A very fashionable friend of mine was vacationing in Greece last month, and crafted a special laurel-leaf headdress from gold foil to wear when he visited the Acropolis. He looked godly in it, so much so that the security guards at the Parthenon asked him to take it off to honor the sacred nature of the site. Another thing the authorities might want to do, if they’re so concerned, is to protect the building properly while it’s being restored.

My friend’s photos captured the timeless appeal of the Acropolis buildings, showing piles of bleached stone against a dazzling blue sky, on a cliff high above the city. They also showed how vulnerable the Parthenon, the site’s chief attraction, is. Right now there are two construction cranes inside it, a web of steel scaffolding running through it, and, all around it, in post-apocalyptic disarray, piles of rubble and cut stone, scraps of ornamental sculpture, and three melon-sized canon balls from what looks like a nineteenth-century military attack. All these things are lying around unmarked, untagged, and uncovered, giving the place the feeling of a sunny junkyard. I remember a devastating piece 60 Minutes aired six months before the Athens Summer Olympics in 2004, which showed sheep grazing in the field where the new stadium would be. A spokesman for the Greeks explained cheerfully that this was “the Greek way,” to work without too much anxiety and bring everything together at the end. I hope there’s a similar magic guiding this project.

Photo by Robert Quadrini

October 03, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) has mounted an exhibit about Doris Duke’s Hawaiian pleasure palace Shangri La. Duke built the estate in Honolulu in the 1930’s, when she was a young woman, to house her expanding collection of Islamic art and artefacts. She built it in a broadly Islamic style, consulting designers in Iran and India to complete ornamental stone and wood work. But the estate is less impressive for its design, which is modern in plan and pastiche in detail, than for its ambition. It’s Duke’s innocent enthusiasm for all things Islamic that lights up the place.

It’s easy to dismiss the entire project as a rich girl’s fantasy of Islam, a term that’s used in the exhibit wall texts to describe any culture in the world that has come into historical contact with the religion. There are on display pieces from Spain, North Africa, Iran, Turkey and North India. One elegant wood table with white stone inlay and curved steel supports is attributed, hilariously, to “India (Goa), or Venice." (My guess is Venice, because the ornament depicts human figures with a expressiveness that’s highly unusual for Indian art.) There are some exquisite ceramics, tapestries and jewelry, but the quality of the work is irregular. The most powerful items are large format vintage color photographs that show views of the rooms and courtyard in delirious technicolor. Here two fantasies collide: the stately, sensuous Islamic palace and the easy, idyllic Hawaiian landscape. It seems strange that Duke traveled so far away, to a place with its own marvelously exotic history, only to bring another kind of exotic to it. But I admire Duke for choosing the fantasy of Islam. For a privileged young American woman in the 1930’s, it was highly original. Walking through the exhibit, one senses that it hit her hard.

Photo by Horst from Vogue, 1966.

October 01, 2012 by Nalina Moses

The Eye Has to Travel, a documentary about the life of legendary Vogue and Harpers Bazaar editor Diana Vreeland, a hero of mine, is aptly named. It roams between magazine layouts, family photos, fashion shows, feature films, newsreel footage, television appearances, and contemporary interviews. The movie scatters itself over so many places that it’s virtually impossible to detect what Vreeland accomplished: she made beauty the eighth virtue. Her own books, D.V. and Allure, remain more powerful representations of who she was.

It’s fun in the film to see off-the-radar tastemakers like Penelope Tree and Veruschka talk about working with the great lady. [Spoiler alert: it wasn’t easy.] But it’s pointless to hear, over and over again, from other fashion celebrities, what a legendary kook she was. Perhaps because I knew so much about Vreeland beforehand I feel the movie didn’t bring me any closer to her. It certainly didn’t capture what she did best in her magazine work, which was to show us beauty where we hadn’t found it before. Towards the end of the film one of the interviewees (it might be John Fairchild), throws his hands up in the air and says, “She understood the genius of vulgarity,” and I imagined that the movie might then show us how she cared so little for good taste and instead veered toward melodrama and the baroque. But this insightful comment gets lost in a montage of similarly spicy quotes. It gives us a lot of people, including Vreeland herself, talking about her ideas about fashion instead of showing them to us.

September 22, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At a private talk earlier this week, I heard an executive who had led one of the public agencies that’s rebuilding the World Trade Center site praise the “non-monumentality” of the current plans. He spoke proudly of his own role in changing the tenor of the project from one of high-design fervor, inspired by architect Daniel Libeskind’s original site plan, to a more pragmatic one, which is chiefly concerned with completing construction. He listed some key decisions that the city had made with his guidance that tempered artistic ambition and made it possible to move things forward, including fast-tracking construction of the National 9/11 Memorial and simplifying the design of Santiago Calatrava’s new transit station by adding columns inside the main hall.

He was a persuasive, intelligent man, but as he spoke my insides churned. We can’t afford to be sentimental about rebuilding at this site, and we don’t need to build the world’s tallest building here to show them, but can’t we try to do something great? This is an important site at the heart of the city’s historical and financial districts that’s giving us the opportunity to build a new neighborhood all at once. Oftentimes, and especially in architecture, what we want to be great ends up going all wrong. But why are we starting out by doing something that’s deliberately less than great? Libeskind’s vision for the site would have been complex to execute, but it had been selected by both city leaders and the general public. One of Calatrava’s signature soaring, rib-cage structures might not be appropriate for this site, but why did the city commission one from him and then lampoon it by sticking columns inside? I remember the rogue scheme Donald Trump presented to the press, shortly after Libeskind’s plan had been chosen, to rebuild both original towers one story higher. As I sat listening to this other, powerful city player praise non-monumentality, the Donald’s outsized ambitions for the site site seemed perfectly sane.

September 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses