BARNRAISING

As architects Herzog and de Meuron were designing the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, Long Island in the late naughts, the stock market plunged and, along with it, their budget, from 80 to 26.2 million dollars. They turned this calamity to advantage and deeply reimagined the original design, for nineteen individual sheds clustered together like a village, as two long conjoined sheds lying side-by-side. The simplified structure, completed in 2012, is dazzling. Inspired by local vernacular barns, its generous scale and gentle landscaping make for an elegant and unpressured art experience.

To be sure, these are no ordinary sheds. Their shells are a severe poured concrete, their roofs are lined with a high-grade honey-hued plywood, their trusses are zealously detailed, and their interior proportions are more zen-like than barn-like. But the museum is sited at a distance from the road and set in a meadow of high grasses, so that its profile remains inconspicuous. (A friend who drives through Water Mill frequently told me she only noticed the building last summer, when an artist installed lit panels along its street-facing facade.)

That Herzog and De Meuron reconceived the building so deeply to meet costs is admirable, and speaks to their architectural savvy. The museum doesn’t feel reduced. Compare this building to another suburban starchitect project, SANAA’s River Building at Grace Farms, which opened in 2015 at a rumored cost of 150 million dollars. The facility, a series of small glass pavilions built with triple-glazed uniquely curving glass panels and flush metal roofs with concealed gutters, yields a fraction of the usable space and occupies the site like a cartoon spaceship. Compared to that pretty folly the Parrish scores points for pragmatism and plainspeaking. This building feels right at home within the flat lands and old New England spirit of the South Fork.

Photograph copyright Iwan Baan.

September 24, 2018 by Nalina Moses

OTHERWORLDLY

The Fondazione Prada in Milan is a former distillery that’s been remade by the luxury brand as an art center. It was opened in 2015, after OMA Europe refurbished the existing structures and added three new ones. The ten-building campus lies along the city’s southern edge, in a precinct of warehouses, factories, and abandoned lots, and is secured with a masonry wall and uniformed guards. Stepping inside from the sidewalk is like falling into another world, one that’s radically interior, like a convent, a prison, or an asylum.

The artworks are sealed away in a series of strange, seemingly unrelated structures, that set a tone of unsettling quiet. It would be a sterile experience if not for the dazzling quality of the architecture. The buildings are cerebral in their planning, restrained in their geometries, and luxurious in their finishes. The Cinema is framed in brushed aluminum and clad with mirrored stainless steel panels. The Hall floor is a richly figured travertine. Staircases in all of the buildings are lined with perforated brushed stainless steel panels. Pragmatic elements like vents, access panels and stair handrails are gorgeously concealed.

Circulation, both through the campus and through each building, is obtuse. There are lots of ramps and staircases, and no door handles. Most of the buildings are entered through immense, unmarked automatic sliding doors. Signage is minimal, and no artwork is visible from outside. Young guards, dressed in unisex blue nylon Prada topcoats and Doc Martens, are required to give detailed directions to visitors. The restrooms are particularly difficult to navigate. All surfaces in these underground facilities, including the ceiling and the stall partitions, are constructed from a heavy steel grate. Dark and disorienting, the space is also slightly maddening. A sensible adult wonders, Where is the door? Where are the stalls? Where are the paper towels? And where, again, is the door?

Recent OMA projects have had a disappointingly commercial aspect, but this one bears the sly, witty signature of Rem Koolhas. The Fondazione has no center, no front face, and no real image. Its most iconic element (until the high-rise Torre under construction is completed) is the “Haunted House,” an existing four-story concrete building that’s been finished in a flat, softly-glowing 24-karat gold leaf, and that houses the permanent collection. It’s nestled at the end of a drive inside the campus, so that it remains invisible from the outside, and from most other points on the campus. Its small bare chambers offer sculptures by Robert Gober and Louise Bourgeois and, more alluringly, opulent views into the city. Yet one isn’t permitted to step onto the balconies or take photos; one remains caught inside.

Photograph courtesy of Fondazione Prada, Milano. By Bas Princen, 2015.

December 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses

HOUSEBOUND

There’s no photography allowed at Kai Althoff’s show at MoMA, which might be for the best. This sprawling multi-media installation, that fills a large gallery on the sixth floor, is something of a mess. It obscures the artist’s signature works – lyrical, exotically-colored watercolors and acrylics. Instead of highlighting these small panels, it drops them within a distracting, disorderly stage-set.

The exhibition resembles a family home that’s been imploded, with the contents of its closets and attics spilling out. There are low white painted partitions, scuffed wood floor boards, and scrims hanging from the ceiling, that all outline a ghostly house with a peaked roof. Within it, household objects (appliances, cutlery, magazines, furniture, dolls, suitcases, clothes) are piled on platforms, packed inside vitrines, pooled on the floor, and pinned on the walls. Because these things are old and worn the place seems highly personal. It’s as if the artist is trying to capture a life – his own – by collecting all the things that passed through it. Althoff is my contemporary, and some of the objects brought back all-but-forgotten sense-memories from the mid-seventies: hand-thrown pottery in speckled glazes, dolls with stiff faces and thick synthetic hair, poorly composed black and white family photographs.

But Althoff’s paintings pack a much mightier punch. These small canvases, no larger than album covers, have a pungent, unpretty realism. They depict characters that seem to be based on real people, observed from up close, capturing particularities in face and figure that only a loved one would note. The scenes are rendered in secondary colors, in opaque fields and patterns, in claustrophobic, aspatial vignettes. Althoff’s brushwork is delicate, his palette feverish, his tone straightforward, and his effects quite moving. But here, at MoMA, rather than showing us his work, Althoff shows us his life. The world captured in his paintings – of the people around him – would have given much more.

Untitled, 2007, Cloth, acrylic, lacquer and dispersion on cloth, 38 7/8 x 50 x 2 inches (98.7 x 127 x 5.1 cm). Image courtesy of Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Kai Althoff.

November 15, 2016 by Nalina Moses

ONE FOR ALL

A new exhibit at FIT, Uniformity, assembles notable work, athletic, and military uniforms, and the high fashions they’ve inspired. There are beautiful uniforms here: a 1942 US Womens naval reserve skirtsuit by Mainbocher, an embellished nineteenth-century British mess jacket, and a dark 1920′s Marymount school dress with a sky blue collar and bow. And there are beautiful couture garments, including a twisting, one-shouldered, princess-seamed corset dress by John Galliano for Dior, in silk camouflage. The most joyful garments on display are TWA flight attendant outfits from 1975 designed by Stan Herman, polyester separates in cherry red, mustard yellow, cobalt blue, and flecked oatmeal, that can be mixed, crazily, at will. They hardly seem like uniforms.

But when happens when uniforms are intended to, and do, foster conformity? Thom Browne’s 2009 Mens show gets at the potentially sinister underpinnings. Browne dresses 41 models in identical grey flannel suits, raincoats, brogues and briefcases, and sends 40 of them to sit in neat rows of desks. They enter in file, hang their coats on stands, pull on sweaters, sit down, and type. Their leader, seated in front, facing them, at an identical desk, remains half a step ahead, dictating their rhythms. The set piece is hypnotic, and not without charm. As the leader rings a bell to mark the lunch break, each man opens his attache and pulls out a sandwich and an apple from a brown paper bag.

Browne’s suits are a skillful reinvention, and caricature, of the prep school uniform and the white collar suit. The trousers are famously short, and the jackets fit tight around the torso and under the arms, giving the men who wear them an innocent, adolescent appeal. But all the men in the 2009 show are young, tall, slender, and, except for one, white. Their striped white sweater armbands, brylecreemed hair, vacant stares, and unchallenged submission call to mind Nazi youth. A uniform, without freedom, quickly becomes hegemony.

Photo courtesy of Thom Browne.

August 01, 2016 by Nalina Moses