BARNRAISING

As architects Herzog and de Meuron were designing the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, Long Island in the late naughts, the stock market plunged and, along with it, their budget, from 80 to 26.2 million dollars. They turned this calamity to advantage and deeply reimagined the original design, for nineteen individual sheds clustered together like a village, as two long conjoined sheds lying side-by-side. The simplified structure, completed in 2012, is dazzling. Inspired by local vernacular barns, its generous scale and gentle landscaping make for an elegant and unpressured art experience.

To be sure, these are no ordinary sheds. Their shells are a severe poured concrete, their roofs are lined with a high-grade honey-hued plywood, their trusses are zealously detailed, and their interior proportions are more zen-like than barn-like. But the museum is sited at a distance from the road and set in a meadow of high grasses, so that its profile remains inconspicuous. (A friend who drives through Water Mill frequently told me she only noticed the building last summer, when an artist installed lit panels along its street-facing facade.)

That Herzog and De Meuron reconceived the building so deeply to meet costs is admirable, and speaks to their architectural savvy. The museum doesn’t feel reduced. Compare this building to another suburban starchitect project, SANAA’s River Building at Grace Farms, which opened in 2015 at a rumored cost of 150 million dollars. The facility, a series of small glass pavilions built with triple-glazed uniquely curving glass panels and flush metal roofs with concealed gutters, yields a fraction of the usable space and occupies the site like a cartoon spaceship. Compared to that pretty folly the Parrish scores points for pragmatism and plainspeaking. This building feels right at home within the flat lands and old New England spirit of the South Fork.

Photograph copyright Iwan Baan.

September 24, 2018 by Nalina Moses

CHARACTER STUDY

I have a friend who’s so radically plainspoken that what he says often slides unintentionally into comedy or tragedy. I thought of him while viewing the small fine exhibit of Chaim Soutine’s paintings at the Jewish Museum, Flesh. Soutine is reknown for his still-lifes of slabs of meat and dead animals. As painted surfaces, they are incredibly charismatic. The impasto, in bold, often garish, hues, makes a scarred, shimmering skin. Their views are so dramatically foreshortened so that the objects crowd the air out of the space, leaving little relief.

Yet these bloody views are also darkly funny. They have the format of heroic paintings. The meat paintings are nearly life-size, and the smaller tabletop still-lives are enlarged. But each one takes subject matter that is not heroic and trumps it up without any deeper connotations. There are no confused and whirling passions here, are those brewing beneath the similarly opulent oil surfaces of Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon. Soutine simply seems interested in these objects before him – herrings on a plate, a vase of dried flowers, a dead hare, a group of slaughtered birds.

His unwavering attention to the objects themselves contributes to the power of the image but does not elevate the subject. This dead cow is not a metaphor for the devastation wrought by the wars in Europe; this is just a dead cow. And Chaim pictures all objects with the same intensity. Two forks lying across a plate of herring seem trembling with life; they’re as vivid and characterful as human arms. In the end these paintings give vibrant testimony to the painter’s personality – his peculiar view of the physical world – than to the world around him.

Chaim Soutine, Still Life with Herrings, c. 1916. Oil on canvas. Larock-Granoff Collection, Paris.

September 23, 2018 by Nalina Moses

SQUARED

I ended my European vacation perfectly, in Berlin, with a visit to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s Neuer Pavillon at the Schloss Charlottenburg. This small villa, set a five-minute walk from the palace, was built for King Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1824 as a private retreat. I had visited once before, more than twenty years ago, in the fall, and photographed its handsome neoclassial exterior against bare trees. The building has since been fully restored and reopened in 2011 as a museum devoted to Schinkel and his work.

The building has a nine-square plan, with a staircase at its center leading to a second floor. As one steps into the front vestibule this geometric order becomes perfectly clear. Each square is a single room and each room is generously proportioned, so that a group of three or four can sit inside comfortably. The interiors, which were restored to their original finishes, are surprisingly opulent. Each corner room has its own strong signature color scheme, with coordinating draperies and upholstery. One chamber is blood red, one sky blue, and one mint green. And each one is furnished with period-appropriate display cases, chairs and tables, in dark polished wood. (None of them are as refined as the chairs Schinkel himself designed, which are displayed in a gallery on the second floor.)

This supremely traditional building feels, somehow, coolly modern. Its nine-square organization provides logical structure and circulation while allowing each room to maintain its own identity, creating drama as one moves from one to the next. One is delighted to walk all the way around a floor and then once again. The building’s exterior, as taut as a drum, is cleanly organized, with high narrow openings that don’t disrupt the integrity of the single volume. This building, rigorous in plan and modest in its facades, opens up to generous accommodations. It’s a lesson in the richness and complexity possible within geometric restraint.

September 09, 2018 by Nalina Moses

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT

The greatest pleasure of the Acropolis is the Erechtheum, the small temple perched at its north edge, across from the Parthenon. This structure, the last built on the site, housed an ancient wood statue of Athena and shrines for other deities including Hephaistos, Poseidon and Erechthios (from whom the building took its name).

Its architecture reflects these multiple purposes. It looks like a collection of small structures built over time, each with its own ground plane, scale and orientation. It doesn’t possess an authoritative front, back or center, although its famous northwest porch, supported by six female caryatids, gives it an extraordinary imaginative charge. It is intimate in spirit, and invites a visitor to approach it from every angle, explore each of its corners, climb each of its steps, and stand inside each of its shadows.

The Erechtheum takes strength in contrast to the Parthenon. It is eccentric rather than unified, lyrical rather than bombastic, charming rather than overpowering. The Parthenon, although ravaged, remains iconic; its array of massive swelling columns gives it an unassailable sculptural presence. It is a true monument, a single figure that can taken in all at once. The Erechtheum, instead, is best understood by walking around and through it. Now it is high, now it is dark, now it is mute, and now it is richly expressive. This building is many different things, a fleeting architecture, continually unreeling.

August 17, 2018 by Nalina Moses