I don’t believe, as many architects do, that the most powerful way to represent architecture is in film.  Then I stumbled across color newsreel footage of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin from its opening in 1939.  These brief passages were so stunning that I nearly fell off my seat.  We’re all familiar with photos of the building, but the film (which is similar in content, although not in spirit, to this black and white newsreel) brought it to life as photographs don’t and, perhaps, even a visit to the building, which still serves as the S. C. Johnson headquarters, wouldn’t.

The grainy clips, with washed-out hues that quiet the structure’s bright red brick, depict a mysterious, lyrically futuristic workspace.  Men in overcoats and hats and women in A-line skirts and pussy-bow blouses rush about with tremendous style and purpose.  And the building itself – the glass corridors, the arched passageways, the round elevators, and the famous lily-pad-columned main hall – seems majestic and slightly noirish.  It gives employees a magnificent stage-set for their everyday lives.

There are always all sorts of real estate shenanigans going down in New York, but they don’t usually involve museums.  Now the Folk Art Museum is selling its building to MoMA and the Whitney is renting its building to the Met.  It wouldn’t mean much except that the two properties changing hands are signature buildings.  The Whitney, especially, is a building that’s indelibly linked with the organization and its collections.  I know that they’re currently building new digs for themselves downtown.  But what will we call the magnificent Madison Avenue building now, The Metney?

I can’t separate these museum buildings from their art.  I’m still haunted by memories of the old MoMA and the way particular paintings lived inside of it.  There was a special room for the “Water Lilies” with picture windows overlooking the courtyard that flooded the room with sunlight.  There was Oskar Schlemmer’s “Bauhaus Staircase” hanging, unimaginatively and perfectly, in the staircase.  And there was an exuberant Florine Stettheimer canvas with a loony frame tucked into a dead-end hallway within one of the larger galleries.  Each time I reached this painting, after winding my way there through larger, more monumental works, it gave me a jolt of happiness.  It was in just the right place.

PRT (Personal Rapid Transit) systems, which convey passengers along tracks in automated battery-powered pods, like a high-tech ski lift, offer a visionary solution to our reliance on fossil fuels.  These systems are about 50% more energy efficient than buses or trains, and give riders a greater sense of privacy.  For decades PRT’s have been the province of far-sighted urban planners and science fiction.  Now they’re becoming a reality as prototype systems are installed at Heathrow Airport in London and in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi.

While I’m open-minded about all of it I can’t imagine how the systems would work in a city as dense as New York, which would require a spaghetti-like mess of tracks everywhere to accommodate the numbers of people who use mass transit.  And I can’t imagine how the systems would work for longer rides, where being trapped inside a small space with other people you may or may not know would be its own form of torture.  Unlike a ski-lift, or a car, there’s no sense of personal freedom.  And the engineers have got to design tracks and pods that people will want to step into, that don’t look like rolling toasters.

I just saw the construction site for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, which is slated to open, somewhat ominously, on 11-11-11.  The concrete foundations, framing, and much of the roofing are up.  The museum, by Cambridge, Massachusetts architect Moshe Safdie, consists of eight unique, pod-like structures strung around a huge pool of water.  It’s stunning that a new museum like this, similar in scale to the Getty Center, is taking shape in the middle of this small Arkansas town, within an undisturbed Ozarks forest.  Less stunning is the strange, artless geometry of the structures.  

Although it’s the name of a nearby spring, “Crystal Bridges” seems New Agey and vaguely evangelical, not artsy at all.  Perhaps we can be grateful that Alice Walton, the Wal-Mart heiress who founded the museum and just blessed it with a $800,000,000 endowment, didn’t want to call it the Alice Walton Museum of American Art.  The artwork is strong for a new collection.  There are some great twentieth-century canvases and an original James Turrell Skyscape, which is housed in its own separate structure.  A new art museum, whatever its aspect, is always a good thing.