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August 14, 2009
"Charming" in a new context.
I don't think "charming" means what Christopher Gray is trying to say in this New York Times article about preserving a particularly anonymous Modernist building in New York City. Here are some bits from the article.
The new Donnell had a facade of Spartan simplicity, about as warm as a jail cell. Above a high ground floor of plate glass and square granite columns rise three stories of plain square limestone panels interrupted only by rectangular windows without frames, divisions or other detailing; they might have been cut out with a keyhole saw. The front could be one of those strange walls with empty windows in the paintings of de Chirico or Dalí.Writing in his column in The New Yorker in 1956, Lewis Mumford likened it to the careful, ordered facade of a high Renaissance palazzo, but one "cleansed of ornament." For Mumford that was not necessarily a negative, but he found the "cheerless" Donnell a design of "assiduous anonymity." The library, he wrote, "has very little to say, and is content with not saying it."
[Now there's an epigram for Modernism! Or perhaps an epitaph.]For decades the Donnell has otherwise escaped commentary,
[Web searches did nothing for him - and I don't have a detailed NYC architecture guide at home to check any print myself] an architectural black hole opposite the lively modernism of MoMA's marble facade.. . .
The Landmarks Preservation Commission is not interested in designating the Donnell Library, and only a micro-community of preservationists
[I like that!] seems to care. Among them are Michael Gotkin and John Jurayj, co-chairmen of the Modern Architecture Working Group, which is active in preservation matters.. . .
Indeed, examined through that lens
[by making some comparisons to surviving examples of similarly blank Scandinavian façades] the enigmatic Donnell seems much more comprehensible, even charming -- a Renaissance palace reimagined, instead of just a leftover packing box. The second-floor windows are extra-large, just like those on the piano nobile of a building in Renaissance Florence. It's a neat trick. [The big windows on the piano nobile were big because those were the public rooms for the family, by the way. What was going on here? Unless there's a functional reason for the window-scaling I think that should automatically disqualify it as an example of Modernism, then!]
You'll have to click to see the pictures - truly banal. In the tradition of architectural historians and architectural commentators everywhere, he includes a unbuilt version of the building - which is so little different you may have to look twice, but merely including it proves that this is serious. Everyone knows the UNBUILT version would have been more interesting!
Telling point - the article is from the Real Estate section, not the Arts and Design. This was never more than a branch building for a public library system - knocked out by in-house architects. Tear it down.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 14, 2009 7:52 AM