road trip 2015: rockin' with Renzo

I am still mad at Renzo Piano and the Kimbell folks for intervening in the lovely lawn between the Kahn building of the Kimbell Art Museum and the Amon Carter. After my Thursday mid-day visit to the Carter, I did walk down Lancaster Avenue toward the Piano Pavilion of the Kimbell, probably the least lovely way to approach the new building as the not-yet-grown-in plantings on the roof of the western part of the pavilion scream loudest. I loved that lawn. Sam and I had lunch on the Kimbell porch dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

Here we are in a picture that appeared in the Kimbell members' newsletter in the early 1990s.

I did see the galleries of the Carter and Modern but, sadly and happily, didn't take enough time in the Kimbell galleries during the convocation reception. Sadly because I would have liked to spend more time with the art; happily because the band at the convocation reception was fine and a few dozen of us were dancing the night away which worked somewhat to allow me to forgive Piano for the intervention on "my" lawn.

Ronnie Self, architect, was the speaker at the membership brunch and he gave a nuanced and helpful talk on the Piano Pavilion. He shares some of my regret that the lawn is diminished but noted that the plantings will work toward a lessening of the visual impact of the pavilion. He also talked about the materials that Piano used which are an homage to Kahn's building.

The ARLIS/NA conference ended this morning (for me, with a great session on photobooks) and, after some repacking and down-time with Sam, I took off toward Little Rock. I stopped for the night in Hope, the hometown of Bill Clinton. It's the first time I've been in Arkansas for many years. Tomorrow I'll visit the Clinton Presidential Center (designed by James Polshek) and the Arkansas Arts Center and then work on progressing toward Fayetteville and Bentonville, probably via Fort Smith.

book is just a dirty four-letter word

Way back in 1972, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote an essay in the New York Times about the library at Phillips Exeter Academy, designed by Louis Kahn. I'm reading her collected essays entitled On architecture, published by Walker in 2008. The Exeter library essay first appeared in October 1972. Her closing words about the library sound as though they could have been written quite recently.

"Mr. [Rodney] Armstrong [Exeter librarian] will be leaving Exeter to become the librarian of the Boston Atheneum on Walter Muir Whitehill's retirement next year, and a suitable parting gift would be completion of the still-unfinished terraces and planting. His parting gift to Exeter is one of permanent grace, in the pre-McLuhan tradition, although electronic resources are duly included.

'Book,' says Mr. Armstrong, obviously not believing it, 'has become a dirty four-letter word.'

'No one ever really paid the price of a book,' Kahn says, 'only the price of printing it.'

Together, they have made a beautiful box that celebrates books."

I haven't made it to Exeter, New Hampshire, to see this Kahn building but I've seen quite a few other Kahn buildings, including eating lunch many times on the porch of the Kimbell Art Museum. By the way, the Huxtable essays in On architecture are proving very enjoyable, especially since she is talking about buildings and architects that informed my appreciation of architecture way back then. And the historical distance is also intriguing.

(Photograph 2009 by Pablo Sanchez, Prague, from Wikimedia Commons)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Phillips_Exeter_Library,_New_Hampshire_-_Louis_I._Kahn_%281972%29c.jpg

Speaking of historical distance, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has moved from a beaux-arts building on Massachusetts Avenue to the mid-century modernism of Watergate.

P.S. I'm still stunned that we were saying "electronic resources" 42 years ago, or at least Huxtable was.