Hello Beautiful!

Today! Live! 6 pm. Architecture critics gather in Chicago.

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:54:00 +0000

See Christopher Hawthorne, Sarah Williams Goldhagen, Blair Kamin, Paul Goldberger and me figure out how to use design and architecture to build dynamic, just, responsible and competitive cities when America starts building again.

6 pm in downtown Chicago. Tickets available and can be purchased at the door. Or here.

Don't delay; it's a great group. Come and say hello.

Sponsored by the Chicago Architecture Foundation.
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A critics summit: Goldberger, Hawthorne, Kamin, Lifson and Williams Goldhagen on November 5.

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 20:53:00 +0000

On November 5th at 6 pm in the elegant Murphy Auditorium at 50 East Erie Street in my hometown of Chicago, Illinois I'll moderate:

A Conversation with the Critics:
Imagining the Future of the City

Murphy Auditorium, Chicago.

We're thrilled to have Paul Goldberger from the New Yorker, Christopher Hawthorne of the Los Angeles Times, Blair Kamin of the Chicago Tribune, and Sarah Williams Goldhagen of The New Republic.

I'll give you a hint of what we'll talk about but I want you to know that this discussion will be part of two extraordinary conferences in Chicago this week hosted by the Chicago Architecture Foundation, A+DEN the Architecture and Design Education Network and the new AAO, the Association of Architecture Organizations. If you're reading this blog you'll be interested in the work of all of these groups.

Since we have critics from New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago we'll compare and contrast and get into some friendly competition. Each will begin with a short presentation on a specific current project in their city.

We'll get their ideas and wishes for how architecture and design can improve city life. And maybe I'll ask them questions such as:

What lessons are coming to us from other parts of the world, for example Asia and the Middle East?

What roles will "sustainable design" play in future cities?

How can we design to make increased density work in our favor?

How should we spend President Obama’s federal stimulus billions?

How to improve public transportation?

How will new technologies, increased mass production, communication and travel affect
our cities and our sense of place?

What's the role of "the little move," the small project, eg. the design of a park bench, a streetlight or signage, to improve life in cities?

Etc. And of course I'll leave time for you to ask questions.

Join us. It's going to be lively, provocative and fun. Come say hello.
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The new Cambridge, Massachusetts Public Library

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:30:00 +0000

Cambridge, Massachusetts needed a library. Oh, they had a library.

A lovely Richardsonian thing from 1887/88. What else would you expect in this part of the world, famous for such libraries?

But I suppose they outgrew this, their main branch. Libraries do so many more kinds of things these days. And so the good people of Cambridge decided to expand their library. That idea started way back in 1992. In 1995 they chose William Rawn Associates and Ann Beha Architect to design 70,000 square feet of new library, to restore the old 35,000 square foot building, to put loads of parking underground and to enhance the open space in front. How do you think they did? The landscaping is quite wonderful.

And the new building was due to open to the public tonight, at 5 pm. There had been some grousing that it didn't fit in with the old library, and with old Cambridge, and that it looked like an office building, not a library. I guess maybe some people thought libraries, in this part of the world, are supposed to always look Richardsonian.

The good people of Cambridge were calling the library for months asking when it would open. The last week was cold and rainy and one worried that the new library would not start off seen in its best light. Today started out a little dreary, but by 3 the sun came out and the sky turned blue and the Cambridgians came to see what was in store for them and their children.

It looks immediately like something very special. Much care went into this, it's clear.

The glass is so transparent, there seems to be no weight to the building, which sits lightly on the ground, its gentle landscape rolling up to it. The enlightenment principles embedded in the library's mission radiate.

And more people arrived who wanted to go in.

They looked along the glass at the reflections.

Through the very transparent and lovely corners

And then went around the corner to gaze through the glass at the land

They looked up

And all the way through from one end to the other.

and back.

They stepped back a bit

And pressed their faces up against the front glass, to see through the treated, insulated very clear low-iron glass plates, to the light-filled reading rooms awaiting them.

This all made the desire much greater.

A large crowd assembled before five. When it was almost time to finally go in they formed a snake of a line.

At five o'clock a jazz band inside launched into a welcoming tune and the glass doors were opened to the citizens, who made themselves right at home.

One little girl was sad that she couldn't check out any book tonight, this was just a preview, to look at the place. Look right from the entrance and you see places to sit and read and enjoy the day and exchange ideas.

In libraries I always look to see if there's a "secret" hiding place where I could curl up with a book and feel alone and safe. So far I haven't found one here, but maybe it's upstairs.

Look left by the entrance and there's a transparent meeting room,

through which you see, and remember, that the old library building still exists. These people couldn't decide which way to go; but it's satisfying to see who else is in the building and the glass adds mesmerizing reflections and colors.

More in the core where less light penetrates, though still a lot, the architects placed a bright red, almost "Renzo Piano red" main staircase.

Every good library building needs a main staircase, right?

Lit from above with sunlight and a happy bright red it beckons to you,

rise up.

Rem Koolhaas put blood red in the Seattle Public Library in the basement, to mysterious, almost dungeon-like, erotic effect. Here the red creates a sense of pleasure and a more wholesome excitement. And as you look up to the second floor, again the outside is brought in through reflections.

On the second floor stand the stacks, bathed in light through a glass that protects the books.

How different from Louis Kahn's masterpiece Exeter Library, not far from here, where daylight is also an inspiration, but to read often involves physically moving a book from a dark space to a light one. The Cambridge main library is more casual than that.

As the sun sets, and the east coast light of Edward Hopper pours in on you, what book will you choose?

Monday I'll finish the story. I'll take you all the way to the darkness of night, we'll talk about how this building saves energy, see if there are any missteps and see if the new Cambridge library connects with the old.

continued......

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Sex sells

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:28:00 +0000

Today the best design site in the world goes with this.

As they say, haha

Hong Kong light to night

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:53:00 +0000

Click on the pic, then run your cursor down the image
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The most amazing computer images of the Farnsworth House

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 08:35:00 +0000

(click any image to enlarge and be really blown away)

Peter Guthrie is the eye and talent behind these highly manipulated and created-by-computer images. They are fantastic scenes and Guthrie tells you on his website how he created them.

While I admire these images greatly, I wouldn't want to look at them for very long. "Just say no," these are the Farnsworth House in a mind-altered state. They are pretty images and that is not what Mies was after.

"I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good." - Mies.

New! Improved! More color! More nature! These pictures do not let the house speak its essential Platonic language. They alter the light in and around the house by diffusing it; to show Mies's work through rosy colored glasses rather than conveying the intense spirit of the place which does transcend, but more slowly and subtley and partly with melancholy. The higher presence manifest in light is made too Hollywood here. The plain old house has been tarted up, as if moved to Los Angeles. The film could be Waiting for Godot in the Land of Oz.

The color, the mood, the emotion, add a Romantic element to Mies, a' la

The Wanderer Above the Mists - Caspar David Friedrich, 1818

Caspar David Friedrich, which is in the architecture, but subtly stated and experienced.

I highly recommend you see all thirteen of Peter Guthrie's renderings, in this slide show.

Or are we being shown the Farnsworth House having flooded for the last time and gone to heaven?

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Previous computer-generated images of the Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House in Plano, Illinois here.

Other Farnsworth-while thoughts here.
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The "Chicago Way" of city planning

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:30:00 +0000

My Q and A in Metropolis Magazine.com with Grahm Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition - trying to save the work of Walter Gropius in Chicago.

Do click on the slide show embedded in their story.

Go Van Gogh

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 07:02:00 +0000

Ever since I saw this gorgeous graphic conveying fifty years of space exploration

click to enlarge

[via] I can't get it out of mind. Partly because it's so beautiful. Partly because it clarifies

this Van Gogh.

Saarinen arch is a rainbow

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 18:15:00 +0000

This photo by a friend makes me smile.

St. Louis is French. In French "rainbow" is arc-en-ciel. Arch in the sky. This high arch reflects the colors of the rainbow. With the two dimensionality of the clouds, contrasted with the 3D curve of the arch, one thinks of Magritte. The clouds seem to be going right through the arch, almost as cloud wallpaper. The arch itself in its enigmatic sculptural form is America's Eiffel Tower. Nearly pure, but more; organic, yet technological too.

It is solid yet changes from solid to light. Not as we do - when we move up to heaven - this turns to light as it approaches earth.

See in this the abstracted mountain. So abstract it looks two dimensional at times. Similar to how modern painting flattened form and picture plane and allows for multiple views existing at once.

Here we have the embodiment of the Zen Buddhist (or was it Donovan?) saying,

"First there is a mountain then there is no mountain then there is."

Mies's 860 - 880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments Restored - Chicago

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:33:00 +0000

Restoration is just about complete on Mies van der Rohe's masterpiece 860 - 880 Lake Shore Drive apartments in Chicago. Long ago I told you of this work. It's fabulous to compare the before and after photographs.

Photographs can't convey the stunning new look in all its splendor. The travertine plaza is completely redone with new stone from Italy. All the glass on the first two floors was replaced. By using low iron glass, the transparent panes are as they were when Mies was around and equally important, once again the opaque glass panels are sandblasted as Mies specified. At night, the original dramatic lighting designed by Richard Kelly has been restored. After about ten million dollars of work, the buildings look better than they have in years; and that's saying a lot.

A partial list of what was achieved:

The entire building was painted. The ground floor and mezzanine level were sandblasted first so now when you walk around the plaza among them they're nice and smooth and black.

All the stainless steel around the lower eight feet of the building was replaced.
Much of the rest of the stainless steel was spot repaired and polished.
Doors on the south elevation of 880 that had been moved to the center were restored to their original positions.

New travertine was installed inside the lobbies near the windows where needed.
The lobby floors were honed.
The travertine lobby walls were cleaned.
The railing that had been along the western edge of the plaza was refabricated and installed.

New plants and planters were placed in the lobbies.
The revolving lights to call taxis that had been added to the canopies over the doors were removed.
The surroundings were re-landscaped.

The restoration also included much more work that you don't see but that will keep the buildings in good shape for years to come; for example, much of the structural steel was repaired. The roofs were waterproofed as was the plaza and the plaza's drainage was improved. The restoration architects are Krueck and Sexton, with Harboe Architects.

I'm wondering now if anyone has home movies or unpublished photographs of the 860 - 880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments from 1949 when it was going up or 1951 when it was finished, or later. I'd love to see them. Contact EdwardLifson@gmail.com

current photos via

Dreams of Eames, reams it seems

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:44:00 +0000

click here

via Coudal and.

Life Magazine photograph archives Charles and Ray Eames

Don't tear down the Mies building at IIT

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 18:54:00 +0000

"The whole is more than the sum of its parts" - Aristotle

Richard Lacayo's recent visit to Chicago reminds me that I have unfinished business. This past summer we both wrote (read his here, mine here) about a little building by Mies van der Rohe that the City of Chicago and the Illinois Institute of Technology appear ready to allow to be demolished. They wish to make way for a mostly empty "Donkey Kong" plaza in front of a generic corporate unremarkable but functional commuter train station. The other three corners at this site are vacant and could hold the station, but Chicago seems to want to tear down Mies.

Many people commented on those posts. Some supported saving it. Many others said that this little brick building with a gate and two brick walls was not an unimportant project to Mies and he must have just turned it over to some unknown junior member of the office. That was pure speculation; the people who assumed that were not in Mies's office at the time. But what we know to be fact is that in the published Mies van de Rohe archives the building in question, called the Test Cell, is included with more than one detailed and interesting drawing.

More of Mies's papers exist than have been published and they are stored mostly in the Mies van der Rohe archives in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I visited there to see what they had on the Test Cell building that Chicago and IIT plan to tear down.

I asked to see the documentation on the Test Cell. The very helpful Paul Galloway brought me the file folders. Thank you Paul, for all your help. Each was filled with papers and correspondence regarding the design and construction of the Test Cell. You read on some letters, "Very truly yours, Mies van der Rohe, by:"

The correspondence regarding the Test Cell is not addressed to some "junior member" of the office - but to Myron Goldsmith. Some letters speak of direct person-to-person conversations about the Test Cell between contractors and others and Myron Goldsmith. Such as this one that made me smile from October 27, 1950 in which Gerson Electric Company says they spoke with Mr. Goldsmith of Mein van der Rohe. (sic)

The list of payments to the contractors for the brickwork, glass, and all work on the Test Cell was approved and signed (Feb. 6, 1951) by Myron Goldsmith.

We know Myron Goldsmith of course. He was hardly that dreamed up "junior member" of the office. An important architect in his own right, he worked closely with Mies on, oh for example, another project some might consider unimportant - the Farnsworth House.

In a 1966 address to the Royal Institute of British Architects (junior members don't usually get to address Royal Institutes) Myron Goldsmith said,

"If I have a total vision of architecture, it is that the majority of building should be a structural solution, the most modest solution to the problem that one can find, executed carefully and placed carefully in its setting.

Which is what he and Mies came up with at the Test Cell. A carefully executed modest solution placed carefully in its setting. I respectfully suggest again that we keep it. The Test Cell can still teach us those lessons.

Goldsmith finished his paragraph to RIBA thus,

"If buildings are approached this way, there will be civic order."

Hm. He thought so. I thought so once. The optimism of the modern era. These buildings on the IIT campus are the progeny of the European Enlightenment. They are intended among other functions to provide order to society and to uplift us. Today most of us can not hear their message over what has become real chaos, individualism and cacophony in the modern, industrial American city. Perhaps they are too subtle for us.

On April 9, 1951 M. Goldsmith writes to people working on the building,

"I am leaving for a long vacation and remaining matters on this building have been turned over to Mr. J. Fujikawa of this office."

So clearly he had been in charge and let's see, he turns it over not to some "junior member" but to another top man in Mies's office, Joseph Fujikawa. Fukikawa was "a patriarch in Chicago architecture" and studied at IIT and then worked very closely with Mies starting in 1944. He was important enough that when the name of Mies's firm was changed after Mies died, it became Fujikawa, Conterato, Lohan & Associates.

View of the Test Cell with one of two adjoining brick walls.

- Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

Seen lower left. Part of the great ensemble at

the Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois.

In his Graham Foundation Chicago Architects Oral History Project Joseph Fujikawa recalls what simple brick, bricks and joining them meant to Mies; how the first thing Mies spoke to Fujikawa about was not glass, not steel, but bricks.

Joseph Fujikawa: I came to IIT (from USC architecture school in Los Angeles), and it really shook me because the first thing Mies said to me was, "Well, I don't know what you did back there, but do you know about the brick?" I said, "Brick? Well, you lay up brick, you make walls out of brick,"and such things, and I thought I did. "Well," he said, "can you lay up a good English bond in a brick wall?" Well, hell, I didn't know what an English bond was!

Betty Blum (interviewer): What is it?

Fujikawa: It's a pattern, and each of these patterns evolves out of a way of setting the brick. See, the whole idea in a brick wall is that you don't have joints that line up with the one below, so that if water gets in it will run all the way through the wall and the thing would freeze and break up. What you want to do is stagger joints, and all of these bonding methods are done just for that. They sort of knit and weave bricks together so that they make a stronger unit. Well, I learned about English bond, I learned about how you turn a corner with a brick wall, how you cut a door or a window in, and it was a real revelation.

And Mies made manifest this revelation in the Test Cell that we want to tear down.

Fujikawa: We never concerned ourselves with things like that back as USC. Mies said, "Well, before you could design, you have to know your materials," the same
thing Frank Lloyd Wright said and the same things all good architects say. You've
got to know your materials.

That's why it's good to be able to look at the Test Cell and the brick walls Mies built with it before you look at Crown Hall.

Crown Hall is design at the highest level. The brick Test Cell is how you get there. How you learn about the materials of architecture. How you put them together in honest ways and with modesty. To full appreciate Crown Hall, first look at Mies's test Cell for a while. Walk past it. Look and listen.

Joseph Fujikawa: I think IIT was a fantastic school, the curriculum that Mies set up, because you learned all these things—how wood goes together, how you build with steel, concrete, brick, masonry, all these materials. With that as a foundation, then you can go out and design a proper building, a building that will hang together.

Pun intended? Crown Hall's ceiling hangs from trusses overhead. Mies wanted to free up the space below from columns. To allow total freedom for the people and activities gathered within. The design suits the purpose. As at the Test Cell.

Blum: Do you think that IIT was unique among schools at that time?

Fujikawa: I think there was no other school in the country that was comparable in the grounding of fundamentals. Students at the school—I didn't have to do this,
but I know in their earlier years they would have to draw up a brick wall.

They'd spend half a semester drawing up a brick wall, showing every joint and every brick in a wall.

There used to be constant griping about "What good does this do?" but you know, Mies was teaching something more than just drafting.

Of course, you had to be an excellent draftsman to be able to
draw this way convincingly, but he was teaching something else.

He was teaching order, he was teaching discipline at the same time, and these kids were picking it up without realizing it.

"Order, discipline," no wonder people don't understand or value the Test Cell. Order and discipline are not the most highly esteemed values of our day. But maybe future generations will find these values truthful and beautiful again.

Mies's first hired draftsman in America, George Danforth, who succeeded Mies as Dean of Architecture at IIT tells us in his Graham Foundation Chicago Architects Oral History Project of the IIT campus,

Mies’s spaces and his buildings evoke a kind of peacefulness. Maybe people don’t like to be at peace with a space. They like something going on. This is why there are different people, of course. That’s the way some people look at it. Maybe that is somewhat what they mean by “cold.” It also challenges them, as a good work of art does, to give something to it, to think about it. Lots of people don’t like to be challenged to think about a play, a piece of music, looking at a painting, or dealing or working within a space.

(This all makes me miss my late friend George Danforth.) Mies died in 1969. For some time before that he had arthritis and moved around in a wheelchair. George Danforth in his oral history continues,

Danforth: In the later years, Mies gave more and more of the work with buildings on the campus to Joe Fujikawa to do. Joe was a very good man in his office. His (Mies's) health was failing.

I take this as confirmation before Mies's later years he was involved in the design of the campus. The Test Cell is dated 1951, Mies was healthy then.

What was the Test Cell to the office? In Mies's MoMA archives I saw a handwritten note about installing a telephone in the little building. The phone company had said they would not bury the cable to the building along the nearby railroad tracks, so who should they get the cable to the building? Any other solution would alter the appearance of the Test Cell. We read in personal handwriting about this,

"Checked with Mies and Spaeth. ... S decided put temporary pole ... (illegible) will erect 19' high pole near gas tanks, use 2" pipe."

Why would a person in the office bother checking with Mies about a simple phone line if he didn't care about the project? Even though the phone pole will be temporary the answer from Mies and/or Spaeth specifies how high it will be and even how thick the pipe will be.

I also saw a letter from April 18th, 1951 reading,

Gentlemen: Enclosed is my drawing of the STEEL GATE for the Test Cell for Armour Reseach Foundation (now part of IIT) dated April 16, 1951. A quotation at your earliest convenience is urgently requested.

Very sincerely ,
Mies van der Rohe
by:

Mies needs the quote urgently, but he's not going to have the office just buy a steel gate which would have been readily available for an unimportant project. No, he or someone in the office whom he has trained and whom he designates will draw a gate for this building. They want it custom fabricated by the Western Architectural Iron Co. in Chicago, to whom the letter is addressed.

The office then sends 3 prints of the gate post to the contractor describing how to install it. Looks to me like they're paying to details with this project. I am not surprised.

Here's what Myron Goldsmith said in the Chicago Architects Oral History Project about the thought processes in Mies's office.

In all his work Mies realized, I think, that he was doing something of great importance. He did everything as if the world depended on it. No shoddy work, no shoddy letters, no shoddy ideas, everything was as good as he could do it whether it was an exhibition, or the toilet of a house, or the materials of a house.

When Myron Goldsmith passed away in 1996, his New York Times obituary printed this:

"He managed with gentleness to exist and prosper in a field that is otherwise eaten up by tigerish egos," said Franz Schulze, an art historian and Mies biographer.

I wish we could say the same about the Test Cell.
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Upside down Mies house

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 05:12:00 +0000

Finally, Mies's Glass House will be built upside down!

Years ago artist Iñigo Manglano-Ovallé (who has made several films on Mies's work), told me he wanted to build Mies's unbuilt 50 x 50 house

(photo of a model)

on the plaza of the Seagram Building in New York - upside down! I waited for that. Now the project goes forward, in another of my favorite locations. I only wish it were full size. And right side up? Or do I just mirror Manglano-Ovallé's perversity?

So much of Mies's work does seem like it could be upside-down. It often features a horizontal symmetry, such as the bookended onyx in the Barcelona Pavilion.

The Farnsworth House itself is symmetrical top and bottom, and then at times the water mirrors it again.

This mirroring nature of Mies's work catches us off guard, surprises us. Often architecture is symmetrical left to right, usually not top to bottom. His works seem to have been unfolded, and left open, in the act of telling us something.

He gives us strong horizontals, new ground planes on which to begin afresh, he also gives us these invisible lines in between, even more Platonic and ideal than the ones he builds. You feel a rhythm, as always in his work, between there/not there. And you experience and feel that dialectic. Being and Nothingness.

As here in this existential photograph of a dwelling in search of a soul - Mies's Barcelona Pavilion.

Table, ottoman, and don't you often see pairs of Barcelona chairs across the glass table mirroring each other? This is even more interesting when individuals are sitting in these industrial, repetitive, symmetrical frames. I like to see twins sitting across the table.

Mies's corners offer mirrored images, of themselves

He is splitting open the world, like a book.

Sometimes of reflections.

When the sun shines brightly in summer on Mies's travertine on the ground and bounces back up the light seems to be from below, disorienting us. At Crown Hall the steps are white travertine, then the reflective floor inside is dark and but the ceiling is white. We lose which way is up. How about the ceiling of Crown Hall hung from trusses above rather than supported on columns? That is inverted. The Lake Shore Drive apartments also feature travertine on the plaza, the sun bounces off of it and the white paint on the underside of the ceiling above reflects it which puts you if you're there in the middle in some kind of floating space. The building itself seems pulled from above as much as it is anchored on the earth.

So why not see what a Mies house looks like upside down?

--=--

Which takes us to this press release:

Inverted Glass House is Centerpiece of
MASS MoCA Installation by Iñigo Manglano-Ovallé

(North Adams, Massachusetts) Iñigo Manglano-Ovallé's Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With, a major new installation, will open December 12, 2009 at MASS MoCA (Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art) in North Adams, MA. Inspired by Mies van der Rohe's uncompleted 50x50 House (1951), Manglano-Ovallé has constructed a half-scale version of this iconic Modernist glass-walled house and inverted it, so that its ceiling becomes its floor. All interior elements, including Mies-designed furniture and partition walls, are installed upside down.

Subtle bits evidence indicate the presence of a mysterious narrative within the flipped house: a cup and saucer lie shattered on the actual floor of the sculpture, as if fallen from one of the inverted tables. A cell phone, sitting precariously on a table, seems poised to fall; on its screen play a relentless series of video messages that seem to call out to the absent occupant of the house. The viewer is left to piece together this haunting, incomplete narrative.

The mysterious tableaux links Manglano-Ovallé's installation to what is widely regarded as the first science fiction novel, Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1921). Set in a futuristic world where individual freedom does not exist and all inhabitants live and work in transparent buildings, the novel tells the story of a state-employed engineer who falls in love with a terrorist and ultimately finds himself in a desperate state. The tale culminates in the engineer futilely attempting to destroy the monolithic power system, banging his head on glass walls.

Filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, said to have been inspired by the Zamyatin novel and Mies van der Rohe's drawings for glass skyscrapers in Berlin, set out to make The Glass House (1930). Eisenstein intended the film as his first Hollywood studio production, but his aim to shape it into a cultural satire of America ultimately prevented its production.

Manglano-Ovallé has long been interested in hybridizing layers of meaning from multiple systems of knowledge (architecture, literature, film, science, art) into singular and moving physical experiences that pose as many questions as they answer. Gravity is a force to be reckoned with (or The Glass House) brings together seemingly diverse, but historically charged, narratives from 20th century cultural practice. As much an event and an action as a work of sculpture, Manglano-Ovallé's work subjects modernist political and aesthetic ideals to a new kind of transparency, allowing us to see them upside-down and to reevaluate both their dangers and their possibilities in a contemporary context.

Accompanying film

Manglano-Ovallé's 2006 film Always After (The Glass House) (2006) will screen in conjunction with Gravity is a Force to be Reckoned With. Functioning as a prelude to his new work at MASS MoCA, the film is about the end of utopian transparency. Always After documented an actual event but was not orchestrated. Inside a building, massive windows have been broken, and someone is slowly sweeping up the shattered remains. From a floor level perspective, the viewer sees the legs of an anonymous audience and hears the sound of broom-swept glass. The location, action, and incongruous audience sounds are unexplained. What is clear is that the viewer has arrived late, always late, always after.

Companion Exhibition

Opening November 28, 2009 and running through May 16, 2010, neighboring Williams College Museum of Art will exhibit Manglano-Ovallé's Juggernaut. In this new film linking the enormity of our modern industrial presence with our surroundings, the pristine, gleaming white salt flats near the El Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve in Guerrero Negro, Mexico, are disturbed by a menacing and thundering human intervention.

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Immeasurable thanks to Robin Evans.

Paper Architecture and Cartoons

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Today we joke that Frank Gehry simply crumples up a piece of paper to arrive at his designs.

I love this cartoon from around 1950- Saul Steinberg takes a piece of ledger or graph paper and makes a modern facade...

(click to enlarge)

Here's another Steinberg from 1954 - Graph Paper Architecture

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Saul Steinberg was born in a small town of a few thousand in eastern Romania in 1914; you can imagine how modern that was. He studied architecture in Italy, indeed we lived in the same house there, me decades later.

Next week I'll post another cartoon by Saul Steinberg poking more fun at modern architecture - no, not his famous New Yorker magazine cover View of the World from 9th Avenue - look for something even more surreal.

Copyrights: top two images - The Simpsons - Fox TV.
Third Image - Saul Steinberg in The Architectural Review (UK).

Fourth image - The Saul Steinberg Foundation.

Calling anyone interested in the arts!

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:50:00 +0000

Tomorrow at 12 noon - 4 pm Eastern Time;
or 9 am - 1 pm Pacific Time

we will live stream to you the first ever

National Summit on Arts Journalism

Here's the full schedule. Don't miss it.

( I removed the stream, now that the event has passed.)

The summit is co-directed by two people I love to pal around with when I can--

Sasha Anawalt is director of USC Annenberg Arts Journalism Programs, including the Masters degree program in Specialized Journalism (The Arts). She also directs the NEA Arts Journalism Institute in Theater and Musical Theater and the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program. Anawalt wrote the cultural biography, The Joffrey Ballet: Robert Joffrey and the Making of an American Dance Company.

Douglas McLennan is an arts journalist and is the founder and editor of ArtsJournal.com. He is also the acting director of the National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP) and a frequent speaker on issue in arts journalism and changing culture in the digital age.

Starting tomorrow, Friday Oct. 2nd at 12 noon ET;
or 11 am CT
or 9 am PT.

Sit down in your most comfortable chair, click on the screen and get ready to be inspired.

You can find me live-blogging the event at ARTicles -- the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program.

Chinese face, Chinese characters

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:02:00 +0000

Today in China the government marks the sixtieth anniversary of the People's Republic of China. So many of the photos show us a faceless force to fear.

Just a few weeks ago I was in Tiananmen Square, as the government prepared for this event. Here's what I saw.

Just a few blocks away, by the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design where I was working stood a series of cutouts of famous western paintings. Become something new.

(Click any image to enlarge it.)

Yes, keep an eye on China.

To learn will return more than to fear.

Top photos copyright:
1. Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
2. David Gray/Reuters
3. Agence France-Presse -- Getty Images
.

Ode on a sugar maple branch

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 13:19:00 +0000

The line and the proximity of the sugar maple branch were as important to Mies as the placement of the two fingers were to Michelangelo.

When you're inside the Farnsworth house that branch seems to reach in toward you, to try to touch you and take your hand, to bring you outside with it; almost to turn you into a tree, the way a Greek temple has you become a column.

I should say the branch seemed to reach out toward you... In another example of how the Farnsworth House tells you the time, shows you the river always flowing, at differing paces, makes you one with the sunrise and sunset, displays the passing seasons in front of you as living tableaux, and, walking up its stairs, makes you aware of the stages of life, once inside, your view pushed outward, you realize we will return to where we came from, a few weeks ago that sugar maple branch fell to earth.

---

Farnsworth House photo by Jon Miller, Hedrich Blessing

Mies, Farnsworth, Durer and Duchamp

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:27:00 +0000

Today I saw this very odd engraving that I had never seen before:

Albrecht Dürer
Illustration of a perspective machine
Published in The Painter's Manual in 1525

The grid, the gaze, the bisecting window pane, the rationalist approach of the artist/technologist reminded me of Mies van der Rohe and his design for a weekend house in the woods for a single woman:

Did Edith Farnsworth feel at times nearly like the woman in Durer's engraving? Archivoyeurs made their ways through the woods to ogle the house. Dr. Farnsworth told of stepping out of her shower to be confronted by a group of Japanese archilovers snapping photos. The stares caused her to write, "I would prefer to move as the women do in the Old Quarter of Tripoli, muffled in unbleached homespun so that only a hole is left for them to look out of."

Her house in Plano though, was very bleached.

---

I've long thought of Marcel Duchamp in the same frame as Mies. Particularly Duchamp's

Large Glass which in the original French is called La Mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même(The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even). (1912 to 1923)

The Large Glass has the form of a painting, the Farnsworth has the basic form of a house. In its transparency it negates painting the way the Farnsworth House negates a house. Duchamp said it was "incompleted," as is the Farnsworth. Both speak of making things, of construction. Will someone come to fix the broken glass? Will someone come to the Farnsworth House to erect walls, a roof and a door? Because both are transparent, they incorporate the surrounding world into what they are. Seen through either, the images of the outside world seem heightened and at the same time unreal.

See the machines in the Large Glass? The symbol of the age, of modernity, as they were for the modern architects including Mies. The Farnsworth House is a machine in nature.

Duchamp called the Large Glass the "love operation" of two machines. But the Bride machine in the upper panel never connects with the Bachelor machine in the lower panel. Ms. Farnsworth wanted more from Mies than just his architecture and ended up suing him in displeasure. As in the Large Glass, perhaps male and female had been connected in the past, but they are no longer. Both works represent dreams and fantasies, of female-ness. In both the idea is to look, but not to truly connect.

The Bachelors in the Large Glass are too busy working to connect with the Bride, and for Mies- architectural work came first. Surrealist André Breton called the Large Glass "a mechanistic and cynical interpretation of the phenomenon of love." An apt phrase for the love nest/temple/weekend house of the lovelorn(?) Edith Farnsworth.

In this 1950 construction photograph, Mies and a woman who must be Edith, face opposite directions and stand apart with space between them.

They connect even less than do

Giacometti figures in a piazza.

The Large Glass represents several men - the bachelors - not connecting with a woman but worshiping her, and thus she becomes a goddess. The Farnsworth is a classical goddess's temple in the woods. At the time the Farnsworth was built, men gathered not far away in a shooting club across the Fox River which flows along the house. They were earth-bound, like Duchamp's bachelors in the lower frame of the Large Glass. In Duchamp's upper panel, the Bride "floats," as does the "goddess" in Mies's temple, which he raised six feet off the ground.

Both goddesses become geometry which represents purity and perfection but could also be a refuge for a male mind frightened at the mystery. Duchamp places those squares inside his Bride, geometric voids; Mies places his goddess inside the squares and rectangular voids. he even manifests her in the geometric house, with its geometric voids so that today, as an unoccupied house-museum we still feel the goddess's presence. She is there in the architecture itself. (Mies's Barcelona Pavilion features a statue of the goddess of dawn, like a siren she moors the sliding planes; but the Farnsworth House itself is more "useful" than the pavilion and stands in a more classical, restful pose and thus a statute of a female nude there would simply be redundant. More on this below.)

Duchamp made the Large Glass for Katherine Dreier whom he later dismissed in the work Tu m'. Her role may have been to allow him to do his work. Their relationship is in some ways can be compared to that of Mies and Edith Farnsworth.

If Duchamp in Coffee Mill (1911), Chocolate Grinder (1913) and Bicycle Wheel (1913) among other pieces strips domestic objects of their sentimental meaning; Mies does the same in the way he designed houses (and kitchens). Duchamp was more ironic, he was French.

Both works draw on the viewer's unconscious, including fears and fantasies.

But back to perspective machines. Duchamp said of the Large Glass, the vanishing point (in perspective) was 'de-multiplied'. Mies's works are also "perspective machines."

Here's Fritz Neumeyer on Mies's Barcelona Pavilion as a viewing device, this applies to the Farnsworth House also:

In the second phase of Mies' attempt to turn technology into art and to promote construction as architecture, the objective structure of the frame became an instrument of perception as well....

Mies transformed the frame into a reflexive architectural element and an instrument for perception and for exploring the realm between subjectivity and objectivity. No longer did the abstract ideal of a viewed construction provide the compositional model; rather its opposite, the perceptual frame of the construction of the view, served this role....

-Fritz Neumeyer in The Presence of Mies, Detlef Mertins, editor (Princeton 1994)

Beatriz Colomina writes in 2G's issue on Mies' houses,

"The house is no more than a device to see the world, a mechanism of viewing.... The world is at once turned into an outside an interrogated, intensified, transformed, by being framed.... The glass house doesn't simply expose the exterior world. It actively turns the world into a highly composed display.

---

Moises Puente writes,

The Mies house is an optical instrument born in temporary spaces, then unleashed in different landscapes around the world, turning the built and natural environments into exhibition sites, and redefining domestic space as the space of exhibition.

---

I see this photo of Mies looking through a model of the house

and it does look like the Durer.
The house is a gridded panopticon.

Maybe Edith Farnsworth should have been scared

like Fay Wray in King Kong,

looking like the sculpture Mies placed in his Barcelona Pavilion

In the Farnsworth House Mies placed no sculpture, the object on view is Edith, or what she represents. He made a frame for desire, manifest when Edith was there, even more interesting when she has picked up and left.

---

The house/machine amplifies desire, when you're outside of it you want to be in, when you're in, you look out; but try to live that way in a constant disconnected cycle in a place of perfection you can not attain and before long you will feel yourself being erased. It never bends to your wishes; and speaks more of interior spirit than of body. Poor Edith got lost in there and ended up losing all perspective.

The house, despite its glass, does not reflect who you are but works constantly to improve you. But any action in that house, any movement is about you, but it always connects you to a higher, more abstract level of cosmic action. After a while you feel that wherever you move in that box is controlled by strings from above. You, the human, are the linchpin that gives the universe a certain reality, without your observation in this heaven-on-earth box, the natural cycle would not occur. It's too much responsibility.

Sit in the chaise lounge looking south at the river

and you become

a modern ancient river god; not named Poseidon, Neptune or Tiber, but now named Fox. And Mies has conveniently provided the marble for you, abstracted into the flat plane of the floor, should one day you take shape.

By the little - hardly usable but highly symbolic (like the rest of the "house") fireplace you are Vesta, goddess of the fire, both domestic and sacred, and Vulcan, god of fire, blacksmiths (metal) and craftsmanship. I would say he's necessary to honor in this place.

Which takes us to Jupiter (the Greeks called him Zeus), the ruler of the Gods. He is the god of sky, lightening and thunder. You can't get away from him here. Edith had to eventually flee. Some architects might identify with said Zeus.

Minerva - the goddess of wisdom and learning would live on the elevated travertine platform before you enter the house. That is the place, the stage that completely honors enlightenment.
Minerva is also the goddess of the arts, sciences, and medicine. Dr. Edith Farnsworth embodied her. Farnsworth was a multi-talented physician specialized in diseases of the kidney (maybe she should have studied the spleen?), a violinist, she studied English literature, wrote poetry and essays and published translations of Italian poetry. Thus she knew these references.

Edith Farnsworth even screened in a porch, against Mies's wishes. She began to claim that "enlightenment plinth" as her own, to make a less abstracted and more comfortable house for Minerva. It became a battle worthy of the gods.

Stay in the Farnsworth House long enough and you see begin to see water nymphs and other woodland gods. That's the beauty of the pure transparent architecture, it allows interior and exterior life around you to unfold. Like a prism it takes what exists but is hard to experience, namely existence itself, and makes it visible, gives it meaning.

But this is not the Pantheon of all the gods (Crown Hall might be.) For example, Ceres, the goddess of grain is left out here. Mies did not domesticate the landscape, but left it in its natural state. (Lord Palumbo who bought the house from Edith Farnsworth did the landscaping later.) Ceres protects women, motherhood and marriage. Not what this place is about.

I am not sure if Venus has an address in Plano, Illinois. She is the major deity of love and beauty. I think she comes to earth elsewhere.

Here Mies honors Diana. The goddess of the hunt, the forest and animals. In this modern abstracted-up-many-levels version of a temple of Diana, the trees are her bow, the house her arrow.

And ultimately, it's a temple to Diana's twin brother Apollo. The god of light. As it's about connections it's appropriate to dedicate this to twins.

Apollo being the son of Zeus must have pleased Mies when he "fathered" this embodiment of the son.

Apollo too is the god of music. One hears his golden lyre, with its straight lines of strings, in the architecture. He is the god of healing, Mies's light-filled post World War II places are that - places for healing. Calm, geometric like the pyramids, places to rest. Oases in chaos, in cities, or here in the woods.

Apollo taught man medicine, Dr. Farnsworth. He is the god of truth, who can not tell a lie. There is no architecture more honest than that of Mies. Structure is exposed, it is what it is.

Ovid tells us in Metamorphoses (and what are Mies's buildings if not metamorphoses?) that Apollo had a first love in Daphne, but this is eros so Daphne, running away from him in the woods, prays to a river god to transform her into a laurel tree. Apollo still loves her and he embraces the tree as if it were her. Like the Farnsworth House and the sugar maple tree in front of it are engaged in eternal embrace.

Indeed, visit the Farnsworth in autumn, when the leaves have dropped away, and you will see the columns, the trunks and branches of the house, are like the bare trees around it. It becomes one of them. Apollo, after pursuing Daphne, was always seen with a crown of laurel leaves around his head. The tree and Apollo almost become one.

Each day Apollo's task was to harness his four horses to drive the sun across the sky. The Farnsworth House, this glass box of four walls - like Stonehenge perfectly placed on the sun's axis - makes Apollo and his labor manifest, it is a temple in which to observe the passage of the sun and to honor it, it makes the passage of the sun more remarkable.

---

Is it coincidence that when the Farnsworth House was for sale, one who lusted after it was the founder of the software firm Oracle? The Oracle was Apollo's.

---

Plato writes,

Chora, the receptacle which is now called space; space is eternal and indestructible and provides a position for everything, and yet is apprehended without the senses by a sort of spurious reasoning and so is hard to believe unless we look at it in a kind of dream.

---
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One last art work by Marcel Duchamp, completes our circle for it is even more like the Durer. Duchamp's last major work Étant donnés can be viewed in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. To see it, peep through

What could be more different than a Mies-designed wall and door?

To see the "adult" view inside, google "Étant donnés - Duchamp." We began with the male gaze, we end with it.

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Inside the body are "vessels" such as blood vessels. The Farnsworth House is a vessel. Vessel can also mean water-born craft, like the Farnsworth House itself by the Fox River, which Henry-Russell Hitchcock described as a "beached yacht." Early modern English women were sometime called "vessels."

---

The Farnsworth, like Duchamp's Large Glass, shines light on our interior lives.

La Mariée Mies à nu...

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The Duchamp Large Glass analysis is indebted to Donald Kuspit's A Critical History of 20th Century Art.

1,000 posts and counting

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 03:25:00 +0000

Glory be.
-Edward

Dust to dust. As seen in Tadao Ando's Church of the Light.

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 15:52:00 +0000

The light reflecting off of the caretaker and back onto the church
gives her a halo.

A modern day Mary Magdalene.

W stands for ?

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 17:32:00 +0000

1. Illustration from Underweysung der Messung -
Four Books on Measurement (1525), Albrecht Dürer
2. It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963), Stanley Kramer
3. Walter Towers, Prague, BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group).

Zen of Mies

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 23:11:00 +0000

At Ryōan-ji
the highest expression of the Japanese zen rock garden

I realize that the grain in the stone

is the grain in travertine

as on the plaza
at Mies van der Rohe's 860 - 880 Lake Shore Drive Apartments

When we restored the plaza
last year
we discussed a lot
whether we could rebuild the plaza out of granite
more durable in Chicago than Roman travertine
marble won

and now I see
it had to be
the grain is so important
like the grain
at Ryōan-ji

Then
I thought how nice
it would be
if Noguchi
had collaborated with Mies
on the plaza

Garden Element Isamu Noguchi, 1962.
Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA
Bronze (set in aggregate concrete).

I kept looking

I realized
that Mies's plan for IIT

on white tabula rasa
is also like Ryoan-ji.

In Spring
Ryōan-ji
allows the cherry blossom in

borrowed landscape
like that sugar maple reaching toward the Farnsworth House

(PHOTOGRAPHY: Jon Miller, Hedrich Blessing)

in what must have been a beautiful act
the branch just came down

We won't lament what is not there
what is at Ryōan-ji?

if it is conceived
it is there

Ryōan-ji is the space
between what you see

860 - 880 Lake Shore Drive apartments

860.Kyoto

Zaha and Chinese scholar's rocks

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 12:38:00 +0000

In China I realized that the Zaha Hadid I'd been looking at

is a lot like Chinese scholar's rocks.

Organic forms that could be shaped by the flow of water. A flow shape that symbolizes currents and the passage of time and dynamic space. Both stimulate contemplation. Exterior becomes interior. One's thoughts are altered, one's thought processes are opened up to new pathways, new, non-linear connections. Both look futuristic and prehistoric at the same time.

The Chinese scholar's rocks are more durable though.

---

Designing for China, an opera house for Guangzhou (Canton), Hadid's project looks less - though still somewhat - like the scholar's rocks and more like crystals.

From Building Magazine: “We wanted to show this building as a dynamic entity; the pebbles are dragged from the river and have been formed and shaped by wind and water forces. This has a link with the immediate context, the Pearl river, but also the Buiyan mountains near Guangzhou” says Wen Kun Bo, the project director for contractor China State Construction.

The larger “pebble” includes a 1,800-seater auditorium; the smaller one houses a 400-seat multi-purpose space for theatre, conferences and exhibitions.

Hadid's little but complex pavilion for Chicago's Burnham Centennial celebration opened late due to construction difficulties; she is having similar troubles and delays in China.

“There are three areas of difficulty,” Wen says. “The most difficult thing was positioning everything on site, the second was assembling the steel structure, and the third was the concrete, which was tricky because of the geometry and problems with the formwork. ... Wen has also found the concrete challenging, partly because of its structural complexity and also because Zaha Hadid wanted a good finish to the concrete. “Fair-faced concrete is quite rare in China so getting the right formwork is quite difficult,” says Zaha Hadid’s project architect on site, Simon Yu. In the end most of the formwork had to be imported or specially made. ...Yu concedes the building is behind schedule, partly due to a fire started by sloppy welding, and may not be completed for May 2010, when Guangzhou hosts an arts festival. Yu says the building will certainly open before November for the Asian Games in Guangzhou.

Tadao Ando's plan to rebalance the world, starting with Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympics

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:49:00 +0000

I'll have an interview with Ando in The Architect's Newspaper online in the next couple of days. We met in Ando's studio in Osaka, Japan. He was quite forthcoming and his plan for Tokyo's bid for the 2016 Olympic Games is, not surprisingly, impressive. Bold and humble at once; an appropriate tack for the games to take at this time. Watch out Chicago, Rio and Madrid - Tadao Ando and the Japanese will be hard to beat.

(Click photo to enlarge)

China posts coming

noreply@blogger.com (Edward Lifson) — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 15:39:00 +0000