Modern life

WHY THE FRENCH LIKE MODERN DESIGN

Watching the French television political soap Marseille—but anything with Gérard Depardieu can’t be all bad—I was struck, again, by how much the French like modern design. The furniture in the scenes was inevitably modernist, more so than would be the case in Madame Secretary, say. Then it struck me that while the furniture was aggressively modern, most of the background architecture was not. The Marseille city hall, for example, is a beautiful seventeenth-century building; Depardieu’s home (he plays the mayor, of course) is a fin-de-siècle villa. In one episode, a hospital room filled with the latest medical gadgetry in a private clinic,

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FRUITCAKE

What is it with Americans and fruitcakes? For many years we used to throw an annual midday New Year’s Day party. Bloody Marys, big buffet table, Niman Ranch ham, stuff like that. People seemed to enjoy the food, but we noticed that there was usually leftover fruitcake. We were puzzled why there were so few takers, because we had gone to a lot of trouble to order this particular confection from Vermont. Perhaps because we came from Canada, where fruitcake—dark, moist, and rich—is a Christmas tradition, we didn’t know that to Americans fruitcake was associated with a different tradition.

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LOOKING NORTH

I attended McGill University, which is sometimes described as “the Harvard of the North.” After reading Ross Douthat’s column on the Ivy League in today’s New York Times, it’s evident that it really isn’t—or at least wasn’t when I was there. One difference is that Canadian students didn’t “go away to college,” they simply attended whatever university was near to where they lived. Thus, most of my architecture classmates—all men—were Montrealers. Unlike Ivy League campuses today, which are awash with monogrammed sweatshirts and caps, we didn’t show off our affiliation—actually we didn’t wear sweat shirts,

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IN THE CORNER WITH MAURY

Richard Terrill recounts a wonderful story in “Who Was Bill Evans?”

Jazz bandleader Stan Kenton told a story about himself as a kid, trying to sneak into a Paris club to hear jazz. He was too young to drink, even in France. The concierge finally said, ok, just go sit in the corner with that old man. His name is Maury.

And it went like this for several evenings. Go sit in the corner with Maury, kid.

Years later, Kenton learned that the old man had been Maurice Ravel.

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A CALM IN THE STORM

“Modernism wasn’t just a style—it was a way of thinking, a way of life,” expounds Jessica Todd Smith in a video on the Philadelphia Museum of Art website. Smith, who is the curator of the current PMA show, “Modern Times: American Art 1910-1950” (on view until September 3), also refers to the “beautiful chaos of innovation.” Those four decades were, indeed, chaotic: two world wars, the Soviet revolution, the Great Depression, social upheavals, the emergence of mass production and the consumer society. Where did this stormy time leave the artist? Adrift, judging from this show. Museums don’t pipe-in music (except in the gift shop),

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PAPER BLINKERS

The first university architecture programs appeared in the late nineteenth century, at MIT (1865) and the University of Pennsylvania (1868). Previously—and for a long time thereafter—most architects in the English-speaking world learned their craft through apprenticeship, on the job, working in an office. Frank Lloyd Wright, Edwin Lutyens, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Charles A. Platt, Horace Trumbauer, Ralph Adams Cram, and Bertram Goodhue are prominent examples. While it is still theoretically possible to become a registered architect through apprenticeship, in practice formal education has taken over the training of architects. How does one teach someone to be an architect? Since architecture is not a science,

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WRIGHT WAS RIGHT

Ian Bogost’s excellent Atlantic article on the fashionable open plan, which integrates the kitchen into the main living spaces of the house, points out the drawbacks of this arrangement: leaving a messy kitchen open to full view, which can be awkward when entertaining. Bogost correctly credits Frank Lloyd Wright with popularizing the open plan, but he doesn’t point out that in Wright’s Usonian houses, the kitchen—which he called the workspace—is generally positioned out of view of the living room. In this photograph of the Pope-Leighey House, a small Usonian built in 1941 in suburban Virginia, the compact kitchen is unobtrusively tucked in behind the brick wall containing the fireplace. 

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PRESERVATION

Why do we renovate, restore, or otherwise preserve old buildings after they have become functionally obsolete? One reason is practical—the building is in good enough shape to be still useful, even in an altered state, or for a different purpose than originally intended. The second reason is cultural. Perhaps the building was once the home of an important figure—Mozart’s house in Vienna, for example, or Washington’s Mount Vernon—or maybe it was the site of an important event such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The third reason is aesthetic: the building is beautiful and incorporates artistry and craftsmanship that have made it the object of our affection.

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