a $150 million dollar building and the almighty cultural tourist dollar.

 

 

 

The Barnes Foundation has traded one of its most valuable resources--the refuge and uniqueness of its collection set amongst historic grounds, buildings, and gardens--for the glamor of a $150 million dollar building and the almighty cultural tourist dollar. (Photo: Barnes protest sign courtesy outofordermag.com)

 

 

This 1926 painting of Albert C. Barnes by Giorgio de Chirico was on display in the special exhibit area of the new museum.

I won’t recount the entire controversy here (you can watch The Art of the Steal). Long story short, certain politicians and cultural institutions saw that the Barnes Foundation was floundering and took advantage of the opportunity. The foundation’s neighbors in Merion exacerbated the situation by complaining about noise and traffic, but quickly changed their minds when their community gem was at risk of being dismantled. They didn’t want the Barnes, but then they did. By the time they changed their minds and launched a SAVE THE BARNES campaign, it was too late. By then, the cultural machine had a well-crafted narrative ready. Liberate the art and bring it to the people! It was the perfect propaganda, for even Barnes himself believed in education and access first and foremost.

Perusing the Barnes Foundation’s PR materials reveals a carefully orchestrated narrative:

“Dr. Barnes’s Last Will and Testament makes no stipulations about the installation of the Collection in Merion. Among its provisions, it simply restates Dr. Barnes’s prior gift of the Collection to the Foundation. It also addresses the gift of Dr. Barnes’s country estate Ker-Feal and other real estate to the Foundation.”

Seriously? Then what has all of the fuss been about and why did the relocation of the collection require a petition to the Montgomery County Orphans’ Court? I made careful note of the fact that the relocation controversy didn’t even merit a mention in the special exhibit gallery, which details the history of the Barnes Foundation, Barnes the man, and his educational philosophy. The foundation’s new book The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks (2012), which was selling like hotcakes in the museum gift shop, also fails to mention the relocation controversy.

 

I made careful note of the fact that the relocation controversy didn't even merit a mention in the special exhibit gallery, which details the history of the Barnes Foundation, Barnes the man, and his educational philosophy. The foundation's new book "The Barnes Foundation: Masterworks," which was selling like hotcakes in the museum gift shop, also fails to mention the relocation controversy. (Photo © Roger Barone)

 

 

A defaced Barnes protest sign on a lawn in Merion (Photo by William Thomas Ternay courtesy Postcards from Philly)

 

 

(Photo by William Thomas Ternay courtesy Postcards from Philly)

For the most part, it appears the PR campaign has been successful. Major critics like Peter Schjeldahl and Roberta Smith have declared the museum a success, and while I was visiting the Barnes, an old man in his 80s in an U.S. Air Force ball cap leaned against his daughter as he explored the new building. In the main room on the first floor I overheard him telling a story about attending classes at the foundation as a young man. Exhausted, he parked himself on a bench next to me and gazed up at Matisse’s The Dance on the south wall. “Well I’m glad they finally brought the art here where everyone can see it,” he said proudly. “It’s all too beautiful to be hidden away.”

The truth is that everything about the Barnes collection has been askew from the very beginning. It started with Barnes and his desire to stick it to Philadelphia’s cultural elite. He did this by collecting controversial modern art, opening his own school, limiting who could attend, and giving precedent to the working and middle classes over the wealthy and the famous. A second twist of the knife came when Barnes left his collection to Lincoln University, an historically African-American college. Though Barnes was friends with Horace Mann Bond, the university’s first black president, he also knew good and well that handing his valuable collection over to Lincoln was a way of  depriving Philadelphia’s art establishment. Intention is everything and the ripples caused by Barnes’ project were poisoned with ill-will from the start.

In the main room on the first floor I overheard an old man in an U.S. Air Force ball cap telling his daughter a story about attending classes at the foundation as a young man. Exhausted, he parked himself on a bench next to me and gazed up at Matisse's "The Dance" on the south wall. "Well I'm glad they finally brought the art here where everyone can see it," he said proudly. "It's all too beautiful to be hidden away." (Photo © Michael Moran courtesy of Architectural Record)

 

 

From the second floor galleries, visitors get a marvelous look at Matisse's "The Dance," which was tucked away and difficult to see in the old space. (Photo by Rick Echelmeyer © 2012 Barnes Foundation)

 

How (Not) to Reinvent a Cultural Institution

No institution, no parkway or city surrounding it, is fixed. Places, even the most historic ones, are dynamic and changing and shouldn’t be mothballed and left to fade into obscurity. Dioramas will be refurbished as style (and insect damage) dictates, plumbing will be upgraded, new pieces will be bought, and old pieces sold, text panels will morph into screens, and screens into projections, and the words on the wall will also change as new research requires revision to the official narrative. And this is just as it should be.

From 2009-2012 the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, perhaps the Barnes’ closest equivalent in the U.S., took the radical and controversial step of building a Renzo Piano addition to the museum in an effort to revitalize attendance and programming. The addition was contentious and required a visit to the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, but the central difference between the Gardner Museum and the Barnes Foundation is that Gardner’s original vision and legacy remained intact. It is hard to imagine city and museum officials deciding to relocate the Gardner collection elsewhere, while leaving its original home vacant. It would be unthinkable.

There are many ways for an institution to recreate itself–some better than others. To separate artwork from its context is the worst sacrilege of all, particularly for an idiosyncratic collection like Barnes’, which was meant to be seen in a specific setting. It’s true that the foundation needed to be reinvented in some capacity, as well as stabilized financially. It needed more transparency and quality leadership capable of establishing priorities and reinventing the institution. But the idea that the collection was being held hostage or needed to be rescued is hyperbolic adspeak. After all, this isn’t World War II. There were no art-rabid Nazis or destructive dictators at the Barnes’ doorstep–only powerful political figures who saw that the Barnes Foundation, in its weakened condition, was ripe for the picking.

 

The best art and architecture is by nature radical and unconventional in some respect---if not radical politically, then radical to the senses. Barnes' collection was the most radical art collection of its day and the building he created it for it was carefully designed to showcase this unique, original work. (Photo: Room 23, West Wall © 2012 The Barnes Foundation)

 

 

Henri Rousseau, "Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest (Femme se promenant dans un forêt exotique)," 1905. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 31 3/4 in. (100 x 80.6 cm). (Photo: © 2012 The Barnes Foundation)

Barnes’ restrictions handicapped the institution from the start. As Panero details, Barnes “limited the salaries of the foundation’s employees without mechanisms that could account for inflation. He restricted any changes to the collection or to the facility’s grounds. Perhaps most importantly, he restricted the investment of the foundation’s endowment, restrictions to which the Old Guard scrupulously adhered. During Barnes’ lifetime, the indenture granted that the endowment could be invested in ‘any good securities.’ After his death, however, the corpus could only be invested in federal, state, and municipal bonds. Over time, this restriction severely eroded the endowment.” The inflationary decades after Barnes’ death dealt a further blow to the endowment. According to Panero, by the early 1970s, says former Girard banker and Barnes trustee David Rawson, the endowment “had lost money.”

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Filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara: Gaudi Made Me Realize the Lines Between the Arts Are Insignificant

February 16, 2012 in Images, Process, Spaces with 1 Comment

 

In Barcelona Hiroshi Teshigahara came face-to-face with Gaudí. "The magic of it overwhelmed me."

 

In the West, Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known as the avant-garde director of the 1964 film Woman in the Dunes–an erotic, surreal film that was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.

Teshigahara’s haunting shots of sand, skin, and water amid the advancing sand dunes have stayed with me over the years. But there is another Teshigahara film, one that is less well-known, that left an even greater impression on me.

Antonio Gaudi is like no other movie I can think of. Teshigahara’s 72-minute meditation on the Spanish Art-Nouveau architect is essentially wordless. He avoids conventional  narrative and instead, lets Gaudi’s buildings do the talking.

Before watching this film, I didn’t consider myself a fan of the Spanish artist. (George Orwell described Gaudi’s cathedral, La Sagrada Familia, as “one of the most hideous buildings in the world.”) But my judgment was based on ignorance–on some vague, false impression that Gaudi’s work was not much more than bulbous, overdone kitsch.

But after viewing Teshigahara’s breathtaking film, my opinion of the Spanish architect has been entirely transformed. Anotnio Gaudi was nothing less than a visionary genius–an original, madly brilliant artist who was unappreciated and misunderstood in his own time.

 

Teshigahara's passion for Gaudi's work comes through on every frame. He's a patient, attentive director with a craftsman's eye for details. He takes the time he needs, allowing the camera to linger.

 

 

Gaudi's Casa Batllo, Barcelona, Spain (Photo by Roby Saltori via Flickr Commons)

 

 

A still from Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy The Criterion Collection)

 

 

Gaudi's Casa Batlló in Barcelona. The roof, terminating in a turret and cross, could represent the sword or spear of Saint George (patron saint of Catalonia), which has been plunged into the back of the dragon. (Photo by Marcel Germain via Flickr Commons)

 

 

A still from Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy The Criterion Collection)

 

 

The Casa Milà is Gaudi’s second most visited building in Barcelona. The roof of this apartment building and office block is one of the city’s hidden treasures, for its view of the nearby Sagrada Familia, as well as for its whimsical and imposing sculptures.

 

Teshigahara’s passion for Gaudi’s work comes through on every frame. Once he has set the scene with opening shots of contemporary Barcelona, Teshigahara brings his camera into Gaudi’s universe, taking us up a characteristic Gaudi spiral staircase. He’s a patient, attentive director with a craftsman’s eye for details. He takes the time he needs, allowing the camera to linger. Blue tiles shift in the light like water moving. Mosaics morph into a dragon’s scales. Güell Park, a planned garden village, feels like a surreal, fairy-tale landscape.

Teshigahara moves his camera slowly through these fluid, organic spaces. Slow tracking shots give us a sense that we’re actually inhabiting these bizarre, sublime places. Gaudi’s curved, organic designs are shockingly surreal and erotic. Like Woman in the Dunes, Antonio Gaudi pulses with human sensuality, and yet there is also something of the divine in both Teshigahara’s film and Gaudi’s fertile imagination.

Hiroshi Teshigahara

This meditation on the power of and beauty of nature is enhanced with music and sound effects by the renowned Japanese  composer Toru Takemitsu and two collaborators, Kurodo Mori and Shinji Hori. As the critic Stephen Holden explains, Takemitsu was an eclectic impressionist “whose music blended avant-garde Western techniques, electronics and random compositional methods with more conventional symphonic music and Japanese traditional instruments.”

The spiral motif, associated with the seashell, is emphasized in Takemitsu’s soundtrack, which incorporates the sound of the distant sea. “The score for Gaudi is a kind of free-floating East-meets-West impressionism,” says Holden, “whose organic flow mimics the sprouting curvilinear shapes of Gaudi’s buildings. The score includes four Catalan folk pieces, electronically altered and combined with other sounds.”

Antonio Gaudi is a tactile film–a visual poem that lingers in your memory long after its over. If you have the patience to listen and look and to defer any pressing questions you may have about Antionio Gaudi the man until the DVD extras, you will find the melding of Gaudi’s inventive architecture, Teshigahara’s sensitive camerawork, and Takemitsu’s haunting score a rewarding experience.

 

A spiral staircase in the bell tower of Gaudi's Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The spiral motif, associated with the seashell, is emphasized in Toru Takemitsu’s soundtrack, which incorporates the sound of the distant sea. (Photo courtesy SantiMB via Flickr Commons)

 

 

The atrium of Casa Mila (Photo by Chong Ming courtesy WikiCommons)

 

 

The Park Güell bench as seen in Teshigahara's "Antonio Gaudi" (Photo courtesy the Criterion Collection)

 

 

Gaudí’s structures, Teshigahara once said, "made me realize that the lines between the arts are insignificant. Gaudí worked beyond the borders of various arts and made me feel that the world in which I was living still left a great many possibilities."

 

 

Tile patterns from the Park Güell Bench, designed by Gaudi (Photo courtesy Make Mine Mosaic)

 

 

The staircase at Casa Batllo (Photo by Chong Ming courtesy WikiCommons)

 

But how exactly did the avant-garde, Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara develop such an intense appreciation for the architecture of Antonio Gaudi? I was curious to know more.

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Gwarlingo Tours the High Line, New York’s Park in the Sky

December 26, 2011 in Design, Images, Spaces with 1 Comment

The end of The High Line as seen from street level (Photo Courtesy Wired NY)

 

If you’re fed up with partisan bickering and political dysfunction in Washington, the gratifying, lavishly-illustrated book High Line: The Inside Story of New York City’s Park in the Sky, just published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, might temper your burgeoning cynicism. The book is a lesson in what can be accomplished in the face of overwhelming skepticism and bureaucracy.

The new High Line park in New York City deserves to be celebrated not only for its innovative design, but also for the grass-roots collaboration that made the improbable idea of converting a derelict elevated railway on Manhattan’s West Side into a beautiful green space a reality.

 

(Photo Courtesy Urban Design Review)

 

The High Line is one of the most important public projects in New York City in decades, and the ultimate example of how fruitful a cross-pollination among various disciplines can be. The book’s authors, Robert Hammond and Joshua David, had no prior experience in planning and development (one journalist referred to them as “a pair of nobodies”), but this didn’t stop them from collaborating with artists, elected officials, neighbors, local business owners, horticulturists, and landscape architects to realize their vision.

This is a story about two ordinary guys taking on a behemoth bureaucracy and actually winning.”I didn’t understand the complexity of what we were getting into,” Hammond says in the book. “We would need to become versed in urban planning, architecture, and City politics, raise millions of dollars, and give years of our lives to the High Line.”

 

Phase 2 of the High Line in 2011 (Photo by Iwan Baan Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

This industrial structure has a fascinating history. The first street-level railroad tracks were built on Manhattan’s West Side in 1847. So many accidents occurred between freight trains and street traffic that 10th Avenue became known as Death Avenue. In an effort to improve safety, men on horses, called West Side Cowboys, rode in front of trains waving red flags.

After years of public debate about the hazard, the High Line was built in the 1930s as part of a massive public-private infrastructure project called the West Side Improvement. The elevated railway lifted freight traffic 30 feet in the air, removing dangerous trains from the streets of Manhattan’s largest industrial district.

The new High Line connected directly to warehouses and factories on its route, allowing the trains to deliver milk, meat, produce, and other goods right inside buildings. This innovative design also reduced theft for the Bell Laboratories Building (now the Westbeth Artists Community), and the Nabisco plant, (now Chelsea Market). The entire project was 13 miles long, eliminated 105 street-level railroad crossings, added 32 acres to Riverside Park, and cost over $150 million in 1930 dollars—more than $2 billion today.

 

Before the High Line was built, trains ran at street level. Conditions along 10th Avenue were so bad that it was nicknamed "Death Avenue." (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

For safety, the railroads hired men – the "West Side Cowboys" – to ride horses and wave flags in front of the trains. (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

The city’s solution was to build a 22-block long elevated railway, or High Line. (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

An archival photo showing construction of the original High Line (Photo Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

Construction of the Elevated Railway on Gansevoort Street Looking North (Photo Courtesy the NY Historical Society)

 

 

The elevated railroad on the West Side of Manhattan is it appeared in 1934 (Photographer unknown)

 

By the 1950s, the popularity of interstate trucking reduced rail traffic nationwide. The southern section of the High Line was demolished in the 60s. In 1980 the last train ran on the High Line pulling three carloads of frozen turkeys.

In the mid-1980s, a group of property owners with land under the line lobbied for the demolition of the entire structure. Peter Obletz, a Chelsea resident, activist, and railroad enthusiast, challenged the demolition efforts in court and tried to re-establish rail service on the Line.

As the line sat unused, it became known to a few urban explorers and local residents for the tough, drought-tolerant wild grasses, shrubs, and trees that had sprung up in the gravel along the abandoned railway. The photographer Joel Sternfeld shot some striking photographs of the High Line during this period. His book, Joel Sternfeld: Walking the High Line, is a transporting glimpse at this rusty, derelict structure before it was reclaimed.

 

Peter Obletz, a Chelsea resident, activist, and railroad enthusiast, challenged the demolition efforts in court and tried to re-establish rail service on the Line. This photo shows Obletz outside his home in 1983. (Photo by Peter Richards Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

As the line sat unused, it became known to a few urban explorers and local residents for the tough, drought-tolerant wild grasses, shrubs, and trees that had sprung up in the gravel along the abandoned railway. The photographer Joel Sternfeld shot some striking photographs of the High Line during this period. (Photo © Joel Sternfeld Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

(Photo © Joel Sternfeld Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

(Photo © Joel Sternfeld Courtesy Friends of the High Line)

 

 

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