Renzo Piano has become our go-to architect for museums. He designed the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977 with former partners Richard Rice and Richard Rogers and then, solo, the Menil Collection and additions to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the High Museum of Art. The Pompidou Center is a singular piece of work, but the others are tasteful, intelligent and unobtrusive structures that generally stay out of the way of the artwork. So nothing prepared me for the power of Piano’s addition to the Morgan Library, which opened in 2006 but I saw for the first time last week. I’ve passed its discrete, metal-clad entrance on Madison Avenue countless times and simply walked on by, so unprepossessing did it seem from the sidewalk.

But the interior is commanding, a place where pristine cartesian space rules. Piano’s addition, which serves as a lobby and cafe, connects three existing Morgan buildings, including the original Charles Mckim-designed museum from 1903. Piano imagined the new building as a perfect cube and there’s a a geometric rigor in its details and construction as well as its proportions. This modest glass box (it’s only about about eighteen feet high) gave me more pleasure than any other modern building I’ve visited in New York City. My favorite parts are the framelesss glass elevator cabs (they’re also cubes) that rise and fall musically, and seemingly effortlessly, on exposed pistons. American architects continually grumble that their clients prefer traditional styles and that their contractors can’t build finely. This building shows otherwise.

April 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses

A new play, Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, takes the controversial closing of the Natural History Museum at Amherst College in 2001 as its subject. That neat, brick box, called the Appleton Cabinet, was subsequently converted into luxe student dorms. In the play the woolly mammoth skeletons that reside inside serve as emblems of historical time, personal evolution, and our own artfully-concealed yet always-stirring animal natures. When I attended a reading of the play I had no real scientific knowledge of woolly mammoths and also a surprisingly clear image of them. I pictured them as clumsy, plundering beasts that made their home in snowy nether regions.

What was missing from my vision were the animal’s most salient feature, their enormous, gravity-defying, corkscrew-twisted tusks. Our images of woolly mammoths are fantasies, not so different in their speculation than our images of unicorns and mermaids. In dioramas the woollies are typically depicted as friendly, hairy elephants, and in scientific illustrations as noble monsters. My favorite image might be the skeletons themselves, which make them seem like big horses with fancy tusks. It’s a happy fantasy.

April 26, 2012 by Nalina Moses

I came of age and came to New York before Sex and the City, so I was spared the ungodly standards of glamor that show established. SATC inspired a whole generation of young women to move here and run around in super-high heels and super-expensive clothes. That’s one kind of fabulous, to be sure, but for me the deep glamor of the city lies elsewhere: in street life, in slang, and in the secret spaces of the city.

I’ve attended line-ups at a midtown precinct, a runway show at Lincoln Center, play-off games at Shea and Yankee Stadiums, a two-dollar burlesque revue at a basement lounge in the Village, and a Star Wars themed party on an East Harlem rooftop. Each time I felt that I was in a privileged place very close to the heart of the city, as I did again last month at a cocktail reception on the forty-fourth floor of Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower in midtown. From photographs and firsthand accounts I knew all about the building’s skewed feng shui escalator, the deafening lobby waterfall, and the look-at-me diamond-patterned exoskeleton, but nothing prepared me for the awesome urban glamor of the event space. To the north there was the entire spread of Central Park, unfurled like the map of a medieval kingdom. To the south there were the blocks of the west side, lit up with a phosphorescent glow. The space wasn’t huge but the canted columns and glass made it feel, somehow, as if we were not enclosed, as if we were floating free above the city. That felt pretty spectacular.

April 24, 2012 by Nalina Moses

It’s hard work being modern, and it must have been especially so for the Steins. Siblings Gertrude, Michael and Leo were middle-class Americans, heirs to a modest fortune, who moved to Paris at the turn of the twentieth century determined to find the future. They attended exhibitions, held salons, and amassed an astounding collection of early modern paintings by Matisse, Picasso and their contemporaries that’s on view now at the Met. Then, as a kind of coup de grace, the Steins commissioned what might be the most modern house ever, the Villa Garches by Le Corbusier.

Tucked deep inside the exhibit, in the corner of a small gallery, there’s a one-minute loop of vintage black and white film footage documenting the house. The clips (like everybody’s home movies, they’re tilted, jittery and out-of-focus) show kids running around in the yard and adults parading about in their finery rather than the house itself, which looks like a big, white spaceship that just landed behind them. The house still looks terrifically modern, a complex, idealized concoction of planes, ramps and ribbon windows. In the film footage the Steins, wearing heavy wools, hose and hats, look like Victorians lost in a future that’s not their own. Their foresight and fearlessness is remarkable.

April 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses