A bit late

When you go to the Museum of the City of New York to see the Eero Saarinen show (as you must: stop to watch the film of Aline Saarinen on the Today show talking about TWA, and the final triangular section being inserted into the St. Louis Arch), be sure to go upstairs. Tucked away in the south side of the second floor is the show Only In New York: Photographs from Look Magazine a small exhibit that could have been a lot bigger, showcasing Gardner Cowles Jr.’s picture magazine’s vision of the city from the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. (There’s even a connection between the two shows, via Florence Knoll, who designed the Look offices.) There’s a lot of excellent photography, as well as the oscillation between the witty and the gritty that I associate with New York Magazine.

Times Square showgirls, socialites and top models all get warts-and-all treatment very different from the icy imagery I associate with beauty at the time (the very image Betty Draper is always trying to live up to on Mad Men). There’s a very clever portrait of MoMA director Rene d’Harnoncourt, master of all the miniature modern icons he surveys (Matisse, white china, that ball bearing from the first Industrial Design exhibit). And the photo above, a counterpart to the one snapped at the Beaux Arts Ball of 1931, where the architects of the Chrysler Building, the Waldorf-Astoria, the Museum of the City of New York and others dressed as their famous creations. Look simply had the architects stand behind shimmering cut-outs of their buildings in 1957—that’s Gordon Bunshaft on the far left, with Lever House; Ely Jacques Kahn appears in both photos.

In 2003, which now feels like a lifetime ago, my now-husband and I embarked upon a three-week modern architecture tour of the Midwest. Most of the sites on our list were topics for my dissertation, but the others were not incidental: to truly understand the history of modernism in the United States, you have to get off the coasts. Our roughly circular trip took us from New York to Pittsburgh (Wright, Harrison), Detroit [Saarinen, Saarinen, Mies (image from Dwell above)], Zeeland (Nelson, Eames, Girard), Chicago (Mies), Racine (Wright), Spring Green (Wright), Moline (Saarinen), St. Louis (Saarinen, Sullivan), Bartlesville (Wright), Columbus, IN (Saarinen, Saarinen, Noyes, Weese), and some other places I am sure we have forgotten. At the General Motors Technical Center we were the only foreign car in the lot; in Zeeland, a dry town, the only restaurant seemed to be Boston Market and the Herman Miller archivist couldn’t believe we lived blocks from the location of his favorite film, Moonstruck; when we got out of the movies in Tulsa at 9 p.m. the vast mall parking lot was empty but for our car. It was a strange trip, mostly strange because, except at the Wright sites, we seemed to be the only people interested in the buildings. I have written about the private proximities of major postwar designers like Noyes and Knoll and Saarinen, and about the corporate proximities of the same, but I never thought to rearrange the names and careers geographically.

I was reminded of this trip by the discovery of the website Michigan Modern (which subsequently posted a link to my Design Observer piece on Aline and Eero Saarinen, Love & Architecture), the online front for a just-launched project by the State Historic Preservation Office intended to highlight the many modern architects and buildings in Michigan. Examples are thick on the ground, with loci of invention in Detroit (and suburbs like Bloomfield Hills and Grosse Pointe) and Zeeland (home of Herman Miller, and close to furniture town Grand Rapids). Cranbrook, the Bauhaus-like academy of art and design founded by auto entrepreneur George Booth and run by Eliel Saarinen, was a node in what became an international design network of teachers, students, and alumni. At one point, of a cold Michigan evening, you could find yourself at a party with Charles Eames, Eero Saarinen, Alexander Girard and Minoru Yamasaki, men who defined postwar architecture and design from what was then a booming city. Everyone seemed to have a bentwood chair in his backseat, or a skyscraper based on a new structural system on the drawing board. And Girard’s pioneering 1949 exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts, “For Modern Living” brought all of these people and more together for the first time.

Everyone knows that Los Angeles—to which Charles and Ray Eames soon decamped—and New York—where the Museum of Modern Art created its own design society, were style centers, but other cities and other states certainly had their moments (Kansas City, where the Halls of Hallmark decided to remake the downtown in the 1960s, certainly comes to mind), much as other cities and other states are now at the forefront of thinking about green living, sustainability, affordability. I hope Michigan Modern inspires other states to get excited about their more recent heritage as a matter of American history and preservation. It is all very well for the media, and out-of-state historians, to try to tell a city what they are trying to tear down, but it is much better to have locals retrace the intertwined histories of industry, innovation and (oftentimes) suburbanization for themselves. The results will be less formal, and closer to the scrappy, personal culture that spawned the icons.

Design Observer posted a link to a wonderful gallery of artists’ Christmas cards at the Smithsonian. Click on the big image, then make sure you click through to Dan Flavin’s minimal masterpiece. I am surprised they didn’t include this, from the Florence Knoll Bassett papers, inspired by the Erwin Hauer concrete screens installed at new husband Harry Hood Bassett’s First National Bank & Trust Company (designed by Chuck Bassett, no relation, of SOM).

It wasn’t for Christmas, but rather congratulations on their marriage, but the gallery also made me think of this lovely note from Charles and Ray Eames to Bassetts, on the occasion of their marriage, also at the Smithsonian. Ephemera like this makes me wish I could have been friends with the mid-century designers about which I often write. Though my friends are pretty crafty: they installed plastic swans and ivy on our car in lieu of a Just Married sign, in keeping with my wedding palette of white and green.

I can’t really think about design this week, as I am too busy thinking about food. We are hosting our first Thanksgiving, now that our renovation is over, and I have been worrying over the menu for weeks.

We are going to have:

Turkey (made by my husband)

Gravy (made by my husband)

Stuffing (made by my mother-in-law)

Sweet and Spicy Sweet Potato Bake (no marshmallows!)

Southern Corn Pudding

Shredded Brussels Sprouts with Bacon and Figs (thank you, Mark Bittman)

Pomegranate and Fennel Salad

Pumpkin and Pecan Pies (made by my sister-in-law)

Whipped Cream (made, I hope, by my aunt, since I can never get foamy peaks)

To me this sounds delicious, the fruit tempering the salt of stuffing and gravy, the vegetables tempering the weight of potatoes and corn. But it also looks like a minefield. Each dish has a different relative’s approval or disapproval buried in the ingredients.

The turkey, for example, we are planning to make in a Reynolds Oven Bag: my aunt does it, and it saves you the hourly anointing with butter. But every time we have mentioned the use of the oven bag to my mother-in-law she gets a deeply disturbed expression. If we tell her she might be afraid she’ll be poisoned. But if we don’t use the bag, my husband will be stuck by the oven all day basting, and I will be 100% in charge of the child.

The stuffing is unknown, and will be baked outside the bird. I am agnostic on stuffing. The only kind I ever really loved, and this was probably more about the person than the product, was my uncle Steve’s oyster stuffing. He made a small batch each Thanksgiving and in my memory only he and I ate it. It felt special and sophisticated. He died just before Thanksgiving six years ago. His birthday would have been this Thanksgiving. I can’t think about oyster stuffing without crying.

Sweet potatoes. My cousin Elli likes mashed white potatoes so much she makes them herself when her mother won’t. Sorry, Elli.

Corn pudding. Mmmmmmm. From a southern cookbook. No objections.

Brussels sprouts. My aunt doesn’t like them. My mother-in-law doesn’t like them. The kids probably won’t eat them. But I like them, and this recipe, published two weeks ago in the Times, sounds so yummy. I think every Thanksgiving cook gets to make one thing to please him or herself. At my aunt’s house it is red cabbage, cooked down with vinegar. It does look pretty on the plate (she says it every year) but only she and my husband eat it. And I will have to look at the leftovers in the fridge for a week.

Salad. Ditto on the aunt and mother-in-law. But I like a palate cleanser, or roughage, or something lemony with my meat and potatoes. And the pomegranate seeds fulfill the pretty on the plate requirement.

The beauty of hosting your first Thanksgiving is that everyone is happy they aren’t cooking, and if I don’t like anything, I can jettison it. No memories yet. Talk to me Friday.

P.S. I can’t believe I forgot this! A must in my opinion, but you must be very careful to preserve the can lines when you decant it onto the plate.

Every time I get an issue of New York Magazine lately I ask myself: is Adam Moss turning it into a men’s magazine? A thinking man’s mens magazine, but still. I have worked for the magazine in some capacity since 1994 (when my capacity was: “Hello, Kurt Andersen’s office.”), and they have kindly had me on the masthead ever since (maybe not for long now), but I can’t say I have any access or insight into the inner workings. All I know is that the covers this year have been Obama, Obama, Obama, Michelle Obama, money, money, money, flu (and a new sports blog), sex, music. The women have all been political or naked. Where are the spooked kids of yore, illustrating the problems of the upper 10 percent? Where are the profiles of powerful women, even power couples? Where are the candy-coated trends? When I was 22, these fetishes felt very distant, but now I understand who they were for.

I suppose these standbys of the previous incarnations of New York must not sell anymore, as the magazines largely devoted to such preoccupations—shelter magazines, women’s magazines, and mom magazines—fall by the wayside. New York still has plenty of shopping, but in its own section, where they also put kids stuff. Culture, too, is largely compartmentalized (except for music). The gossipy dialogue of stars and shows and openings flourishes online in the Vulture blog, which I love.

Even this year’s gift guide, adorably illustrated on the cover with Wes Anderson’s Fox family, isn’t the feature. Instead we have Taconic dad, Obama siblings, (male) kidney donors. Oh, and Nabokov. These aren’t topics just for men, but they don’t seem strictly unisex. I always liked the idea that the old New York balanced itself for both sides of the (heterosexual) couple. My husband may have used the recipes in Cookie, but he would have been startled if he actually read the articles.

When the “Screens” issue of the New York Times Magazine includes an entire article I understand not one word of, it becomes clear that I (female, 36-45) am no longer the most desired audience. And I never shopped enough when I was. I think I just realized that my first New York home, physically and psychologically, no longer fits (and just at the moment it fully embraces Brooklyn).

I don’t usually like to write about architecture that isn’t there. Too much of architecture blogging is picking over renderings, so much so that by the time the building is actually built, we are already over it. Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI, unveiled for real this week, doesn’t feel any realer to me now than when I saw the swoopy, transportation-inspired form however long ago. And reading reviews of the museum while it is still empty doesn’t help.

But I have to lift my self-imposed moratorium to make one comment about Robert A. M. Stern Architects’ design for the George W. Bush Presidential Center (brief chuckle about the fact that it is no longer in vogue to call these boondoggles libraries). Christopher Hawthorne ably reviews the building and its relationship to the man, the man and his relation to the architect and landscape architect, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. But he misses what is, to me, the most salient influence: Philip Johnson, Bob Stern’s mentor and friend, and the popularizer of a Texas school of neo-neo-classicism built of brick and limestone. Johnson worked in this mode on several projects for Houston’s leading family, the de Menils, as well for the university’s school of architecture—there’s also the 1956 Boissonas House in New Canaan—and it is not without irony that their aura should be transplanted and augmented for the glory of the Shrub. It is wholly without irony that RAMSA should now be mashing up mid-century formalism with eighteenth-century formalism. It’s all history.

Last D/R post until the book comes out next September, I promise: 10 minute segment on the Design Research Headquarters Building, Marimekko, and the recreation of 1969 on Brattle Street.

Writing reveals a lot about a person. Is he sloppy? In love with the sound of her own voice? Ambitious beyond his powers? Trying to be too cute? Late, perpetually, disastrously late? What you are on paper is not that different, in most cases, from what you are like in real life. After each semester I teach architecture criticism at D-Crit at SVA or NYU, I feel like I have just participated in a seminar-size group therapy session, trying on the role of the wise, calm, suggestive but not restrictive therapist. I know I can’t make someone a better writer, but I can show a student the special qualities he is missing in his own work, or how a little more structure could make her insights clear to all.

As I read first drafts and then revisions, I am seeking that feeling of calm I get when I read the best pieces of journalism. The calm that comes from the feeling that the writer knows exactly where he or she is going. The calm that comes from descriptions that don’t leave you with unanswered questions. I prize visuals (obviously), but also flow. There’s no need to rattle off credentials, true authority comes from a sense of completeness, nothing left out, themes stated at the top brought round to some satisfying and literary conclusion.

The problem with thinking like this is that you start to do it all the time. On this blog, I know I keep picking at the New Yorker, but that’s because I need to have something to aspire to. I want it to be better, and to treat the things I care about (design, architecture, the visual world, even the classics) with the respect and insight they deserve.

Reading a lot of architecture criticism for those same classes, I also start to develop a running mental list of the writerly tics of those critics far higher in the ranks than I. Paul Goldberger, for example, who I have to say in a way that can only read as presumptuous, has gotten a lot better. On the Rise, a collection of his early reviews for the New York Times, has the flimsiness and ephemerality of blog postings. We no longer care about many of the controversies, and he has apologized for his support of postmodernism (scroll down). At the New Yorker he has more room and more time, and his early tendency to make it all about the architect has expanded. If you ever want to know what to say in conversation about a leading member of the profession, just read Goldberger. His review of Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower is one of his best—energetic, vivid, experiential, characterizing man and building as one. His review of Arquitectonica’s Westin Hotel is also extremely funny, but partly inadvertently, as he tries to apologize for the architects’ lapse into…ugliness. This week’s very early assessment of Jean Nouvel’s 100 Eleventh Avenue (I building I love for simultaneously reminding me of Kristin Chenoweth’s Emmy dress and out-sparkling Frank Gehry) is a model of his form, surveying the career and telling you exactly what to think:

Each of the angled windowpanes—there are more than sixteen hundred—reflects light slightly differently, making the building glitter like sequins in the afternoon sun. If you are tired of the way every modern building feels flatter and thinner than the one before it, well, so is Jean Nouvel…

Nouvel’s designs, for all their bombast, are conceived as a whole. You can take them or leave them, but tone them down and you’ve missed the point.

For once, I couldn’t agree more.

Bonus! Paul Goldberger on the Colbert Report.

From my archives, an excerpt of a review I wrote for The Architect’s Newspaper on the Brooklyn Children’s Museum, published November 19, 2008. When I wrote this my son was almost too small for the museum, and now he is just right. We went this rainy Saturday, and I initially felt a softening of my opinion toward the building. It is fun to be driving the car and able to say, “Look for the yellow building!” as you head down Brooklyn Avenue.

But, as with 41 Cooper Square (reviewed for Design Observer) most of the architecture is on the outside. Inside, it is another cacophonous barn, filled with small things, low to the ground. Yes, it is for children, but I continue to believe children can respond to atmosphere and larger gestures. My son just bounced from place to place to place (he is 2, after all), and it felt like there was no place to settle. Saddest of all, a temporary exhibition for which kids were supposed to be “toy testers” featured the 1969 Eames film Tops, so surrounded by graphics and overwhelmed by other elements, that even today’s digital-happy kids weren’t looking at the screen.

When you are a design critic and a new parent, your first encounter with much of babyworld leads to many questions. Why does every toy come in three primary colors, rather than a single hue? Why so bulbous? Why does it need to light up/sing “Old McDonald”/moo? My first encounter with the expanded Brooklyn Children’s Museum, which reopened in Crown Heights this September, made me ask almost the same questions—and with the same fear of being a spoilsport.

Rafael Vinoly Architects took a 1977 Hardy Holtzman Pfeiffer building which housed the 109-year-old museum (the country’s first expressly designed for kids) on two underground levels, and wrapped it in a two-story yellow-tile shell, almost doubling its size to 104,000 square feet. That shell is a hovering, wavery, L-shaped form that seems intended to evoke many metaphors, and cute nicknames from kids, but all I could come up with was Jell-O. The $49 million new building’s slight exterior curves and its relentless artificial hue, augmented by supporting single-story steel boxes in red and green and brown, are derived from the language of Toys R Us, not the natural world (or even the world of wooden toys).

Which is to say, it looks fun, it looks new, and it looks like it is for kids, so while I might wish for something more subtle (a mysterious aluminium-clad cloud, a sinuous scaly tube), symbolically RVA has more than done its job in repositioning the museum for the current repopulation of Brooklyn by babies. While the color and shape are wildly out of context in a neighborhood of gorgeous townhouses, the museum lies low, its roofline just under the cornices of the houses across the street, just above the rise of historic Brower Park with which it shares the block, and so is a model contemporary interloper…

There’s an ongoing tension in the exhibits, too, between the real and the ersatz. I do not feel qualified to judge children’s exhibits, but on the nature side, kids were asked to plant those fake lettuces, spot a motionless preserved bug, catch a stuffed fish. Only in a few cases were there real, living, moving critters to see or touch. Everywhere you looked there was another little table, a computer monitor, a glass case, without a real sense of progression or even labelling about which activities were appropriate for which age group. To me it felt cacophonous visually, educationally and sonically…

Classrooms and bathrooms are put in sheetrock boxes along the upstairs halls that only take up half its height; above these the steel underside of the roof is exposed, sprayed with lumpy gray fireproofing. Budget restrictions are to be expected on a city- and state-funded project, but the mismatch of architectural ambition on the interior and exterior was deeply disappointing. It felt as if the museum had all this new space, but not enough stuff to fill it, and that the architects had checked out after the lobby.

My somewhat racy, somewhat serious take on one of the first architecture power couples, Aline and Eero Saarinen went up on Design Observer today. A taste:

When Aline met Eero in January 1953, she was the associate art editor and critic for the New York Times, recently divorced, and on a trip to Detroit to meet the young architect whose General Motors Technical Center had proved to be such a smashing success. She was to write a profile of Saarinen for the New York Times Magazine, eventually published on April 23 as “Now Saarinen the Son” with the byline Aline B. Louchheim. A little over a year later she would become Aline B. Saarinen.

Cathleen McGuigan had a different spin on the same topic in Newsweek. All because Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future opens at the Museum of the City of New York today. The doorstop of a catalog, to which I contributed essays on Saarinen’s corporate campuses and houses, is available here.

Any CT readers of this blog should watch “Living Modern in Connecticut” tomorrow night at 9 on CPTV, with additional broadcasts over the weekend. The half-hour show gives a short history of modernism in Connecticut, offering brief tours of the state’s three mid-century hot spots, New Canaan, New Haven and Hartford. It is a primer on the preservation issues facing the architecture of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, and manages not to demonize the architecture or the demolishers.

I hadn’t realized it before, but I have done a lot of writing about preserving the work of modern architects who lived or worked in Connecticut, and the show mentions Philip Johnson, Gordon Bunshaft, Eliot Noyes, Paul Rudolph and Eero Saarinen. The episode ends with a building still hanging in the balance, Warren Platner’s Kent Memorial Library. Platner is better known for his restaurants than for his buildings, but this is a beautiful structure, and it would be a tragedy to lose it to the digital age.

My son shows his first interest in the New York Times! But only because Big Bird was above the fold on Sunday’s Arts & Leisure section in honor of the show’s 40th anniversary. We have begun a bit of a study of Sesame Street in our house, as we alternate, depending on wake-up time and day of the week, between the two DVD sets of Sesame Street: Old School (please make more) and what we like to call “real Sesame Street”. And all three of us much prefer the fake one.

As my husband said, at various weekend brunches:

The older Sesame Street had more trickster figures and anti-heroes than role models.

The divine anarchy of Grover, the dopiness of Big Bird, the grouchiness of Oscar, all were accepted and accomodated by the wise, relaxed adults of the Sesame Street of my youth, who seemed to be going about their business (were David and Maria dating?) but always willing to join in a big brass band. They didn’t spend all their time trying to entertain us (as personified by the puppets) but could be drawn in by an argument or a game. And all instruction was a game, Susan with her “One of these things” song, the Count with his laugh.

We have never been able to figure out why the episodes come with a warning that they are for adults. Is it the disco? The “Macho” man, looking like the guy on the side of Brawny paper towels, that illustrates the letter M? Because they do a much better job of holding the attention of a two-year old. Every segment is short and to the point (every time Neil Patrick Harris as the Shoe Fairy comes on, my son moans; adults may find NPH funny, but it is just too long, too abstract and jokey for a toddler). In the old school episodes there was much more variation in the on-screen visuals, as it jumps from the space of the street, to lightly animated (and often very stylish) sequences, to skits featuring the puppets, to songs. Nothing is very long, nothing is endlessly repeated, and no one overacts. Several segments are just weird, like Capital I, which will stick in your head for days if you watch it on YouTube. Several of the adults on today’s Sesame Street spend all their time looking at the camera, popping their eyes and over-articulating. It is tiring from an adult perspective, and perhaps an indication of the child-centered world we are raising our son in, as dissected by Daniel Zalewski in his recent review of current children’s books in the New Yorker, The Defiant Ones.

My son’s favorite segment, to which he begs us to return, is one in which Grover and Kermit have to figure out the order of cart, horse, and driver. It is hilarious, and even a two-year-old can see what the problem is. If they tried to do the same thing with Elmo, it would surely involve Mr. Noodle, nervous laughter, yelling, and a full cast. Back in the day those two had to work it out for themselves, by themselves, and move on to the next thing.

And speaking of the alphabet: ABC Books on the Design*Sponge guest blog.

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.

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.

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.

Two short pieces in New York Magazine this week, both on topics close to my heart.

The first, “We All Live in a Bauhaus,” is about the continuing influence of the Bauhaus (and Eero Saarinen) on contemporary product design—even in mysterious places. Exhibitions at the MoMA and the Museum of the City of New York open next week. Don’t Josef Albers’s nesting tables still look great?

The second, “Original Gossip Girls,” is my small tribute to Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books: the high school and young married novels have just been reissued in paperback.