Alice Tully’s makeover: dry, dull, uncomfortable

Among the New York Times’ consistently excellent music critics, Allan Kozinn is often the odd man out. He writes intelligently about concerts on the margins, while also standing up for many traditional performances and artists of the old guard. He sometimes sounds a bit prickly, which is one of the things I most admire about him. Today he struck a blow for those of us who loved the “old” Alice Tully Hall and are sad to see it gone.

Liz Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, the architects of the project, are freshening up Lincoln Center, ostensibly because the “closed and elitist” language of this 1960s landmark has turned away the concertgoing public. As with much that is transforming American cultural institutions during the recession, Lincoln Center’s motives for changing its buildings and public spaces are rather short-sighted. Putting more bodies in the seats at the expense of preserving the longstanding value of a cultural landmark, the LC administration hired a trendy, “conceptual” architectural firm to update its public spaces. Unfortunately, a casualty of this makeover was one of the city’s best concert venues.

Kozinn’s appraisal of the Alice Tully Hall renovation is written from the point of view of a discerning listener as well that of a regular patron who demands a commodious venue in which to enjoy many kinds of music. He does not swoon, as many have, over the “transparency” of the cantilevered lobby looming over Broadway. He finds the high tech lighting in the new hall rather gimmicky after the first visit. He minces no words about his view of the acoustics and general performance of the new hall–”I hate the new Tully Hall.”–strong condemnation from a leading music critic in view of the almost universal praise that followed the opening some months ago.

To those who have followed the career of Diller and Scofidio, Kozinn’s views should come as no surprise. Like many contemporary “starchitects,” these designers care little about the experience of patrons who regularly use their buildings. They were among the most arcane, abstruse and arid of the “conceptual” artist-architects of the 1970s and 1980s. Mixing performance, texts and often unbuildable collages in their early work, Diller and Scofidio developed their reputations as “paper architects.” Like Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, and Daniel Liebeskind, they professed their disdain for building–that is, until they began to make money doing it.

It is little wonder, then, that Kozinn finds the new concert hall numbingly dull, colorless, and inhospitable to music. He questions the decision to fill the bright, large lobby with a restaurant rather than leaving space for patrons to mill about the space. He finds little to praise about the hall’s new interior. Pietro Belluschi’s warm wood and comfortable red seats in the old hall were beloved of patrons. I remember many wonderful performances in the Belluschi hall, which was intimate, sonically rich, and popular with performers. Why was it renovated? I suspect that the administration and the architects simply saw a chance to “re-brand” the hall with a hot new designer’s label. Their attitude shows clearly, if ironically, in the choice of a new location for the portrait of Alice Tully that once stood in the lobby–a small vestibule adjacent to the ladies’ rest room.

No one questions the need for a larger lobby and a better circulation system at Tully. The original location at the back of the Juilliard School and tortured entry sequence were hated by everyone who used the facility. The architects improved this immeasurably. Give them credit for this modest accomplishment. But don’t be dazzled by shiny new surfaces and expensive technology, overlooking the obvious flaws in this ill-conceived project. Allan Kozinn has not bought the “propoganda line” that Lincoln Center is employing to sell its renovation plans. To wit, that the new architecture will create “open,” people-friendly spaces that will bring new audiences to what was once a “closed citadel” of the arts. Perhaps New Yorkers should be skeptical too.

Has Athens Lost Its Marbles?

After years of delays and much embarrassment, the new Acropolis Museum has opened in Athens, Greece. Strangely, in the years since the Athens Olympics (for which the museum was intended but couldn’t be finished on time), Greece has slipped back into a decades-old pattern of cultural and architectural underachievement. For a civilization that is still revered as the crucible of Western art and ideas, this situation is at the very least disappointing. There has been some buzz going around that the new museum would remedy the vacuum, but don’t bet on it. Bernard Tschumi has designed a building that belongs in 1960s Miami Beach, not next to the most important historic site in the world. So far the Athenians haven’t liked it much.

More significantly, the Greek government has been fighting with the English government over the return of the Elgin Marbles, which are slated to be installed in the upper gallery of Tschumi’s kitschy jewel box. Just about every commentator has an opinion on which country ought to take care of these extraordinary sculptural metopes from the frieze of the Parthenon. There is even a new book about repatriation of national art treasures from the director of the Art Institute of Chicago that weighs in on the subject. If only the great temple itself, recently restored on the Acropolis, were ready to accept these priceless antiquities, the case would be simple. Unfortunately the choices being considered include a beautiful set of rooms in the British Museum, designed by John Russell Pope, or a sterile, technocratic grid of boxes in the Tschumi museum.

On the subject of repatriation, I can only say that I do not believe that so-called “national” works of art must necessarily be displayed in the nation or place where they were originally created. While in principle the nations and regimes that paid artists to create great works ought to have first claim to them, many situations exist in which the works have taken on new meanings in new venues, or which scholarly communities have studied and protected antiquities better in far-off institutions than in those of the home country. Moreover, the global and multicultural nature of contemporary society offers numerous ways in which to view and enjoy works of art. Placing them in contexts that may be original but not safe, as in the Baghdad museum debacle, is no more acceptable than lifting them illegally from their place of origin for sale on the open market. It is interesting to observe that the countries most adamant about the return of their treasures are those with the least confidence in their own political and cultural place in the world–Peru, Greece, and Italy come to mind.

The Parthenon metopes are quintessentially architectural scupltures that should not be divorced from their place at the top of the cella inside the peristyle of the temple. In the British Museum installation they are given a simulacrum that is very close to the original spatial arrangement, in a classical room. In Athens they will be given an alien, disjunctive installation next to a wall of glass that looks out on the Acropolis, as if to say “modernity has ripped you from your mother’s breast.” From an architectural standpoint, the British have honored the sculptures, while the Greeks have besmirched their beauty and uniqueness.

The crude and brutal Tschumi design for the Acropolis Museum muddies the waters in the controversy, which is perhaps why it has thus far generated so little comment, either positive or negative. On his website, the architect calls the building an “anti-Bilbao,” as if this comparison were germane to a cultural museum on a historic site. He has little or no understanding of the context in which he builds. Demitri Porphyrios, the Greek architect most capable of producing a distinguished work of architecture in the classical mode, was not asked to compete for the commission. Both the Acropolis’s stewards and their chosen architect have failed not only their city, but the entire world in providing a compelling setting for one of the greatest art works ever created.

Do the Parthenon metopes deserve “repatriation?” Yes, in a setting that does them justice. Does Athens deserve to have them after the Tschumi debacle? No.

Work 2.0–smell the sawdust

“Knowledge workers,” according to the conventional wisdom, are America’s ticket to prosperity and happiness in the 21st century. Armed with graduate degrees in obscure scientific, technological and financial subjects, these new workers will sit at computers endlessly reinventing the world as we know it, adding “value” to products and services, and generating billions in new wealth.

Why then, are so many younger people jumping off the bandwagon and starting small handicraft businesses? Why has “homemade” music entered the lexicon of popular culture? Why do many sustainability gurus advocate low tech, handmade solutions?

To those of us who deal with craftsmanship and handwork as a matter of course, the answer is simple–people need to feel connected to the things they produce. This principle guided the leaders of the Arts & Crafts movement over a century ago. It has come to mean more to today’s disaffected workers as the bubble economy fades each week amidst concerns about job security. This week’s New York Times Magazine legitimized this trend with an article by Matthew B. Crawford, a young man with a Ph.D. who works as a motorcycle mechanic and loves his job.

“The trades suffer from low prestige,” he writes, “and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience.” Crawford’s positive experience is a revelation only because our society has so skewed the relationship between work and what John Dewey called “the materials of life.” As children proceed in school, their learning takes them further and further from the hands-on joys of things like gardening, woodworking, household arts, and mechanical repairs. By the time our children reach college, they have been brainwashed into believing that working with their hands is a low class option. Even when they see plumbers, stone carvers and woodworkers earning higher wages than they do, they persist in reaching for “knowledge work.”

This situation contributes to a sickness in our society. People in all walks of life are suffering from anxiety, low self esteem, despair over their future, and a general malaise in the workplace. Especially among the so-called working class and recent immigrants, the misplaced desire for betterment through “higher” education robs children of their natural intelligence when they are discouraged from working with their hands.

There is only one college in the United States devoted solely to the building trades–The American College of Building Arts in Charleston, S.C. Europe has myriad schools of this kind, and children there find alternative courses that lead to jobs in the culinary arts, handicrafts and other endeavors that do not require advanced degrees. It is time that American educators recognized the need for such avenues to self-fulfillment. Perhaps with the demise of Wall Street, we will wake up and smell the sawdust.

Renzo Piano, stealth classicist

The opening of Renzo Piano’s new Modern Art wing at the Art Institute of Chicago has won him another rave from critics throughout the U.S. Even the New York Times’s Nicolai Ouroussoff, generally a curmudgeon when it comes to Piano’s work, granted him a positive nod. His only complaint was that the country was feeling the effects of “Renzo Piano fatigue” as a result of his slew of recent commissions  in America. Why should this be the case?

Piano is a suave, cultured and disciplined designer who engenders confidence in institutional clients, both in the U.S. and abroad. His success is  hard won and, in my view, entirely deserved. While other international starchitects like Daniel Liebeskind, Rem Koohaas, and Zaha Hadid plop their trademark works in cities, expecting adulation for ignoring their local audience and trashing the urban environment, Piano carefully knits his buildings into the fabric of the places he encounters. While there is a superficial similarity to his work–most buildings are light, glassy and structurally innovative–he tries, sometimes to a fault, to find a balance between his interventions and the character of the buildings which set the stage for the new work. This is true at the Morgan Library entrance pavilion, which must attach to three disparate urban buildings (including the greatest classical building in New York–Charles McKim’s original library of 1909). It is also true of his California Academy of Science in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, a building that effortlessly includes an older Beaux Arts museum into a larger new facility while providing numerous sustainable systems that make the structure as contemporary as possible. His light, beautiful, and classical museum so outshines its clumsy Herzog & DeMeuron neighbor (the De Young) that visitors may wonder how the Swiss architects were ever considered for their commission at all.

There are moments when one architect achieves a pre-eminent position in the global marketplace, often because his work strikes a chord with stylemakers, critics and politicians. This was the case with Frank Gehry around the time of his Disney hall and Guggenheim Bilbao projects. It was surely the case when Louis Kahn unveiled his brilliant Kimball museum and Salk Center designs. Today’s master builder is Renzo Piano, an architect who has found a contemporary answer to the world’s need for a classical balance and assurance amidst chaos and uncertainty. He has made his mark quietly, largely without pandering to avant-garde critics, and the patronage network has responded with the best institutional commissions of the last decade. On balance, Piano has given us work that will outlast the flash-in-the-pan quasi-sculptures of Gehry, and perhaps rival the serene masterpieces of Kahn. That is an achievement worth celebrating, and Americans should be pleased with their good fortune and good judgment in choosing an architect of such gifts.

There goes the neighborhood

This week’s  New  York Times featured two disturbing articles that reinforce points made in earlier posts on this blogsite. Both suggest that the built environment of New York City, its wonderful urban fabric and historic neighborhoods, is not getting the attention it deserves from those who design and govern it. Santiago Calatrava’s transit hub for the World Trade Center site, years in design, has been beaten to death by bureaucrats eager to cut costs and improve anti-terrorist features. The Spanish architect works best when he is given relatively free reign, and this work shows him at his worst (as Nicolai Ouroussoff rightly points out). Give the Port Authority and the city government an “F” on this one. The WTC/Ground Zero site was the last best chance for the city to create a significant urban design with monumental features and parks. That chance is gone now.

On the other side of Manhattan, the neighborhoods that comprise an expanded South Village historic district bordering the Lower East Side, have fared no  better in the hands of the Landmark’s Preservation Commission. For two years the LPC has dragged its feet on scheduling hearings to designate the new historic district. Meanwhile, at least three of the area’s most important historic structures have either been demolished by greedy developers or renovated unsympathetically, voiding their significance. Robin Pogrebin has been following the controversy, and her story paints a depressing picture of the machinations of the one civic organization that is supposed to protect the neighborhoods of America’s greatest city. The LPC is letting the foxes in the henhouse; be afraid.

General Motors and the University

I spent almost 15 years in academia, teaching graduate and undergraduate architecture students at three universities as a full-time professor. When I left full-time teaching, I was convinced that the system I helped sustain was broken beyond repair. Today’s New York Times Op-Ed page confirms my assessment. Everyone who cares about higher education should read Mark C. Taylor’s brilliant condemnation of the American system: “End the University as We Know It.”

Taylor has made a name for himself as one of the most far reaching scholars in America, writing books on many topics including architecture, death, literature, and philosophy. He doesn’t teach in any of those fields. In fact, he is chair of the religion department at Columbia. At Williams College, where he spent most of his career, he pioneered interdisciplinary methods of teaching and research. Taylor is a polymath and a generalist in a field of myopic specialists, a breath of fresh air in the stuffiest of disciplines.

I have often thought that the American university was similar in its intransigience to General Motors. Both institutions have operated for decades on an unsustainable model, resisting change at every level, ensuring jobs for life for professors and line workers, and chasing immediate cash rather than looking to the furture health of the institution. Taylor agrees: “Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning.” His prescription for improving the university is to dismantle the entire system and rebuild it from the bottom up. Can we do for the University of Michigan what we are about to do for Chrysler? Well, as anyone who has spent time in an academic department will tell you, changing things at Chrysler will seem like a picnic compared to restructuring a modern universtity.

Nevertheless, it is clear that if the U.S. intends to create a future that ensures prosperity and a high standard of living for its children, the university system will have to change, and change drastically. Taylor has six bitter pills that no college president will want to swallow. The last, and most important is: “Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure.” You can bet that Taylor will be getting some cold stares at the next faculty meeting. If you think that the ire of displaced automobile workers is hot, try dealing with the resentment of an aging full professor who loses his corner office and graduate assistant. It’s really ugly.

An Escape Pod by the Blobmaster

[Previous versions of this blog were incomplete]

I never cease to be amazed at the paucity of real domestic architecture that is published in the home design issues of the New York Times Magazine. Last Sunday’s issue was even more disappointing than usual, with nary a feature on what most Americans choose to call their houses–whether apartments, townhomes or single family dwellings. Pages and pages of advertising make a concerted effort to sell home products to consumers, but the writers and editors find it beneath themselves to actually acknowledge the taste of their readers. Avant-garde design continues to be their target, even when examples of this elusive animal are scarce.

Leave it to those editors, and to Nicolai Oroussoff, to pick one of the most inept examples of single family house design ever published in the Times–a small residence in California by the vaunted master of “blobitecture,” Greg Lynn. Does the house resemble the free form globules that are Lynn’s trademark? No, it is a rather boring box with a large translucent window on one end. The rooms inside and the plan suggest the work of a first-year architecture student at a small midwestern college. Lynn has, according to Ouroussoff, turned his back on building any of his work so as not to sully its purity and computerized wizardry. In his forties, the “young” architect has built nothing of consequence. Add this ineffectual building to his oeuvre.

How did Mr. Lynn, the purist, get the commission? An employee of his firm married a rich Hollywood film maker and became both the project manager and the client, a convenient arrangement. What kind of budget did he have? Almost unlimited it appears, with the added perk that the interiors would be hung with obscenely expensive contemporary art.  And the furnishings? Most are built in and made of Corian, a material that sane architects refuse to consider these days (it’s petroleum based, expensive, and mainly used as faux stone). Some pieces echo the classics of trendy mid-century modern designers–Charles and Ray Eames, Eero Saarinen, and Florence Knoll.

Apparently oblivious to the irony of his commentary, Ouroussoff admits that Lynn’s little plaything is “a nice if cautious work,” “a perfect little fairy tale,” and “an exercise in good taste and high craftsmanship”–all comments that should make a design hipster want to vomit. You can hear Lynn’s student admirers running for the exits. Where is the edge, the shock value, the perversity that made Lynn a superstar for a few months in the late ’90s?

Grasping at straws, the critic and the magazine are more or less admitting that this article, and the house it puports to critique, have been “placed” by a public relations agent for the client and his architect. (Remind you of Architectural Digest during the Bush years?) Even Ouroussoff, clearly an admirer of Lynn’s work, can’t bring himself to drink the Koolaide and dole out the proper adulatory prose. The bathroom cabinetry “speaks of luxury,” the child’s  bedroom is Spielbergesque, as in “E.T. phone home.” The ultimate put-down for a shock-jock architect? “Rather than confront uncomfortable realities,” [Lynn's house] is “designed to insulate us from them.” Didn’t we just elect a president who promised to bring us back to reality after years of delusion? It now appears that “blobs and shards” were just the flip side of an architecture of escape, little different in psychological terms from their doppelgangers, the Disney-theme-park houses of those Wall Street derivative kings we’d like to tar and feather.

Nostalgia, drug of the unwashed masses

Well, Nicolai Ouroussoff has now decided to take on baseball fans, after aiming his critical jabs at museum goers, preservationists, and virtually every citizen in New York. The New York Times architecture critic offered his assessment of the city’s two new baseball stadiums in time for opening day, and had little good to say about either one. Both, he opined, were dragged down by their obeisance to “nostalgia,” his term for everything that is wrong with contemporary architecture. Never mind that baseball is America’s most tradition-bound sport, and that both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium had seen their fair share of sports history through the years. History, it appears, has no place in serious architecture.

“American stadium design has been stuck in a nostalgic funk,” wrote the critic, “with sports franchises recycling the same old images year after year.” His view of the generally acclaimed turn towards “old fashioned” baseball parks with the Camden Yards design by HOK Sport about a decade ago was the same as his view of most American architecture–the Baltimore stadium was an example of populist design that eschews the avant garde in favor of mass appeal. Lowbrow culture was dragging down the quality of sports architecture as it had the rest of the public realm.

This kind of elitism has been the posture of “progressive” architects and critics for more than a century, and it led to the kind of cold, indifferent stadiums that are now being demolished throughout the world. The sporting public, at least those who cared enough about their teams to buy season tickets, demanded a more intimate and evocative environment in which to enjoy their hard-won leisure time. Down went multi-purpose stadiums in Houston, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Cleveland and many other top sports venues, replaced by special venues for baseball, football and soccer. Fans loved the “new-old” look in many of these parks, and owners made significant profit from an increase in corporate boxes.

Of course, the age of excess that we have just left behind fueled some rather grandiose and wasteful spending on mega-stadiums for owners like George Steinbrenner and the partners in the New York Giants franchise. Old Yankee Stadium might well have been saved with Fenway Park had Steinbrenner not needed his puffed up revenue to buy more aging talent. The money and the architecture were tangentially related, as is often the case.

“Nostalgia,” a buzz word like “theme park architecture,” has taken on a new significance in cultural criticism of the kind practiced by Ouroussoff and many highbrow architects. Its mere invocation is meant to swipe away all pretense of design quality. A society infected by a desire to embrace the past in any form, according to this view, is a society in steep decline, and one that cannot support “new ideas” in architecture.  Should baseball fans, who carry around the history of the game in statistics and iconic performances, be branded with this epithet? Emphatically no; their allegiance to the history of their sport is no more a cultural stigma than the opera buff’s thrill at entering a grand old theatre. Mr. Ouroussoff is treading on thin ice when he attacks one of America’s most loyal sporting communities for their nostalgia, for he places himself in a political posture that tramples on a central myth of our democracy, the rights of the polis to its aesthetic choices, whether based upon tradition or rational judgment.

Are we a nostalgic culture? Probably not, but to the extent that our enduring values depend upon tradition and history, there is nothing wrong with a little nostalgia, especially as an antidote to “unprincipled change,” David Lowenthal’s term for the crushing march of technological progress. Using “nostalgia” as a pejorative code word is a weak critical strategy. Just as political name calling dragged our democratic process through the muck of several bitter presidential contests, finally giving way in 2008 to a new civility, it is time that cultural criticism shed its warlike subtext. Leave baseball alone, and let the fans enjoy opening day.

Mortars, pestles and limes

Since readers seem to have liked my last post on preservation issues, here is another pet peeve of mine. I have worked for years with historic masonry and, like many architects who appreciate the best craftsmanship, have been consistently frustrated by the poor quality of re-pointing in many restorations. Even when the mortar used is a so-called “soft” or “historic” mix of Portland Cement, sand, and lime, the resulting mortar never looks as beautiful as the historic example that is being “replicated.” My colleagues in the field explained years ago that it was impossible to duplicate these natural lime and sand recipes because they were weak and would never stand up to modern codes. Besides, where was one going to get old fashioned slaked lime?

Well, after years of wandering in the wilderness, preservationists have a saviour. Virginia Limeworks is a company that believes in old fashioned construction techniques and has backed up their preference with products that perform beautifully and have been tested to modern standards. I have used their products and swear by them. Mix’n'Go is a premixed mortar containing only sand and natural lime. It is a mason’s dream, according to tradespeople I’ve talked to. The advantage to lime mortar is twofold: 1) the resulting mortar is completely breathable, just like the stone and brick it complements; and 2) the natural color of the sand stands out as in no other mortar mix. One never has to use a colorant or admixture. Simply get the local sand that the original masons used and combine it with lime for a beautiful wall.

Check out Virginia Limeworks when you do your next repointing project, or insist that your mason call them up. And if you are a purist, simply buy their natural lime and mix everything yourself. No need to slake the lime or grind the mortar with a pestle. Unless of course you want to risk burning your eyeballs out.

Preservationists Don’t Do Windows

As one who has spent his career trying to convince others of the value of historic buildings, I am amused by the new alliance between the green energy folks and the National Trust for Historic Preservation. The Trust has its purpose in this democracy–mainly to remind civic minded people that “heritage” matters–but it often sounds as if it is preaching to the choir rather than leading a new movement. The Trust is always behind the curve, proclaiming yesterday’s news to people who love the past enough to tolerate a little deja vu.

The most recent issue of Historic Preservation magazine, the Trust’s main mouthpiece, featured another “green” issue, close on the heals of the first one issued last year. Not much has changed in a year as far as preservation technology is concerned, but one or two things emerged that caught my attention.  Articles on the adaptive re-use of historic buildings started to make sense as models of energy efficiency, not because the buildings were better insulated or more advanced than new structures, but because they maintained their “old” materials and technologies. It turns out that when considered holistically, older structures often make sense as examples of environmental conservation even if they haven’t been modernized.

To an architect who lived through the first energy crisis in the 1970s, and saw the preservation movement through its highs and lows, this revelation was not news. Many traditional buildings use passive heating and cooling, clever means of ventilation, and inherently sustainable materials. One bugaboo, however, has existed since I began restoring houses 30 years ago–the question of what to do about “leaky” single glazed windows. Conventional wisdom was to throw them away in favor of double glazed sashes that would seal the house and keep heat and cold inside in hostile climates.

Finally the tide has changed and preservationists have started to look at windows as pieces of the treasured fabric of older buildings that don’t need to be sacrificed to the altar of sustainability. It turns out, according to recent research, that a well-made wooden double-hung or casement, equipped with tight-fitting wood storm sash, can perform almost as well as a double-glazed unit in terms of thermal resistance and infiltration. Moreover, the cost of replacing beautifully-crafted wooden sash continues to rise, increasing their potential “embodied energy.” There is really no compelling reason to remove character-defining wood windows from any historic structure, if storm/screen units can be installed outside.

Though this may not sound revolutionary, it frees preservationists from one of the most vexing problems in building conservation. If one wants to be green, don’t install windows made of green wood. Why? The seasoned, old-growth wood in most historic windows will continue to perform better than either new wood units or comparable synthetic or metal sashes (metal conducts heat faster than wood). It turns out that when it comes to windows, they really don’t and can’t make ‘em like the used to.

From now on my answer to clients who tell me their energy bills will be intolerable if they don’t replace their “leaky” windows will be: it’s not easy being green; add some foam to the roof deck.