The second half of the Auden pairing (see yesterday’s post): Up There (for Anne Weiss) Men would never have come to need an attic. Keen collectors of glass or Roman coins build Special cabinets for them, date on, index Each new specimen: only women cling to Items out of their past they have no use […]
Architecture
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Wisdom from Another Time
MIT Chapel, Cambridge MA. Eero Saarinen, 1955 There is something profoundly moving about this show; an inescapable nostalgia pervades it for that elusive American Century. The faith in the future, the belief that science and technology would bring us a better world, is part of a more innocent era. Seeing how one architect expressed its […]
Architecture in the Aughts
Blur, Expo 02, Yverdon-les-Bains, 2002. This sensational pavilion, which was designed by New York architects Diller + Scofidio, was the star of Switzerland’s Expo 02. A cat’s cradle of tensile steel, 20m high and 100m long, it brooded at the end of a steel-and-glass jetty over Lake Neuchatel. Inside, some 30,000 water jets created clouds […]
Unfolding A New Reality
Zaha Hadid, in her home. Now that’s what flamboyant looks like! (Photo: Miles Aldridge) Two weeks ago I read the article written by John Seabrook for The New Yorker about architect Zaha Hadid. Up until now I’ve watched her international success with a curiosity and respect, but with a certain detachment. Her work doesn’t exhibit […]
More on Museum Expansion
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston I just found a spunky rebuttal to the much-discussed article by the Times’ Robin Pogrebin about the recent era of museum overbuilding. Pogrebin’s article is referenced in yesterday’s post, and anyone who has read her piece should also read through Lee Rosenbaum’s article on CultureGrrl, Not Dead Yet: Museum Building […]
Remote Futures, Remote Pasts
Salt crystals on the Spiral Jetty, Utah When a place is lifeless or unreal, there is almost always a mastermind behind it. It is so filled with the will of its maker that there is no room for its own nature. –Christopher Alexander, one of my ideological mentors, as quoted by Edward Hollis in The […]
The Wince Factor
The New York Times’ architectural critic Nicolai Ouroussoff captured it all in the title of his review: The Chanel Pavilion: Clear folly in lean times. Look how quickly everything in our lives has shifted. In just a matter of weeks, the vox populi has traded its old laissez-faire lens for a sharp edged one, one […]
Lessons in Tenacity
The World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 This morning I excerpted from an article in the Chicago Tribune about Daniel Burnham on my Slow Painting blog. For those of you who have read The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, you will recognize his name. Burnham was the architect and visionary behind the magical Chicago […]
Ara Pacis, Richard Meier and Minding the Gap
Richard Meier’s Ara Pacis Museum in Rome was controversial from its inception. The museum was built to house just one artifact, the Ara Pacis, a finely carved sacrificial altar built in 13AD to commemorate the victories of Emperor Augustus in Spain and Gaul. Adding to its historical significance to Romans, the altar was fully restored […]
Monumental Grandiosity
Clyfford Still So maybe this is my week to air art world frustrations. My latest complaint: The newly unveiled Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. An excerpt about the proposed museum from the Denver Post can be read on Slow Painting. The building concept sounds soulful, more of an invitation to solitude than its brassy, sassy […]