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Architecture is History
The Woolworth Building: Gothic, yet Modern
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Commentary:The Gateway Arch
It was wonderful to climb to the top shortly after it was completed and to hear the Park Rangers in the viewing lounge describe it as their local “mountaintop” where they relaxed after the crowds had gone for the day. I agree with Sauer’s notion of its inevitable tactility and its essential and unfettered modernism. Now, viewing it on the web in recent photographs I am struck by its kinship to that other great modern American monument The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. One is arched vertically, the other horizontally. One exults in a new beginning with soaring optimism, the other rejoices in and yet grieves for life-ending heroism. But each expresses in the purity of its relationship to earth and air the poetic aura that emanates from buildings of unfettered, minimalist clarity. The Arch is worthy of inclusion. The Disney Concert Hall
It is clearly Gehry at his creative best. Having seen most of his works in Europe and the USA, I find that the Disney hall has the tautness of a Stradivarius both in its elegant, curvilinear exterior case and in the fabulous limpidity of the instrument itself.......before it lets loose its controlled, yet exuberant sounds, reverberating with clarity and ease. A bassoonist from the orchestra of St. Martin in the fields having been asked “how did you enjoy playing the wonderful Troy Music Hall?” responded “Well, it's a beautifully tuned space, but have you ever played in Los Angeles' new concert hall? We just did and it was beautiful.” Clearly Gehry has designed the space as an instrument to be played by sensitive musicians. The joyful exterior is something to elevate the spirits of those who fail to get in to a sold-out performance and whose disappointment is eased by the chuckling subtleties of the great morphological game. Empire State Building
The Empire State Building, sporting new energy-efficient windows and with high-performance LED fixtures illuminating its spire, looks grand at 77 years of age. Familiar to every visitor to New York City, and to every filmgoer, it handily topped the Harris Poll of America's Favorite Architecture, conducted for the 2007 sesquicentennial of the American Institute of Architects. But the King Kong of all skyscrapers was appreciated from the get-go. The WPA Guide to New York City, written just eight years after the Empire State Building was completed, states: “its architectural importance far transcends the matter of height alone. The design, for which Shreve, Lamb, and Harmon won the gold medal of the Architectural League in 1931, is essentially modern.” Seen from near or far, the stepped-back form of the Empire State Building is immediately identifiable. For New Yorkers, its dirigible-mooring mast gestures emphatically, with an iconic timelessness that reinforces our sense of who we are and, post-9/11, what we fear to lose. In his 1948 book, Here is New York, E. B. White wrote, “The Empire State Building shot twelve hundred and fifty feet into the air when it was madness to put out as much as six inches of new growth.” He saw this as “the white plume saying that this way is up.” The building has become our lighthouse, the landmark against which we measure distance and time. As one of the buildings that give shape to New York, it is essential and still modern, after all these years. Tribune Tower
The Tribune Tower is a wonderful distillation of the aspirations of America in the 1920s — a nation that had embraced and advanced the technology of modernism but continued to struggle — as we do to this day — with its aesthetic expression. The product of a renowned international competition that featured entries by some of the leading architects — both modern and traditional — of the era, Raymond Hood and John Howells’ winning entry is a soaring, elegant structure rendered in Late Gothic dress, modeled after the tower of the Cathedral of Rouen, in France. As such it carries forward — in an arguably far more suave and architecturally resolved fashion, the aesthetic of the Gothic skyscraper that was definitively established in the prior decade by Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building in New York. Both of these of course derive their architectural logic from the Gothic spire, the most refined and powerful vertical expression found in traditional architecture. The architectural brief put forward by the Colonel McCormick of the Tribune called for the “Most Beautiful Skyscraper in the world,” but it is interesting to speculate as to what meaning he and the Tribune Corporation were seeking to communicate to their public. Gothic architecture primarily connotes the spiritual and the scholastic — not normally what would be considered defining traits of a large commercial enterprise like a newspaper. The competition actually did much to expose this dilemma of style — and it is especially Eliel Saarinen’s second place entry, which exploits the tapering verticality of Gothic architecture while rendering it in a contemporary abstract fashion that removes much of its traditional symbolic (religious) meaning, that begins to point the way toward an appropriately modern skyscraper expression. Hood himself was quick to pick this up as can be seen in subsequent buildings such as the Daily News Building, and the great urban ensemble of Rockefeller Center (both in New York). Having said all this, the Tribune Tower is an icon of Chicago and American architecture; it remains a strong and striking presence both at the pedestrian level along Michigan Avenue, where the wealth of detail is brought down to a fine human scale that creates one of the great entry experiences to be found anywhere in a building of this type, and on the Chicago skyline. As a work that defines the quality of design and construction technology that was possible in the America of the roaring twenties — while simultaneously revealing its deep stylistic ambivalence, the Tribune Tower has few if any equals anywhere in the country. The Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
The Air and Space Museum (1976) contains the largest collection of air and spacecraft in the world. The intensive functional requirements of housing such a collection, when combined with the client's requirement that the building not stand out against its monumental backdrop of the Washington Mall, dictated its simple design solution. While graceful, and constructed of fine materials with elegant details, there is little for a visitor to note about the architecture of the museum (especially when there are lunar rovers and flying boats to distract you!) Architect Gyo Obata of HOK adeptly met the complex programmatic requirements, but the resulting structure is so vanilla that it hardly compares to the presence of the rest of his oeuvre. Obata's training under Eero Saarinen is much more apparent in works like Independence Temple and McDonnell Planetarium (both in Missouri). In fact, the Smithsonian was a much more lenient parent to the Air and Space Museum's two neighbors on the Mall, the Hirshhorn (1974, Gordon Bunshaft) and the Museum of the American Indian (2004, Douglas Cardinal). It's as if Obata was made to design by stricter rules to pay for some imagined sins of Bunshaft's sculptural Hirshhorn, and then by the time the baby Museum of the Indian came along to fill the last site on the Mall, the Smithsonian had given up on trying to raise only prim and unobtrusive buildings on the Mall. The most unfortunate effect of the Air and Space Museum is that it, like nearly every other building along Independence or Constitution Avenues, contributes to the dead zone of activity and urban design at the boundaries of the National Mall. Across Independence Avenue from the Museum are the massive and institutional buildings of the Department of Education and Federal Aviation. The only difference between the two sides of the street is that the entering the bureaucracy requires extensive security checks, allows no photography of the building's contents, and leaves the visitor standing in just as oppressive of an environment as she found outside on Independence. Once you enter Obata's chicly austere travertine volume, however, you immediately recognize that the building comfortably houses both a horde of happy children and hundreds of priceless, fascinating artifacts. The Smithsonian, for its urban design foibles, still inspires its visitors to celebrate the shared cultural property of the nation. We can only imagine a federal bureaucracy that might be so engaging. Fenway Park
Fenway Park’s allure is one part intimacy, one part eccentricity, one part urban setting and one part nostalgia, adding up to a special place to watch a baseball game. This is not an eye-catching arena standing in a sea of parking, containing a vast interior space for sports. Aside from its light towers seen from the turnpike, Fenway is an unremarkable piece of urban fabric, nearly anonymous. Set amidst narrow streets featuring a mélange of shops, restaurants, bars and businesses, this unassuming structure happens to house a small, nearly century-old ballpark. You are on top of it before you know it. The urban location dictates Fenway’s famous irregular shape, hemmed in by the pre-existing street pattern. The resulting limitations, epitomized by the Green Monster, affect both the team’s character (offense is favored over defense) and its revenue. In fact, before the recent discovery that Fenway teams could win a modern World Series (twice!) and before the continuing inventive work of the architect Janet Marie Smith, many in the sports world assumed that Fenway’s small, idiosyncratic field was the true curse of the Red Sox. This was apparently not the case. |
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