Faith & Form

This afternoon we enjoyed Community Day at Grace Farms in New Canaan, Connecticut. Grace Farms is an 80-acre former horse farm operated by the Grace Farms Foundation, which describes it as a place where people can "experience nature, encounter the arts, pursue justice, foster community, and explore faith." The event was one of several this weekend to mark the inauguration of a new facility.

The architecture of the new complex is quite stunning. Designed by the Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architectural firm SANAA, the main building, known as The River, meanders down the hill in the form of a large, sinuous canopy that "pools" in several areas to enclose programmatic spaces: sanctuary, library, commons, pavilion, court. Its the kind of sinuous modernism I particularly enjoy. My wife described it as "opulent in its minimalism." I quite agree.

Several times during the day, I heard the new facility described as a "gift" to the greater community, and indeed programming for the newly-opened complex already includes use of the sanctuary as the new permanent home of Grace Community Church's Sunday worship services. I had read that the vision for Grace Farms was inspired by the Christian faith, and that it had the intent of house the Grace Community Church, but this last connection was what was curious to me.

I am a Christian and my faith is central to my life. I also value the arts. Since both of these are initiatives of Grace Farms, no problem, right?

In this particular place, though, I was finding it difficult to square faith and art (and more to the point, architecture) in my mind. I was struck by the cognitive dissonance going on in my head as we explored the grounds.

On the one hand, the building is pretty stunning as a work of architecture. Less a building than a pavilion, or even a folly, the architect in me loves the idea of this type of minimalist artistic locus, on the rolling hills, overlooking nature. It's a bit of a romantic notion, I'll admit.

But this is no run-of-the-mill work of architecture. It's a no holds barred, no expenses spared work. I mean, there's hardly a flat piece of glass in the whole place! It takes a lot of expertise and precision, and therefore money, to create something so effortless. Less may be more aesthetically, but it's often more work.

To put it plainly, then, given the extravagance of the building, I couldn't help myself thinking, couldn't the millions and millions of dollars I'm sure it cost be better used elsewhere supporting churches or other faith-based programs? Why spend so much on a facility?

If the complex had been built by a secular arts organization, no problem. But this? Cognitive dissonance.

Here's why I hated that thought in my head, though. Was I suddenly thinking that art and architecture were not a worthy Christian pursuit? The connection between faith and the arts have throughout history produced some amazing things: Cathedrals, Renaissance paintings, Handel's Messiah.

We meandered up the River and found ourselves in the Sanctuary at the top of the hill at the end of the afternoon just in time for a performance.

The first act was a teen pianist who played a Chopin Polonaise. But this wasn't any ordinary teen. The severely autistic teen was a participant in a program called Arts for Healing, where he flourished as a pianist. And that program--the one where this young man had discovered a true gift and a way to communicate and connect with the world when words failed--we were told was going to start being held in one of the brand new facilities at Grace Farms. Warming.

Then out walked the gospel choir. Their performance was amazing, and I found myself particularly enthralled by the woman signing in the choir. Yes, I did mean to say "signing," not "singing." As in, sign language. (As an aside, I've always loved signing choirs. My home church as a teen used to frequently have a signing choir visit, and I was always amazed.) Warming.

Then out came the modern dance troupe. Together with a vocal soloist and gospel choir backup, the dancers interpreted the story from Matthew 28 when Mary Magdalene came to Jesus' tomb only to find it empty and was told by an angel that he had risen from the dead.

That's it. Bingo.

During this performance it hit me. This is why this facility is here; this is what the Foundation is after. This is faith. This is art. In this place full of architects (who like me were probably more interested in the building than the Foundation and its goals) and curious community members the name of Jesus was used unabashedly. Art and faith. Faith and art.

When the choir started their last piece, the young autistic man who had played the piano stood up in his seat and started dancing, unashamed and with what I imagine to be "faith like a child." But he broke the ice. The audience stood, clapping along. It was pretty amazing.

I'm still not feeling entirely squared on this, but I suppose I'm less worried about how much the building cost at the moment. Instead, I hope and pray the facility will be used to provide the opportunities the Foundation seeks: for community engagement with the arts, bound by faith, among nature, seeking justice.

Beinecke Library

In Memoriam: Oscar Niemeyer

Here, then, is what I wanted to tell you of my architecture. I created it with courage and idealism, but also with an awareness of the fact that what is important is life, friends and attempting to make this unjust world a better place in which to live. (Oscar Niemeyer)

Renowned Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (December 15, 1907 - December 5, 2012) died yesterday in Rio de Janeiro. The last of the great Modern (with a capital "M") architects, he was just 10 days shy of his 105th birthday. He was one of my heroes.

Why such a hero to me? Honestly, I can't really even put my finger on it. Writing about his life and work a few years ago, I called both the man and his work "A Strange Paradox." He was by all accounts a visionary, an artist, a lover of life--and he defined the image of a nation quite literally with his extensive work in Brasilia, Brazil's mid-century ex nihilo capital. But he was also an atheist, communist, exile whose love for life was, it seems to me, mediated by a melancholic longing for something more.

Though I had the privilege of being around a number of "famous" architects while in grad school at Yale, I am not generally the star-struck architecture fan type. Niemeyer was different for me, though. Until learning of his death last night, I secretly held on to a long-time dream of "some day" meeting him, even if only to shake hands and say a few words. At 104 and still at work, one could imagine him living forever. The closest I came was during a trip to Rio de Janeiro in 2009. As we were working out the details of our itinerary, I corresponded via e-mail with his office trying to arrange a brief meeting, but I was not able to work anything out.

Coincidentally enough, I was actually thinking about Niemeyer yesterday. That tends to happen when early December rolls around and I remember his upcoming birthday. I walked over to the bookshelves in my office where I keep all of my architecture books. I browsed the section of Niemeyer books (I have close to a dozen) and picked up his memoir, The Curves of Time, which I read a few years ago. Crossing the line completely into star-struck-fan, I even though, "I wonder if I could mail this to him to sign for me?"

I have been fortunate to be able to see a number of Niemeyer's notable works in the past few years in Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, and Belo Horizonte, Brazil and in Milan, Italy. Some visits were pilgrimages that my family graciously indulged me with, while other projects were simply viewed in passing. I've included some photos from these trips below.

Outside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Niteroi, across the bay from Rio de Janeiro

(December 2009).

The kiddos being cool in front of the Ministry of Education and Health in Rio de Janeiro.

(December 2009)

Heading through the 2nd floor reception room of the Ministry of Education and Health out to the lush rooftop garden.

(December 2009)

In front of the Museu Oscar Niemeyer in Curitiba, Brazil.

(July 2011)

We were looking for a grocery store in Belo Horizonte and stumbled upon this residential building by Niemeyer.

(July 2011)

The sinuous curves of the Casa do Baile (Dance Hall) on the lake in Pampulha, Belo Horizonte.

(July 2011)

Ex casino in Pampulha, now an art museum.

(July 2011)

Happy architect in front of the Chapel of St. Francis in Belo Horizonte.

(July 2011)

Brasilia from the air, with the monumental axis where may of Niemeyer's iconic government buildings are situated running from lower left to upper right in the photo. This has got to be on one of our next Brazil trips!

(July 2011)

Additional Resources:

I've written about Niemeyer on Through the Oculus (here), and I've also written some research papers about Niemeyer and his work while in graduate school (here and here).

Here are some links to recent articles in response to Niemeyer's death: ABC, Arch Daily, Arch Daily Brasil, Archinect, BBC, CNN, Fox News Latino, O Globo, O Globo (2), O Globo (3), The Guardian, Tue Guardian (2), Huffington Post, The Independent, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, NPR, The Telegraph, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post.

Toronto Modern

I was in Toronto last week for the 10th annual Greenbuild conference and expo.  Though my short time in the city was spent primarily in the convention center attending seminars and visiting product booths, I took a few hours one glorious afternoon to take a brisk walk around downtown.

First stop, the Toronto-Dominion Centre by Mies van der Rohe in the late 1960s.

A view up to the Mies monoliths from the grassy lawn.  The buildings appear to be undergoing a re-cladding or re-painting of the curtain wall.  I wonder how the architects of the renovation have taken into account Mies' vision within the context of modern technologies and advancements in building envelope design?

Apparently, I missed a major feature of the TD Centre when I did not pass through to the banking pavilion on the northeast corner of the block (a cousin to the post office at the Chicago Federal Center).  Oops!  However, I thought the lawn near the southwest corner of the complex was a nice respite from the usual paved plaza of Mies' other urban work.  I walked through the area near the end of lunch time, and the lawn and surrounding granite benches were still being heavily used, which is always a good sign in a public place.

I love the simple glass box lobby with travertine walls--classic hallmarks of Mies.  One thing I noticed for the first time, however, was the tiled soffit.  I do not know if this is typical of other Mies high-rises, but it gave a nice gloss to the ceiling inside and out and added to the lightness at the base of the large buildings.

A couple blocks north, I stopped by Toronto's city hall by Finnish architect Viljo Revell in the early 1960s.  Revell is a sort of one-hit-wonder architect and is most famous for Toronto's city hall but relatively unknown otherwise.  Currently, they appear to be doing some renovation work on the glass facades of the towers.

Toronto's city hall exhibits just the kind of free-form "fun" Modernism that I tend to be drawn to.  Though the plaza in front seems well-used (there was a farmer's market on the day I visited) the urban environment suffers a bit from the sterile bleakness of many aging Modern public spaces.  (I am reminded of my visit to photograph Albany's Empire State Plaza on a weekend, where during my entire visit, I saw fewer than half-a-dozen people in the vast public space.)

Although I think the form of the two towers gently enclosing the UFO...er, council chamber...is formally elegant, I cannot help but think that their windowless outer face turns the towers' proverbial back on the city, focusing inward on the bureaucracy of city government.  It makes sense that something like this would have been built within the context of mid-century urban renewal, where in cities across the continent whole neighborhoods were bulldozed for monumental, internally-focused (often governmental) projects, but it seems out of touch with a vibrant urban community that I get the sense of when I am in Toronto.

One of the recent attempts to both "green" and humanize city hall is the addition of a green roof, gardens, and public space on the roof of the building's podium.  The design is by PLANT Architect of Toronto, and I must say that it is a welcome and beautiful addition to the building.  It was delightful to walk up the long ramp to the roof and enter a world of bugs, cricket sounds, and playful birds.  Though the sounds of "nature" were not quite enough to drown out all the sirens, car horns, and buses of the surrounding city, the elevation above the street and the connection with a natural landscape (contrived, but beautiful of course), was a great respite.

Gravel and paved paths wind their way around the city hall towers, with benches and seats providing spots to rest, read, or relax.  As I think about it now, I wish there had been a bit of a water feature to provide some white noise over the city, but during my visit, I did not really find the experience lacking.

What looks like bush-hammered concrete on the outer face of the city hall towers a la Paul Rudolph and the Yale Art & Architecture Building is really something quite extraordinary.  Instead of rough concrete, the surface is actually inlaid with split- or cleft-faced white stone (marble?) strips.  I have never seen anything quite like it.  In areas where the facade has been cleaned, in the sunlight it was really quite brilliant, and with the addition of the public park on the roof of the podium it is easy to access the building for a closer look.

Let's take a look inside city hall!  I loved the big, wooden doors.  The wood hardware bends slightly out away from the door to signify "pull" and slightly in toward the door to signify "push."  Nice design!

Just inside the doorway is a really cool sculpture on the wall...

...made of nails!

Revell died before the building was completed.  He is commemorated on a column just inside the doors of city hall.  Notice the floor, which has white stone strips laid into the terrazzo, similar to the exterior of the towers.

The council chamber sits atop a pedestal that skewers the podium and goes clean down into the floor surrounded by lights and a little amphitheater with flags and commemorative plaques.  The clerestory surrounding the council chamber lets natural light into the podium and allows the chamber and its pedestal to "float" within the composition of the podium.

I love when architecture is so iconic that it becomes a logo!  (Like Oscar Niemeyer's Chapel of St. Francis which we saw on logos all across Belo Horizonte during our trip to Brazil this past summer.)  This photo was of the sign to the roof garden of city hall, but the logo is really everywhere, including trash cans all across the city.

Continuing my jaunt north, I walked up to the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) which features an addition and facade renovation by native Torontonian, Frank Gehry.  The expansion opened in 2008 and is Gehry's first project in Canada.

The new facade of the AGO is a sleek, curved glass facade supported on curved wood beams.  It reminds me of Gehry's early explorations of fish in both sculpture and architecture.  It is quite restrained for a Gehry, which is entirely appropriate for the context.  I really appreciate its subdued and elegant forms.

Each end of the block-long facade flips up in a...fish tail?  Or is it a billboard?  (What would Venturi do with this Duck-cum-Decorated Shed!?)

Looking up at the backside of the extended facade, including the wood beams.

Behind the AGO is another component of the Gehry addition:  a bright blue titanium box with a squiggly stair.  Blue titanium and squiggly design elements.  Now we're talkin' Gehry!

A closer view of the spiral staircase.

Next stop, Will Alsop's Sharp Center for Design, adjacent to the AGO from 2004.  Though I think the idea of the floating box up on stilts is interesting, I find the black and white metal skin and multi-colored pencil-columns a bit inelegant and childish.  Less would have been more here.

I had to catch one more new piece of architecture on my little tour, so at the far north end of downtown, I went to see Daniel Libeskind's 2007 addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM).

Libeskind's work has never really been my thing, but I had to see it since I was so close.  The form is a bit jumbled for my taste, and I had to work really hard to figure out how to open the doors (unlike Revell's city hall).

I believe they call this addition "the crystal"...

...but it appears somewhat parasitic.

Meanwhile, back at the expo, one booth had a chair made out of full-size and half-size rolled drawing sets and three strap clamps.  Simple.  Elegant.  Cool.

And since we're talking Toronto here, there is always the requisite (parting) shot of the CN Tower, former tallest freestanding structure in the world.

In Memoriam

Ten years ago, I was a senior at Georgia Tech studying architecture. Feeling a bit under the weather, I had decided to skip my morning structures class, and I was sleeping when a phone call from a friend startled me awake. I could not believe what I was hearing when she said, "the World Trade Center has been attacked and one of the towers just fell." As an architect, I could not even grasp the concept of a building that large falling. It was surreal as I turned on the television to see replays of the tower collapsing on itself. Unsure of what was going on and whether other large cities such as Atlanta would be a target, we got a small group together and went to my friend's parents' house outside Atlanta and watched the news all day. It was unreal.

In more recent history, I have been slowly but surely cleaning our basement, which includes going through and organizing a number of old boxes. It dawned on me as we approached the tenth anniversary of the 9|11 attacks that back in high school, I went with my father to photograph skyscrapers in New York City for a class project.  After looking through a couple of boxes marked "photos," I was able to find a pile of photos of New York and felt it would be a nice tribute to post photos of the World Trade Center.

Most of the photos are in black and white and they were shot with 35mm film.  They were probably taken in 1997 or 1998, but I cannot remember.  After I scanned the photos, I did a little bit of digital doctoring, but did not want to do too much to them as I think the tones and textures of the imperfect photos give them an air of nostalgia.

This photograph above was one of two photographs of the World Trade Center I chose to have enlarged for my class project.  I think I called it Tracks, and I paired it with the photograph below, entitled Chambers WTC, of the World Trade Center subway station.  I always felt the photograph of the station had an air of melancholy.   Though according to Wikipedia the Chambers WTC subway station survived the 9|11 attacks, I still think there is something sad about the photograph.

I think this photograph epitomizes the typical view of the World Trade Center and is taken from across the Hudson River in New Jersey.  Looking back at the photo now, I am struck at the scale and height of the massive towers, easily twice as tall as anything else around them.  (Note the Woolworth Building, just to the left of the World Trade Center towers.  It was once the world's tallest building!)

If my research is correct, I think this is a view looking south toward the north face of the base of the South Tower from across Tobin Plaza.  The sculpture is called Ideogram by artist James Rosati, and was destroyed on 11 September 2001.  The 200+ foot broad face width of each square tower easily accepted the full wingspan of the Boeing 767s that hit them in the attacks.

The view up between the towers can only be described as dizzying.  It is hard to believe that in 1974, French aerialist Philippe Petit strung a wire between this gap and performed a "dance" between the towers more than a thousand feet above the pavement.  (There is a great documentary about Petit's amazing feat called Man on Wire, which I very much recommend.)

Yes, I count myself among the architects who love to take photographs looking up the corner of tall buildings.

Another view up one of the towers through the leaves of a tree on the plaza.

In my attempt to be artistic, I had wanted to document the elevator doors of New York's tallest buildings.  I thought it would make a cool series to see how their design and ornament changed over time.  After having a difficult time getting permission to photograph in the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and Woolworth Building, we were not only allowed to photograph in the World Trade Center lobby, but also to set up a tripod!  If you look carefully, you can clearly see the tripod in the photograph.  My father and I are also visible in the slightly distorted reflection of the chromed doors.

This photograph of the World Trade Center elevator doors was taken at the moment the doors were either opening or closing, I cannot remember.  You can see the ghostly image of people inside the elevator cab, and looking at the photograph now, I am haunted wondering if any of these people were in the towers on 11 September 2001.

We went up to the observation deck on the top of the South Tower that day.  Though I cannot remember if it was particularly windy, I do distinctly remember the uneasy feeling of the building moving slightly beneath my feet.

A view north toward Midtown that will never be again, with the Empire State Building front and center.  This part of the city has changed significantly in the past ten years, including the addition of the Time Warner Center, New York Times Building, Bank of America Tower, and Hearst Tower to the skyline.

A view south over New York harbor toward the Statue of Liberty.

Another view south toward Governors Island, with the Verrazano Narrows Bridge in the distance.

A view looking west up at the towers from Liberty Street.  The steel facade of One Liberty Plaza is in the foreground on the right edge of the photograph.  One Liberty Plaza suffered broken windows but no major damage in the 9|11 attacks.

This photograph shows the South Tower reflected in the facade of the Deutsche Bank Building.  The Deutsche Bank Building sustained massive damage, including a 24 story tall gash in the facade, when the South Tower fell and was subsequently dismantled.

I cannot be sure, but I think this staircase was near the base of the Deutsche Bank Building.  I am pretty positive the small amount of facade showing at the upper left of the photograph is the old Marriott Hotel, and that this view is of the South Tower.  (If anyone knows where this staircase is--or was, rather--please leave me a comment.)

At the end of our trip photographing around Manhattan, my father and I took the ferry back to Jersey City where we had parked and set up the tripod to catch the downtown skyline slipping into the night.