A few days ago I took a trip out to Lou Kahn’s Bath Houses in Trenton, now under restoration. Like much of Kahn’s work, the bath houses have a monumentality to them, though they are small in scale, really just four rooms set around an open court, with pyramidal roofs floating above. You can get the measure of them in about fifteen minutes, if that long. Are these (let’s be honest) minor buildings the best works of architecture in all of New Jersey? Silly question, sure, but it’s the New Yorker’s birthright to treat Jersey with condescension, so I got to discussing this with a friend and we couldn’t come up with anything better. Yes, there’s some great vernacular stuff, lovely Victoriana, a couple of Wrights, various infrastructural, industrial, and religious works of splendor, not a few exemplars of collegiate gothic and corporate modernism, etcetera—but as for capital-a architecture? If you can think of something better, let me know.

A few more pictures of Trenton’s Taj Mahal of concrete block:

Continue reading Lou Kahn’s Trenton Bath Houses: The Best Buildings in New Jersey?

I don’t think Philip Johnson would much care for Croon Hall, the new and very green building for Yale’s school of forestry and environmental sciences. Johnson scoffed at what he called “do-gooder” architecture, design with more concern for functional or social problems than aesthetics. Croon is most assuredly a building driven by its ecological program. Johnson liked to be wowed, and Croon isn’t really a wow building unless the LEED rating system gets your blood going. The entry could not be less monumental: open the front door and you’re in a long, dim hallway with low ceilings. It only opens up as you ascend its stairwell, which delivers you to a brightly lit space with a woody, Swiss-chalet type feel. The air is a bit still, and perhaps a degree or two warmer than optimal—at least on a hot summer day. Not the kind of place to draw tears of euphoria. It’s nice.

Croon naturally draws comparison to Johnson’s own Kline Biology Tower, which sits just above it on a bluff over the Yale campus. (Croon’s louvered windows, unfortunately, block any view of it.) While both buildings have distinct phallic overtones (Kroon especially), the Johnson building is by far the more verile of the two, a commanding brick-clad slab rising above the trees. If it’s slightly butch, it is by no means insensitive; Johnson set it before a broad, comfortable plaza enclosed by a canopied pergola, where students and faculty can gather at picnic tables. As Vincent Scully has noted, it is set off-axis from Hillhouse Avenue below, so that it is not an overbearing presence above that historic street. A work of “do-gooder” design, perhaps, but one made on Johnson’s terms.

Over on DO, Alexandra Lange and I launch our new feature, Lunch with the Critics, with a discussion of the doings at Lincoln Center. Here’s me on the Johnsonian aspects, but do check it out in its entirety:

Though I was concerned because I so admired Philip Johnson’s old fountain, the new one by WET is a dancing wonder. The same can’t be said of what’s been done to the interior of Johnson’s David Koch Theater — formerly the New York State Theater, and don’t get me started about this renaming — where several broad aisles have been driven through the orchestra, in a single stroke removing many of the best seats in the house while destroying its aesthetic unity. Those familiar with the old theater will remember its “Continental” seating; that is, each row was an unbroken arc of seats. If this was admittedly a bit of a pain, it was done quite consciously to create a sense of community in the audience, and it did that, brilliantly.

When I think of the Shakers I think of a kind of homespun simplicity: ladderback chairs, straw hats, an unfettered (if somewhat loopy) relationship with the almighty. “‘Tis the gift to be simple,” as the song says. Like most stereotypes, the trope of Shaker simplicity is deceptive, a reality with which I was confronted this past weekend at Hancock Shaker Village, a preserved Shaker community outside Pittsfield, in the Berkshires. I had come, along with my family, to hear our friend Ilyon Woo read from her new book, The Great Divorce, which itself should forever disabuse anyone of the notion that the Shakers were naive innocents, unsophisticated as to the ways of the political world around them. The Shakers, it seems, could be as cynical and manipulative as any interest group. (They bare particular comparison to today’s Hassidic communities, which may also appear quaint but quietly exert enormous and not always beneficial political influence in New York.)

These days, the Shakers are best known for austere, well-made design. Touring the village, however, I was impressed not by the simplicity, but by the extraordinary complexity of their architecture. The Hancock roundhouse [see below], for all its geometric clarity and meticulous stonework, is a tour-de-force of programmatic and circulatory inventiveness, with multiple entry levels for livestock, feed storage, and waste removal. You will find nothing more radical in the work of Rem Koolhaas. The entire complex unfolds with a controlled asymmetry that looks like it might be the product of the International Style, but precedes it by decades. It is a study in formal contrasts: color, shape, scale. I don’t think there’s anything simple about it. A few images after the jump.

Continue reading The Complexity of Simple Design: A Note on the Shakers

With digital imaging technology so advanced and widely accessible, the photo-collage has reached a level of almost baroque absurdity; anything can be grafted onto anything else, seamlessly, by just about anyone. The old-school images of Chris Berg make a nice counterpoint to this digital profusion. From a distance, they appear to be single exposures. Up close, one can see the painstaking technique with which they have been assembled: a series of snapshot photographs sanded down on the back, grafted together with great precision, and then varnished to a sheen. [The digital versions shown here accentuate seams within the images that are, to the naked eye, almost imperceptible unless one looks closely]. Berg is an architect—this is something of an architectural technique—and his subjects show an interest in constructing artificial or speculative landscapes cobbled together from the built world. Repetition is a theme, as are infrastructural ruins and generic building types. The fanciful horizon city of The Reservoir [top], with its gang of towers borrowed from Philip Johnson’s NY State Pavilion, is a particular favorite. A few more after the jump.

Continue reading The Constructed Landscapes of Chris Berg

Behold the very dashing cover for the forthcoming paperback edition of Master of Shadows, design by the great John Gall. Learning that John would be designing the cover was one of the best days of the publishing process, and something I had been (not so secretly) hoping would happen for a long time. The results show why. Drops in October.

From the everything-old-is-new-again department, Spain and Holland will re-enact the Eighty Years War in tomorrow’s World Cup final. One can only hope the match does not mirror that long-ago conflict, which was a plodding war of attrition, fought primarily on neutral turf, with much brutality and few moments of heroic action. Rubens, of course, tried desperately to bring a halt to that conflict—the subject of my book. For a bit more on how the World Cup will channel the first truly global war, check out my essay at Mediaite.

[For the record: The image above, Velazquez’s Surrender at Breda, marks one of the signal Spanish victories in the war, though it had essentially no effect on the eventual outcome.]

We are in a sad state, are we not? The oil spill, the economy, wars, plague, pestilence, aspirational bicycles that cost three grand. For goodness sake, we can’t even put away a second-string African nation at sports. What are we to do? Buck up, I say. We Americans are a can-do, optimistic lot. In looking forward, however, we might look back to the past. Some forty years ago, when we were similarly embroiled in intractable conflict and our nation’s urban cores were in dire straits, an unlikely man appeared with a plan to save us: Philip Johnson, house architect of blue-chip, blue-blood America. Some of his ideas are more progressive than you might think. Others, downright barmy.

It might please today’s Tea Partiers to know that, at least on certain days, Johnson thought the Federal Government wasn’t up to the job of rebuilding our cities. Such a task, he suggested, was the business of business, namely General Motors. GM was the biggest company on earth, and fresh off the unveiling of its Saarinen-designed HQ—so a design patron of some standing. Give GM $20 billion, and let them build a city. That was his idea. But how to pay for it? This is the part that will satisfy the liberals. I’ll let him explain. “The money? There are lots of lovely taxes that can still be used if mere printing is not enough. We love to tax what we consider sinful. We’re still Calvinists and we tax liquour a hundred percent, cigarettes a hundred percent. I suggest a tax on our other popular sins. For instance, automobiles are surely as sinful as drinking. Perhaps a thousand a year per car….And I have in mind another tax—a tax on war. This would be put into the Constitution, you see, so that the Congress couldn’t cancel it.”

So there you have it. Me? I’d leave GM out; it’s got enough problems these days. But taxes on cars and war? Johnson, that Connecticut Yankee, had a bit of Berkeley in him after all.

Happy Fourth of July weekend.

PS: That Jasper Johns flag was gifted to MoMA by none other than Philip Johnson. The museum’s curators wanted the picture, but the trustees were afraid to buy it themselves for fear it would be interpreted as an un-American work (ridiculous as that might seem today), so Johnson was asked to do it for them.

In my recent piece for the Wall Street Journal on the new museum for the Red Star Line, now under construction in Antwerp, I briefly mention the story of Morris Moel, 97, the oldest known immigrant to have come to America on the Red Star. As I wrote, his story is extraordinary in the way that many immigrant stories are. Moel arrived in 1922, after a harrowing trip across the Pale. Upon arrival, he moved to West Virginia, where his father already had a men’s shop, and later graduated from the University of Cincinnati medical school. He has lived in Florida since 1980, a retired radiologist. For the historical record, I thought it would be worth publishing a transcript of Moel’s accounting of his trip, as he told it to me.

Are you the last surviving member in your family to emigrate.
I’m the last one in our family living. I’m 97 years old. I was the youngest. So I lasted longer. I came over in 1922 on the Red Star. Four children and my mother. We came from the Ukraine, a little town called Lubar in the Ukraine.

What do you remember about your journey.
First of all, it’s a long story. My father was here [in the USA]. He came in 1913. We didn’t hear from him for many many years during World War I, and after this the revolution in Russia. Things were terrible. So we didn’t hear from my father for 12 or 13 years. We finally got a message. It came through from Warsaw, from HIAS, the Hebrew immigration society. So my mother went to Warsaw, she left us with my grandmother. She was there for two months, three months, and during that period my grandmother passed away, and my older brother who was 17 became our mother and father. And one winter day a big sleigh approaches the house and a man comes out and asks if we are the Moel family. “We’re here to take you to your mother.” Put on the warmest things you can put on. I wrapped all kinds of rags on my feet. We traveled to the Polish border all day and part of the night. This was I suspect some time in late winter. We got to this house near the border where we slept part of the night and we were awakened and we found this sleigh and were taken to close to the border and then walked to the border. The Russian part of the border was all forest. And we were stopped. I heard rifles being cocked while we were walking. Russian soldiers. And the soldiers searched everyone and took everything that was valuable and said you’ve got to go back, and I guess they [the guides] knew another route so we got through. And the Polish border was absolutely free, but it was all snow. I was so little and my older borther dragged me across that border. Finally we got to the other side inside Poland. Stayed in a house for half a night and we were then taken to a train station. And that train took us into Warsaw. The first time I was in a train. And my mother was waiting for us in an office. We told her my grandmother died. She never knew about it.

Continue reading Coming to America: The Extraordinary Journey of Morris Moel

There was a time—and this seems almost preposterous now—that the airport was a destination in itself, a place that promised the sexy modern lifestyle of the jet age. At an airport, you were going someplace—if not overseas than perhaps to some nearby hot-sheet with a swinging Braniff brunette in Pucci. (Score!) Joe Baum brought flaming food tableside at the Newarker, precursor to the Four Seasons. Raymond Loewy streamlined the so-chic cafes at Eero Saarinen’s TWA Terminal. It was quite a moment. And then the future happened.

I.M. Pei’s terminal for National Airlines at JFK [above left] came at the end of this romantic era. I spent many hours in it as a kid, waiting for flights to visit my grandmother in Miami. (National was big in the NY-Florida trade.) It’s a terminal for high traffic, and designed as such, with arrivals sent down below and departures in the signature upper space, a broad open room with glass walls and massive round columns outside. It’s a great building: technologically innovative, dramatic to be in. At least it used to be. (It’s not what it once was.) And now the Port Authority claims it’s no longer capable of handling JFK’s traffic, and they’d like to tear it down. Preservationists are giving them a fight. I hope they can find a way to integrate it into whatever comes next. Pei himself seems fatalistic about its future. “Like all things, buildings never remain forever,” he told me. It was his first and only air terminal, and a significant commission, as he won it in a competition, an affirming moment. “That was important in my life.”

Philip Johnson also submitted to that competition. His proposal [above right], called for a massive open concourse (he called it the “Great Room”) covered by a wavy concrete roof engineered by Lev Zeitlin. Unlike Pei, he intentionally chose not to segregate arrivals and departures, instead dumping them all into one chaotic space. “I am glad the genius who designed the Grand Central Station [sic] lets me come from the train into the same Great Room where others are about to en-train,” he wrote. “What good is a great getaway room if the visitor is not to see it?” A nice idea in theory, perhaps, but one can only imagine the carnage. The right design won the competition. Now it deserves a reprieve.