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Ten minutes before his plane landed at Logan International Airport here, Henry Cobb peered out his window at the John Hancock Tower—Boston’s most famous and iconic skyscraper. Mr. Cobb, the building’s architect, tapped his index finger hard on the glass twice, as though playfully poking an old adversary. “I still like it, but it’s a long story.”
A principal at Pei Cobb Freed & Partners, one of the world’s leading architectural firms based in New York, Mr. Cobb, 85, invited a writer to join him on a rare visit to the once-controversial office tower. When the 62-story building emerged in the early 1970s, its slender form and mirrored-glass facade shocked the city, rising ominously in Boston’s historic Copley Square like the monolith in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” Then nightmarish problems with its windows surfaced, stirring civic concern and putting the architecture firm’s reputation at risk.
But since opening to the public 35 years ago on Sept. 29, 1976, the Hancock Tower has steadily won the hearts of residents, tourists and architectural critics alike. Earlier this year, Mr. Cobb’s bold geometric edifice received the prestigious 2011 American Institute of Architects’ Twenty-Five Year Award, which is bestowed on buildings that are 25 to 35 years old and embody architectural design of enduring significance.
Marc Myers
Wall Street Journal
In architectural circles, the town of Owatonna, Minn. is best known for its extraordinary Louis Sullivan bank, a design whose mastery of color and ornament remains as fresh today as it was when the bank was completed in 1908.
Now, Owatonna is home to a second architectural jewel–a Frank Gehry-designed home, the Winton Guest House, which was originally built on in the suburbs of Minneapolis and has since been moved to the University of St. Thomas in the town.
Writing about the house when the move was announced in 2008, Architectural Record magazine observed: “Gehry’s innovative yet playful 2,300-square-foot house is composed of a series of diminutive spaces clustered together under various sculptural forms: a pryramidal roof defines an atrium, a wedge-shaped space shelters the bedroom and bath, a curving trapezoid shapes an office, a cube encloses a cozy fireplace alcove, and a rectangle encloses the kitchen and garage.”
Blair Kamin
Chicago Tribune
‘At first I said no,” says Renzo Piano. “We were very busy. For me, the idea of building a convent next to Le Corbusier at Ronchamp was, in any case, a bit crazy.” Certainly, it must have felt like a big risk. The chapel of Notre Dame du Haut at Ronchamp is one of the 20th century’s most treasured buildings, and Le Corbusier a demigod in the architectural firmament; being asked to build alongside this French national monument, an international destination for religious and cultural pilgrims, is like receiving an invitation to knock up a postmodern extension to the Parthenon or St Peter’s in Rome.
Jonathan Glancey
Guardian
Sagrada Família church in Barcelona has been under contruction for 128 years. “My client is in no hurry,” Antoni Gaudí once said, referring to God. Photograph: Alamy
Barcelona’s emblematic Sagrada Família church finally has a completion date — 2026 or 2028, more than 140 years after it was started.
Joan Rigol, president of the committee charged with finishing the building by Antoni Gaudí, said it should be finished in time for the centenary for the architect’s death – or, if not, two years later.
Five huge towers are being added to the eccentric building, which is among Spain’s most-visited tourist attractions.
Gaudí died in 1926 after being runover by the city’s No 30 tram. He had been living on the Sagrada Familía building site and looked so impoverished that it took several hours for doctors to realise who he was. The tram driver thought he had hit a drunken tramp.
Originally paid for by subscription, the church was always set to take a long time to build. “My client is in no hurry,” Gaudí once said, referring to God.
Giles Tremlett
Guardian
The Capitol in Colonial Williamsburg (Photo: Associated Press)
Americans have always wanted the past and the future—the idyllic dream of a mythical past and the magical promise of a perfect tomorrow. These are fantasies, of course, but they are quintessentially American fantasies, intrinsic to the good life that is the American dream—no matter how you get there.
We look to the past for comforting familiarity, for reassuring connections to a heritage that may be real or imagined, and to the future for solutions that break all the established rules—the simple Cape Cod cottage with its rose-covered picket fence or the house of tomorrow with its visionary labor-saving devices and futuristic forms. Both, of course, are stuffed with the latest technology.
This ambiguous and anachronistic duality has created an irreconcilable split between tradition and modernism in this country; each style has its passionate advocates of the new or the old as the only right way to build. Those who have remained wedded to the established materials, proportions and details of the classical tradition consider themselves defenders of the true faith. Modernists, intent on new solutions, dismiss classical forms as an impediment and embarrassment, obsolete for contemporary needs.
But unlike modernism, which stakes its claims on new materials and technologies that have revolutionized construction to create unprecedented ways to design and build to meet changing needs, the idea of tradition involves a far more complex set of values and associations. The architecture and furnishings of this country’s early years are so closely identified with its founding ideals that they have acquired an overlay of shared heritage and patriotic sentimentality far beyond their undeniable aesthetic appeal.
Behind the reality is a backstory of mythmaking and tastemaking as intrinsically American as the style itself. A small, unorthodox exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York, “The American Style: Colonial Revival and the Modern Metropolis,” has a large agenda: to restore the reputation of a tradition discarded by modernists as irrelevant and expendable, and to establish the style’s continuing suitability and adaptability to the contemporary city and, in particular, New York.
Ada Louise Huxtable
Wall Street Journal
Irony in the soul: the Piazza d’Italia in New Orleans, by Charles Moore & Urban Innovations Group. Photograph: Norman Mcgrath
The Sony building stands at the corner of Madison Avenue and 56th Street in midtown Manhattan. At 197m, it’s a little higher than its immediate neighbours, but there are at least 60 taller buildings in the city. It is an inoffensive, creamy colour. At ground level there’s a spectacular atrium. Yet when it was completed in 1984, it was considered the most shocking building in the world.
The reason is the top. You have to walk a block or so away to get a sense of it. The building, originally known after its first corporate owner, AT&T, is crowned by a broken pediment; a circular space has been carved out of the apex of the triangle which tops the façade. It’s a simple, rather beautiful gesture. It is also a huge act of betrayal by the architect and the most visible trace on the New York skyline of postmodernism, a cultural current that is the subject of Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990, a major new exhibition at the V&A.
Why betrayal? The architect was Philip Johnson, who in 1932 had curated an extraordinary architectural show at the Museum of Modern Art. Images and models of buildings by Mies Van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Richard Neutra and others led a generation of architects to make an absolute break with the styles of the past and embrace the tenets of modernism, chief among which was the idea that form should follow function. Johnson termed this new wave the “international style”, a name which stuck as the skylines of major cities (notably Chicago) were transformed by constructions of plate glass and structural steel, buildings which banished decoration, mere skin and bones enclosing volumes of space.
Hari Kunzru
Guardian
Cornell University’s new Milstein Hall for architecture studies, designed by Rem Koolhaas
(Photo: Lee Rosenbaum)
It’s not entirely finished yet and it’s been under the radar in terms of press coverage. But Rem Koolhaas’ new Milstein Hall, tucked behind the Arts Quad at Cornell University, has opened for the new school year, providing much needed studio space and meeting areas for students in Cornell University’s architecture program.
This highly anticipated 47,000-square-foot facility is part of a sudden burst of starchitects on the Ithaca campus: I.M. Pei, Richard Meier and Thom Mayne, all Pritzker Prize winners, are helping to shape my alma mater for the 21st century.
Lee Rosenbaum
CultureGrrl
“Tribute in Light” is an art installation of 88 searchlights produced annually by the Municipal Art Society. Courtesy EJP Photo via Flickr
Few tragedies have inspired such an outpouring of commentary and art as 9/11. It was, after all, the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, taking place square in the heart of the nation’s biggest city. Consequently, the events of that day and the site of the former World Trade Center have taken on an unmatched weight in American iconography. With the tenth anniversary arriving and the austere memorial at Ground Zero finally about to make its debut, the floodgates have opened again with countless exhibitions and tributes planned.
Yet, as befits an event with a truly traumatic status, 9/11 has proved difficult to approach in an uncontroversial way. No work of “9/11 Art,” in fact, seems complete without some commentary on how it fails or does disservice to the true nature of the tragedy — though, of course, this true nature varies depending on who is doing the commentary. Below, ARTINFO summarizes some of the most notable episodes in art’s relation to the tragedy, and how these controversies have entered the public debate about the meaning of September 11, 2001.
Ben Davis
Artinfo
Where the love began … Rothko in Britain at London’s Whitechapel gallery looks back to his first UK solo show in 1961
Mark Rothko is the modern American artist the British love best. He seems to strike a chord with the public here that other famous US painters don’t. As an enthusiast for American art, I have often stood in disbelief at an exhibition that seems absolutely mindblowing to me, wondering why it fails to fire the great British art lover. Arshile Gorky, a great modern painter, seemed to go down like a lead balloon at the Tate a couple of years ago; even a retrospective of Jackson Pollock at the height of the Young British Art years did not appear to grip audiences as much it thrilled me. But Rothko? We love Rothko. When his late paintings were shown at Tate Modern they were a hit.
Now the Whitechapel Art Gallery is staging an exhibition-about-an-exhibition that looks at the origins of this love affair between the brooding colourist and the British. It uses photographs to bring to life a renowned show at the Whitechapel in 1961, when Rothko was seen solo here for the first time. The uncompromising severity of his floating rectangles of colour awed artists and critics alike.
Rothko saw an affinity between his art and the British heritage of Romanticism: he felt a connection with the sublime landscapes of JMW Turner. He was a cultured man who was very good at seeing relationships between abstract art and older work – he even claimed inspiration from Michelangelo – so perhaps it’s no surprise that he was able to throw out this idea. But it’s true that his art is different in spirit and arguably more “European” than that of some other great Americans. Pollock is unambiguously American and his theme is freedom, the big American idea – he paints like a jazz musician improvising.
Jonathan Jones
Guardian
Pipilotti Rist. Photograph: Giorgio von Arb/Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring
If you’re unfamiliar with the artist Pipilotti Rist, your first encounter with her work could prove surreal: at the end of this month, to coincide with her major solo exhibition at London’s Hayward gallery, she will hang a string of 300 pairs of white underpants along the south bank of the Thames. The pants, in three sizes, will be lit from within to form a bizarre outdoor light sculpture called Hip Lights, one of two new works that Rist has created specially for the Hayward show.
“From a distance,” Rist tells me by phone from her studio in her native Switzerland, “they will look like whipped cream. Or sheep’s heads, with the legs of the pants forming the eyes. I hope they will make people smile, but also think about the relationship we have with this important, sexually charged area in the middle of our bodies. We all come out from between our mother’s legs. From there that we first see the light of the world.”
This preoccupation with the body – and the female body in particular – underpins much of her art, which encompasses sculpture, audio and video installations. In her 1996 film I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, Rist dances frenetically for the camera, her breasts bare. And in 1992′s Pickelporno, lurid images of leaves and flowers are overlaid with erotic closeups of writhing lovers.
Laura Barnett
Guardian
