FIRST LOVE

The movie Columbus, shot on site in the Indiana city, is about a young woman who has trouble leaving her home and her hometown, where she’s tantalized by the celebrated modern monuments around her. When a well-known professor of architecture is hospitalized there, his son and his protege visit, befriend her, and hatch a plan.

The movie is shot almost entirely in one-point perspective, an optical scheme in which all orthogonal lines meet at a fixed point on the horizon, so the viewer is always looking flat onto a surface or deeply into a space. It’s a vantage that gives the city’s iconic twentieth-century buildings a grave formal beauty. The landscapes, lush late-summer lawns and ancient hardwood trees, are rendered similarly. The scenes, firmly and quietly composed, hold the buildings and grounds still so the characters can roam freely in front of them.

The story unfolds slowly with generous spaces and silences that are unusual in an American film. We see that the young woman does not feel secure, the son does not feel loved, and the protege stifles any feelings that might arise. We see that all three characters are slightly unmoored and slightly enamored of one another. They move together and then apart, until they reach a kind of social detente.

Columbus is the only movie I know that shows what it’s like to love a building. Not to find supreme beauty in it, but to be sustained by it. Each night the young woman leaves the home she shares with her mother and drives to Deborah Berke’s Irwin Union Bank, a small, elegant building with a bold parti and deceptively banal detailing. At night its upper floor – a glowing cantilevered bar – casts a cool blue light across the lot below, where the heroine sits on the hood of her car. This building is the only one part of her world that makes sense, that is correctly ordered, that gives her a home. This is a power of architecture, to hold one together, that’s rarely expressed.

Deborah Berke Partners, Irwin Union Bank, Columbus IN, 2009

May 05, 2020 by Nalina Moses

BRAVE NEW FORMS

The architecture megashow at MoMA Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 highlights the era when the nation became politically and economically fortified after the second world war. It’s eye-opening for a number of reasons. First, it puts Yugoslavia on the map as a nation with an extraordinary legacy of modern architecture. The buildings documented here are stunning, and most likely unfamiliar to those who haven’t traveled through the country or studied the subject. The installation, featuring drawings, photographs (many commissioned for the exhibit by Valentin Jeck), video, and furniture, provides a rich context for the design.

Second, the show makes a strong case for concrete over steel and glass, the preferred materials of high modernism. Valentin’s photographs have a graininess and grandeur that capture surfaces of aging concrete magnificently. One sees in these avant-garde concrete structures the innate plasticity of the material, the drama of sculptural forms, and the inventiveness of the architects. One sees traces of, and perhaps homage to, Le Corbusier, Lou Kahn and Paul Rudolph. And one sees a unique modern language emerge, one unconstrained by orthogonal geometries and open to emotional expression. Some of the buildings, through pragmatic in programing, have the feeling of science fiction.

Finally, and most deeply, the show reminds one of what architecture, at its most elemental, can mean and do. Similar to South American architects today, the Yugoslavian architects featured here were operating at a nexus of shifting political and cultural identity, making forms charged with meanings that were in every case more than formal. The resulting buildings are hopeful, forward-looking, violent and otherworldly. At a time when so much of contemporary American architecture is cynically corporate, intended primarily to improve the value of a property, these buildings – that climb, spin, splinter and rage – elevate physical experience, and give testimony to history and place.

Photograph by Valentin Jeck. Marko Mušič, Memorial and Cultural Center and Town Hall, Montenegro, 1969-75.

October 06, 2018 by Nalina Moses

ROGUE ARCHITECT

The American Masters documentary Eero Saarinen: The Architect Who Saw the Future is really two different films spliced together. It’s a hagiography of the modern architect, with photographs and footage of his best-know works. And it’s a conflicted My Architect-type portrait of the man by his eldest son, Eric Saarinen, who narrates the film. Like Louis Kahn, the subject of My Architect, Eero Saarinen left his eldest son and first wife for another woman and started another family. And, like Kahn, he’s ulitmately pardoned by his abandoned son because he’s a genius.

The accomplished cinematorgraphy, that includes dazzling aerial sequences, takes us through the General Motors and John Deere campuses, the Miller House, Ingalls Rink, Kresge Auditorium, Dulles Airport, and the TWA Terminal. These lyrical passages go beyond the iconic, expressionistic, black-and-white Ezra Stoller photographs of the same projects. In addition to seductive views, they give a sense of the buildings’ rich physicality, spatial complexity, and peculiar asymmetries.

Eric Saarinen’s personal account of his father is touching, but holds the film back from exploring more deeply the development and detail of the buildings. Instead of landmark modern structures, each one is framed as an artifact from the architect’s biography. We learn in considerable detail how the architect falls in love, gets married, has children, meets another woman, leaves his first family, marries again, has another child, and dies at the age of 51. An off-screen narrator even reads to us, pointlessly, from the love letters he wrote to his mistress. In between, we learn about his buildings.

It’s confusing but not terribly surprising that accomplished men behave less-than-heroically in their domestic lives. Eero Saarinen’s personal life was eventful but had no impact on his work. (The only major architect I can think of whose personal life is inseparable from his work is Frank Lloyd Wright.) My favorite image from the film is a black and white photo of the architect lying flat on his stomach inside an enlarged cardboard study model of the TWA Terminal, his legs hanging off the edge of the table. It illustrates clearly his passion for architecture, one that’s both ennobling and humanizing.

January 16, 2017 by Nalina Moses

DOMESTIC TRANQUILITY

The house Frank Lloyd Wright built for Roland Reisley in 1959 in Pleasantiville, NY, might be more affecting than his better-known houses in Chicago. It was the third and final house he built in the 26-house Usonian community there, a spread of one-and-a-half-acre circular plots. Each house is unique, designed in a brazen modern language by Wright or one of his disciples. And each house is modest – by contemporary standards, at least – with a living area, dining room, three or four small bedrooms, patio, and carport. Most are one level, and are located at the tops of the small hills that run through the site, offering lovely views.

The Reisley House is built on a grid of equilateral triangles, so that all its walls meet at 120-degree or 60-degree angles. This creates dramatic roof and wall lines that exaggerate perspective views. While the geometries seem eccentric and impractical, they shape dynamic, graceful interior spaces. The house has an open plan, and only the bedrooms, bathrooms and closets are closed with doors. The major rooms slide seamlessly into one another: vestibule into living room into dining room into hallway, and – when the doors are thrown open, as they were on the summer afternoon I visited – into patio and lawn.

The house is anchored by heavy retaining walls and chimneys, which are finished with local stones set in a rough horizontal ashlar. Interior walls are finished with gold-stained cypress panels that unfold into bedboards, bookcases, banquettes, and tables, all constructed from the same wood. There’s drama in the low thresholds and narrow halls one passes through moving from one room to the next. And then, as one steps inside, there is uncommon repose.

Photography by Roland Reisley, from his book Usonia, New York: Building a Community with Frank Lloyd Wright.

June 14, 2015 by Nalina Moses