The Kalita Humphreys Theater, Dallas

On a sloping site overlooking Turtle Creek, a couple of miles from downtown Dallas, stands one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s final projects, the Kalita Humphreys Theater. The Theater was completed in 1959, nine months after Wright’s death, and it represents the culmination of Wright’s thought about theater design. In an era of popular Broadway musicals and Hollywood films, Wright’s Kalita Humphreys Theater represented a commitment by both architect and client (the Dallas Theater Company) to live, local theater as a communal ritual, an almost religious experience, free from the taint of commercial entertainment. Initially supported by wealthy patrons and built in one of Dallas’ wealthier areas, the Theater may have originally reserved the communal experience for a rather exclusive audience, but with the donation of the theater to the city in 1973, the emphasis on maintaining a vital, local theater has continued to the present.


With few other buildings nearby, the Theater stands alone as a Wrightian sculpture in the landscape. The building itself comprises softened geometric forms made from Wright’s signature adobe-like concrete: its plasticity suggests both solidity as well as a mud-like connection to the earth. Jutting out of the sloping limestone site, both the materials and colors also provide visual links with the local topography, recalling the design of Wright’s earlier Fallingwater. While it is difficult today to imagine the 1950s context, the site was probably more serene and picturesque. Now, condo towers on the other side of the creek compromise the view, while low-rise housing developments are encroaching on the site from behind. The Theater’s position in a natural setting away from downtown Dallas’ commercial center coincided with Wright’s vision of an ideal decentralized city, Broadacres, where civic culture was to be placed on the peripheries rather than in the city center. While the Theater is, in a typically Wrightian manner, intimately connected with its natural surroundings, in a typically Texan manner, it is also intimately connected with the parking lot. Arrival at the Theater was to be strictly by car – while admirable in many respects, Wright’s Broadacres version of urbanism seems out of step with 21st century moves to reduce auto-dependency.


The Theater’s lobby space is horizontal and low, with a band of small, high windows that doesn’t capitalize on the view over the creek but instead directs the audience towards the theater experience within. Inside the performance space, the circular stage broke with conventional theater design of the early 20th century, dispensing with the proscenium arch or “picture frame” through which an audience views a play. By tearing down the proscenium arch, Wright and his client, the Dallas Theater Company, aimed to create a more intimate experience between audience and performers. In addition, the semi-circular seating arrangement was also intended to highlight the communal experience, as the audience have a more intimate relationship with each other (in contrast, for example, to the more individual and voyeuristic experience of the increasingly popular cinema). This intimacy is further enhanced by the low-hanging balcony and human scale of the space. Other technical innovations of the Theater included a revolving circular stage with the central drum above for lowering scenery, and sliding balconies. Wright also famously claimed that there was not a single right angle inside the theater, consciously challenging the crisp geometric forms of 1950s International Style modernism.


The young Frank Lloyd Wright worked as a draftsman for Adler and Sullivan on Chicago’s Auditorium Theater in the late 1880s, his first experience with theater design. Wright’s next theater project was a 1916 project for a theater in Olive Hill, Los Angeles, for his patron Aline Barnsdall. Several versions were proposed but none ever built. Common to all of these designs was a significant reduction in the proscenium arch, and one even had a semi-circular seating arrangement similar to the much later Dallas theater. Interestingly, Barnsdall was planning to work with Norman Bel Geddes on the Los Angeles theater, and Bel Geddes had also proposed a theater design without a proscenium arch in a 1914 exhibition. Wright’s theater plans were adapted in 1932 for a proposed theater in Woodstock, New York, which was not built, and then later adapted again for another proposed theater in Hartford, Connecticut, which was also not built. Finally, in the last years of his life, Wright had the chance to put his innovative ideas on theater design into practice with the Dallas commission.


While the rejection of the proscenium arch may have been innovative in the interwar years, by the late 1950s, the idea of breaking down the barriers between audience and actors was no longer radically new. Bertolt Brecht, whose “epic theater” theories from the 1920s called for the elimination of the “fourth wall” separating audience from actors, had been dead for four years. Interestingly, the sources of Wright’s communal theater were not completely derived from such European avant-garde theater ideals, with his interest in Japanese kabuki theater perhaps providing an alternative source for both the revolving stage and the intimate connection between audience and performers. Finally, a brief comparison with the Theater’s contemporary, the Guggenheim Museum in New York (also completed in 1959) may further illuminate Wright’s celebration of communal culture and intimacy. The Guggenheim’s famous internal spiral ramp encourages a more intimate viewing experience than conventional rows of rectangular galleries, with visitors constantly aware of others moving up and down the ramp (the Kalita Humphreys Theater also includes internal ramps) – Wright’s “space in motion” highlights not only our awareness of the architecture, the art, or the performance, but also our awareness of each other.

All images by D.J. Huppatz

Dallas, Texas: Architecture and Urbanism

It’s a good Cold War story that has taken on mythological proportions: In the 1980s, brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu aired the soap opera Dallas on local television in order to illustrate the decadence of capitalism to the Romanian people. However, Romanians were so enamored of the American lifestyles they saw in Dallas that they overthrew the dictator and all lived happily after: the glossy image-world of Dallas’ excessive consumer lifestyles sparked the revolution that saved Romania from tyranny. Or so the story goes. Visiting Dallas for the first time (as I did for last month’s CAA conference), it is hard to reconcile the real Dallas with the virtual one of the soap opera.

Downtown Dallas

Encircled by a ring of freeways, downtown Dallas is a collection of bland corporate skyscrapers, alienating concrete plazas and parking garages. Even during the day, its streets are largely empty of pedestrians, while its roads are full of SUVs and large pickup trucks, heading into downtown in the morning, and out again to the suburbs in the afternoon. At night, downtown Dallas is abandoned to a nomadic homeless population, and, apart from a couple of self-contained conference hotels, is almost completely devoid of shops, restaurants, cafes or bars. Urban planning seems to be non-existent: all of the corporate skyscrapers are self-contained, and many include their own parking garages so the commuter need not interact with the greater city at all. The excesses of Reaganism and the 1980s oil bonanza saw twenty such skyscrapers grow on the Dallas skyline, transforming it from a modest city into an instant metropolis. Although heralded as a successful boomtown in the 1980s, downtown Dallas today might serve as a good case study of the problems of much late 20th century American architecture and urbanism.

I.M. Pei, Dallas City Hall, 1966-78

At the symbolic (if not quite the geographical) heart of downtown Dallas is I.M. Pei’s City Hall (1966-78). After the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, the city’s reputation plummeted, and it was popularly portrayed as a kind of new Wild West. The Town Hall was intended to be a bold public statement that might restore this tarnished image. Pei’s concept was not just another civic building, but a major urban project that would encompass a large public plaza with enough open space to offset the height of downtown’s growing commercial skyscrapers. The resulting City Hall comprises an eight storey concrete monolith whose triangular form overlooks a six acre plaza with a pool and large Henry Moore sculptures. Formally, City Hall is an exercise in geometric design; the concrete poured without joins to create an unbroken sculptural surface. But it was more than just a modernist design exercise, as Pei recalled in a later interview: "When you do a city hall, it has to convey an image of the people, and this had to represent the people of Dallas.” (Wiseman, Carter, I.M. Pei: A Profile in American Architecture, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990, p.125) Strong, unadorned and monolithic – are we to read this as a metaphor for the people of Dallas? More importantly, the City Hall is a statement about the city’s solidity and permanence, even as its neighbouring corporate towers change hands or rebrand every few years. However, the alienating, inhuman scale and bleak outlook of both the City Hall and its vast plaza may well have impressed Nicolae Ceausescu.

Dallas City Hall, plaza

The soap opera Dallas, coincidently, first aired in 1978, the year City Hall was completed, and the soap’s global rise in the 1980s coincided with the rise of postmodern Dallas. In a way, the soap created an image for the city that worked in tandem with its new wave of corporate buildings – the glamorous surfaces of both embody similar narratives of big business, patriarchal power and the materialist excess of the 1980s. One of the earliest examples of postmodern Dallas is the Hyatt Hotel (Welton Becket & Associates, 1978), whose mirrored surfaces and broken rectangular forms are best seen in the light of Fredric Jameson’s reading of the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles (John Portman, 1976). Like the Bonaventure, Dallas’ Hyatt is a self-enclosed volume, isolated from its surroundings; its mirrored skin repels our gaze, leaving us with a distorted, fragmented reflection of the surrounding city.

Pegasus Oil neon sign reflected in a skyscraper's mirrored surface

Similar to both the Hyatt and Bonaventure, downtown Dallas’ later 1980s corporate architecture contributes to this sense of a non-place without history or context. While popular stereotypes of cowboys abound in tourist stores and public sculptures, Indians are conspicuously absent in downtown Dallas. But it is not just Native American history that has been erased, Spanish and Mexican histories of the area have also been entirely erased from the postmodern city. However, not all histories have been lost, they are just hard to find. Looking carefully, a scattering of Art Deco buildings suggest a longer urban history, as well as a lone neoclassical mansion (the Belo Mansion, late 1890s) and an extravagant Romanesque Revival building (the Old Red Courthouse, 1892), both of which confirm the existence of an almost forgotten 19th century city. In the postmodern city, even these remnants of an earlier Dallas look isolated and decontextualized.

Pei, Cobb & Freed, Fountain Place, 1986

After City Hall, I.M. Pei (in the 1980s operating as Pei, Cobb and Freed) went on to design several other Dallas skyscrapers, and, along with Philip Johnson and John Burgee, reshaped much of the downtown area during the 1980s. The Texan cities of Dallas and Houston were key sites for the development of Johnson and Burgee’s version of postmodernism: historical references (though never local ones), granite facades and gables were applied to corporate headquarters, creating an effect of distinction and differentiation from the usual crowd of minimalist modern towers. Although not as self-consciously historicist or decorative as Johnson/Burgee’s projects, Pei Cobb and Freed’s corporate skyscrapers function in a similar way here in Dallas. Among their many Dallas landmarks, Pei, Cobb and Freed’s most celebrated Dallas project is Fountain Place (1986), now known as the Wells Fargo Bank (formerly Allied Bank Tower). Designed by Henry Cobb, Fountain Place is a 60 storey crystalline sculpture with a pointed top, covered entirely with reflective glass. It looks similar to Pei’s slightly later Bank of China headquarters in Hong Kong. Although Fountain Place follows the high modernist guidelines in its sense of purity, geometric form and high-tech materials, the jagged top cuts a distinctive silhouette on the city’s skyline.

Dan Kiley, landscaping, Fountain Place

The landscaping around the base of Fountain Place was designed by well-known landscape designer Dan Kiley, and comprises three acres of fountains, waterfalls and large cypress trees positioned at regular intervals in granite planters. The landscape’s center-piece is a computer-programmed fountain with over two hundred jets shooting water in geometric patterns. In a downtown devoid of genuine public spaces, such a space provides cooling water and shade from the hot Texas sun, but the security guards and cameras make it quite clear that this is not a space for lingering too long. Such landscaping is popular in Dallas: each corporate tower is surrounded by a landscaped space with scattered trees and greenery safely contained in stone planters and rectilinear grids. Here, nature has been completely conquered, and is contained within a highly controlled environment. An abundance of sculpture decorates these corporate gardens, with Rodin’s tortured bronze figures providing a bizarre juxtaposition to the blank, mirrored surface of a nearby skyscraper. The landscape designers of Chase Tower (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, 1987) have gone even further in creating a completely controlled “total design”, with the inclusion of piped classical music emitted from loudspeakers hidden in the low foliage.

A downtown Dallas skywalk

Connecting these self-contained corporate environments is another curious Dallas phenomenon, the skywalk. The skywalk is an enclosed bridge, typically connecting two corporate skyscrapers. It seems to have at least two functions: firstly, the skywalk’s air-conditioned comfort keeps nature at bay (the Texan heat, but also rain and wind); and secondly, it functions as a means to travel between corporate buildings while avoiding the streets (thus the absence of sidewalk activities in downtown Dallas). Unlike in Hong Kong, where similar-looking skywalks function as literally a network of overhead sidewalks which connect various parts of the city (complete with buskers and pirate DVD sellers), Dallas’ skywalks are as sterile and empty as its streets.

Plaza of the Americas, atrium

In the Plaza of the Americas, an odd indoor atrium space between corporate towers (with the obligatory Texan ice skating rink at the bottom), I paused to take some photographs (see above), and before long a security guard ordered me to stop (not “asked nicely”, ordered). When I asked why, he said, “for security reasons.” In the postmodern city, secrecy and privacy are essential (hence all the mirrored surfaces). The new regime of 1980s corporate spaces watch us via a range of surveillance devices, including prominent guards and cameras, in what Mike Davis referred to as the “militarization of urban space” (see “Fortress Los Angeles: the Militarization of Urban Space” in Sorkin, Michael, ed., Variations on a Theme Park, New York: Hill and Wang). This has no doubt intensified in American cities since 2001.

Downtown Dallas parking garages

Beyond the downtown area, the clipped-lawn suburbs, shopping malls and developer’s historical fancies represent on the one hand an escape from, but on the other a mirroring of, downtown’s corporate spaces. The Texan emphasis on individual liberties seems to have morphed into paranoia, exemplified by the huge (militarized) SUVs and pickup trucks driving down the freeways from self-contained corporate environments to the suburbs. Not surprisingly, Texas is a popular state for building gated communities.

Edward Larabee Barnes, Dallas Museum of Art, 1983

While there may be a complete absence of street culture, Dallas and its neighbor, Fort Worth, have an abundance of art galleries filled with acknowledged “masterpieces”. Yet even these cultural sites seem very Texan in conception and presentation. Edward Larabee Barnes’ Dallas Museum of Modern Art (1983) is similar to its corporate neighbours: self-contained and monumental, its mute stone walls shut out the surrounding city. Within, its patrons’ desire for immortality is taken to a bizarre extreme with the recreation of the French Riviera villa of Wendy and Emery Reves (she was a Texan model in the 1940s) as a home for their collection of decorative arts and paintings. Fort Worth’s trilogy of museums, the Amon Carter, the Kimbell and the Modern, stand in a row outside the downtown area of Fort Worth, accessible only by automobile and disconnected from any other signs of life. Museums here seem to function as badges of sophistication, an acknowledgement that there is something here beyond money. However, the absence of local culture in all of these museums suggest otherwise – “culture” is something that is imported (even the curatorial frameworks have been imported, with the Kimbell functioning as a miniature Met and the Modern as a miniature MoMA. The Amon Carter, at least with its “cowboy” art theme, seems original in this context).

SOM, Chase Tower, 1987

In the postmodern city, images are all important – much of the soap opera Dallas was filmed in Hollywood and David Jacobs, who wrote the original concept, apparently knew little about the real Texas. The distinction of the Dallas skyline, meanwhile, was used prominently in the soap, creating a symbolic economy of the city based on both the soap’s image-world and downtown’s corporate architecture. Not coincidently, the finance capitalism fuelling the downtown rebuilding (and re-branding) in the 1980s was similarly built increasingly on image and intangibles (stocks, software, insurance certificates, and the like). However, the reality of the resulting physical city is significantly different from its appealing image. Controlled spaces of exclusion and paranoia, the absence of diverse public spaces, and little of the vitality usually associated with a city suggest a fundamentally flawed urban environment. Freedom means little without the ability to use it in absolute space and time: participatory democracy needs public spaces; communities need to be represented in real spaces in which they can remain vibrant. Such spaces are conspicuously absent in downtown Dallas. Thinking back to Nicolae Ceausescu and the tale of the soap opera that ended the Cold War: if only Ceausescu had shown the Romanian people the real Dallas rather than the soap opera, they may have recognised the monumental, alienating scale, and the sterile, solemn spaces of exclusion and paranoia. He might still be in power today.

Store sign, downtown Dallas, February 2008

A Portrait of the Architect as Artist: Frank Gehry in New York

America’s most famous architect, with a career stretching back forty years, only recently completed his first freestanding building in America’s most famous city. However, Frank Gehry’s few New York projects are worthy of analysis as they illuminate some key themes in 21st century American architecture – the relationship between architect and client, the media representation of architecture as art, and the role of the celebrity architect in contemporary society. Three of Gehry’s completed New York projects: his sculptural addition to the interior of the Issey Miyake flagship store (2001), the iconic ICA/InterActive Corp headquarters (2007), and his unfinished (actually yet to be started) Atlantic Yards are analysed below, and this trio traces both Gehry’s recent career but more broadly may also suggest the post-Bilbao role of the celebrity architect in the 21st century.

The Architect as Creative Genius: Canonization

It is difficult to consider Gehry’s architecture without firstly coming to terms with his media representation as a leading starchitect – he is thus far the 21st century’s best known architect. In addition to guest appearances on the Simpsons and Arthur, Sydney Pollack’s 2006 documentary, Sketches of Frank Gehry, confirmed Hal Foster’s suggestion that Gehry may be America’s “Greatest Living Artist”. Sketches is less a critical documentary about architecture and more of a celebration of the architect as a creative genius. Pollack, who confesses to having no knowledge of architecture, presents Gehry as a stereotypical artist – risk-taking, angst-ridden, and both aesthetically and technically innovative. Pollack dwells on the artist’s troubled psyche (via some pop psychology by his therapist), as well as Gehry’s “freedom of expression” in the face of critical opposition (the latter notably absent from the documentary). Pollack’s cast of celebrity sycophants includes actor Dennis Hopper (who lives in a Gehry-designed house), artist/filmmaker Julian Schnabel (who has himself been recently involved in real estate speculation) and musician Bob Geldof, whose contribution is a pointless anecdote about his first vision of Gehry’s Vitra Design Museum building while sitting on a bus driving through the German countryside. The documentary opens with Gehry’s sketches (making the clear connection with art) and even the accompanying classical score of strings underlines architecture’s “high art” credentials (imagine the same documentary scored by a fellow Los Angeles 1980s pop export like Van Halen). Pollack’s documentary is the final act in the canonization of Gehry, who, if he wasn’t a household name following the spectacular media success of Bilbao, certainly is now. The documentary is free from any critical commentary except for some vaguely negative comments about Bilbao by a very circumspect Hal Foster that are immediately dismissed by Midred Friedman’s and Julian Schnabel’s counter-arguments.

In his book Design and Crime, Foster traces Gehry’s aesthetic from the primal scene of his Santa Monica house renovation in 1978 and his engagement with pop art to his “gestural aesthetic” of the 1980s and 90s. This narrative is, importantly, one that traces Gehry’s career from a particularly local scene to the designer of multinational institutions. In addition to the use of vernacular materials (chain-link fencing, etc), Gehry’s use of architecture as a kind of corporate advertisement, such as his Chiat Day Building (1985), also connects the architect to his LA context – is it any surprise that the concept of architecture as a single iconic landmark arises from auto-centric LA? From there, it is an easy step to the spectacular architecture of the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), with the new addition of computer-aided design to help render complex sculptural forms into material ones, thus creating a distinctive work of art. By the late 1990s, then, the aesthetic is fully gestural and expressive, with Gehry’s inner artist finally emerging, and, like a sculpture, each building’s unique titanium shapes are hand-crafted (despite the digitally-aided design).

But how do such personal creative expressions engage with society? Gehry’s cultural centers such as Bilbao and the Walt Disney Concert Hall, argues Foster, rather than “forums of civic engagement”, become “sites of spectacular spectatorship, of touristic awe” (Design and Crime (and other Diatribes), London: Verso, 2003, p.41). Bear in mind also that Gehry’s earliest work, often claimed to be distinct from these later icons, includes a Californian shopping mall, perhaps the quintessential site of spectacular consumption. For Foster, Gehry’s role as a celebrity artist is that of a social figure who is allowed to be freely expressive – this is the rumpled, angsty creative genius portrayed in Pollack’s documentary. Gehry’s freedom, Foster argues, is “a franchise in which he represents freedom more than he enacts it.” (Design and Crime, p.40-41, my italics) With the spectacular architectural icon, the public enjoy the spectacle of freedom rather than actively participating – our role reduced to consumers of Gehry’s freedom of expression.

Following the success of the Bilbao Guggenheim, Thomas Krens, the director of the Guggenheim who commissioned Bilbao, rewarded Gehry with a retrospective in the Guggenheim’s New York museum in 2001. Here, at the dawn of the 21st century, he was crowned as the most important architect in America (if not the world). Beginning with Guggenheim branches in Bilbao and Berlin, Krens’ aim was a particularly American one – to make the Guggenheim into a global brand, franchising it in a cultural version of McDonalds or Starbucks. And Krens’ expansionist agenda elevated spectacular architecture as more important than content (ie. what would fill all of these planned Guggenheims?) – exhibitionist architecture plus the Guggenheim name equaled massive tourist potential (at least this was the implication of the Bilbao success story). The Guggenheim expansion was slated to continue into the 21st century with plans for a Gehry-designed Downtown Guggenheim unveiled in 2000. Designed as a huge structure at the end of Wall Street, the Downtown Guggenheim was to comprise both a titanium sculptured gallery space with a skyscraper jutting out of it (which, appropriately enough for New York, included luxury condos). While the tragedy of 9/11/2001 is often blamed for the shelving of this Gehry project, Krens’ expansion plans were also not as financially successful as the Bilbao hype suggested, with the failure of a Rem Koolhaas-designed Las Vegas branch and an increasingly precarious financial situation brought on by the spectacular fees the Guggenheim was paying for spectacular architecture (see Deyan Sudjic, The Edifice Complex, London: Penguin, 2005 for more details). All spectacular surfaces with little substance – is it any wonder the major corporate sponsor of Gehry’s Guggenheim retrospective was Enron?

The Architect as Sculptor: Issey Miyake flagship store

Although the interiors were designed by Gordon Kipping (of G TECTS), the prominent feature of the Issey Miyake flagship store (2001) is a sculptural installation by Gehry. The context is the fashionable downtown enclave of Tribeca, and the Miyake store is in a retro-fitted 1888 red-brick warehouse with a cast iron façade and cast iron interior columns. On nearby North Moore Street, a couple of art galleries, an antique store, designer furniture store, upscale restaurants and cafes complete the retro-chic scene. As with most luxury retail spaces, the interior is sparsely furnished – plain white walls, exposed wooden ceiling beams, furniture of silvery burnished metal and a metallic counter. Distinctive hanging racks with oversized wheels suggest mobility and flexibility on the one hand, but on the other, they are an in-joke reference to the rag trade district where such racks were once seen crossing the streets (although the rag trade was never located in Tribeca).


But the prominent feature of the interior is Gehry’s sculpture, “the Tornado”, an undulating strip of titanium that wrinkles through the space like a stiff, silvery strip of fabric. Gehry’s contribution here is literally sculptural, but it self-consciously echoes Miyake’s rumpled shirts and flowing, pleated fabrics. Suckers hold the titanium strip onto the cast-iron columns like post-industrial fungi growing on an old industrial skeleton. Gehry’s Tornado is intended as a creative expression that parallels Miyake’s, suggesting uniqueness, originality, and the innovative use of new materials (although the use of the titanium strip may be simply a creative use of Bilbao leftovers?). The baroque sculpture enhances the space and aestheticizes the retailing of the expensive fashion within (the first jacket I picked up had a $1450 price tag). It provides an appropriate “high-tech meets high art” entertainment to compliment Miyake’s clothing, in much the same way as the giant ferris wheel in the Times Square Toys R Us store compliments the merchandise on sale there. Importantly, Gehry’s sculpture for the Miyake store confirms his status as an artist, and the association with high fashion adds to the exclusivity of his designs (imagine, in contrast, a mass produced Tornado for Target stores? Maybe not so good for the creative genius image?).


The Architect as Icon-Builder: IAC Building

Gehry’s first freestanding building in New York, a corporate headquarters for IAC/InterActiveCorp, was completed in 2007. In the far West condo territory of Chelsea, beyond the retro-chic warehouse galleries and a short walk from the Meatpacking District, the building is the new headquarters for a diverse group of e-commerce businesses. Gehry’s Chelsea headquarters was intended to create a physical presence for Barry Diller’s fluid and diverse conglomerate of e-brands and services, including ask.com, Home Shopping Network, Match.com and Ticketmaster. Since 1995, Diller has been acquiring and merging internet-related businesses, but his previous Hollywood career included long-term positions as CEO of both Paramount Pictures and Fox. As well as being fabulously wealthy (#3 on Forbes’ list of the best-paid CEOs for 2007), Diller is also well-known for his large boat, one of the largest private yachts in the world.


This last point is relevant to the IAC headquarters, because the building’s form allegedly evolved out of the client’s love of sailing, the curved glass walls evoke billowing white sails. Ten stories tall, the IAC building comprises five modules of unusual, curved forms at bottom, with another three on top. However, Gehry has traded his signature titanium for glass here, creating a milky glass skin on a concrete skeleton (oddly angled concrete, and oddly shaped glass pieces, but a conventional construction nonetheless). The glass panels were bent onsite, making this building another unique sculptural project. While restrained compared to the uninhibited expressionism of Bilbao, the IAC headquarters is nevertheless a distinctive and highly visible corporate icon on a corner plot, and is striking while driving along the West Side Highway. It is particularly impressive at night, when the luminous effect really makes the building stand out from its dull neighbors. Big, bold and highly visible, Gehry’s “learning from LA” is brought to New York with a building that functions as a three dimensional billboard for vehicular traffic (very few pedestrians make it out this far West). Though currently isolated from its surrounding context of old red-brick warehouses, a Jean Nouvel-designed luxury condo building is slated to be going up opposite.

Inside, Diller insisted on open spaces with plenty of natural light for employees. Though the lobby’s video walls were touted as part of a new public space for the neighborhood, the building is insulated from its surroundings and not especially welcoming from street level – as with most corporate headquarters, the IAC building appears closed and self-sufficient rather than open to the surrounding neighborhood. As a client, Diller was apparently obsessive on details, and the client’s contribution here brings into question the image of Gehry as a creative genius, struggling to express a personal inner vision. Even in the Sketches documentary, you get the distinct impression that Diller and Gehry worked together on this project, with the client’s input on both practical and aesthetic matters as crucial as the architect’s creative expression. But just in case we were beginning to think the sails metaphor was all Diller’s idea, we’re reassured in numerous reviews that Gehry loves sailing too.


The Architect as Urban Planner: Atlantic Yards

Finally, Gehry’s biggest and most ambitious New York project, the Atlantic Yards, may soon bring iconic architecture to the starchitect-starved borough of Brooklyn. The client is developer Bruce Ratner of Forest City Ratner, one of the biggest developers in the city. Ratner’s best-known developments in Brooklyn to date are the soulless corporate Metrotech complex (early 1990s and ongoing) and the Atlantic Center (1996), an alienating shopping mall that seemed especially designed to serve central Brooklyn’s disenfranchised. Situated opposite the Atlanic Center, the Atlantic Yards project will cover a 22 acre site, and will comprise an arena for the Nets basketball team (recently purchased by Ratner), as well as 16 skyscrapers, mostly filled with apartments. According to Ratner’s website, the Yards will be a $4 billion development, but, according to some opposing analysts, up to $2 billion of this will be public money. While some of the Yards’ apartments are designated “affordable”, it is not clear how this term is defined by Ratner, and critics further suggest affordable housing will not eventuate as it relies on unconfirmed government support. Given the desperate need for affordable housing in New York, this last issue is crucial – starchitecture is not for the poor.

Gehry’s centerpiece skyscraper of the Yards, the unfortunately named “Miss Brooklyn”, is a “curvaceous” glass tower (of frosted glass perhaps?) and seems the most formally interesting of the 16 skyscrapers. Many of the other towers appear to be simply conventional high-rise condo boxes with a jaunty angle here and there. While Gehry has mastered the singular iconic building, it is hard to see how this will translate to urbanism on such a scale. The designs thus far suggest no radical rethinking of urban space and little thinking about the effects on the existing local community. The increased population density, combined with the absence of adequate parking, schools, hospitals or other social services to service such a huge influx of people, all confirm that the proposed Yards is an exercise in simply maximizing profit by squeezing in as many luxury apartments as possible.

While Ratner’s basketball arena and the promise of NBA in Brooklyn is the sweetener to win over the local African-American community, commissioning starchitect Gehry seems to be a ploy to win over the design-conscious local gentrifiers. The website for the Atlantic Yards interestingly states the following for Gehry’s biography: “Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1929, Mr. Gehry and his family moved to California after living in Toronto, Canada, until he was 18.” The born-in-Brooklyn connection seems less an honest mistake than a fabrication designed to further make the Gehry design palatable to the local community. However, judging from the strong local opposition to the project (which even includes local anti-Gehry graffiti at the site), the ploy seems to have failed, and may yet damage the reputation of the rumpled genius, at least in Brooklyn.

Finally, a particularly disturbing aspect of the Atlantic Yards development has been the threat of eminent domain in order to seize properties from homeowners and business owners still holding out on the proposed site. As recently as February 1, 2008, the Federal Court upheld the right of developer Forest City Ratner to use eminent domain on the proposed site. Eminent domain was originally designed for the state to take private property from individuals for “public use” – to build power lines or railways through farming property – when deemed to be for the public good. However, its use in the Atlantic Yards case amounts to the use of state legal power to aid in furthering private profits. While eminent domain has not actually been used yet, presumably the threat and ongoing legal battles will be enough to dislodge any remaining hold-outs. A mega-development such as the Atlantic Yards is clearly not about the public good or community needs but about the creation of mega-profits. And America’s “greatest artist” is complicit in all of this, providing an aesthetic alibi for profit maximization. But such social issues are presumably not the responsibility of the “artist as architect” whose role here is merely that of providing an attractive aesthetic form for Ratner’s real estate investment.

Starchitecture in the 21st Century: Form Follows Finance

The consistent critical attention to Gehry’s architecture as aesthetically and technologically innovative conveniently ignores its relationship to any broader social context. Art’s illusion of self-sufficiency masks the power relations inherent in such a collaborative and social discipline such as architecture. Returning to the roots of Gehry’s practice, Los Angeles is, not coincidently, the key production site for the creation of a contemporary image-world of glittering digital surfaces, and in this light, each of these Gehry projects can also be seen as architecture driven by media reproduction (that is, they look great as images in magazines and glossy coffetable books). But beyond aesthetics, some recent criticism has focused on the functional failings of Gehry’s architecture (the recent MIT lawsuit is a good example), but even this emphasis on function rather than form sidesteps architecture’s engagement with the social, economic and political realities of the 21st century. Certainly in a New York context, Gehry’s architecture as art fails to engage with the city’s most crucial urban issues: affordable housing, repairing or replacing the decrepit infrastructure and the creation of diverse communities. But for the New York projects of America's greatest artist, the starchitect formula holds true: form follows finance.

Further notes and links

The Issey Miyake store was not Gehry’s first interior project in New York. In 2000, he designed a cafeteria for the new Conde Nast building, but given it is not accessible to the public (that is, I haven’t been there), it is not included in this entry. However, the sculptural use of both glass and titanium relate to the above analysis. Images of the Conde Nast cafeteria can be seen here and here.

More images of Issey Miyake store here.

A good article on the interiors of the IAC headquarters from Metropolis, June 2007, here.

Gehry has designed at least another two New York projects: a headquarters for the New York Times in 2000 (developed by Forest City Ratner), and an Astor Place Hotel in 2001 (developed by Ian Schrager). Both projects were unrealized, but Gehry’s sketches and models for both are included in Mark Rappolt and Robert Violette, eds., Gehry Draws, London: Violette Editions, 2004.

Finally, a notable absence from Gehry’s published oeuvre is his American Center in Paris (1994). Read the story of this building here.

Photos of the IAC building by D.J. Huppatz.

The New New Museum

In the last decades of the 19th century, after decades of revivals in European art and design, an avant-garde emerged that was committed to artistic originality – imitations or interpretations of the past were out, and, for artists and designers associated with Art Nouveau and early modernisms, the new was in. Fast forward to the last decades of the 20th century in New York, and Downtown art, music and literature engendered a similar shift in American culture. While the Downtown aesthetic was eclectic – from Richard Prince and Sherry Levine’s appropriations, to the critical performances and posters of the Guerilla Girls – Downtown art, music and literature presented a formidable critical challenge to both the formalist modernism of the uptown commercial cultural scene and the serious tradition presented at larger cultural institutions such as the Met.

Founded in 1977, the New Museum was a key player in the Downtown scene. It was a museum dedicated to contemporary art – back when contemporary was the new new with the modern now associated with the thoroughly institutionalized modernism of MoMA. Under the directorship of Marcia Tucker, the New Museum opened in a cast-iron building in Soho and remained an important center for artistic production in the bourgeoning 1980s Downtown scene. More than just a venue for exhibiting paintings, the New was a critical laboratory for the production of non-commercial art: raw, collaborative, politically-charged and cross-disciplinary, its irreverent program consciously rejected the previous generation’s polished minimalism and aloof abstraction. Importantly, the New was a crucial venue in the development and dissemination of postmodernism, both as an artistic and as a critical practice (the New’s Documentary Sources in Contemporary Art publication series, for example, produced such classic anthologies as Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation and Blasted Allegories: Writings by Contemporary Artists).

Finally, last December, the new New Museum opened in the Lower East Side with the accompanying publicity promising either a transformation or a revitalization of the New. However, the vitality of New York’s Downtown scene which gave birth to the original New is now all but gone – the artists and art galleries of 1980s Soho have long gone in favour of fashion boutiques, upscale apartments and designer furniture stores. Even the Lower East Side has recently gentrified – both CBGBs and Tonic, two key Downtown music venues formerly located near the new New, have closed in the past two years, while starchitect-designed luxury condos are rapidly sprouting like mushrooms in the fertile downtown ground. While the original New was located in the midst of the Downtown scene, the new New’s neighbours will no doubt soon be Wall Street financiers seeking a “bohemian” lifestyle while the artists have long since moved out to more affordable neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Queens. At the same time, the major figures of the Downtown scene of the 70s and 80s have (for the most part) been canonized and safely institutionalized. Three brief recent examples will suffice: “The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene 1974-1984” exhibition at NYU’s Grey Gallery in 2006; a companion book on the Downtown literary scene, Up Is Up But So Is Down (NYU Press, 2006) edited by Brandon Stosuy; and Richard Prince’s 2007 retrospective at the Guggenheim. If the New helped nurture the cultural ferment and political radicalism of New York’s Downtown scene in the 1970s and 1980s, what can it mean in the 21st century? Is the kind of critical engagement and institutional critique engendered by the New thirty years ago still possible?

Brand New

Designed by the Tokyo-based firm Sanaa, the new New Museum is located on the Bowery amongst restaurant-supply stores, small businesses and run-down tenement buildings. The building comprises six rectangular shapes, stacked in a haphazard pile and covered in a silvery steel mesh. With its distinctive form and materials, the new New delivers the most important post-Bilbao demand expected of a new cultural institution: it is an instant icon. The distinctive shape not only sets the building apart from its local context, but importantly provides a memorable silhouette for reproduction on promotional material – from advertising posters to tote bags – the New’s jagged stack of blocks is a readymade logo.

The ground floor street facade is comprised entirely of glass, which makes the New feel open and accessible from the street. Besides the ticket desk and coat check, the obligatory book/gift store and cafe are located on the ground floor, and both are accessible without buying a ticket to the museum – consumption is prominently sited within the 21st century New. The galleries in the floors above are accessed via either a large central elevator or a concrete stairwell. The classic white walls, high ceilings, exposed beams and banks of fluorescent tubes are complemented by polished concrete floors, with few windows to distract from the art.

Experimental? Radical? New? Certainly the exterior could just as easily be a luxury fashion house headquarters, while the interior could be a fashion retail store, an upscale bar or a designer furniture outlet. The style is what I referred to in an earlier post on the Meatpacking District as “retro-fitted industrial chic” – except here it’s not retro but apparently, well, new. While the interior has been publicized as a (polished) attempt at the “raw” Downtown aesthetic, a few eccentric details make the building itself almost worth the hype, particularly the long, narrow and unexpected back stairs between floors three and four, which feature a framed view of the Lower East Side halfway up, and an odd little exhibition space further down. Framed vignettes of the LES appear through odd windows on the upper floors, indicating both a careful attention to detail on the part of the architects, as well as some sensitivity to the location.

Rather than choose an established starchitect to design their new New Museum, the board opted for Sanaa (principles Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), a firm largely unknown in the US. Importantly, Sanaa has designed several cultural institutions in the last few years, including a New Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, as well as a building for Christian Dior in Tokyo and for Prada in Hong Kong. These last two examples highlight the easy fluidity between the world of high fashion and new museums of contemporary art – whether for high fashion or contemporary art, the container is essentially the same.

As well as a new building, the New’s newness is further highlighted by a new identity program, analysed briefly in a recent article by Joe Marianek. The New’s new identity program was overseen by global brand consultants Wolff Olins – they of the successful (RED) campaign , Tate gallery franchise identity (note similarities to New Museum’s?), and the not-so-popular London 2012 Olympics logo. Marianek also includes excellent images of recent posters and publicity material, all featuring the building’s distinctive silhouette. Together, the building and graphic program comprise a polished contemporary identity for a new global cultural institution with little connection to its local context or critical beginnings.

In contrast to the slick identity, the art exhibited in the New’s first exhibition was an attempt to display their continuing experimental program. The show, entitled Unmonumental, was as the title suggested. The first part of the three-part exhibition featured “unpolished” sculptures such as John Bock’s series of small works comprised of old bottles, yoghurt containers, milk boxes, and assorted kitchen trash patched together roughly. Radical and un-monumental in 1977 perhaps, but in 2007, an exhibition featuring junk-piles of found objects all seemed like déjà-vu. Which makes me think the context in which such work appears is crucial – the new New is a familiar and predictable institutional space for a certain cosmopolitan “cultural” class to safely consume contemporary art rather than a space which might challenge their expectations or raise critical issues about contemporary life.

New for Whom?

Beyond the vague “downtown” references, the new New’s building and identity program fit comfortably into 21st century Manhattan’s spectacle culture. For some local residents, the new New represents a final step in the ongoing process of the Lower East Side’s gentrification and sanitization. Given the proximity to cultural producers is now gone, the new New Museum has less to do with engaging with a vital, living culture, and more to do with real estate and tourism – on the one hand, the “avant-garde” prepares the ground for further escalation of downtown rental prices, and on the other, provides entertaining “culture” for consumption by tourists and middle class residents. The thoroughly establishment New is part of the global spectacle of cultural institutions featured in glossy architecture journals and airline travel magazines – it could be located just about anywhere. After taking in the Met and MoMA, tourists will marvel at the building’s unusual form, wonder at the “trash” that passes for contemporary art (“my three-year-old could do that”), and consume a cappuccino and a few catalogues on the way out. The new New? New for whom?

Photo by D.J. Huppatz

Good interior photos of the new New building at The Gothamist while this Arcspace review includes both interior photos and plans.