INNOCENTS ABROAD

To announce my arrival in Prague last month I posted a photo of Frank Gehry’s Nationale-Nederlanden Building, more popularly known as the Dancing House or Fred and Ginger, on social media. As intended, it made a splash. One friend, a talented architect, commented, “The ugliest building in Prague.” Another friend, also a designer, asked, “Is this building finished yet?”

Compared to other institutional buildings in central Prague, the NNB certainly stands out. This seven-story exhibition and event space occupies a prominent corner on Rašínovo nábřeží, the street that runs parallel to the Vlatava River, right across from the Jirasek Bridge. Cars and pedestrians swarm around it all night and day. Its outer corner is expressed as two slender volumes – a stiff cylindrical tower and a swooning, glass-enrobed cone that leans passionately into it. The building looks less like a signature Gehry structure – a heap of swirling metallic shards – than an illustration from Delirious New York rendered in three dimensions. This expression is, within the setting, brazen. Among the stately early twentieth-century apartment and office blocks along the street, whose staid facades are trimmed with neoclassical and art nouveau ornament, the NNB is cartoonish. Its scale and attributes are slightly overscaled, slightly exaggerated, and slightly garish.

The NNB is constructed from a concrete frame and lifted off the corner with chunky columns, all of which lends it a crude, workmanlike feeling when seen from the sidewalk below it. It lacks the lightness and the dynamism of Gehry’s more recent monumental work, and of the real Fred and Ginger. But the building is not a deliberate provocation. It retains an innocence in spirit, as if imagined by a child. In its simplicity and expressiveness it’s true to Gehry’s vision, an LA building dropped, with joy, inside the heart of an old European city. It’s not concerned with following the rules, and not concerned with breaking them either.

Photograph by Nalina Moses.

August 12, 2017 by Nalina Moses

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.

December 12, 2012 by Nalina Moses

How many lectures and receptions have been made more insufferable than they really are by folding chairs? Regardless of the locale, a painted aluminum folding chair sends the message This event is not fancy and neither are you. The Flux folding chair sends an altogether different message. It certainly doesn’t look like a folding chair. Instead it resembles an origami zoo animal, the blossom of some hothouse flower, and, a little bit, Frank Gehry’s Flintstones-style molded plastic furniture. It certainly doesn’t feel like a folding chair. It’s made from a stiff grade of plastic that offers a sturdy seat, and its boxy base gives it a substantial mass. This folding chair sends the message on over and take a seat.

At the design fair where I first saw them, Flux had secured an unadorned corner booth and crowded it with white chairs. A tired-looking woman, thinking it was a cafe, came over and took a seat. The product rep cheerfully brushed aside her coffee order and seized the occasion to demonstrate how the chair folded, simply, into a flat package the size of a card table, and to explain how it could be slipped into the trunk of a car, underneath a bed, and into a closet. The woman closed her eyes and waved him away, which made it clear that the chair had passed the greatest test of all. She simply didn’t want to get up out of it.

April 04, 2012 by Nalina Moses

There was a summit of architecture critics last week to launch Alexandra Lange’s new book Writing About Architecture. Julie Iovine scored points early on, when she said that good writing mattered far more than good criticism. She read extraordinary passages from Reyner Banham and Esther McCoy out loud, which landed those authors on my must-read list. Then she lost points at the end when she said that architects can’t write, a generalization that hits awfully close to home. The emotional highlight was when Lange read a famous excerpt from the late Herbert Muschamp’s 1997 New York Times Magazine cover story on Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. In the passage, which was even excerpted in the writer’s obituary, Muschamp describes returning to his hotel room at Bilbao, seeing a woman in a white dress on the street below, and, all at once, understanding something vital about the building. He writes, “[T]he building I’d just come from was the reincarnation of Marilyn Monroe." Fifteen years later the panelists still found the reference "galling” (Iovine’s word) and rattled on about the eccentricities of the writing, including its stupendous length, starchitect worship, hyperbole, and mythopoetic prose.

Their stony reactions sent me back to the original text, in which Muschamp follows the Marilyn reference with this lucid perception: “What twins the actress and the building in my memory is that both of them stand for an American style of freedom. That style is voluptuous, emotional, intuitive and exhibitionist. It is mobile, fluid, material, mercurial, fearless, radiant and as fragile as a newborn child… " Muschamp’s essay is, in addition to a hagiography of Gehry and a critical account of the building, an attempt to understand architecture as a popular culture and to claim, for just one moment, in a tumbling world order, an American cultural victory. It’s rich and magnificent overwriting, which often happens when a serious writer tackles a subject that matters dearly to him. Here the building seems too big for the writing, even Muschamp’s writing, and remains, somehow, just out of reach. The heated language makes it clear that Muschamp loves architecture, something that’s not so clear about the critics on the panel.

March 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses