Last night was a giddy night for TV watchers, with an important Giants game, a new episode of Downton Abbey, and the Golden Globe Awards on all at once.  I watched the awards show, thinking I could catch Downton in a rebroadcast and the Giants (fearless prediction) in the SuperBowl.  It wasn’t until I spotted Viggo Mortensen at the Globes with a MLK pin on his tuxedo lapel that I remembered that it was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.  Octavia Spencer mentioned Dr. King in her acceptance speech, but no one else at the ceremony took note of the holiday, the man, or his mission.  I thought the pin was a perfect gesture.  The image of Viggo wearing it was tweeted and posted online immediately, and included on television fashion recaps the next day.  It seemed more than merely fashion, as it does sometimes when actors in formal dress sport red ribbons, pink ribbons, and flag pins.  Because Viggo has a history of political concern and unorthodoxy (he endorsed Dennis Kucinich in 2008), the gesture seemed heartfelt.  And the small pin, which simply spelled out M-L-K, was discrete and pointed.

But where did this pin come from?  Are we a culture that can’t behold any feeling, any memory, any idea, until it’s transformed into a product?  It was unseemly to me when, before the holidays, Barack Obama kept tweeting about giftable Obama for America merchandise like a coffee mug with his birth certificate on it (“Made in America” ), and another with a likeness of the Vice President (“Cup of Joe”).  Of course Dr. King, who possessed an awesome personal dignity, died before he and his movement could profit financially from his likeness.  But his family has been accused of peddling his legacy by copyrighting works like the “I Have a Dream” speech, and friends have attempted to profit by selling his letters and other documents.  The Martin Luther King Jr. National Monument that was unveiled last summer on the lawn in Washington DC depicts him with pharaonic authority.  And while the representation is richly-deserved it seems cliched, not getting at the complexity and difficulty of his work.  The best way to honor him might be to think long and hard about what he did, and to keep doing it.

At a reception at the University Club earlier this week I met a gentleman who’d visited Udaipur and stayed at the Taj Palace.  “The rooms were so incredibly ornamental,” he said, “you couldn’t tell where the walls ended and the decoration began."  That’s an apt description of the Club itself.  Built by McKim Mead and White in 1893, it’s the most sumptuous of the city’s turn of the century university and athletic clubs.  Stepping inside off the midtown sidewalk is like stepping into ancient Rome or, rather, a city sophisticate’s fantasy of ancient Rome.  The broad, atrium-like entrance hall is populated with gigantic Doric columns, cut from a heavily-figured green marble and topped with gilded capitals.  And that’s just the beginning.  There’s the seventh floor Dining Room and the ground floor Reading Room: high, sweeping, French-flavored halls that span the entire depth of the building.  The Club’s most celebrated space, its Library, modeled on the one at the Vatican, was closed for renovation.  Every surface of every room in the Club is lavishly plastered, trimmed, upholstered and coffered, but the effects fall just short of vulgarity.  The architecture is a sustained, exquisitely calibrated fantasy. 

For whatever reason, there just aren’t many prominent interiors in New York City that transport one this way.  Maybe, on a smaller scale, Philippe Stark’s designs for the lounges at the Paramount and the old Royalton had a similar kind of power.  City interiors are typically governed by good taste and good sense; they aren’t about crafting a fictional space.  Architectural historian Vincent Scully famously declared that when arrived at the original, extraordinary Penn Station (another McKim Mead and White masterwork with Roman strains, modeled after the Baths of Caracalla), "One entered the city like a god."  In contrast Kevin Kieran, one of my professors in architecture school, praised Louis I. Kahn’s work by saying that it made one feel deeply human.  While Kevin’s words will always guide me in making and thinking about architecture, I have to take Scully’s point of view with respect to the University Club.  Walking through the building’s entrance hall to get to the coat check makes one feel, for just a few moments, like an empress.  And that’s a pretty great feeling. 

Vision-impaired, temporarily, from dilating drops administered during a routine eye exam, I stumbled home from the doctor’s office like a movie drunk, navigating by counting blocks, and attaching myself to other pedestrians to cross the street.  I couldn’t read street signs, gauge the distance of oncoming traffic, or see clearly into store windows.   For the hour or so that the drops remained in effect, I was unable to read, write, use my phone, or move around my neighborhood with any degree of confidence.  Powerfully, if only temporarily, disoriented, I came home, sat down, and waited for the effects of the drops to subside.  It all made me acutely appreciative of my eyesight.

At their design triennial last year the Cooper-Hewitt included a pair of self-adjustable eyeglasses designed by Josh Silver for Adaptive Eyewear, a non-profit overseen by the Centre for Vision in the Developing World.  A wearer can adjust the lenses with the turn of a dial to correct refractive problems, without an eye exam or prescription.  Silver was trained as an atomic physicist, but now he’s working to bring improved vision to one billion people internationally before 2020.  A pair of these eyeglasses can be life-changing for someone without access to formal vision care; it’s some kind of gift.  And the frames have a nice retro, Encyclopedia Brown-goes-steampunk feeling.  Elaine Scarry has written about the deep beauty of the light bulb, describing how this seemingly inert object transformed our lives, releasing our bodies and imaginations from darkness.  I’d say that eyeglasses are similarly transformative.

Stepping into the living room of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Little House from 1912, a permanent display at the Met, I thought to myself how ridiculous it was to have a big piece of someone’s house sitting inside the museum. And then, after thinking about it for a bit, I realized that it made a great deal of sense to have a big piece of someone’s house sitting inside the museum if it was a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Wright built hundreds of single-family houses throughout the country during his lifetime, and they’re famously difficult to maintain. Over decades they’ve been plundered for their Wright-designed furnishings, renovated by owners, and punished by the elements. When I visited the Robie House in Chicago ten years ago it was badly peeling and patched, in need of a serious structural and interior overhaul. It was raining heavily that day, and while standing inside the iconic living room, with its dazzling horizontal proportions, I felt incredibly vulnerable, as if the roof and windows might collapse in on me and the other visitors at any moment.

Frank Lloyd Wright did not build his houses to last; it simply was not a priority. In a marvelous essay about Wright’s Jacobs House in his book Strange Details, architectural historian Michael Caldwell outlines Wright’s complicated, cavalier attitude toward construction. Wright wasn’t governed by the same tangle of national and local building and safety codes that architects today are. And he was highly inventive, often incorporating untested building and mechanical systems, driven by overall spatial and sculptural effects rather than soundness.  The Little House, built in Wayzata, Minnesota, was ready to be razed when the Met purchased it in 1972. The house’s library is now on display at the Allentown Art Museum, a hallway at Minneapolis Institute for the Arts, and its remaining furnishings were sold off like parts from a junkyard car. (In 2009 two pairs of windows from the house were resold at Christie’s for $45,00 each, which might be about what the house originally cost to build.) Wright houses are magnificent structures. So if one can’t be maintained properly in situ it makes good sense to move it inside a larger building, or even build a super-structure right over it.