DREAMSCAPING

I made the trek to Governors Island this summer, for the first time, with high hopes for the recent redevelopment. I had entered the original design ideas competition over a decade ago, followed news of the final competition, and applauded the National Parks Service for selecting and implementing a master plan by the audacious Dutch firm West8. The heart of their scheme is a park called The Hills, a verdant, rolling landscape that teases and refines views across New York Harbor to the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and Manhattan. Their intitial competition renderings didn’t look like renderings for a city park. They had a kooky golden glow, and showed idiotically smiling New Yorkers roaming through green fields and valleys, carpeted with grass, flowers and shady trees.

So I was surprised to find, instead, a flat field, cut through with a network of bizarrely curving walkways, and punctuated by four scrubby piles of dirt. Lookout Hill, the tallest at 70-feet, has a pile of artfully piled stone blocks along its steep north slope, that leads visitors to a sloping peak from where, behind one, the lower Manhattan skyline is beautifully revealed. From this point one can also see the nineteenth century barracks and forts at the north of the island, maintenance buildings to the east, and the three other hills. Slide Hill features four long metal slides, Grassy Hill features gently sloping fields, and Discovery Hill features richly varied plantings and, at its peak, a Rachel Whiteread sculpture.

Perhaps it’s unfair to judge the park only a month after it’s opened, before its plantings have taken hold and filled the ground. Even my less critical, more botanically-literate companions had trouble imagining what the final groves and fields will feel like. But the design of the park seems severely cerebral, without any of the warmth and weirdness of the renderings, which promised a lush, enveloping ground. It was blisteringly hot during our visit and there were, throughout The Hills, no shaded ground, no permanent water fountains, no permanent restrooms, and only a handful of seats. The Hills doesn’t yet have the grace of the city’s loveliest parks, or the amenities of its roughest.

Image courtesy of West 8.

September 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses

CHILD-PROOF

The Cooper-Hewitt Museum is like a mullet, with a staid canopied visitor entrance in front, on East 91st Street, and a dreamy garden in back, on East 90th Street. That garden is half a block deep, with low trees and shrubs, an open lawn, meandering walkways, and flowering vines tumbling down the back of the building. It had been for paying visitors only until 2015, when the museum completed its renovations and it was opened to the public. The garden offers an intimate alternate to Central Park, which is just across Fifth Avenue. There’s a row of smart orange cafe tables under umbrellas, where one can meet a friend for coffee or wine, and wood benches under trees, where one can slip away with a book.

I stepped inside this Tuesday, after a difficult morning, to unwind before heading home. And I was surprised to find that the place was overrun with small children. Their strollers were lined up along the west fence and their blankets were laid out on the grass. These children weren’t visiting the museum, but had been brought by distracted parents and nannies so that they could run, scream, and snack on the lawn, under the wary gaze of a museum guard, while they themselves stood to one side checking their phones and, in general, checking out.

The garden was designed by a team of heavy-hitters including Walter Hood, Diller Scofidio +Renfro and RAFT. Furnishings are by Yves Behar and Heatherwick Studio. Right now there’s an installation of black and white benches designed by Hood, inspired by Roberto Burle Marx’s iconic curving paving tiles at Rio, that the children were climbing on and jumping off of. A great chunk of our popular culture (television, movies, musical theater) has been given over to children, engineered so that it’s appealing and inoffensive to their eyes and ears. Must this little space – a pocket of high design – be given over too?

August 28, 2016 by Nalina Moses

ONE LIFE ON EARTH

For the launch of Voyager in 1976, NASA commissioned pop-scientist Carl Sagan to create a document that could be carried on board to explain human life on earth. That phonograph, The Golden Record, contains Scenes From Earth (139 scientific diagrams and photographs), Sounds from Earth (21 audio clips), Songs from Earth (27 compositions), and Greetings from Earth (55 audio hellos, including one in whalesong). A copy of the record was left, along with a player, on both the Voyager I and II capsules. They remain aloft, where they might encounter, as Sagan had hoped, “advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space.”

While the idea is terribly moving – that there are beings on other planets that will find our record and become our friends – the documents themselves are not. The scientific diagrams have been simplified graphically, without text and shade, stripped of their musicality and complexity. The photographs are radically inclusive, showing men and women of different ages, cultures and races, but they’re grainy and loosely composed, with a cloying Family of Man sweetness.

The songs are an instant controversy. The playlist includes, correctly, three compositions by Bach and, incorrectly, no Beatles song. (EMI didn’t allow Sagan to use “Here Comes the Sun.”) The sounds are mundane but poignant, perhaps because they’ve been curated and recorded so painstakingly. Their listing alone goes a way to capture the Whitmanesque texture of life on earth (…”Chimpanzee/Wild Dog/Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter”)

There’s a famous scene at the end of Manhattan when Woody Allen lists those things that make life worth living, and while it’s solipsistic and culturally specific, it’s true. For each one of us there are certain things (a shade of blue, a flavor of hard candy, a pop song, a rainstorm) that rupture the texture of everyday life and, for whatever reason, carry great meaning. When compiling The Golden Record Sagan was striving for a universal comprehensibility and comprehensiveness. What if, instead, he had reached for personal power: astronomical problems, a favorite poem, a town he dreamed of visiting, his childhood home. That record would not have given us life on earth, but one life on earth, and that would have been enough.

Image courtesy of NASA.

August 14, 2016 by Nalina Moses

ONE FOR ALL

A new exhibit at FIT, Uniformity, assembles notable work, athletic, and military uniforms, and the high fashions they’ve inspired. There are beautiful uniforms here: a 1942 US Womens naval reserve skirtsuit by Mainbocher, an embellished nineteenth-century British mess jacket, and a dark 1920′s Marymount school dress with a sky blue collar and bow. And there are beautiful couture garments, including a twisting, one-shouldered, princess-seamed corset dress by John Galliano for Dior, in silk camouflage. The most joyful garments on display are TWA flight attendant outfits from 1975 designed by Stan Herman, polyester separates in cherry red, mustard yellow, cobalt blue, and flecked oatmeal, that can be mixed, crazily, at will. They hardly seem like uniforms.

But when happens when uniforms are intended to, and do, foster conformity? Thom Browne’s 2009 Mens show gets at the potentially sinister underpinnings. Browne dresses 41 models in identical grey flannel suits, raincoats, brogues and briefcases, and sends 40 of them to sit in neat rows of desks. They enter in file, hang their coats on stands, pull on sweaters, sit down, and type. Their leader, seated in front, facing them, at an identical desk, remains half a step ahead, dictating their rhythms. The set piece is hypnotic, and not without charm. As the leader rings a bell to mark the lunch break, each man opens his attache and pulls out a sandwich and an apple from a brown paper bag.

Browne’s suits are a skillful reinvention, and caricature, of the prep school uniform and the white collar suit. The trousers are famously short, and the jackets fit tight around the torso and under the arms, giving the men who wear them an innocent, adolescent appeal. But all the men in the 2009 show are young, tall, slender, and, except for one, white. Their striped white sweater armbands, brylecreemed hair, vacant stares, and unchallenged submission call to mind Nazi youth. A uniform, without freedom, quickly becomes hegemony.

Photo courtesy of Thom Browne.

August 01, 2016 by Nalina Moses