AT THE BARNES
In April 2005 I wrote my Slate column about the projected move of the Barnes Foundation to downtown Philadelphia: “Why not treat the galleries of the Barnes as an artistically significant artifact, and simply move them to the new location, burlap-covered walls and all? The result would resemble the transplanted historical interiors exhibited in many large museums, such as the Ottoman room at the Metropolitan Museum.” Well, that’s what they did—sort of. I had avoided visiting the new Barnes since I was attached to the original, but last week I finally relented. The collection hung as before (following a judge’s ruling), but thanks to Williams & Tsien’s tinkering, the feeling of the place had changed. Although the room layout was more or less the same, moldings had disappeared or been altered, and a kind of fussy modernist slickness permeated Paul Cret’s architecture. The collection itself can be a little overwhelming, and I was drawn—as I have been before—to Toulouse-Lautrec’s “A Montrouge.” After all those chubby Renoir nudes it is a breath of fresh air.
STACKED
Duo Dickinson seems to have discovered the stacked box fad in a recent post on Common\Edge. Well, duh. In April 2009 I wrote a Slate column about “The Jenga Effect.” It was prompted by 56 Leonard Street, a New York apartment building designed by Herzog & De Meuron. Of course, what looked like a pile of stacked boxes was actually a conventional high-rise with cantilevers and setbacks. I think what attracted architects to stacking was the appearance of shakiness; architects in the past had always aimed at solidity, so why not go the other way? The granddaddy of stacked buildings was Habitat 67, but as I pointed out, Moshe Safdie’s stacked boxes were real boxes (of prefabricated concrete), and the stacking had a functional and structural logic. “While the rather loose arrangement appears random, it maximizes views from within the houses and provides one or more garden terraces for each unit. And the pyramidal stack looks very solid.”
FRESHENING UP THE PAST
The Sainsbury Wing of London’s National Gallery is an example of postmodernism, a style that was already in decline when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown won a controversial competition to build this addition. In the eyes of many, including this writer, the Sainsbury Wing, like James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, is one of the (rare?) paragons of postmodernism. So it was with dismay that I read the headline in Dezeen: “Sainsbury Wing Revamp Approved.” Revamp? Although the Sainsbury Wing is a Grade I-listed building, it apparently needs freshening up. The freshening up includes removing some of the non-structural columns in the lobby as well as carving a large Trump-like sign into the Portland stone facade. The chief motivation for the alterations is the dubious decision to convert the Sainsbury Wing into the main entrance to the Gallery. The lobby rendering released by Selldorf Architects shows a rather banal space that reminds me of an airport lounge, with none of the quirky brilliance that characterized the Venturi Scott Brown design. The British architecture critic Hugh Pearman told Dezeen that the proposed alterations “would be damagingly destructive—sterilizing the original architectural character of the building.” What a shame.
FOREIGN SHORES
The Zhejiang University Press of Hangzhou has published Chinese translations of Home and Waiting for the Weekend. A reader of the latter will find a postcard with an image of Georges Seurat’s “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte,” which is referred to in the book and was on the jacket of the Viking edition, back in 1991. Nice. Zhejiang has also published a translation of One Good Turn, which is a natural history of the screwdriver and the screw. It’s printed on black paper–a first for me–and has a screw post binding. Like a shop manual!
CHARLESTON RENAISSANCE MAN
My friend Ralph Muldrow has just published a book on the life and work of Albert Simons (1890-1980), an architect of Charleston, South Carolina. Simons (rhymes with persimmons) is an interesting figure. Trained as a classicist he practiced during the period when architectural modernism was emerging and gaining predominance. He was also a leading figure in the Charleston architectural preservation movement, which means he was a leading figure nationally, for in 1931, Charleston passed an ordinance creating a historic district—the first American city to do so. You can read my Foreword here.
JACK DIAMOND
The architect Jack Diamond (1932-2022) died last week. He was perhaps Canada’s leading architect. Yet no-one would refer to him as a starchitect. “It’s easy to do an iconic building,” he once said, “because it’s only solving one issue.” Diamond’s designs were never one-dimensional. His opera house in Toronto is a traditional horseshoe-shaped auditorium situated within an unprepossessing blue-black brick box whose chief feature is a glazed lobby facing one of the city’s main streets; dramatic, but hardly iconic—very Canadian. At $150 million in 2008, the cost of the Four Seasons Centre was modest as opera houses go, but more important was how the money was spent—on the hall and the interiors rather than on exterior architectural effects. Sadly Diamond would not be attending the gala reopening of his last project, the redone David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center. The New York Times’ Michael Kimmelman, writing about the architecture of the hall, was rather mealy-mouthed in his back-handed compliment, “it is like the second-best-looking man in an old Hollywood film: generic, attractive enough, ceding center stage to the star, which is the music.” But ceding center stage to the music is the whole point, isn’t it?
