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Of the many individuals who found themselves in the orbit of Philip Johnson over his long life, Landis Gores stands as one of the more fascinating. He was a native of Ohio (like Johnson) who loved horses (he met his wife on a ranch in Wyoming) and played football at Princeton. He met Johnson at Harvard, where the two studied architecture (Gores, though younger, was a class ahead) and developed a shared a friendship based on their interest in the classics and a taste for the kind of modern architecture that was not fashionable under Walter Gropius. Johnson preferred Mies; Gores was more of a Wright man, as the house he built for himself in New Canaan, just after the war, makes plain. Gores’s wartime service had been exemplary; he was a part of the now justly mythologized code-breaking team, based in Bletchley Park, England, that broke the cyphers of the Nazi high command. Upon return from the war, he was recruited by Johnson, who needed a deputy to assist him in practice. The collaboration was not too long; Gores, talented in his own right, was anxious to go off on his own. His house, however, though quite different from Johnson’s nearby Glass House, was also in many ways modeled on it; set on a promontory with a view; broad expanses of glass opening out onto nature. Gores, sadly, was stricken with polio just a few years after opening his own office, and before the release of the Salk vaccine. It was the end of a promising career. A few more images of the house, designed when Gores was all of 26 (!), follow.

Back when I was in high school, some 25 years ago (ouch), the Whitney was already mired in controversy over its expansion plans. Michael Graves was the culprit then. Rem Koolhaas would come along in later years, and Renzo Piano after him. Marcel Breuer’s gray granite fort somehow resisted all comers, a fact for which we should all be very glad. The Whitney has never given up its dreams, however, and now has its eyes on a plot at the foot of the High Line in the Meat Market, with Piano as designer. I hate to think of the Whitney decamping from the Upper East Side, though I can appreciate the museum’s desire for more gallery space. A satelite downtown sounds appealing, but like many of the trustees, I fear the costs of operating it might be prohibitive. The Guggenheim’s downtown outpost didn’t work out. When big plans go awry, it’s always the little guys at a museum—the registrars and librarians and designers and guards—who get stuck with the brunt of the pain.

The news about the Whitney’s expansion drew a rather splenetic response from Times art critic Roberta Smith, no fan of Breuer’s building. It has, she wrote, “all the disadvantages of starchitecture and few if any of the rewards. Even in a country where museums are rarely designed with art in mind, it stands out as relentlessly unforgiving to works of all styles and periods. If the stone floor doesn’t kill, the oppressive overhead concrete structure almost undoubtedly will. Unlike the Guggenheim, the Breuer building is not considered a must-see destination by tourists, regardless of what shows are on view.”

I’d just like to add my voice to those who find that opinion—and the nasty tone in which it is voiced—objectionable. Yes, the building has a brooding profile, but I’ve never found it resistant to art. The Whitney has a personality, and it actually belies first impression. You cross over that moat, and it’s like you’re in a place out of time. It’s not oppressive. It’s the one New York museum that has a sense of humor, that doesn’t have airs. MoMA is Imperial. The Goog is chic. The Frick and the Morgan are old money. The MET is an encyclopedia. The Whitney? It’s Calder’s circus, Stuart Davis, Oldenburg’s soft toilet, all those biennials that everyone hates—it’s the 1962 Mets of New York art museums. (Those ’62 Mets, incidentally: owned by a Whitney.) It even has its own scent. The Whitney smells like no other place in the world.

Perhaps I’m jaded by my own history, but I happen to think Breuer’s stone flagging and concrete ceilings do just fine for art, thank you very much. Idiosyncratic? Sure, but that’s okay. I hate to think that the only way to look at modern art is in giant white-walled warehouses. As for popularity, the place seems to be doing pretty well tourist-wise: that’s part of the reason it wants to expand. (And apparently the folks in Vegas think it’s pretty iconic.)

Smith doesn’t like Sanaa’s New Museum any better; its galleries are “horribly proportioned and oppressive in their lack of windows.” Well, I agree that the galleries are a bit claustrophobic, as I wrote in a recent piece on Design Observer, but, again, let’s not get crazy. I like our two museums. Quirky ain’t a bad thing. It’s us.

This seems like an opportune moment to make public the news that I am at work on a new biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, to be published by Little, Brown. It will be the first fully independent biography of Johnson, and the first published since the 1990s, well before his death. This is, of course, a wildly ambitious project. As I begin my research, the photo above, of Johnson’s Glass House in New Canaan, seems a useful metaphor for what lies ahead: a difficult, obstacle-filled journey, but with a reward that makes the effort worthwhile. With that, I fall back on Johnson’s own words—in the third-person, no less—on the publication of his first monograph: “Whatever Johnson’s place in history may be, it is a plus for the historian to have a book on his work.”

If you or someone you know has any information that might be germane to this project, please do contact me. I’m especially interested to speak with Johnson’s relations, colleagues, employees, clients, business associates, personal friends, students—or anyone else who has something interesting to say about the man, a telling personal experience related to him or one of his buildings, or documents concerning his life.

To whet the appetite, a few more images of the Glass House compound follow.

Anyone who sees fit to pontificate on the status and future of the book should be legally obligated to see the MET’s exhibition of the Limbourg brothers’ Belles Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry. This magnificent illustrated manuscript is in an unbound state (it will shortly be reconstructed), allowing a rare chance to see its pages in entirety. The Heures is a celebration of many things. The Christian faith. The act of devotion. The duke’s patronage. The art of illustration. But also, and perhaps most pertinently these days, it is a celebration of the book. The extraordinary artistry of the Limbourgs’ is a testament to the precious value of the book as an object. Books, also, have an unusually strong presence as subjects in the (uncommon) iconography of the Belles Heures. Saints Jerome and Catherine, both known for their scholarly erudition, are featured prominently, often reading and surrounded by books. In the image of the Adoration above at left, note how books are given pride of place in a temple structure. On the right, monks read during what appears to be a funeral mass. I don’t know what the future of the medium holds, but a little of the reverence demonstrated so beautifully in these pages would be much appreciated.

The last time I was in Moscow, in 2004, there were a number of subway bombings—though outside the stations, not on the trains or platforms—and a couple of airliners were bombed. Then came the Beslan school siege. In aggregate, these attacks were designed to instill fear, but at least to my eyes they did not. The Putin administration, while vehement in its rhetoric that it would root out evil-doers, basically returned to business-as-usual in its public face. No reason to disrupt confidence in the government. The public, inured after years of such attacks, seemed to brush them off. I would hope they can move forward so easily after this most recent spate of bombings. There’s nothing more terrifying than a subway attack, and it seems these were calculated, cruelly, to cause maximum civilian damage. Lubyanka station, across the street from the old KGB (and current FSB) headquarters, was a symbolic target, but also a heavily trafficked one at the city center. Park Kultury is also one of the city’s busiest stations: it’s on the ring line where several lines converge. The image above gives a hint at just how crowded the Moscow metro—one of the great glories of modern urban design—can be; it is taken at the Kievskaya station, just one stop from Park Kultury.

I suppose it was ironic, but mainly just unpleasant, that I was kept from the opening party of Storefront’s Landscapes of Quarantine exhibition by a case of pneumonia. There was a time when that illness did in fact warrant hospitalized seclusion; in the 21st century, a few days at home and a dose of antibiotics is generally enough for recovery. Feeling better, I managed to catch the show a few days after the opening, and it’s well worth the visit, a beautifully installed and thought-provoking show that raises many intriguing and not easily resolved questions about the boundaries we raise for the purposes of security. The exhibition, curated by Bldgblog‘s Geoff Manaugh, focuses primarily on the spatial implications and costs, both physical and metaphorical, of quarantine. The show put me in mind of W. G. Sebald’s wonderful novel Austerlitz, which points to another kind of quarantine we impose on ourselves: intellectual. The titular character of the book, Jacques Austerlitz, is a child of the Holocaust and the Kindertransports, who spends most of his life suppressing the memories of his own history, to catastrophic effect. A key passage, narrated by that character:

“I did not read newspapers because, as I know now, I feared unwelcome revelations, I turned on the radio only at certain hours of the day, I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my own early history….If some dangerous piece of information came my way despite all my precautions, as it inevitably did, I was clearly capable of closing my ears and eyes to it, of simply forgetting it like any other unpleasantness.”

Meanwhile, I’m on a self-imposed quarantine of my own right now—a much needed beach vacation. Some quarantines are better than others.

“No man could outfight him—No woman could resist his charm.” So reads the copy on this pulp cover from 1953. I picked it up for a buck from an antique shop a few blocks from my home. The packaging suggests a historical bodice-ripper, and in fact the contents delivers on that torrid promise. It is not, however, an (entirely) fictional account. The book is actually the autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, one of the great sculptors of the Renaissance. Cellini is best remembered today for the Perseus and Medusa he crafted, on order of Cosimo de Medici, for the Loggia de Lanzi in Florence. It’s a gory affair, and one senses that the artist, who claimed to have used his own sword in brutal fashion, saw himself in Perseus, a sense that is affirmed by the fact that he signed the sculpture, prominently, on a strap that crosses the hero’s chest. (He probably would not have been pleased to learn that the esteemed Renaissance scholar Frederick Hartt called his masterpiece “remarkably inert.”)

Cellini fits squarely into that long tradition of artist rogues of which Caravaggio is only the most notorious. We have rather romantic notions in these modern times about what an artist should be (a tortured genius), and we like painters who fit into that paradigm. Rubens, a most conventional UHB, was not that kind of artist, and I sometimes feel he suffers for it. His writing is a case in point. Familiar as they are with Cellini’s rather purple and lurid precedent, even the most serious of art historians tend to dismiss Rubens the author as a colorless writer of arcanely detailed diplomatic treatises. This is not only crazy ironic (art historians making accusations of boring, jargon-y writing?), but a gross mischaracterization. Beyond his almost preposterous erudition, Rubens was in fact an elegant prose stylist who wrote with great personal conviction and with a rich vocabulary, a keen sense of metaphor, and a gift for a quotable turn of phrase. If some of his correspondence is necessarily technical, it was because he was conducting complex international diplomacy. Rubens, essentially, was an intellectual writer, a writer for the high-brow, and like so many high-brow (and middle-brow) writers in our day, he is suffering for it. Today we value the sensational. Cellini would have fit right in.

The Vancouver Sun has run a long follow-up story, by Jennifer Moss, to my Los Angeles Times piece on the plagiarism charges leveled by Sze Tsung Leong against David Burdeny. I bring it up here as I find it to be a thoroughly disreputable piece of journalism, larded up with charged phrases clearly intended to frame the story in a positive manner for Burdeny. The implication is that a fancy-pants New York artist and a big city paper are somehow in cahoots against an innocent hometown boy. And so my article “coughs up” rather than “presents” evidence. And then there’s a paragraph like this, which seems almost cribbed from Sarah Palin: “Borrowed or not, there’s a little thing called freedom of expression at stake whenever an artist puts an image out there. In a corporate era, especially in a lawsuit-happy culture like that of the U.S., ownership of an image is more contentious than ever before.” So there is a tonal character to the Sun piece that I find objectionable. But far worse is its casual treatment of the facts. Continuing what is essentially a defense of Burdeny, Moss writes, “The L.A. Times points out that there are even similarities between the artists’ statements.” This subject is then dropped. Notice how the author does not see fit to examine these charges herself, or suggest that there might be some importance to the fact that Burdeny has apparently copied significantly from Leong in a second medium.

More egregiously, Moss raises an accusation—found on the Internet—that Leong’s gallery, Yossi Milo, has exhibited another artist whose work might be overly indebted to another artist. This, I suppose, is fair enough. But there is a gross imbalance given what Moss has not mentioned: that Leong is not the only artist Burdeny has been accused of copying. As I wrote in my article, Burdeny’s images also bear striking resemblance to works by Elger Esser and Andreas Gursky. And as I wrote in a follow up on this site, and as has been widely noted online, his images also closely approximate those by Michael Wesely, Michael Kenna, and David Fokos, among others. Through my own source I’ve learned that Burdeny actually took a course with Fokos, and then began copying his work so closely that Fokos’s gallerist was forced to intervene. Burdeny, as seems to be his M.O., denied the accusation. So Moss is content to impugn the character of the Milo gallery (and by association, Leong) but has withheld from the reader direct evidence that would seem to impugn Burdeny, the ostensible subject of her piece. Moss then concludes with a logical mindbender, suggesting that, somehow, Leong may have been the one copying Burdeny: “perhaps it’s the other way around, and Leong’s images are similar to Burdeny’s.”

Whether Burdeny is truly a plagiarist, or whether his work can be described as legitimately inspired by other photographers is a reasonable question on which reasonable people may disagree. Certainly the law is vague. But the idea that Leong is guilty of copying Burdeny is preposterous, and the Vancouver Sun’s article is, quite simply, a grossly irresponsible work of journalism.

It’s been a tough stretch for muscular, brooding architecture. Last week, Raimund Abraham, the uncompromising architect of New York’s Austrian Cultural Forum was killed in an automotive accident. This week, Bruce Graham, the SOM partner who collaborated with engineer Fazlur Kahn on the Sears and Hancock towers in Chicago, passed away. “Big John,” as the Hancock was called, was their best work, a tapered, hundred-story condo tower, with the X-braces of its “trussed tube” structure laid plainly bare on its facades. It is dark and imposing from the outside and comfortably modern within. (So, kind of like Chicago.) It has long been one of the city’s best addresses, considered as such from the moment it opened, advertising the “world’s highest residences.” A few years ago I edited a book on the building, with photographs by Ezra Stoller and an introduction by Kahn’s daughter, the architectural historian Yasmin Sabina Kahn. One favorite anecdote: the architect and engineer tested human response to the building’s slight sway at a Maytag “Tale of the Tub” washing machine installation at the Chicago Museum of Science. A nice story for a sad day.

Herbert Muschamp often griped that New York was allergic to “serious architecture,” a refrain frequently aped by his successor, Nicolai Ourousoff. This was and is both unfair and inaccurate, and one of the buildings that demonstrates as much is Raimund Abraham’s 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum, which opened in 2002. Only 25 feet wide, it slices down from the sky, a kind of Easter Island guillotine. It’s a great building, a building with a spine [both literal and figurative], and a series of controlled, smartly crafted spaces. Abraham was killed earlier this week in a Los Angeles car accident, awful news. He had just given a lecture at Sci-Arc. A loss for architecture.