SHAKY FOUNDATIONS

Before they were awarded the Pritzker Prize in 2010, the Japanese architecture office SANAA accepted a commission from the non-profit organization Grace Farms in Greenwich, Connecticut to build their new facility. That structure consists of five pod-like glass chambers, spread across a gently rising meadow, strung together with a low, snaking, metal canopy. The form, which seems ludicrously naive in drawings and models – cartoon futurism – makes a building that’s both audaciously contemporary and entirely tranquil. The curved glass walls, turning canopy, and flat gravel path are detailed and constructed simply, without calling attention to their assembly, and achieve a radical transparency. So that when one steps inside a chamber it’s as if the structure, and oneself, are suspended in union with the landscape.

What’s not quite clear is what the program of these building are. Grace Farms is not, as many believe, an artistinal farm, and it’s not a church. Its website is deliberately vague, stating only that the facility serves five purposes: nature, arts, justice, community and faith. What’s known publicly is that Grace Farms is a non-profit foundation, with a board made of of local hedge-fund managers and their spouses, that raised about 35 million dollars to buy this land and about another 50 million dollars to build this facility. The glass pods are used rather loosely. Inside the Pavilion a young woman brews teas from blossoms collected on the site. Inside the Court teenagers play basketball. Inside the Sanctuary locals gather for religious services every Sunday morning. Inside the Library activists meet to discuss human trafficking and visitors browse the bookstore. These spaces and the grounds can also be rented out for events.

Grace Farms is an inventive and uncompromised piece of architecture by a major talent. And it gives gorgeous counterpoint to Philip Johnson’s Glass House, which is just miles away. But it’s not strongly shaped by program and has no sense of utility. During the design of a building, pragmatic concerns (e.g. square footage, building codes, storage, circulation) typically upset a conceptual design but, almost always, also enrich it, give it texture and complexity. It’s this process of irritation – worldly realities rubbing up against platonic form – that distinguishes architecture from other arts. Here, at Grace Farms, there don’t seem to be pressing concerns other than diversion. It’s a lot of architecture for not much use, a delirious, dreamy folly.

Photograph © Iwan Baan. Courtesy of Iwan Baan and Grace Farms Foundation.

October 15, 2016 by Nalina Moses

LIKE NOTHING BEFORE

Is there anything left in fashion that is truly transgressive, any taboo that’s been left untouched? Last month, for his Spring 2017 ready-to-wear collection, Hood by Air (HBA) designer Shayne Oliver delivered powerfully disruptive designs that overturned conventions of gender, class, race and taste. HBA makes sophisticated separates (sweatshirts, track pants, hooker heels, hightops) for knowing young creatives. At a time when many designers (Rick Owens, Kanye West) present high fashion with street inflections, HBA brings street-wise clothes into the world of high fashion.

HBA garments make a bigger impression on the runway than they do in ads and on real people. At first glance the ensembles look like outrageous feats of styling. Models in the recent show wore minimal makeup, with hair that was slicked back with Vaseline or capped with a clear, waxy film. They looked as if they’d just awoken after a late, rough night. Men wore long, brilliantly-colored quilted satin robes, the kind boxers wear entering the ring, wide open, over black briefs, with fireman boots. Women wore parachute jumpsuits, in slithering nylon, pulled and belted around the waist like skirts. Both men and women wore cleanly tailored white dress shirts, folded, with black ties, looped around the neck like aprons.

Oliver’s aim is not to shock, but to assert something new and true. He’s a poet, and the garments, in addition to disrupting ideas about gender and grooming, disrupt the fundamental syntax of tailoring. Suit jackets are constructed like garment bags, from clear plastic with rounded shoulders. A pair of fluid silver pants falls straight at the right leg and balloons around the left leg. A womens miniskirt is assembled from three trouser waistbands, with pockets, stacked on top of one another. The most photographed piece of the show – and of all New York Fashion Week – was a pair of cowboy boots, itself a loaded iconography, with backward-facing boots attached at the heel. It’s simple, bold and brilliant. And it’s something we haven’t seen before.

Photo courtesy of Hood by Air.

October 10, 2016 by Nalina Moses

CURLICUED

A small exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt, Fragile Beasts, collects prints with motifs in the spirit of the grotesque. This style has highly specific origins; it was born when ceiling frescoes from the Domus Aurea were uncovered in Rome in the sixteenth century. These elegant, ancient panels are decorated with sepia-colored angels, wrestlers, garlands, centaurs, leopards, and flowering trees, all depicted in profile against a light-filled sky. Grotesque is a baroque style, characterized by curving, curlicued forms that incorporate, very literally, the figures of plants and animals, including humans, so that they seem to be morphing into each other. Grotesque forms have a bizarre half-object half-thing quality; they spring strangely to life, with a tenuous, slithering identity.

The exhibit itself, of small prints displayed behind glass, didn’t hold me. But as I moved through adjoining galleries, with displays of Tiffany glass and Victorian birdcages, and through the museum itself, the old Carnegie Mansion, lined in carved wood panels and lit with decorative iron chandeliers, I felt as if I were submerged in the grotesque. The rich, thick ornament in the objects and the architecture feels animate, as if the place is a living thing. This whirling, stirring quality might not be unique to the grotesque, but characteristic of all premodern art. Before God was in the details, life was in the ornament.

Print, Plate from a Series of Designs for Ewers and Vessels, 1548; Cornelis Floris II (Flemish, ca. 1513-1575); Published by Hieronymus Cock (Netherlandish, ca. 1510-1570); Engravings on paper; Museum purchase through gift of Mrs. John Innes Kane; 1946-3-3. Courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt.

October 08, 2016 by Nalina Moses

NO SO SIMPLE

In lieu of church, I walked to the Met on Sunday morning to see a show of Shaker objects culled from the collection called Simple Gifts. There is an immense maple dining table held together by pin-sized wood dowels. There is a handwoven bolt of wool, just wide enough for a dress, with softly jagged edges, dyed darker than midnight. There is a chair made with such minimal material, and fuss, that it looks like a line drawing of a chair. All these objects are handsome but none has the revelatory, purifying effect I was searching for. They are sort of beautiful and also sort of unremarkable.

What is remarkable is their purposefulness, their unapologetic pragmatism. There are no tchotchkes or decorative pieces here, like those that fill the ceramics, metalworks and furniture halls surrounding the gallery. Each is, instead, made to meet a particular need, and each of its attributes responds to an aspect of that need. A cabinet has drawers just wide enough to store bolts of fabric laid flat. A sewing table has inches marked off along its front lip to reference when cutting patterns. A knit glove has open fingertips so one can sit inside, near the window, on a cold day, and turn the pages of a book.

This pragmatism is strikingly apparent when one steps into the Shaker Retiring Room, just footsteps away. The room is furnished with a constellation of everyday objects, and without any decoration. The atmosphere is sensually spare and dramatically rich, as each object speaks powerfully to its use. There is a desk and chair for writing in a journal and keeping accounts, a rocking chair with a footrest for knitting and mending, a small iron fireplace for heat in winter winter, a bed for sleeping (it’s too narrow for much else) and small high windows to let in light. Each thing is simple in form and rich in life.

Photo courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum.

September 18, 2016 by Nalina Moses