My first toehold in New York City was a summer internship during college at the public art gallery operated by the Department of Cultural Affairs.  Both the Department and the gallery were housed at 2 Columbus Circle, the famous Edward Durell Stone building at the southwest corner of Central Park.  It was built as a private museum in 1965, acquired by the city 1980, and then, with some controversy, sold in 2005 and renovated to house the Museum of Art and Design.  For three months I sat at a desk on a narrow, cluttered balcony on the eighth floor, whose only ventilation and natural light was admitted through plate-sized portholes at the corners.  I inspected sheets of slides submitted by artists and wrote rejection letters explaining that while their work was very, very good, we just wouldn’t be able to show it at the gallery.  It was a job I was good at.  And the great, ostentatious interior gave my endeavors a whiff of artistic authenticity.  I wasn’t sure if the building was good, but I knew that it was architecture.

Last month I heard Hicks Stone, Edward Durell Stone’s son, speak about his father, who’s work he’s just commemorated in a monograph.  Hicks is an architect too, and took great pains to compare his father’s work, building by building, to the work of more celebrated contemporaries like Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright.  Hicks was trying to legitimize his father’s work, which was considered too ornamental, too excessive, and just too bizarre to be part of the modern canon.  While Hick’s efforts are poignant they’re disappointing, because he’s not looking entirely clearly at his father’s work.  Right now, when we’re all mindlessly nostalgic about mid-century modernism, might be the perfect moment to look back at Stone’s work, which challenges the proprieties of High Modernism.  Herbert Muschamp (who has unpacked the history of the building brilliantly) relates 2 Columbus Circle to the Venetian Gothic and to Ruskin.  Whatever it’s fundamental failings (like lack of light and air), the structure has got drama and glamor in spades.  It’s ultra-modern and also highly artistic.  Thirty years ago Tom Wolfe, in From Bauhaus to Our House, upheld Stone as a great modern American architect who didn’t get his due.  That’s still true.

Years ago, for a second-semester project in architecture school, I drew the interior perspective of a cafe space with saucers and cups on each table.  My critic was so shocked when she saw it that she started laughing.  An architectural drawing is supposed to be the facts of the building, a description of what it is, and nothing more.  It’s up to the architectural rendering, which has crasser, more commercial, connotations, to present the image of the building, a projection of what the life inside it is like.  The drawings of the late modern American architect Ralph Rapson, who lived and worked in Minneapolis, dance in the gap between the two.  While they’re accurate dimensionally and proportionally, like proper drawings, they also capture all-at-once the mythology of the building.

Repson’s drawings are cartoon-like but held in check by the conventions of architectural drawing – standard hatch patterns to indicate materials like wood and stone, and carefully constructed perspective lines – that describe the structures with a designer’s clarity and certainty.  His drawings have more life, more joy, than conventional architectural renderings, especially contemporary, computer-generated renderings, with their elegant, hyper-real chill.  Rapson has a heavier, more sensual hand than an architect.  Every line carries substance and shadow.  Unlike Le Corbusier’s renderings, for example, which are only populated by abstract, big-limbed scale figures, like Le Modulor, Rapson’s are populated with ladies and gentleman, children, animals and vehicles, all going about their business.  They’re brimming with activity.  It could reflect a distinctly American, suburban, postwar joy.  And it could be the pleasure of drawing.

One afternoon last week I saw something on the subway I’d never seen before, a woman in a burqa, a full body robe, and a niqab, a face veil that leaves only the eyes uncovered.  Her robes were a heavy black cotton but her veil was a silver-grey chiffon, so that you could see the shape of her nose and her long, dark hair underneath.  It was a young woman, I think, maybe a college student.  She paired her robes with sensible leather boots and a knee-length parka, and carried a canvas tote bag full of books.  After taking a seat she pulled a galley out of her bag and began to read.

Of course the whole purpose of the burqa is to dampen a woman’s physical allure, but I couldn’t keep my eyes off this woman.  I wanted to know who she was, where she was going, and what she was reading.   Nicolas Szarkosy, famously and controversially, made it illegal for women to wear the burqa in France earlier this year, saying that it concealed their identities and threatened national security.  The move was interpreted as both colonialist and feminist.  One positive thing about the ban, I think, is that it encourages women from immigrant communities to participate in civic culture.  There was nothing suspicious, or even conspicuous, about the woman I saw on the subway.  Surrounded by high school students and construction workers on their way home, she attracted little attention from anyone besides me.  But even the most cursory online search for burqa pulls up images of women in garments that resemble Klansmen’s robes, and that leave them faceless and voiceless.  Maybe it’s a decision best left to each woman.

At the public library, searching for a copy of Sigmund Freud’s case histories, I found many shelves devoted to this writings.  There were enough volumes to fill a room.  In addition to practicing medicine, proselytizing for psychoanalysis, and caring for a family with six children, Freud wrote.  He wrote scientific and scholarly articles about analysis, medicine, art, literature and his own life.  It’s hard to imagine a practicing doctor today finding the time to sit and write like that, or even to sit and think like that.  It was a different time, and Freud was a different kind of doctor. 

Freud corresponded with colleagues, friends and patients too.  He wrote letters, by hand, in French and English as well as German, in a florid, looping script that leans dramatically to the right.  That slant is an indicator, apparently, of “acute intelligence,” one that’s single-minded and that does not easily admit other points of view.  It’s very different, for example, from Karl Jung’s more hesitant, perpendicular handwriting, which indicates a “profound intelligence,” one broader and more open to influence.  I much prefer Freud’s writing, an inky, artful mess, to Jung’s childlike horizontal scrawl.  I especially like the way Freud’s letters are crammed together on the page.  It’s baroque, passionate and personal.  It’s as if he’s in a rush to get out the flood of words, that is, of thoughts, and as if he finds physical pleasure in the act of writing.  His work relied deeply on language, and this shows in his hand.