Smiles for Michael Jackson

It turns out Michael Jackson's family house and thus the makeshift shrine in front of it is just a few blocks from where I'm staying in Los Angeles.

Above them all hung the strangest note; hanging from a tree, like a lynching.



In clear print and New Testament terms:

"Let's not forget that Martin Bashir was a bad reporter and a betrayer. Let's not forget the evil kid and his whore mother. Let's hope and pray that these bad people and Michael's enemies will pay the consequences One day. AND we promise you that we will teach the next generations that you Michael Jackson are The greatest Man that ever lived."

He was innocent once.

We love you Michael Jackson 5 Remembered Tribute Died Public Memorial Tribute Encino Family House California June 2009 photos fans respect flowers gifts

Mayne gets sensuous in New York

I am shocked this week in New York by how much I like the ways that Thom Mayne/Morphosis's new building reflects the light and fits the context.



A lot of great architecture reminds you of something you know, even if you're not quite sure what, and it creates something new. Think of New York's Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright. That's what this building for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art does. You'll find it bursting with energy and movement on Third Avenue between Sixth and Seventh Streets. It'll hold art studios and rooms for the engineering school. The central glass, as expressive as on a Louis Sullivan bank, will allow you to peer in and see students milling about, busy-bees in a hive.

Is that


Japanese calligraphy in the shadows of the facade?

Or is it supposed to be


Cape Cod? Or

The Nike Swoosh? We know how Mayne likes signage and symbols and billboards on his buildings; and how architecture is commodity, and a jet-set starchitect is hired partly for branding, much the same as Nike brands itself worldwide. Of course Mayne's is a one-off, making it "high art."

The other day he told me, "people think I just drew a "swoosh," but of course I didn't. The exterior opening signals to you what the space inside will be like. Inside you see that the ceiling and the space of the grand staircase relate to the opening you saw from the outside."

Looking back into history, is this a building as a walking machine, like Le Corbusier, and an Archigram dream?

Archigram, Walking City, Ron Herron, 1964

Remember, the context for "Walking City" was a world ruined in the wake of a nuclear war. Is Mayne describing our post 9-11 times in New York?

If so, he offers great hope. This is the most optimistic building I've seen from him.



The most moving of Thom Mayne's works. Is it a walking elephant? Or a

Albrecht Dürer, 1515

rhino? Nice how the Rhino has its own "swoosh" between its eyes.


Mayne's concave curved metal reflects light in more interesting ways than the vertical panels we used to see from him. They soften the work. The concrete and metal may still be raw, but the whole is more refined than his earlier projects, and assembled less crudely.

The horizontal metal screens on the facade will open and close to alter the light coming into the building. Students can operate some as they wish, giving the street too a lively, always-changing facade.

Pentagram worked with Mayne on the signage, always a key feature of his projects. This one features somewhat small for Mayne lettering that looks right when you look straight at it, but particularly the cut out bottom halves of the letters distort when you look at it from an angle.

Funny that Santa Monica-based Thom Mayne found it appropriate to be industrial and hard-edged in colorful, curving, sensuous L.A. - as at his Caltrans Headquarters - and in a gritty part of New York he goes soft. Cooper Union casts a feminine feel, like his lacy "Phare Tower" in Paris, also made to glisten, like nylon leggings. Since when has a New York streetscape felt so Parisian?

Mayne picked up the Empire style across the street to create a satisfying symmetry which does not mirror the old. Yet his slant recalls the Mansard roof.


His varying tones


make the modern wall porous, like the older building's solids and voids. With a surfeit of steel and glass projects in New York, this one stands out.

Did I say feminine? Yes. Mayne's curtain wall hangs like a skirt over those concrete legs.


That, the curved metal reflecting light, the movement, and the corner of this project


recall Frank Gehry and Gehry's "Fred and Ginger" corner in Prague.

But ultimately, it's the reflection of the light that animates the exterior. Mayne's perforated metal sheets and hard forms dissolve in ways that Gehry's don't, in that way they call attention to themselves but don't, whereas Gehry's always do.



In the post 9-11 world, Mayne's Cooper Union building is a collector for manna from heaven. It filters the manna down and lightly sprinkles it on you when you stand in front of it gazing at its glimmer; or perhaps in an undoing of the way the powder and ash spread throughout the boroughs on 9-11, this manna is meant to flow out onto the entire city.

This behemoth disappears into ethereal beauty, a slide that connects the heavens with our heads, our eyes, our bodies, our legs and the earth we walk on. The students and designers who will work inside will feel the inspiration.

This "Moby Dick" of a building sears itself into your memory and will create obsessions, as obsessed as Mayne himself is. The manna will also fall on you in the great like-the-inside-of-the-great-whale stairway.


Morphosis describe this glass-enclosed nine-story building as a "vertical piazza."

The soaring central atrium

renderings by Morphosis

gives views out through the oddly shaped glass in the facade onto Cooper Union's 1859 fortress-like Foundation Building across Third Avenue and Astor Place. Mayne placed his entrance right across Peter Cooper Park, facing the entrance to the older building.

He's provided much glass and transparency, including the ground floor lobby walls which are glass; but inside you'll find the dark corners and hidden spaces that Mayne usually provides, especially for youth and students.

With all the discussion in New York and elsewhere, of how fortress-like our public buildings would have to be, Mayne gives a civilizing answer. This work projects strength, but the glassy ground floor remains open and accessible. It is a fortress, because the institution is strong, but the walls - its separation from the city and the world - are porous, confident and inviting.

Here's my take on another recent Thom Mayne/Morphosis academic building- the Cahill Center at Caltech. Also here. All my Mayne here.

Lighting Crown Hall - film

Jim Coudal of daily must read - Coudal.com and his pal, the esteemed Steve Delahoyde, put together a fine film of last week's lighting of Crown Hall by artist Jan Tichy and his students.

Watch their film, here.

It makes sense they'd be there - (they said the same to me.) Coudal runs the MoOM - the Museum of Online Museums, whose spiritual home is, Crown Hall.

That event, after a day of rain, brought people together,


'Twas one of the most peaceful and yet intriguing evenings I've ever spent in Chicago.

I did see Crown Hall in a new light.



The project reminded me of the great series of art installations at Berlin's New National Gallery, also by Mies and of which Crown Hall is the prototype. My best photos of the evenings were the ones I took when I was with the artists inside the building.






After you've watched Delahoyde and Coudal's film of the event, watch mine of artist Jan Tichy. Tichy got to spend two weeks in this space preparing the event. So I asked him, "What is the genius of Crown Hall?"

If you missed the event you missed a lot; to avoid that in the future consider joining the Mies van der Rohe Society. They co-sponsored "Lighting Crown Hall" and membership means you'll know of other upcoming events. Do it for Mies, do it for me; I'm the co-chair.
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Renzo Piano's Chicago Museum as a Roman monument

Renzo Piano often jokes, "I'm Italian, there's not much we can do about that!" He's flirting when he says it. He knows people like things Italian.

I'm still ruminating (Rominating?) on why the Pritzker Garden at Renzo Piano's Modern Wing of the Art Institute of Chicago has a Roman feel to it. It's partly the imperial scale and the classical expression. But there's much more. If you enter the Garden not from the street but by going inside the Modern Wing, and then going back outside into the garden, it has the feel of a Roman courtyard.

The rectangular proportions are like those of Roman temples. Piano's new work is layered with the older Art Institute buildings. They meet in this garden. Public places, like people, art and cities, are often most interesting where two cultures come together. In this garden you see and physically feel that Chicago now has a certain age, has been around awhile, wasn't built in a day. The minimalism of Piano's structure can remind you of Roman ruins.

Temple of Antoninus and Faustina, Rome c. 141

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So, Piano


is to Chicago


as Norman Foster


is to the Roman temple in Nimes.

--~--

But to be like Rome you must have an


arch. Such as Rome's Arch of Constantine. Just around the corner from the Pritzker Garden, as part of the layering of time at the Modern Wing, Chicago has


The arch from Louis Sullivan's demolished Stock Exchange.


The Pritzker Garden was built more or less above an "ancient" theater. (1925, is that ancient by today's standard?) The Goodman Theater was also a memorial to a son who died young. It was underground, due to height restrictions that in olden days, even under the empire of Emperor Richard (Daley) I, used to be enforced on any structure erected in Grant Park. The Goodman is gone now; so in this place you get a vertical memory of buildings, including some unseen.

Detail from the Goodman Theater, demolished

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The


Nichols Bridgeway - with its bottom engineered into an arch and its curved, open pipe shape like like an aqueduct - is infrastructure, of the kind of which the Romans were fond.

Roman Pont du Gard

Infrastructure about movement, about bringing things from elsewhere to here.

--~--

Then there's the confidence, the ambition, and the scale of this civic project. For these I reasons I write in my review of it in The Architect's Newspaper that it's best new building in downtown Chicago since the 1970 John Hancock Tower.

There's even a sense of imperialism in the Modern Wing. That in here we have treasures "plundered (?)" from around the world. The flat roof extends our dominance out over the lands around us. The building, a temple for art, is oversized for its site, and monumental. The three part composition of the main building and the symmetry make it more monumental.




Here is more Hello Beautiful! on Modern Wing by the raised-in-Genoa, Italy Renzo Piano. (Then scroll)
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Piano's Modern Wing gives Chicago a Roman Square, a Parisian Park

Of all the wonderful spaces in the new Modern Wing at the Art Institute of Chicago, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, one of the most special is a surprise - because it hasn't been talked about much.

Click a photo to enlarge it.

Maybe it's under appreciated because Chicago has not been sunny of late. But when it is, pack up your thoughts, give yourself time to unwind and go to

The Margot and Thomas Pritzker Garden.

It's just off of the main "street" arcade, called the Griffin Court, just behind the new galleries, between the new building and the old Columbus Drive entrance.

To stand in this square is to be transported to Italy. The scale is Roman. The serene balance is classical. The quality of the materials, like everywhere in the Modern Wing, is first rate.


You stand among ordered columns, giving a classical feel; but they're so thin, metal and white, it's modern.


Only modern technology allows a column so sleek.

This garden, or square, is square is new world and old world, classical and modern, humanist and grand, at once.

And the lucky Museum Education center looks out on it.


Great to see the museum making such a distinctive commitment to educating the next generation.

The landscaping, which will grow and improve, is by Kathryn Gustafson, who co-authored the Lurie Garden just to the north in Millennium Park. Gustafson lives much of the time in Paris, and does it show.


These simple metal chairs,


dragged in the dirt, are so like the sights you see in the Tuileries Gardens.

Chairs in the Tuileries, Paris

Chicago's are a modern lime-green.

Piano's space is protective and bordered. Within it you have the freedom to sit where you like and the chairs then mark where people just before you wanted to be.

The Pritzker Garden is an outdoors space that feels good because it's semi-indoors - protected by the open roof.


This aspect recall Frank Gehry's trellis across the street in Millennium Park. You sit under that and you feel protected. Gehry's trellis, like Piano's canopy, contains the space. You are listening to music outdoors but you almost feel that you're also indoors. In Piano's galleries you know you're indoors but as they're filled with natural light you almost feel you're outdoors.

If there is a criticism of the Pritzker Garden to be made it's what happens at the east end.


Not much. This modulated space just kind of leaks out into Grant Park. You see cars parked between the two. Chicago needs to remove the parking spaces that affect this view, and perhaps alter the landscape that you see from here in Grant Park to respond to this. A semi-circle of trees would do. So would a tapering east-west allee. It'd be nice if you could open it up all the way to the lake.

The other hindrance to bliss is the noise from the street that gets into an otherwise peaceful place. Don't believe anyone who tells you, "two rows of trees will block much of the noise." They won't. How about a low stone wall at the end of the garden, about as high as the metal fence is now? You'd still see the treetops over it, and the space would flow out. I'd put a fountain in the wall, water tumbling over the stone. Done right, that could drown out some traffic noise; and remind you that to the east is Lake Michigan. The Modern Wing as a whole does not acknowledge the lake enough.

I've left one of the richest pieces of this garden for last. The wall sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly.


"White Curve" has a deep lacquer so at certain times and angles it reflects the trees and sky. Lacquered like a Japanese vase, it reflects and draws in your vision at the same time. The piece honors James Wood, the Art Institute’s director from 1980 to 2004, and who began the project of the Modern Wing. Wood - who is a friend of Ellsworth Kelly - told me that a lesser artist would have opted for green or some other color but once you see it you realize that it had to be white. I think he's right.

The fan shape also recalls Asia and helps you realize the Asian influence in this garden and in the Modern Wing as a whole. Asian influence is found in nearly all good modern architecture. Feel it in the still, quiet here.

And you recall that the Art Institute has a superb Asian collection.

Then you realize this garden responds to the great European art in the collection, such as this Matisse who can now soak up the sun in the new galleries under "Renzo's roof."


As you can now soak up the sun outdoors in the Pritzker Garden.


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More Hello Beautiful! on the Modern Wing here. (scroll)

Read my review of the Modern Wing and my interview with Renzo Piano in the The Architect's Newspaper .
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The most amazing photographs of the "Ferris Bueller House"

Yes the glass pavilion "Ferris Bueller House" - a fine mid-1950's design in Highland Park, Illinois:

along with its added garage or auto "display case" or vitrine:

Sudler Sotheby's International.

is for sale. In "real life", as in the movie, the glass pavilion held classic cars. Click on the arrow to open the doors.



In the movie it famously housed "the (red) 1961 Ferrari GT 250 California. Less than a hundred were made."

Is the architecture in its setting dramatic enough for Hollywood? Well, no.

But if you want to see really amazing representation of the house,
click on the photos below.

Then click on the photo you want to see, let it load and let it rip.

You've got to see these high-resolution 360 degree virtual reality photography, by Robert Harshman.

You get panoramic views on a gorgeous Highland Park day. Exquisite light cascades through the glass. You see much of the original furniture; and in the study- fabric designed by the original owner of the house- Ben Rose. I'm told he was also an accomplished jazz musician and held jam sessions in there. Reminds me of Duke Ellington and his orchestra playing in Crown Hall.

The four-bedroom, 5,300-square-foot house (asking $2.3 million) dates from 1953. It's one of the few by A. James Speyer, a friend and protégé of Mies van der Rohe and a cultural force in the second half of the twentieth century in Chicago. In 1961 Speyer was named curator of Twentieth Century Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Over the next twenty-five years he organized, designed, or installed more than 125 exhibitions.

The glass pavilion, also indebted to Mies, was designed about three years after the house, by David Haid and was a later addition to the site.

Highland Park, Illinois is the same leafy suburb north of Chicago that has Frank Lloyd Wright's Ward Willits House.

It's interesting to compare the two houses- there's much Wright in Miesian Modernism- and I'd love to see Robert Harshman photograph the Ward Willits House with his vr photography, since it's one of Wright's first plans in "pinwheel," emanating out from the center.

Crown Hall gets lit by artists

Press release:

See Crown Hall in a Whole New Light

Lighting Crown Hall · Thursday, June 11 · 9pm – midnight

3360 South State Street

Lawn outside S. R. Crown Hall

Free public outdoor event

Bring a blanket and picnic basket and be a part of the historic Bauhaus Lab at IIT this summer. On Thursday, June 11, your family can settle into a comfortable spot on the lawn outside S.R. Crown Hall to watch Jan Tichy and the students of the Bauhaus Labs present a technical multimedia installation, Lighting Crown Hall. Students, who will be posted inside Mies’ translucent, spacious masterpiece will use the structure as a massive light box, sending video projections and elaboarte time-based lighting sequences through the glass windows for the outdoor audience to enjoy. Don’t miss this unique opportunity! Reservations not required.

Public parking in Lots D1 and D2 (SE corner of 33rd and State, entrance on 33rd Street)

A collaborative program of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the Mies van der Rohe Society/Illinois Institute of Technology celebrating modernism in Chicago.
www.mies.iit.edu for more information

Ascending a stair - in Thom Mayne / Morphosis' Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Caltech in Pasadena

In mainly conservative Pasadena, a town with many red tile Mediterranean-style roofs, you see it from afar:


Thom Mayne and Morphosis' building on the campus of Caltech. This being Pasadena Mayne didn't give them Big Signage, as he did some years back at the University of Toronto:


Here the architecture speaks for itself. When you approach, just a little sign reads


Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics. I like the use of color, rather than Mayne's usual grey, and his aggressiveness is easier to take at this smaller scale. He nicely brings natural light into the auditorium,


There you see Mayne's grey on the ceiling, along with the metal and mesh he likes to use. The exterior doesn't come in much to the interior, the offices are mainly straightforward and rectangular. But how about those hallways,

Some of the hallways offer two perspectives,


fitting for scientists looking for answers.

The team at Morphosis are rightly proud of the four story central stairwell.



Mayne has said this stairwell is like a telescope you can occupy; and it should make us think about how we look out at the world, as astronomers and astrophysicists do. It's also supposed to encourage encounters with colleagues. Go inside now, and up the stairwell - (click on the arrow to ascend). Don't miss the cosmic "wallpaper."

I think it works. The craziness in the stairwells does not seem gratuitous. He seems to be saying: there are many ways to solve a problem, try them all. Take a risk. Put unlike together and see what happens. Maybe it will "lead" somewhere. It's a sculptural tour de force; so good it makes you want to say, "Take that, Daniel Libeskind!" I like that natural light is seen entering from the top of the stairwell; this makes us want to ascend to it, to feel a part of it and to discern its nature. Such a stairwell reinforces the seeker in each of us.

Other Hello Beautiful! posts on Thom Mayne / Morphosis' Cahill Center here; and Mayne gets sensuous at Cooper Union in New York here.
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What Mies van der Rohe firmly believed...

I've heard people say - based on what I don't know - that Mies would have said it's okay to tear down the Test Cell he designed for the corner of his campus at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Those who say that are speculating. But here's something Mies did say, which is more reason to not tear down part of his work and then dilute the design of the campus:

"I firmly believe a campus must have unity."

-Mies van der Rohe

He continued, "Allowing every building or group of buildings to be designed by a different architect is sometimes considered democratic, but from my point of view this is just an excuse to avoid the responsibility of accepting one clear idea.”

"Responsibility" is a good word here.

No one is against building a commuter train station here, but all around the Test Cell you find vacant land. Build the station right across the street from the Test Cell and you'll preserve the unique and exciting vistas and the experience of walking past buildings and walls designed by Mies van der Rohe, leading up to Crown Hall.

Mies quotes from "Mies van der Rohe" by David Spaeth, p. 117.

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I have much more on the plans to demolish part of Mies van der Rohe's Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) here.