The Turner Contemporary

Photography by Jeffrey Kilmer

The cool, white, glass sheds that house the new Turner Contemporary in Margate, England are a surprising addition to this rough-and-tumble, seaside neighborhood, which is dotted with empty lots and abandoned buildings.  In fact the building, a home for contemporary art exhibits and education programs, sits on the site of an old rooming house where the great eighteenth-century English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner once lived and worked.  The new building, designed by English architect David Chipperfield, captures the delicate northern light and misty Margate seascapes so beloved by the painter with specially-oriented skylights and windows.  While the structure was conceived in homage to ethereal views and lighting, it’s strong and seaworthy.  It’s got high, broad galleries to properly show off large-scale contemporary painting and sculpture.  And it’s protected with a concrete plinth and opaque glass panels that have been designed to resist corrosion, humidity, and even the occasional overpowering wave.

For  many years, along with Melville and Proust, Ada Louise Huxtable has languished on my need-to-read list.  This highly accomplished architecture critic, who wrote many years for the New York Times and now writes, occasionally, for the Wall Street Journal, is beloved by both design types and lay people.

Well, last week I picked up a compilation of her work, “On Architecture,” and I simply fell right inside of it.  Huxtable is a dazzling voice.  A building is so many things: art object, infrastructure, civic space, machine, mythology.  More so than any other contemporary critic I know, she can get at a building at all these levels all at once, and in the relatively short format of a newspaper column.  She has a vast knowledge of architecture and history and New York.  And she’s a savvy, supple writer.  She dips into both vernacular and literary language and, as much as it is possible when writing sanely about architecture, she lets it fly.  I’ve always held Paul Kael and Peter Schjeldahl in the highest esteem as critics because their passion for what they are writing about is matched by their passion for language.  Now I’m adding Huxtable to that list.

What makes a city a city, gives it an indelible, like-no-other-place character?  It’s some kind of alchemy between landscape, location, culture and planning.  In Savannah one essential element is the giant old live oak trees draped with clouds of spanish moss along the sidewalks and in the squares.

Along with ravaged socialites and fresh-faced SCAD students, these great, graceful trees are real city characters.  Their enormous branches are twisted into demented, expressive shapes, as if they had been imagined by Edward Gorey.  At daybreak the clouds of moss filter sunlight so that only a soft, skittish haze reaches the ground below.  At dusk they sway slightly in the breeze and give off the faintest, phosphorescent glow, as if they’re sentient creatures, suffocating the trees and poisoning the air.  It’s an old world, gothic feeling that’s part of the city’s allure.

I’m not a big one for city planning, believing that cities are super-complex organisms that develop entropically, and magically, overtime.  But there is something about Savannah.  Here the city planners got it just right: the height of the buildings, the width of the streets and sidewalks, the size of the squares, the depth of the lots, the distance from one open space to the next, and the depth and width of the city itself.  One morning I walked from the riverfront down Bull Street to Fairmont Park and then back again, taking in the entire historic city, and left off feeling enchanted rather than overwhelmed.

Along with its gorgeous greenery, what saves the city from being an oppressively relentless grid is the unfussy state of its buildings.  Unlike in Charleston, its northern sister, the buildings in Savannah are not all scrubbed clean and prettily restored.  Some quite grand ones remain a bit of a mess, with peeling paint and moldy block construction.  This city’s judicious plan, coupled with this faint pallor of going-to-seed, makes it like no other.