A bit late

Kicking Down the Door

If Mad Men were only about the corporate architecture of the 1960s (which it is not, and thank god for that, as even I need a romance plot under the hung ceilings… Speaking of which, didn’t it look as if they had lowered the ceiling in Roger Sterling’s rarely-seen office? Just to increase the feeling Sterling, Cooper and Draper had of being literally boxed in?) the last shot of the very satisfying season 3 finale, “Shut the Door. Take a Seat,” would have been Roger Sterling and Don Draper staring back at the rows of desks, the grid of lights, and the pink and blue office doors, all receding into infinity, that were the scene of their greatest glories and disasters. That’s it, the shot seemed to say, on to something less hierarchical, fleeter-footed. Out with the old, in with the 1960s. The scenes of all our fan favorites packed together in a hotel room was merely a prelude to what I hope is the magnificent new architecture of the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (Campbell Olsen) offices. In reality it took some years to shake off the SOM model, and in truth it never really went away. But if Matthew Weiner’s minions are looking in the right sources, SCDP could owe a debt to the Ford Foundation, a project bridging the gap between the buttoned-down and the opened-up. Or could they emphasize the temporary nature of the new group’s arrangements (and that same forward momentum) by using some of Herman Miller’s Action Office? Both would require a jump forward in the timeline to 1968, which I don’t think will happen, but he’s fudged the design dates before (see Selectric).

I love the show, but this was not my favorite season (and I am not just backlashing, as I have no water cooler about which to kibitz). I did not like the way Weiner hermetically sealed his characters in their own plots, acting as puppeteer, thumping us over the head with his themes, and occasionally forgetting their characters entirely (Peggy and Duck, really?). I felt like I never got to see enough of the characters I loved. I now see that that sense of stasis, the inability to advance the plot was part of his plan. Until the final episode the characters were really no further than they were at the start of the season (false new beginnings abounded), allowing this episode to explode with the drama of people actually doing something. It was like Mission Impossible, assembling the team. When Roger says, “Let me make a call,” and we know it is to Joan, I felt a little ping! of pleasure. I still think he delayed our gratification too long, but I can’t wait for season 4.

Review: The Price of Fitting In

In the November 4 edition of The Architect’s Newspaper I review the new exhibit at the Center for Architecture, Context/Contrast: New Architecture in Historic Districts, 1967-2009. The short review isn’t online, so I posted my text below. That’s Smith-Miller + Hawkinson’s 322 Hicks (about 4 blocks from my house) above.

The title of the AIANY’s new exhibition on architecture in historic districts, “Context/Contrast,” suggests opposition between two approaches to preservation. So does the wall quote from Brooklyn Heights preservation advocate Otis Pratt Pearsall, “I do not subscribe to the idea that any building that is not offensive is appropriate.” This exhibition is intended to showcase the work of the Landmarks Preservation Commission since 1965, and “to ask how the Commission’s charge of ensuring ‘appropriate’ new architecture…has allowed neighborhoods to evolve without endangering the[ir] essential character.” But to travel through time in New York’s first historic district, Brooklyn Heights, along with four others, is to travel through the changing fashions in preservation, from high contrast to contextual invisibility, tweaking tradition to adopting only its base material. There are an incredibly motley assortment of responses to that charge, as the Commission, architecture, and the definition of ‘appropriateness’ have all changed over time.

To be able to survey the field, and to try to decide for yourself which approach works where, is a terrific opportunity. I only wish that this exhibition had embraced its inherently controversial nature, instead of trying to smooth it over. The projects presented are all described as successes (with a few rough drafts shown to be failures), but there’s no sense of self-analysis, or irony. That’s not the way of the AIA NYC or of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, both exhibit sponsors, but the subject of preservation in the twenty-first century has so many ironies waiting to be explored that aren’t. Tucked into the stairwell, for example, is a placard telling the tale of Marcel Breuer’s proposed tower over Grand Central and the 1978 Supreme Court decision that saved the station. It fails to mention either the destruction of the original Penn Station in 1963, or (more fun) all the architects who have failed to build towers over Breuer’s own Whitney.

“Context/Contrast” is divided into five sections, each one focused on a different district. Brooklyn Heights and the Upper East Side start the show on the Center for Architecture’s first floor. South Street Seaport, Douglaston and Soho are sequestered downstairs. A shelf running along the wall above waist height holds photographs, renderings and plans. Blow-up images of each neighborhood paper the walls, nicely setting the scene. The handsome design is by Moorhead & Moorhead (exhibition) and PS New York (graphics). Starting with the oldies allows the show to put on a happy, noncontroversial face: no failures are shown here and the architects’ approach, by and large, is rigorously contextual. When you look at the image of Platt Byard Dovell’s 47 East 91^st Street (the building Woody Allen weighed in against) it is hard to tell what could be new. There are contemporary articles of the projects (some negative) in binders for your perusal, but they aren’t integrated or obvious.

You won’t have a problem spotting the new in the Soho section. Jean Nouvel and Aldo Rossi, these are architects of contrast worth arguing about. Next to Soho is a sort of grab-bag wall of other projects of interest under the rubric “The Architecture of Appropriateness” and these too include way more contemporary reinterpretations than most of the work more prominently featured, as if curator Rachel Carley realized too late things were looking traditional. In the Soho section former Landmarks Commissioner and current Polshek partner Richard Olcott asks, “Which strategy do you think is most appropriate for designing in historic districts: mimicry, contrast or interpretation?” While “Context/Contrast” is an excellent survey, I wish it more explicitly took up his question, and opened the Commission’s decisions to discussion, rather than affirming their wisdom.

Back to School

If you stand in a certain spot in the second room of the MoMA’s gorgeous and serious new exhibition Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity (opening November 8) you can see Marcel Breuer becoming modern. On axis with the entrance is his “Romantic” or “African” chair (1921) whose arcing back was woven with silk and hemp and wool by Gunta Stotzl (that’s one of her sketches above), eventual head of the weaving workshop. It seems to have more to do with folk art than modernity, but around the corner you see him transforming the crudeness of the first attempt into something more suave: the TI 1a armchair (1922), with a more refined woven wool seat, and slim legs and bent arms that slide past each other in unusual ways. Across the room, his children’s chairs and table (1923), the first with a flat board back similar to Gerrit Rietveld’s 1917 Red Blue chair, the second the original of the cubic Parsons tables made ordinary by repetition and knock-offs. All this is before 1926. His real breakthrough, the cantilever chair of bicycle tubing, is still hidden beyond another wall, sequestered with other well-known works of architecture and furniture by Breuer and Walter Gropius and Josef Albers.

That putting off of the stars, denying us the best-known objects and sticking to chronology, is a strength for this exhibit. Its underlying intent is to remind us that the Bauhaus was a school. Student work and masterpieces of modern textile art, painting, craft and industrial design are presented as part of the total package. Mies van der Rohe barely shows up until the last room, and we see his students imitating his style, but none of his own drawings. Curator Barry Bergdoll says this was an obvious choice: Mies kept his architectural commissions separate from his teaching, and the show is about the school. This has the lovely effect of reducing the well-known names to beloved profs, allowing us to better observe the hidden talents of the wider Bauhaus pool. One of my favorite cases is at the back of the last room, stocked with samples of Bauhaus upholstery fabrics by Anni Albers and Gunta Stotzl, Bauhaus wallpapers (abstract as can be) by Heinrich-Siegfried Bormann. Thewallpapers were apparently the most successful Bauhaus products. One of the cleverest textiles is practically digital, a 1932 fabric by Hajo Rose whose original sketch was typed on a typewriter, letterforms turning into repetitive and almost floral scallops.

You should go. And you should especially go on one of the days when MoMA is offering hands-on workshops. Pretend to be a first-year in Johannes Itten’s class. Learn color the Albers way. Something different is happening at MoMA when they embrace a little of the Etsy spirit.