The New York Times, April 6, 1997, A&E, p. 42.
Architecture View/Herbert Muschamp
Making a Rush-Hour Battleground High Art
New York, the great vertical city, must get back to thinking
horizontally. There are other boroughs out there besides
Manhattan -- four big ones -- and the city cannot afford to
regard them as depositories for superstores, landfills,
juvenile detention centers and such. Nor will the city happily
survive the great sucking force that would, for instance,
leave Yankee Stadium hanging on the edge of Manhattan.
In Paris and in Barcelona, to cite two prominent examples,
planners understand that new buildings can play a critical
role in stretching the urban horizon beyond the dense central
core. In New York, urban stretching has historically been the
task of transportation -- bridges, tunnels, subways --
monumental works in their own fashion.
Staten Island is now embarking on a project in which
infrastructure and architecture are imaginatively joined. As
designed by Peter Eisenman, the project will expand the site
of the existing St. George Ferry Terminal and create a new
home for the Staten Island Institute of Art and Sciences. The
$100 million plan is to be financed by government and private
money, with construction to begin in 1998. Combining ferry
operations with a museum, this is the most innovative civic
project to go forward in New York in more than a generation.
The focus is on relationships: between transportation and
destination, movement and repose, energy and place. The
building is also the most buoyant Eisenman has yet designed.
Its most spectacular feature is a large, translucent roof of
faceted, whirling contour. Viewed from the water, the roof
recalls the weatherman's pinwheel sign for a hurricane.
Formally, it recalls the sinuous metal roof of the convention
center Eisenman designed for Columbus, Ohio, a serpentine
construction that brings to mind the flow of goods and
information over highways and fiber-optic cables.
Though Eisenman's buildings may look expressionistic, their
plan is usually grounded in an "objective" method. To
calculate the roof design for the ferry project, he used a
computer program that generates laminar flows, a technique
typically used in the design of planes, ships and cars, to
register the disturbance of air or water by an obstruction. In
this case the site was treated as the obstruction to the flow
of ferries and commuter buses. Essentially, it locates a scale
of order within turbulent chaos.
The existing terminal building will be renovated, its exterior
clad in Kevlar, the translucent steel material from which the
museum's roof will be fashioned. On the east side, a broad
public plaza will be set atop a parking garage. These two
strongly horizontal elements will emphasize the assertively
non-Euclidean geometry of the roof. The interiors should be a
marvel, comparable in sculptural strength to the great vaulted
spaces of Eero Saarinen's T.W.A Terminal at Kennedy
International Airport.
The institute, which now uses the slogan "From cicadas to
Chagall," is, in effect, a science museum, though its
permanent collection, housed in a small Georgian Revival
building a short walk from the terminal, is a potpourri of
oddments: butterflies, a Monet, antique silver, fossil fish.
In its new home, the emphasis will be on temporary
exhibitions, beefed up with interactive video technology and
other wow devices. One might expect, for instance, an exhibit
that shows how a butterfly sees. The emphasis on perception,
indeed, could help bring art and science into coherent
relationship.
This is Peter Eisenman's second New York building. The first,
a fire station in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn,
attracted little notice on its completion 10 years ago. The
station dates from a period when Eisenman, in association with
Jaquelin Robertson, was trying to make the transition from
paper architect to builder. In the process, his ideas were
often watered down into decorative surface effects. The fire
station's most distinctive feature, in fact, is an arrangement
of red neon tubes, conceived in collaboration with Robert
Slutsky, that flash when the firefighters are on call.
Eisenman has had better luck since branching out on his own.
His designs have grown progressively larger in scale and
esthetic ambition. And the ferry project should encourage
people to see that this legendarily radical designer is more
than accessible. He is an ace entertainer as well. I confess
that when I first saw this design, the image that sprang to
mind was of Tommy Velour, Lily Tomlin's impersonation of a Las
Vegas lounge singer. Eisenman's act -- the performance of an
avant-garde architect -- is also sort of corny in this day and
age. But he imbues the role with an affection that is almost
sexual.
That's more apparent here than in earlier projects, like the
Wexner Center for the Arts, another Columbus project,
completed in 1989. There, Eisenman's obsession with rotated
grids often grated on the senses, like the screech of chalk on
a blackboard. But creating actual buildings has sensitized
Eisenman to architecture's sensuality, evident here in the
curves of the light, translucent skin. Ka-chunk-chunk-chunk.
And what about the Other Terminal, the famous clock-adorned
Whitehall Ferry Terminal, designed by Venturi, Scott Brown &
Associates in 1992? Opposed by Staten Island residents, the
design was later modified considerably. Indeed, Venturi, Scott
Brown resigned the commission late last year, feeling that
their concept had been compromised. Less than three weeks ago
city officials announced a plan to turn the project over to
the New York firm of Anderson/Schwartz Architects. Frederic
Schwartz, a partner in the firm, has been associated with
Venturi, Scott Brown on a number of projects, including
Whitehall.
The loss of Venturi, Scott Brown's original design is not a
major catastrophe. Yet, together, the Whitehall and Staten
Island projects do make a highly memorable pair, an unmatched
set we might call History and Theory. Eisenman, of course, is
commonly thought of as a theorist, an architect inspired by
linguistic and literary speculation. Venturi is the man whose
1966 book, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,"
gave architects license to draw once again on the historical
styles.
But haven't these two leading architects been stuck with the
wrong tags? Surely Venturi is the more compelling theorist.
His philosophy was established early on, in terms that are
easily grasped. Even the title of Venturi's "gentle manifesto"
offered readers a lucid idea of its content. Still, his
implicit view of history as eternal and unchanging is less
than profound. It's amusing, no doubt, to note the resemblance
between, say, Jumbotron signboards and Ravenna's Byzantine
mosaics. Yet at a certain point one needs to think about
differences as well as similarities. How did civilization get
from mosaics to Jumbotrons? What does the change portend?
Eisenman's theories, in contrast, are generally imported from
other disciplines. And he prefers enlisting academics to
interpret his buildings rather than shouldering the burden
himself. No American architect of his generation has probed
deeper into the philosophical roots of historical change. He
seeks to challenge not the modern movement but the
Enlightenment concepts that ground it.
Despite their considerable differences, both architects have
responded creatively to the major crisis that confronted their
generation: the collapse of historicism, the erosion of the
19th-century idea that every era should produce its own
distinctive style. Trained at a time when modernists believed
they had left the 19th century behind, they came to see that
modernism only extended that century's belief in the concept
of a historical mainstream.
Some people are dismayed by History and Theory. They're
alarmed that especially in today's architecture schools, these
fields of study threaten to supplant traditional practice. Why
can't architects content themselves with the task of
manipulating the physical environment for the well-being of
contemporary users?
The fact is that architecture has traditionally reckoned with
the task of creating a culture's connective tissue. Above and
beyond the user-friendliness of individual buildings,
architecture operates on the level of metaphor. For more than
a century, historicism defined that metaphoric level. As
recently as the International Style, the mainstream idea gave
individual architects the sense of common purpose. Today,
History and Theory together -- the speculative connection of
ideas and events -- provide a comparable common ground.
Together, they are the metaphoric infrastructure for a time
when the mainstream has broken up into many turbulent flows.
[Two photos] Computer images of the Institute of Arts and
Sciences at the St. George Ferry Terminal as viewed from land
and from water.
[End]
To see b/w photos: http://jya.com/eisais.jpg
Architecture View/Herbert Muschamp
Making a Rush-Hour Battleground High Art
New York, the great vertical city, must get back to thinking
horizontally. There are other boroughs out there besides
Manhattan -- four big ones -- and the city cannot afford to
regard them as depositories for superstores, landfills,
juvenile detention centers and such. Nor will the city happily
survive the great sucking force that would, for instance,
leave Yankee Stadium hanging on the edge of Manhattan.
In Paris and in Barcelona, to cite two prominent examples,
planners understand that new buildings can play a critical
role in stretching the urban horizon beyond the dense central
core. In New York, urban stretching has historically been the
task of transportation -- bridges, tunnels, subways --
monumental works in their own fashion.
Staten Island is now embarking on a project in which
infrastructure and architecture are imaginatively joined. As
designed by Peter Eisenman, the project will expand the site
of the existing St. George Ferry Terminal and create a new
home for the Staten Island Institute of Art and Sciences. The
$100 million plan is to be financed by government and private
money, with construction to begin in 1998. Combining ferry
operations with a museum, this is the most innovative civic
project to go forward in New York in more than a generation.
The focus is on relationships: between transportation and
destination, movement and repose, energy and place. The
building is also the most buoyant Eisenman has yet designed.
Its most spectacular feature is a large, translucent roof of
faceted, whirling contour. Viewed from the water, the roof
recalls the weatherman's pinwheel sign for a hurricane.
Formally, it recalls the sinuous metal roof of the convention
center Eisenman designed for Columbus, Ohio, a serpentine
construction that brings to mind the flow of goods and
information over highways and fiber-optic cables.
Though Eisenman's buildings may look expressionistic, their
plan is usually grounded in an "objective" method. To
calculate the roof design for the ferry project, he used a
computer program that generates laminar flows, a technique
typically used in the design of planes, ships and cars, to
register the disturbance of air or water by an obstruction. In
this case the site was treated as the obstruction to the flow
of ferries and commuter buses. Essentially, it locates a scale
of order within turbulent chaos.
The existing terminal building will be renovated, its exterior
clad in Kevlar, the translucent steel material from which the
museum's roof will be fashioned. On the east side, a broad
public plaza will be set atop a parking garage. These two
strongly horizontal elements will emphasize the assertively
non-Euclidean geometry of the roof. The interiors should be a
marvel, comparable in sculptural strength to the great vaulted
spaces of Eero Saarinen's T.W.A Terminal at Kennedy
International Airport.
The institute, which now uses the slogan "From cicadas to
Chagall," is, in effect, a science museum, though its
permanent collection, housed in a small Georgian Revival
building a short walk from the terminal, is a potpourri of
oddments: butterflies, a Monet, antique silver, fossil fish.
In its new home, the emphasis will be on temporary
exhibitions, beefed up with interactive video technology and
other wow devices. One might expect, for instance, an exhibit
that shows how a butterfly sees. The emphasis on perception,
indeed, could help bring art and science into coherent
relationship.
This is Peter Eisenman's second New York building. The first,
a fire station in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn,
attracted little notice on its completion 10 years ago. The
station dates from a period when Eisenman, in association with
Jaquelin Robertson, was trying to make the transition from
paper architect to builder. In the process, his ideas were
often watered down into decorative surface effects. The fire
station's most distinctive feature, in fact, is an arrangement
of red neon tubes, conceived in collaboration with Robert
Slutsky, that flash when the firefighters are on call.
Eisenman has had better luck since branching out on his own.
His designs have grown progressively larger in scale and
esthetic ambition. And the ferry project should encourage
people to see that this legendarily radical designer is more
than accessible. He is an ace entertainer as well. I confess
that when I first saw this design, the image that sprang to
mind was of Tommy Velour, Lily Tomlin's impersonation of a Las
Vegas lounge singer. Eisenman's act -- the performance of an
avant-garde architect -- is also sort of corny in this day and
age. But he imbues the role with an affection that is almost
sexual.
That's more apparent here than in earlier projects, like the
Wexner Center for the Arts, another Columbus project,
completed in 1989. There, Eisenman's obsession with rotated
grids often grated on the senses, like the screech of chalk on
a blackboard. But creating actual buildings has sensitized
Eisenman to architecture's sensuality, evident here in the
curves of the light, translucent skin. Ka-chunk-chunk-chunk.
And what about the Other Terminal, the famous clock-adorned
Whitehall Ferry Terminal, designed by Venturi, Scott Brown &
Associates in 1992? Opposed by Staten Island residents, the
design was later modified considerably. Indeed, Venturi, Scott
Brown resigned the commission late last year, feeling that
their concept had been compromised. Less than three weeks ago
city officials announced a plan to turn the project over to
the New York firm of Anderson/Schwartz Architects. Frederic
Schwartz, a partner in the firm, has been associated with
Venturi, Scott Brown on a number of projects, including
Whitehall.
The loss of Venturi, Scott Brown's original design is not a
major catastrophe. Yet, together, the Whitehall and Staten
Island projects do make a highly memorable pair, an unmatched
set we might call History and Theory. Eisenman, of course, is
commonly thought of as a theorist, an architect inspired by
linguistic and literary speculation. Venturi is the man whose
1966 book, "Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,"
gave architects license to draw once again on the historical
styles.
But haven't these two leading architects been stuck with the
wrong tags? Surely Venturi is the more compelling theorist.
His philosophy was established early on, in terms that are
easily grasped. Even the title of Venturi's "gentle manifesto"
offered readers a lucid idea of its content. Still, his
implicit view of history as eternal and unchanging is less
than profound. It's amusing, no doubt, to note the resemblance
between, say, Jumbotron signboards and Ravenna's Byzantine
mosaics. Yet at a certain point one needs to think about
differences as well as similarities. How did civilization get
from mosaics to Jumbotrons? What does the change portend?
Eisenman's theories, in contrast, are generally imported from
other disciplines. And he prefers enlisting academics to
interpret his buildings rather than shouldering the burden
himself. No American architect of his generation has probed
deeper into the philosophical roots of historical change. He
seeks to challenge not the modern movement but the
Enlightenment concepts that ground it.
Despite their considerable differences, both architects have
responded creatively to the major crisis that confronted their
generation: the collapse of historicism, the erosion of the
19th-century idea that every era should produce its own
distinctive style. Trained at a time when modernists believed
they had left the 19th century behind, they came to see that
modernism only extended that century's belief in the concept
of a historical mainstream.
Some people are dismayed by History and Theory. They're
alarmed that especially in today's architecture schools, these
fields of study threaten to supplant traditional practice. Why
can't architects content themselves with the task of
manipulating the physical environment for the well-being of
contemporary users?
The fact is that architecture has traditionally reckoned with
the task of creating a culture's connective tissue. Above and
beyond the user-friendliness of individual buildings,
architecture operates on the level of metaphor. For more than
a century, historicism defined that metaphoric level. As
recently as the International Style, the mainstream idea gave
individual architects the sense of common purpose. Today,
History and Theory together -- the speculative connection of
ideas and events -- provide a comparable common ground.
Together, they are the metaphoric infrastructure for a time
when the mainstream has broken up into many turbulent flows.
[Two photos] Computer images of the Institute of Arts and
Sciences at the St. George Ferry Terminal as viewed from land
and from water.
[End]
To see b/w photos: http://jya.com/eisais.jpg
