Art Institute's 20th Century Masters: Better Kahn'ed than on the Piano?

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I have to admit to being somewhat taken aback this past year by the total lack of discussion or interest in the Art Institute of Chicago shutting down one-third of its Renzo Piano-designed Modern Wing for six months of “adjustments” only four years after its opening. Nearly 100 masterworks were shipped to the Kimbell Art Museum in Ft. Worth for a blockbuster exhibition The Age of Picasso Matisse: Modern Masters from the Art Institute of Chicago.

Louis Kahn, Kimbell Art Musem.  Photograph: Andreas Praefcke, Wikipedia Commons

Ironically, to make move for the exhibition, the Kimbell's permanent collection has been moved out from the original world-renowned building designed by Louis Kahn to a new addition designed by Renzo Piano.  According to architecture critic Martin Filler, writing in the current issue of the New York Review of Books . . .

The switch involves unfortunate comparisons.  With their celebrated skylit concrete ceiling vaults and use of creamy travertine on the walls, Kahn's interiors virtually caress pictures shown within them, in an almost uncanny melding of sensitively proportioned volume and mysteriously modulated light.  Not surprisingly, the Art Institute's best twentieth-century pictures here look better than they ever have at home.

Filler damns the Piano addition with faint praise.  The title, No Harm to the Kimbell, pretty much says it all.  Although Filler raves about Piano's finely crafted, 2 percent titanium walls as “the most ravishing concrete I have seen in the U.S.” he concludes “the new Kimbell addition will soon fade into the middle rank of Piano's oeuvre, neither at the top . .  . nor the bottom.”  He doesn't mention where the Modern Wing falls in his rankings.
Filler's review is not available online, except to subscribers.  If you don't have it already, pick up the January 9th issue of the NYRB.  With a haunting new poem by Wislawa Szymborska, Garry Willis's acute dissection of the mis-analyses of Joe Scarborough, and the usual assortment of great pieces on myriad topics, it's well worth the price.

When the Modern Wing opened, it met with a largely ecstatic critical response.  There's much to admire in Piano's design, but I can't help thinking of it as something of a great white whale, ever-so-tastefully smothering the sting of the often ragingly provocative art of the early 20th century.  The scrupulously neutral harbors its own aggressions.

Read the whole story:

The Shock of the New: 1/3 of Modern Wing Shuts Down as Picasso and Matisse head out for six month Texas excursion.  Read here.

Retro Saturday: The Architects the Pritzker Dare Not See - Anne Tyng, Denise Scott Brown and Lu Wenyu

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Even as architects as diverse as Jeanne Gang and Zaha Hadid emerge us fully-empowered practitioners in the world of design, the barefoot and back-room status of female collaborators to famous alpha males stubbornly lingers.  

Last year, when architect Anne Tyng died, we wrote about how her collaboration with Louis Kahn on such early and innovative projects as the 1950's Philadelphia City Tower was deliberately effaced so as to humor the prejudices of the day and build up the brand.

Go back another half century, and you have the story of Marion Mahony, the woman whose striking renderings helped establish the reputation of Frank Lloyd Wright and with the conceptional drawings she created for her husband Walter Burley Griffin's clinched victory for their entry into an architectural competition for the design of Canberra, Australia's capital city.  But that's a story on its own, and we'll return to it next next.

More recently, two Harvard design students, Caroline James and Arielle Assouline-Lichten, have mounted a high profile petition drive to rectify the fact that Denise Scott Brown was left off the 1991 Pritzker Prize awarded to her personal and professional collaborator of 50 years, Robert Venturi.  As of yesterday, the petition has over 11,000 signatures from 88 countries, with a wide range of architects including Renzo Piano, Richard Meier, Herzog and deMeuron, Jeanne Gang, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas and Rafael Moneo.  (Bob Stern won't sign because he objects to the world “demand’, although he says he supports the general idea.)  Martha Thorne, executive director of Pritzker Prize, has pledged that the committee will take up the issue at their next session.  (If you're in Philadelphia this Sunday the 28th, you can hear Denise Scott Brown in conversation with William Menking.)

Which reminded us of the story we wrote on Robert Venturi's appearance at Crown Hall back in 2005.  At the end of the event both Venturi and Scott Brown were very gracious with their time in talking with students and signing copies of their books, but only Venturi spoke, giving an engaging talk on the different perspectives that he and Mies van der Rohe brought to architecture.

That, of course, was a very long time ago, but you still have to wonder whether we'll still be going through the same thing a few decades from now.  When Wang Shu won the Pritzker Prize in 2012, his wife and collaborator, architect Lu Wenyu, was not cited, although she co-founded their firm, Amateur Architecture Studio, and is reported to work in close partnership with her husband.  In Chicago appearances earlier this year, there seemed to be little interest in bringing Lu Wenyu into the discussions and her role appeared to be confined to unofficial photographer.

READ:
The Architects behind the Architects: Anne Tyng dies at 91
Marion Mahony: Frank Lloyd Wright's Right-Handed Woman
Bobbing for Mies - Robert Venturi at IIT

The Shock of the New: 1/3 of Modern Wing Shuts Down in September, Picasso and Matisse head out for six month Texas excursion

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Update [September 12, 2013] .  The galleries have now closed until next April, leaving many disappointed patrons wondering what happened.  Sun-Times report by Madeline Nusser.

It's been less than four years since the Renzo Piano designed Modern Wing of the Art Institute opened to great fanfare.  After this coming Labor Day, to much less fanfare, the third floor galleries, covering Modern European Art from 1900 to 1950, will be shutting down for over six months, as nearly 100 works, including 10 Picasso's and 10 Matisse's, are packed up and shipped to Fort Worth for the Kimbell Art Museum's exhibition The Age of Picasso and Matisse: Modern Masters form the Art Institute of Chicago.   Running through next February, it's billed as “the largest loan of its kind from the Art Institute.”

While the e-mail exchange I had with the Art Institute's Director of Public Affairs Erin Hogan was nothing less than responsive and pleasant, I still get the impression that the closing isn't exactly the museum's favorite subject for discussion.  When the Art Institute last had such a major gallery closing and made a major loan - again to the Kimbell, for its 2009 The Impressionists: Master Paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago - it was heralded with a press release quoting then President James Cuno  as being “thrilled” about the whole thing.  In contrast, searching the Art Institute website, I can find absolutely nothing about the upcoming Modern Wing closing.

Museums have been known to make such loans as a way of raising cash, but when a 2008 article in The Art Newspaper claimed the Art Institute would receive $2 million from the Kimbell, Cuno, in a New York Times interview, scoffed. “It was said by some that we rented the pictures. That’s just not what we do. The Kimbell is covering costs associated with mounting the exhibition, with producing the catalog and with reframing the pictures.” He declined to disclose the amount involved, as does Erin Hogan about the latest loan, which she says is “really just to ensure that the works can be seen while we work on the third floor. It's not a major source of revenue.”  If the amounts are really negligible, you'd think they'd just disclose it and end the controversy, but that doesn't seem to be in cards.

Similarly, Hogan paints the six month closing as no big deal.  “On the third floor there were a number of things we wanted to adjust and it just seemed to make more sense to do them all in one fell swoop rather than piece by piece.”

Two years ago, the museum filed a $10 million complaint in U.S. District Court against Arup, the structural engineers for the project, citing work that was “woefully inadequate”, including cracked concrete flooring and faulty humidity controls that resulted in condensation that fogged the glass of the facades.  The blades of Piano's “magic carpet” roof, designed to bring natural light into the third floor galleries in a way that was safe for the paintings, were said to whistle in high winds.  Hogan says that all the problems were fixed by the time of the May, 2009 opening.  The lawsuit against Arup was resolved about a year after it was filed.

When asked what this years renovations would consist of, Hogan responded “Many things! Repainting/refinishing all walls, podiums, pedestals; recalibrating lighting systems by moving light sensors and adjusting light filters; reweighting and adjusting motion detectors for doors; etc.  The lighting system in particular isn't problematic; it's just that the larger galleries ‘harvest’ more daylight than the smaller galleries, so that there can sometimes be inconsistent light levels as you move throughout the third floor. So we definitely wanted to make that adjustment to even out the light levels.”

I've always wondered if there wasn't a simpler, more cost-efficient way to get safe, natural light into the galleries than the complex ‘magic carpet’ Piano designed, which seems to exist in no small part to be an architectural billboard for the new building.   Piano has attacked the problem in parallel ways at his numerous other museum commissions.  At Atlanta's High Museum of Art, there are a hundred rooftop ‘sails’, mini-skylights that twist to defuse and focus the light.  Back at the Kimbell, Piano is constructing a new addition to Louis Kahn's iconic original building.  At $1470 per square feet, it makes the Modern Wing's $1114 look like a bargain.  Here, Piano deploys aluminum louvers that also incorporate photovoltaic cells to provide the building with power.  Kahn's design is famous for bringing natural light into galleries, but it does so more modestly, with aluminum reflectors hanging from the ceiling rather than the ornate sculpted Piano rooflines that Wall Street Journal critic Lee Rosenbaum says have become the “must-have fashion accessories of museum expansions around the country.”

In the final analysis, no one can begrudge the Art Institute taking the time to ‘fine tune’ the Modern Wing.  And yes, everything should be back in place by this time next year.  Move on; nothing to see here - I get it.  Still, I can't quite shake the nagging feeling that something's not quite right, that we should be expecting more from a $294 million building only four years old than having a huge chunk of it shut down for six months while the priceless treasures it was built to display are exiled out of view.

The Architects behind the Architects: Anne Tyng dies at 91

photograph courtesy Domus magazine.  You can read Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss's excellent, beautifully illustrated interview with Anne Tyng here.

According to Inga Saffron's fine obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer, Anne Tyng "struggled her entire career to be taken seriously." Much like Marion Mahony with Frank Lloyd Wright and Walter Burley Griffin, she was a pioneer, one of the earliest female architects.  Without a doubt they had a major influence on the now iconic architects they worked with and for,  but their identities were subsumed in history.

At a recent lecture by Tyng at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, dean Mohsen Mostafavi revealed some of Tyng's history by reading from her book, Louis Kahn to Anne Tyng: The Rome Letters, 1953-1954, a collection of letters written during her year in Italy  . . .

I was the only woman to take the exams in 1949.  In addition to the written exam for state registration, an oral exam was required for national certification.  In Harrisburg, one of the three reviewers was so against the idea of a woman architect that he refused to speak to me and actually sat apart and turned himself away so he wouldn't have to look at me . . .  Any misgivings were apparently resolved, because I passed.

They was another complication that may have affected her hostile examiner.  Anne Tyng was a great beauty.  It would have been bad enough if Tyng had been the stereotypical mouse of male fantasy fears - homely, wearing eyeglasses, socially inept, a misfit, a female looking to become a man - but to be razor-sharp, beautiful and ambitious,  that's a toxic cocktail for any male chauvinist to have to swallow.

And there was still one more complication.  She not only worked with Louis Kahn, she was his lover.  (He was married at the time.)  She bore him a daughter.  Awkward.  Not just in matter of personal relationships, but in writing history.  Saffron relates that although Tyng kept all of the letters she wrote to Kahn when in Rome, Kahn destroyed all of her replies.

It was Tyng that turned Kahn on to the possibilities of geometry, resulting in their remarkable 1956-57 proposal for a Philadelphia City Tower.  In an interview in Domus by Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss, Tyng relates "The tower is really just something I did . . .  Lou also worked on the base, so he didn't have much to do with the tower either. He didn't really grasp the geometry that well."  The unrealized tower is a stunning "geodesic skyscraper"   "Each level is identical," Tyng told Mostafavi, "and it just rotates in plan as you go up.  It kind of animates the building to some degree, I think, because it looks as though it might be in motion, possibly, if you have enough imagination for that. If you look at it, it almost looks like a women with her hips thrown out dancing . . ."

Kahn basically expunged Tyng as a generator of the design, which Tyng found out when she never received an invitation to a MOMA opening of an exhibition that featured the project.

He's a rascal.  He actually took my name off.  I had put his name on with mine because I thought it might be a gesture he might appreciate. And then he took my name off. So I went into his office and I say, 'Wouldn't it better if you called them than if I called them?' and he did and straightened it out.

Tyng's influence on Kahn is apparent in such projects as the Yale Art Gallery and the recently restored Trenton Bath House.  At the very end of her very long life, Anne Tyng was finally rediscovered, with an exhibition of her work and thought, Anne Tyng: Inhabiting Geometry, which opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia just last January, before coming around to the Graham last April.  I didn't get around to seeing it.  Idiot.

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone

It was just last fall that Tyng, age 90,  went to Harvard for that remarkable GSD lecture, which, fortunately, was captured on video, and you can see it below.  (I would recommend you click on the video to view it on YouTube full-size.)

“The feminine is more dominant for the moment. There are many women doing things that they never did before or given positions they were never given before or earned before.  They had earned it before, but never got it.

“Geometry when you have it in school was never animate in any form, but I think that there are ways of making things that are flexible that have a kind of life of their own.  That aren't necessarily gimmicks, but something that is just basic . . . the kind of things I think architects can discover.  Something that adds function, adds dimension or some sort of quality that hasn't been done before. If you look back at the five platonic solids, we don't really use all of those .  I mean - there they are.  We can use them. The tetrahedrons and the octahedrons fit together.  They fill space.  They're really quite simple . . .  Out of that, you might make all kinds of interesting architecture that almost has a life of its own.

New ways of seeing architecture: Alex Roman's The Third&The Seventh

Spanish-born artist Alex Roman describes his striking film, The Third&The Seventh as trying "to illustrate architecture art across a photographic point of view where main subjects are already-built spaces. Sometimes in an abstract way. Sometimes surreal".  The twelve-minute work, best viewed in HD full screen, includes meditations of the interplay of light and nature on such iconic structures as Mie's Barcelona Pavilion, Louis Kahn's Yale Library and Santiago Calatrava's Milwaukee art Museum.

And it's all virtual. "I use 3DS Max and Vray for rendering," says Roman to Motionographer's Justice Cone, "Photoshop for texture work, AfterEffects for compositing and color grading and Adobe Premiere for edit it all."

The piece's consistently slow rhythms makes the work a bit on the lugubrious side, a little slow, a little heavy, a little too much in love with its own artistry, but there's no denying this is a stunning piece of work, one that could help lead the way past the press-agent photography of architecture that too often manages to kill any sense of the magic - and mystery - of the buildings.

(thanks to EuroRSCG Chicago's Baptiste Limb for showcasing this film)