I’m a girl who is in love with her books, all her books: super-sized art books, life-changing novels, and tattered, secondhand paperbacks from college.  I live with them in piles, on shelves, and lying randomly throughout my home. Then last year, to save trees, I started reading the newspaper on a tablet, and then, because it was easier than running to the library, I started reading newly-released books on a tablet, and then, when I was packing for a summer getaway and realized that I was, suddenly, freed from lugging a separate tote bag with magazines and paperbacks, I had a revelation.  Who really needs books?

Now I’ve arrived at a more moderate position. Last night I downloaded a new novel onto my tablet, settled into my couch, and was poised to dive in when I realized that this book looked exactly like every the other book I’ve ever read on my tablet. I’m ready to surrender the pleasures of a physical book for the convenience of a tablet: an evocative dust jacket, the satisfaction of moving through a stack of pages, and the comforting bulk of the thing in you lap. But I’m frustrated with the reading software my library uses, that reduces a book to a stream of text without graphic hierarchy.  This makes it possible to download an entire book in less than a minute, which is important for accessibility.  But it renders all books in an identical font and format, so that War and Peace  looks exactly like Huckleberry Finn looks exactly like Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?  The software offers ways for a reader to adjust font size, screen brightness, and page orientation, but none to adjust page width and line spacing. The software simply floods the screen with text, and wading through it requires a special tenacity. The New Yorker and McSweeney’s have luscious, graphics-heavy apps that capture the feeling of physical issues of those magazine, but they require downloading files that are a hundred times the size of a book on my tablet.  This is one solution. But there has got to be a middle ground, a way to set font, kerning and paragraphs within an easily downloadable text file, so that each e-book is something special.

I subscribe to the myth, still.  I believe that Modernism is something entirely divorced from what went before, a historical rupture, a revolution.  But the  exhibit celebrating reknown nineteenth-century New York furniture maker Duncan Phyfe on view now at the Met makes it seem much less so. Phyfe opened his workshop in 1794 and died in 1854.  His work impresses because, like a lot of great work, while it seems absolutely of its time it also looks far forward.

As displayed in the small, open, interconnected galleries in the museum’s American Wing, adjacent to the work of his contemporaries, Phyfe’s pieces have a singular assurance. They are finer, smarter and less fussy, with more elemental profiles. And they are stronger, more fit, than the other Victorian pieces, which seem to be drowning in their own over-ripe Gothic and classical embellishments, some so much so that it’s hard to determine what purpose they serve.  Is that a side table or an umbrella stand?  A console or a bench.  After taking in the Phyfe exhibit my friend and I walked through galleries packed with Arts and Craft, Art Deco and Shaker treasures, arriving finally at the museum’s famous Frank Lloyd Wright-designed period room. The Duncan Phyfe exhibit was a perfect overture. 

The Shard

(photography by Jeffrey Kilmer)

Far removed from China and the Middle East, where super-tall buildings are sprouting like weeds, there’s a spectacular 1,017-foot tall, 72-story glass tower taking shape. It’s the London Shard, under construction in the south side of the city near London Bridge. Designed by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the Shard will be Europe’s tallest building. But unlike so many other contemporary skyscrapers, which are obsessed with sheer height, the Shard has rather complex ambitions. Its state-of-the-art frame and cladding systems were designed to maximize energy and materials conservation. Its planning, begun in 2000, was refined after 9/11 to incorporate stringent fireproofing and exit guidelines. And it wasn’t conceived as a stack of office floors but as a kind of vertical village, with atriums to connect interior spaces. The tower will house offices below and, above them, restaurants, a hotel, and observation galleries. Right now floor framing has been completed and cladding and construction of the pinnacle are underway, with the building scheduled for completion in May 2012.

Though the Shard won’t challenge skyscrapers like the Burj Khalifa or the Shanghai World Financial Center in height, it’s bound to eclipse them in character. Similar to One World Trade Center in New York City, which is also in mid-construction, the Shard has gently canting walls that give it a distinctive, pyramid-like shape. But it has a much smaller, triangular footprint than the New York tower, and doesn’t resolve itself into a neat geometry. Its sides will taper to slender, asymmetrical panes at the very top that pull away from the core like petals. Renzo Piano is renown for making buildings with simple, striking volumes and finely-layered glass skins, so there’s little doubt that the Shard’s exterior shell will be beautifully rendered. Its tall, attenuated profile will furnish a fresh icon for the city. And the tower will make a graceful partner for the faceted, cigar-shaped tower that architect Norman Foster built in 2003 across the river at 30 St. Mary Axe, better known as the Gherkin. Like that other tower, the Shard will wear its not-entirely-flattering nickname with pride.

Although I missed the display of Elizabeth Taylor’s clothing and jewelry at Christie’s, I was able to see Robert Rauschenberg’s private art collection at the Gagosian just before it closed. It’s eclectic but unsurprising. There are some Native American artifacts and some Americana. There’s a great four-panel Marilyn painting by Andy Warhol, and an intimate, book-sized wood assemblage by Damien Hirst. And there are lots and lots of drawings, which seem to have been exchanged among Rauschenberg and his artist friends (including Cy Twombly, Brice Marden, John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Trisha Brown) like postcards. Walking through the gallery I thought to myself, it’s good to have a lot of artist friends.

I liked Marden’s proto-architectural drawings, which clung tightly and intriguingly to the thin, hard line between abstraction and figuration. But I was most intrigued by the drawings by choreographers Trisha Brown and Merce Cunningham. The two drawings by Brown are composite images of moving body parts – feet in one, and hands in the other – that capture the flickering meanings folded into a single gesture. Merce’s drawings are more like scratchings, incorporating musical notation, sketches of the human figure, line diagrams, and text, all in order to capture, on a sheet of paper, with pen and ink, a dance. These seem less like drawings than like notes Cunningham is making for himself. Although there are codified notation systems to record dance, is it an exercise in futility? Dance might simply be something that cannot be held on the page.