DREAMSCAPING

I made the trek to Governors Island this summer, for the first time, with high hopes for the recent redevelopment. I had entered the original design ideas competition over a decade ago, followed news of the final competition, and applauded the National Parks Service for selecting and implementing a master plan by the audacious Dutch firm West8. The heart of their scheme is a park called The Hills, a verdant, rolling landscape that teases and refines views across New York Harbor to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Manhattan. Their intitial competition renderings didn’t look like renderings for a city park. They had a kooky golden glow, and showed idiotically smiling New Yorkers roaming through green fields and valleys, carpeted with grass, flowers and shady trees.

So I was surprised to find, instead, a flat field, cut through with a network of bizarrely curving walkways, and punctuated by four scrubby piles of dirt. Lookout Hill, the tallest at 70-feet, has a pile of artfully piled stone blocks along its steep north slope, that leads visitors to a sloping peak from where, behind one, the lower Manhattan skyline is beautifully revealed. From this point one can also see the nineteenth century barracks and forts at the north of the island, maintenance buildings to the east, and the three other hills. Slide Hill features four long metal slides, Grassy Hill features gently sloping fields, and Discovery Hill features richly varied plantings and, at its peak, a Rachel Whiteread sculpture.

Perhaps it’s unfair to judge the park only a month after it’s opened, before its plantings have taken hold and filled the ground. Even my less critical, more botanically-literate companions had trouble imagining what the final groves and fields will feel like. But the design of the park seems severely cerebral, without any of the warmth and weirdness of the renderings, which promised a lush, enveloping ground. It was blisteringly hot during our visit and there were, throughout The Hills, no shaded ground, no permanent water fountains, no permanent restrooms, and only a handful of seats. The Hills doesn’t yet have the grace of the city’s loveliest parks, or the amenities of its roughest.

Image courtesy of West 8.

September 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses

THE WRIGHT STUFF

In addition to being a master architect, Frank Lloyd Wright was a master storyteller and a master showman, skills he put to excellent use constructing his own outsized persona. Many of his buildings (particularly the houses) can be understood independently of the man, but Taliesin West, his Arizona home and school, cannot. It’s a vivid, eccentric work forged from the disparate influences that shaped his personality. It’s name is Celtic, derived from a Welsh word meaning “shining brow.” Its materials, plantings and colorings reference, gently, Native American traditions. And its geometries and planning exploit, magnificently, modernist principles of free space.

The buildings that make up the complex possess a monstrous sculptural charisma, real-world presence, that owes less to good planning and composition than to inventive, unorthodox construction. They have few of the traits we associate with canonical modernism (insistent grids, reduced facades, restrained materiality). Instead they are crafted from a rich, varied palette of materials, including stones culled from the site, rough concrete pours, stained hardwood, and painted steel, all combined with dazzling elan (if not always good sense). The buildings seem less “constructed” than “assembled,” with elements conventional architects might shy away from: bare canvas roofing, mitered glass corner windows, steeply sloping masonry retaining walls, and exposed wood frames tipped dramatically from the horizontal.

In fact the buildings at Taliesin were built by hand, by Wright’s apprentices (i.e. paying students). Though their designs were likely drawn and studied painstakingly, the buildings feel loosely-structured, concocted. In their formal ambition, willful eccentricity, happy syncretism and irreducible physicality, Taliesin is the most Wrightian of Wright’s projects that I’ve seen. The campus embodies a vision so peculiar, so evocative, so expressive, that it seems to have sprung directly from his head onto the land.

January 03, 2016 by Nalina Moses