brutalism to industrial

After several inspiring, friendly, and collegial days at the 54th annual ARLIS/NA conference, I took off this morning from the Hôtel Bonaventure in Montreal toward New York State. The Bonaventure is at the top (10th floor plus) of a brutalist masterwork built for Expo 67. I am fond of brutalism but the hotel is very much closed off from the outside world. There are courtyards (with ducks) as well as the swimming pool area. It was hard to know what was North or South when you were on the conference floor. Our hotel room looked out onto the city but other folks had courtyard views.

Since I drove to Montreal, it was possible to switch out the traveling a little bit. I went up to Montreal via Syracuse, crossing into Canada at Alexandria Bay. The flatness of the Ontario and Quebec landscape on the North side of the Saint Lawrence River was a surprise to me. I headed home straight South from Montreal, into the Adirondacks toward Albany in order to head over to Williamstown and North Adams, Massachusetts, for visits to the Clark Art Institute and MASS MoCA respectively.

MASS MoCA's shorter-term exhibitions for this year do not open until later in May but the spread out spaces of the industrial buildings with plenty of windows and a variety of things to view through them were an elixir for a tired brain. I had already seen the Jeffrey Gibson show but it was more compelling to just let it wash over me this time. Immersive, they say. I had seen the "New York State of Mind" show but the 1975 picture with Patti Smith at a political protest where the sign next to her says "Stop U.S. arming the shah's fascist regime" resounded quite differently than it did a year ago. One of the pieces in Zora J Murff's show was "Bully Pulpit" from which her recorded voice includes text inspired by Black radical activist and political prisoner George Jackson who was killed by guards in 1971. "When my people receive justice, I am sure I will receive it too." The text of Jimena Sarno's two-channel video installation "Las Tres Gracias" draws on creation legends and Third World literature. One of the days (ninth?) of creation "marked the nether world for those who have poison in their souls."

The picture is an aerial view of the industrial buildings that have been converted into the MASS MoCA campus in North Adams, Massachusetts, a few miles East of Williamstown.

yellow stairs and brutalist buildings

Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, London

Monte Amiata housing, Gallaratese, Milan

(Carlo Aymonino, archt.)

separated at birth: Abidjan and London pyramids

La Pyramide (1973)

Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire

Rinaldo Olivieri, architect

photo by Iwan Baan, from Architect magazine website,

review of Graham Foundation exhibition

Tate Modern extension (2016)

London, England

Herzog & de Meuron, architects
photo by Mara Brandl / Imagebroker / Shutterstock

from Art News article on Tate's "Head of Coffee"

Gund Hall & Fondazione Feltrinelli

Today's email news from Docomomo notes that Herzog & de Meuron and Beyer Blinder Belle will be expanding and rearranging Gund Hall which houses the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Gund Hall is a brutalist masterpiece from 1972 by John Andrews. Its distinctive angular top houses The Trays studio space. The pillars and use of raw concrete are both familiar in brutalist buildings.

(Peter Wanderwarker / Harvard Graduate School of Design)

The most recent work of Herzog & de Meuron that I have seen is the Fondazione Feltrinelli in Milan. It also has an angled top. It will be interesting to see what happens at Gund Hall.

These are my pictures of the Fondazione Feltrinelli building as viewed from the nearby streets. I enjoyed seeing its distinctive shape in the city landscape, as I enjoy seeing Gund Hall when I'm walking the streets of Cambridge.

New Paltz brutalism update

I blogged in 2013 about a brutalist building at my alma mater -- New Paltz State -- that was going up as I finished college. The building was being stripped, resurfaced, expanded, and otherwise mangled in 2013. Now I've discovered that the civil engineering firm that worked on the renovation has used my "before" photo. Normally, I figure a picture on the web is rather up for grabs -- not really, of course, but there's always a chance. I am disappointed that my photo has been used as if Larsen Engineers -- http://www.larsenengineers.com/Structural_Engineering_Projects.asp -- had fixed the brutalist building and made it solid for another fifty years. Instead, they were part of a process that covered up the wonderful brutalist building and left it quite ordinary.

brutalism renovated, replaced by bland

When I was going to college at New Paltz State in the mid-late 1960s, brutalism was in high swing and Le Corbusier's La Tourette monastery was one of my favorite buildings. And then they started building the new science building on campus. It was designed by Davis Brody and stretched along one side of the main quadrangle with the old main building and the then library and student union on the other sides of the quad. It wasn't finished by the time I graduated but the concrete was beautiful and the stair cases were sculptural.

This picture is from a visit in 2009, along the side away from the quadrangle and toward the fine arts building and the dorms. The quadrangle side of the building was lined by a parking lot so it didn't form a fourth elevation for the quadrangle. Sad.

Like all buildings, a brutalist one needs loving care and attention to siting if it is to work in a friendly way. Not only was it a gray rainy day and there was a parking lot, the covered walkway to a neighboring building isn't particularly compatible. It blocked the view of the stair sculpture. Still, I really enjoyed seeing this building that had been so influential in my appreciation of 20th-century architecture, particularly brutalism.

Imagine my grave disappointment when I stopped by yesterday on my way home from a week of cataloging at Bard. I figured a visit to campus and the Dorsky Museum of Art would be amusing even though I didn't know what shows were on. I parked near campus, on the quad side. I rounded the corner of the wing of the old student union and saw:

There, where I would have liked to see the Wooster Science Building with a lawn up to the building, forming the fourth side of the old main quadrangle, were a construction fence, crane, removed stair sculptures, and new framing for replacement walls. They're "renovating" the building and giving it a new bland façade:

How could they??

The shows at the Dorsky? "Anonymous: contemporary Tibetan art" had some interesting works, way better than the rather hokey animation of the special on Buddhism we'd been watching the evening before. "Screen shot" also had some amusing pieces, including a video of women bodybuilders preening to a soundtrack of Falling in love again (as made famous by Marlene Dietrich), the title of the work by Rachel Rampleman.

To the Sicilians and Cambridge: Brute, brutta, Calogero

One of the reasons, the main reason, that I came out to Boston a day early on my way to VRA in Providence was to see the "Brute" show at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard. The Carpenter is the only building by Le Corbusier in the U.S. and it's a marvel of Brutalist architecture, a style I fell in love with in college as Davis Brody's Wooster Science Building was being built at New Paltz State. I hadn't read more than announcements about the show and was expecting a retrospective of the building. No. There WAS a large model of the building on the first floor and photos on other floors. The  gallery space on the third floor, however, was devoted to an installation of chairs with a dozen archival photographs. On the podium were six or eight Le Corbusier chairs and facing the podium were about 40 chairs of a wide variety, from little plastic chair to vintage rocking chair. Lots of thoughts: people come in all shapes and sizes; Le Corbusier was an inspiration to many and preached theory; singularity and diversity; furniture can be lonely without people, or not.

In Italian, at least in Sicily, "brutta" can be used for ugly. When we checked into the B&B Giucalem in Piazza Armerina, it was a nice country retreat, a bit of a respite after the rainy check-in into the B&B Proserpina in Enna. That was brutal: scary circular stairs, rain, reception area under construction, water shutoff for construction (they DID fix it in 10 minutes, after we called when we got back from supper). From the B&B Giucalem, the red house on the hilltop was afire in the late afternoon sun. I was amused. Giuseppe and his son Calogero, hosts at the Giucalem, thought the house was brutta.

Breakfast brought some very yummy plum jam made by Nonna (grandmother) from the trees on the property. The slogan for the B&B is "La casa negli orti" or the house in the orchards. We'd have bought some of the jam to bring you if they'd been selling it.

It wasn't the only time we ran into a Calogero. Our host in Capo d'Orlando at B&B Le Terrazze was Calogero Nici. He grew up in the Nebrodi mountains in the town of Ucria. His brother is an officer of the Nebrodi park. Signore Nici enthused in the evening (another after-dark arrival) about his love of the musician André Rieu. I said I loved classical music and Rieu sounded vaguely familiar. In the morning, he took us on a tour of a video of a recent Rieu concert at Radio City Music Hall. It isn't really my style of classical music; Christie described it as "schlocky" but appreciated Signore Nici's total lack of sarcasm or irony in looking at the musical presentation. I really appreciated his sharing his enthusiasm too.

The last morning we were in Sciacca, I went out for a walk up to the high part of town above the Via G. Licata near our B&B, the Conte Luna. And, there, I found the Porta San Calogero and, through the gate, the general market. Love the morning activity: people setting up their market booths; deliveries being made; streets being swept; coffee. And it doesn't hurt that morning sunlight is glorious, just like the evening sunlight on the brutta house on the hill above the Giucalem.

wang shu: ningbo

Today's arts section in The New York Times has an article about Wang Shu who won this year's Pritzker Prize. His architecture uses rough and sustainable materials and the shapes are sometimes simple, sometimes sculptural and complex like the Ningbo History Museum (pictured above, image from the About.com: Architecture site). Though I like this building for itself, I also like its evocation of new brutalism.

The Times article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/12/arts/design/wang-shu-of-china-advocates-sustainable-architecture.html?_r=1&hpw

There has been critical press about the selection of Wang Shu as an individual even though his work is done in collaboration with his wife Lu Wenyu. Marcia Thorne, the Pritzker Prize's executive director, is quoted in the April 2012 issue of Architectural Record as saying that the prize committee looked at the individual as well as the team and decided that Wang Shu was "exceptional and worthy of the prize."

It has been great over the past few months to be doing my latest gig: indexing for the Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals. There too, I sometimes debate with myself about individual versus firm access points. As Weinberger said: both/and; it doesn't need to be either/or ... except perhaps for the Pritzker. Christie and I were talking the other day on the phone about the irreplaceable delight of working (being) in a good architecture or art library and having the periodicals at the ready for perusing. It's nice to have Architectural Record, Old-house Journal, Metropolis, others on the "to do" stack rather than the "when I've got time" stack.

brutalism

Hmm. I wonder which is more brutal: the Carpenter Center, Le Corbusier's brutalist masterpiece (top), or what they've done to the old building of the Fogg Art Museum (bottom).

Polish cabin fever

New Year's Day 2011 in Boston, and the weather is pretty close to perfect. It's in the 50s (at least) and the snow from the Blizzard of 2010 is disappearing except the stacks. What you need after the Eve's drunken excess is a quiet walk around the neighborhood. I'm at Bill's in Cambridge, Massachusetts and he suggested that I might want to see how the Fogg looks as it is being deconstructed and reconstructed to Renzo Piano's grand plan. They've taken down the back wall, lots of the guts, and Werner Otto Hall from the 1990s. The Fogg is next to the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts done by Le Corbusier in the early 1960s, his only building in North America (not including the U.N. building) and a grand brutalist building. You can see a lot more of Carpenter without Werner Otto and Fogg back in the way.

After I got home to Bill's, he was almost done with preparations for folks coming over at 4 and I insisted that he go get some fresh air rather than my going to get a bottle of wine. WGBH was playing a Rimsky-Korsakov work and it ended. The announcer started telling us what she would play next and I thought I'd like to hear the "Warsaw Concerto" ... so she announced she was about to play the "Warsaw Concerto." Magic. It must be a sign that the coming year will be fine.

For the curious, the picture is of the Lazienski Palace in Warsaw, taken by Andrew Ward, Getty Images, and picked at "random" from the Google Image results from "warsaw poland." The picture with snow was from a war game so not appropriate for me. And the fact that I picked a picture of a neoclassical (Palladian) building is totally coincidental.

shiny richard serra

Sometimes you take a picture and it comes out unlike what you expected. This Richard Serra is one of three or four at Storm King Art Center near Newburgh, New York. I stopped on the way back from another week of backlog cataloging at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. I wanted to see the Maya Lin "Wavefield" which is out beyond Andy Goldsworthy's wall. The "Wavefield" was pretty interesting. From the front side, it looked about like pictures I'd seen, but on the back side, it's wonderfully rustic this time of year, in the dried grass stage of autumn when they've started the reseeding for next year. It was drizzly as I walked around the grounds; not quite enough to get you soaked or to force you to get the umbrella out, but drippy. The Serras were slick wet and I liked the way the surface reflected the crest of the hill into which the slabs are inserted. The reflection turned out making the piece looking like the "start" arrow of a YouTube video.

My stop at Storm King was after I'd visited the campus of SUNY New Paltz, my alma mater. In 1967-1968, my senior year, the Wooster Science Building was being built. Designed by Davis Brody, it reminded me of Le Corbusier's La Tourette. We're talking high new brutalism. I thought it was just wonderful: the concrete, the pour forms, the staircases. When Daniel Starr and I visited the campus a decade or so ago, again on a drippy day as I remember, Daniel thought it was the ugliest campus he'd ever seen. Well, I couldn't really argue; it's the state college stuff from the 1960s SUNY boom. Thanks, Nelson Rockefeller. There are now a good number of post-1960s buildings around the edges but it's still a SUNY campus. And I love the Wooster Science Building.

ungers and pasolini

Last week at MoMA, I looked at one of the newer books in the regular backlog, i.e., O.M. Ungers: Kosmos der Architektur (Hatje Cantz, 2006). When I checked our catalog, I discovered that NYU didn't have it but NYSID had the English translation. It has some wonderful photos of the library space that Ungers built on his brutalist house in Berlin as well as the recent house that he had built in the countryside. The library space is very central in plan and has those great classical proportions that Ungers does so well. The space also includes busts by Ian Hamilton Finlay. Really a beautiful space. The exterior of the house in Berlin is fine too and, according to the book, was so exemplary that Reyner Banham included it in his The new brutalism.

When I started this, I wasn't thinking of the connection on the word brutal but the other interior space that rose from my reading in the last few days was an article in the Times style magazine on design from a couple weeks ago. It describes how Manuela Pavesi has bought and is refurbishing the Villa Zani outside Mantua which served as a setting for Pasolini's "Salò" which I saw not too long ago at Lincoln Center. The setting is deliciously decadent, the action is brutal though the thought action speaks more loudly than the physical action. It's about some Italian fascists who kidnap some young women and men and torture them emotionally and bodily while also listening to Sade-like tales and esoteric songs. The article may be found at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/16/style/tmagazine/16pavesi.html

New brutalist architecture was in high swing in the mid-late 1960s when I was in college. Davis Brody designed a wonderful science building for the New Paltz campus that was rather in the style of Le Corbusier's Convent of La Tourette. I was dumbstruck by the beauty of the materials: raw concrete, staircases sticking out from the main block of the building. That brutalist concrete, alas, didn't always age well. The Ungers house is more brick than concrete and in the book looks rather like a deconstructivist predecessor with cubic shapes. More like other Corbusier works of the brick and concrete style.