As I was reviewing a book about contemporary micro-houses (Rock the Shack: Cabins, Cocoons and Hide-Outs) I realized that our homes are not longer true refuges, retreats from work and society.  Instead our houses and apartments are extraordinarily sophisticated instruments: exquisitely furnished, mechanically conditioned, fitted-out with audio-visual systems, pulsating with streams of electronic data.  They shape vibrant micro-environments that allow us to keep working, consuming and communicating when we’re supposed to be resting.  Country houses aren’t much different, just finished with a slightly lower level of complexity.

As the book suggests, we might want to run away and live in a “shack,” a primitive hut, the kind of small building that hearkens back to the first manmade structures.  Their architecture is primarily about shelter from the elements, and does little to serve identity, status and place-making.  These are structures that stand lightly, that barely disturb the ground, that can be simply dismantled and replaced, that can be washed away by rains or blown apart by a storm.  When left inside a little building like this with nothing to do, what would we do?  What dreams and stories would we find?

Bridge Studio, Saunders Architecture, Newfoundland, Canada.  Photography: Bent Rene Synnevag.

Six weeks ago MoMA announced that it would raze the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building on West 53rd Street that originally housed the American Folk Art Museum (AFAM).  In its place MoMA wanted to build one to properly connect its existing building, just to the east, with the new Jean Nouvel-designed tower it’s building, just to the west.  Then last week MoMA announced that it was reconsidering.  Many had opposed the proposed demolition, including AFAM’s architects, architecture critics, and even MoMA’s Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, Barry Bergdoll.  But, if art critic Jerry Saltz’s commentary in New York Magazine is any indication, the art world is less concerned about it.  Saltz argues that the building served architecture far better than it served art, and supports its removal with a directness that approaches zeal.

It’s sad to see any building razed, especially one as architecturally ambitious and distinctive and AFAM, and one that’s only twelve years old.  Yet I’m unmoved about seeing it go.  AFAM sold the building to MoMA and left, and it occupies a key property within the MoMA campus.  From the outside the AFAM building has never felt like a part of midtown Manhattan.  Its signature super-tall bronze facade panels are uncomfortably overscaled — unrelated to the scale of surrounding facades — and, when seen from the sidewalk, have a dull, mottled surface that feels unfinished.  On an isolated site in the woods the building might cut a dramatic figure, a post-Brutalist megalith, but on a dense block in Midtown, rubbing shoulders with towers dressed in limestone and glass, it feels overly rugged, like a cocktail party guest in a parka.  Inside, the museum is spatially and sculpturally dynamic, but doesn’t carve out substantial spaces and surfaces for display.  Nearly half of each floor plate is given over to three staircases and an elevator.  Artworks are scattered all over the inner skin of the building, in corners and nooks and along stairwells, giving the place an eccentric, unorganized feeling.  My lack of sentimentality about razing AFAM is linked directly to my persistent nostalgia for the original, intimate MoMA building, which I remember, along with the installations of many of the individual artworks housed inside, from childhood.  After that building was swallowed up inside Yoshio Taniguchi’s 2004 expansion, I have little ardor left to preserve museum buildings, especially on this block.  MoMA has evolved as a corporate entity, amassing properties in midtown the way New York University does in Greenwich Village.  I didn’t flinch as I read in the Times that the AFAM building might be gone before the end of the year, but I did when I read that the MoMA board is currently chaired by Tishman Speyer head Jerry I. Speyer.  Museum leadership is running the place with a developer’s eye, designing a signature property rather than a temple for art.  It’s this same mentality that led to the construction of the AFAM building in the first place.  Let’s see if MoMA, in its upcoming expansion, can hit both marks.

Credit: © Peter Mauss | Esto

The Thorne Miniature Rooms the Art Institute of Chicago are a collection of 46 historically accurate models of various European, American and East Asian interiors.  They were imagined and commissioned by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the 1930’s to house her collection of miniature furniture, and donated to the museum in 1940.  Today they’re installed in a basement gallery, within the walls, behind glass, at chest level, so that small children can peer right into them, and with a carpeted ledge running around the entire room so that very small children can do the same.  The rooms certainly have a dollhouse appeal.  They’re built at 1:12 scale, each about the size of a breadbox, and capture the places they represent in mesmerizing fidelity. One takes in their period furnishings first (elaborately turned matchstick-sized legs on tables and chairs, hand-threaded carpets, plaster mouldings as fine as lace) but ends up transfixed by the ordinary objects with which the rooms are furnished to give them a sense of scale and warmth: a pair of eyeglasses on the kitchen table, a folded newspaper in the living room, the electrical cord on a lamp, a dinner fork.  While the rooms faithfully render the proportions and splendor of a Tudor hall, a mid-century modern living room, and a traditional Japanese house, they trade less in architecture than a kind of special effects, conjuring other worlds.

The Thorne Miniature Rooms aren’t really individual rooms; most incorporate a cluster of rooms, one central space and also the rooms and passages branching off of them, as wells as the stretches of outdoor space beyond their doors and windows.  Each model is lit from within, from various hidden sources, that establish a specific time of day and time of year.  We see the morning sun spill over the slate floor of a Cape Cod kitchen, and the setting sun graze the curtains of a Charleston drawing room.  It’s easy to look at each room and imagine what kind of life unfolds inside.  There’s a fancy feathered hat on a stand in the dressing room of the Biedermeier apartment, as if the lady of the house is preparing to meet later with a gentleman friend.  There’s a clarin trumpet lying on the window seat in an eighteenth-century English study, as if the lord of the estate has just unburdened his heart in a letter, in pen and ink, and summoned a servant to deliver it on foot.  There’s a bronze statue of Shiva presiding over the desk of a prim eighteenth-century Virginia drawing room, as if the wealthy merchant who lives here has ties to the East, as well as a hankering to leave his life here behind and explore the far corners of the world. In the end the Thorne rooms, historically faithful, are less evocative architecturally — in their expression of space through forms and structure — than novelistically  — in their expression of character through a cloud of details.  Each period room is set in the dramatic present, where anything can happen.

 Image courtesy of Art Institute of Chicago.

Kirsten Greenidge’s play Luck of the Irish at LCT3 takes the single family house as a lens through which to examine race and class.  Its story begins in the 1950’s, when an Irish American handyman “ghost buys“ a house for an African American doctor and his family in a posh suburb of Boston.  The play’s writing is admirably even-handed, exploring each character’s point of view.  The play’s set, designed by Mimi Lien, is at once incredibly suggestive and incredibly elegant.  It gives us the house itself, a clapboard colonial with a pitched roof and brick chimney, as a full-size clear plexiglass cut-out at the back of the stage, tethered to the ceiling with wires.  This ghost-bought house is appropriately spectral, more of an idea than a thing.  The house’s back yard is expressed as a stretch of artificial turf that covers the entire stage, spilling over its front edge to the floor below.  Its sumptuous texture and crazy green color are indelible; they overwhelm the house itself and all the other furniture on stage.

None of the characters seems entirely happy about the house.  The handyman’s wife is resentful she can’t live in a home this grand (“This is not the order of things — I got passed over.”) and the doctor is disappointed that the house doesn’t bring him satisfaction (“I don’t feel lifted.)  The handyman and the doctor’s wife, however, kindred spirits, are drawn more powerfully to the land than the house.  The doctor’s wife rushes through her chores each morning to spend her afternoons lounging dreamily in the back yard.  One day the handyman meets her here and observes that the grass “curls up to your toes like the sea.”  The house promises stability and status while the lawn promises freedom, both physical and imaginative.  It’s a tribute to the play that, at the end, we’re not sure what matters most.

Image courtesy of Rose Brand.

Architecture doesn’t need words; it stands on its own.  So when I saw the title of the current architecture show at MoMA posted outside the gallery, 9 + 1 Ways of Being Political: 50 Years of Political Stances in Architecture and Urban Design, I wanted to turn around and leave.  It sounded more like a PhD dissertation than a show, and promised little delight.

The exhibit, culled from artifacts in the musem’s permanent collection, is text heavy, like an exploded book.  Most of what’s on display describes speculative constructions and consists of drawings, collages, posters and pamphlets.  But those things on display — those actual, tactile, three-dimensional objects — are enchanting.  There’s a facade panel from the Ricola headquarters by Herzog & de Meuron, printed with the image of a single wildflower, that magically fuses elegance with kitsch.  And there are models that bring projects to life in a way that renderings and photographs simply cannot.  Foremost among these is a foot-high, laser-cut, clear acrylic massing model for a proposal to rebuild the World Trade Center by United Architects.  It’s a group of narrow towers, in staggered heights, that are becoming gently tangled up in one another.  Someone I know, a poet, says that the Twin Towers were lovers.  This model makes this notion that buildings harbor desire perfectly real.

World Trade Center Proposal, 2002, United Architects.

Has Frank Gehry become a classicist?  His interiors for the Signature Theater, a year-old off-Broadway venue on far west Forty-second Street, have a remarkable repose.  Which isn’t to say the place isn’t recognizably Gehry; everything is finished in plywood, aluminum and concrete, and there are stretches adorned with his (signature) complex, faceted geometries.  But the forms are more resolutely composed than those in his well-known buildings like the Guggenheim Bilbao; the place is calm.

The Signature is tucked inside the second and third floors of a new condominium tower by Arquitectonica.  The twisting, freestanding, wood-clad staircase that pulls visitors up from street level is the only major expressed volume.  Two of the theaters, reached through long ramps on the second floor, are box-shaped, trimmed inside with puzzle-piece-shaped plywood panels to dampen acoustics.  The open lounge area on the second floor, a kind of public plaza (it’s open to all), might be the most uninspiring part of the place. The floor is only about ten feet high, which doesn’t leave room for big sculptural moves. Though the ceiling is animated with floating plywood panels and clouded acrylic lamp shades, the space seems, quite literally, flat.  But those moments within the complex where Gehry has a free hand (the staircase, the theater interiors) are energetic and finely composed.  This architect, known as a free spirit, is just as skillfull in restraint.

Photography by James Ewing/OTTO.

At an astonishing lecture at the Institute for Classical Architecture last week, historian Nancy Steinhardt traced the influence of the École des beaux-arts through Chinese architecture.  To illustrate how marginally Chinese traditional architecture was positioned within the canon, she showed the frontispiece of Banister Fletcher’s 1924 book The History of Architecture, a drawing called “The Tree of Architecture.”  Embedded in this diagram are some not-so-certain notions that still have purchase today: that ancient Greece is the primary origin, that Asia is a minor source, that contemporary American and European forms are the highest expression, and that the Middle East, South America, and Africa beyond Egypt don’t exist.

Though the interpretation is single-minded (progress is symmetrical and vertical) and the representation is kitschy (robed  figures posed beneath the branches embody virtues of Geography, Geology, Climate, Religion, Society and History), it’s hard to resist the charms of this illustration.  The tree and figures are rendered naturalistically but composed melodramatically, like scenes in Puvis de Chavannes.  What tree in real life is shaped like this, with a dense, high crown and strangely criss-crossing lower branches?  More deeply, there’s something touching about Fletcher’s desire to fit a subject as expansive and as complex as the world history of architecture in a single diagram.  In middle school I had an English teacher who taught us how to diagram a sentence graphically, to draw a horizontal, fallen-tree structure and set each word on its own limb.  It gave immense satisfaction to tease language into its most basic components like this, but at the same time it was always understood that any sentence, once uttered, surpassed its spindly diagram.  As he was imagining “The Tree of Architecture,” Fletcher might have felt something similar. 

At the closing reception for the 2012 Summit for New York City  there was, set out right beside the bar, a site model showing a stretch of midtown Manhattan.  One cartoonishly futuristic structure, stepped at the base and capped with four vertical fins, rose high above the fray of anonymous office buildings.  “What is that?,” a woman scowled as she walked by, heading for a refill.  That, I found out later, was Norman Foster’s winning competition entry for a new office tower at 425 Park Avenue, which he’d unveiled just a few days earlier.  The other architects invited to submit their designs for the plot, just a block north of the stately Villard Houses, were Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid.

Their entries are hearteningly different from one another.  Rogers proposed a structure with open, intermediate floors planted with pine forests.  Koolhaas proposed an enigmatic, worm-like tower that twists forty-five degrees as it rises.  Hadid proposed a square, metal-clad tower that swells outward at the bottom to meet the street, like an upside-down mushroom cloud.  It’s the slickest and most sophisticated of the entries, and also the most fitting.  The tower, symmetrical on four sides, merges her personal, idiosyncratic formal vocabulary with that of a conventional office tower.  It’s distinctive — a building that looks like no other building — without being aggressively avant-garde.  It has a molten, organic feeling and yet it’s constructed from standard elements.  In one simple volume, Hadid has shaped a structure that projects the modern, moneyed gloss of midtown Manhattan.

I grew up in a leafy suburb about an hour outside of New York City.  When I was a kid my parents sometimes brought us into the city on Saturdays, to shop Canal Street (back in the 1970’s it was an important source for appliances and gifts) or attend the seasonal movie-and-a-show spectacular at Radio City Music Hall.  We would arrive early in the morning and leave after dark, driving home along the FDR Drive, with views of the Pepsi Cola sign lit up across the river in Queens to send us on our way.  From the back seat of the family station wagon the city was magical, a gentle stream of noise and light.  It’s precisely that dream of New York City that brought me here, and the one that’s captured at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Jazz at Lincoln Center.

The space, designed by Rafael Vinoly, sits on the fifth floor of the Time Warner Center in Columbus Circle and faces east through an immense stretch of curtain wall.  The auditorium is hi-tech.  On its website Jazz claims it was “[d]esigned acoustically to be the premier jazz performance hall in the world.”  There are adjustable curtains, video monitors, stage platforms, and banks of seating to suit different music and performance styles.  The night I was there, for a rather sedate awards ceremony, the hall was arranged in tiered, semi-circular rows that overlooked the stage and, beyond it, the southwest corner of Central Park, the statue of Christopher Columbus (which is temporarily enclosed), and West Fifty-Seventh Street.  It was a spectacle that rendered the goings-on all but irrelevant.  The walls, stairs and steps inside are all finished simply in blonde wood.  Though the layout is pragmatic it reminded me of the auditorium at Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in LA, where every seat seems to be perched on a balcony, as if there’s no main space and no main floor.During the ceremony there was a large, and largely unnecessary, video monitor hanging right in the center of the glass.  The organizers could have set smaller screens at each side instead.  Surely they knew we weren’t there for the ceremony, but for the view.

I first saw the Richard Meier-designed twin glass condominium towers at 173 and 176 Perry Street one evening in 2002, just after they’d been enclosed.  The lots were still filled with construction rubble.  Lit gently by the sunset, the small, tall buildings had an elegant presence.  It was hard to understand why West Villagers were up in arms about them.  The towers became better known as a “celebrity dormitory” than starchitecture.  They’ve housed, at various times, Calvin Klein, Natalie Portman, Nicole Kidman, Martha Stewart and Vincent Gallo.  (Does the thought of Stewart riding the elevator with Gallo make you smile too?)  Because of maintenance and administrative challenges, there’s been considerable tenant turnover.  When Meier constructed a third (larger, glassier and pricier) condominium tower in 2010, just one block south at 165 Charles Street, the Perry Street buildings lost what little cachet they had left.

Now that every neighborhood in Manhattan is studded with tawdry, absurdly tall, mirror-glass condo buildings, the ten-story Perry Street towers seem terrifically restrained.  And after a decade these two buildings have assumed a quiet authority on the street and in the skyline.  From up close one doesn’t see expanses of glass, but a dense, gridded layering of metal and glass panels.  The facades have collected a fine layer of grime, which lends them, like wrinkles and grey hair on a handsome man, a certain gravitas.  Like all of Meier’s buildings, the towers have been conceived with ideal geometries and slightly stodgy volumes.  And that’s what saves them — they’re solid.  They sit comfortably on the ground, and feel as if they’d be comfortable to live inside of too.  They’re no longer spectacles; they’re apartment buildings.