Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West, Scottsdale, Arizona

Frank Lloyd Wright, Taliesin West, 1937-1959. Photos: 16 Miles [more]

While in Phoenix recently, I stopped over at Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright's winter estate in Scottsdale, Arizona. (His summer home, Taliesin, is located in Spring Green, Wisconsin.) Wright began creating the series of buildings in 1937, with the help of a team of apprentices, and continued adding to it until his death in 1959. (The two Taliesins now host a year-round accredited architecture school.) Here are some things that I learned on the very pleasant, rigorously comprehensive tour of the grounds.



Taliesin suffered from two devastating fires, one set by Wright's servant Julian Carlton, who murdered the architect's lover Mamah Borthwick, her two children, and four other people with an axe as the house burned. (Wright rebuilt it.) At Taliesin West, he built this pond right outside the kitchen area.



Obsessed with the idea of camping in the desert, Wright originally designed all of the buildings with sporty canvas roofs, which had to be replaced about every other year. Every structure was open to the air; protection from the rare rainstorm was found by tying down canvas sheets. In the 1940s, his third wife, Olga, convinced him to add glass windows to the buildings. (Like Picasso, Wright get a lot of attention for the various ladies that were in his life.)





At a West Coast department store, Wright bought up a bunch of boxes of damaged Japanese sculpture scenes, designed to be sold to tourists, and reportedly told a young apprentice to rebuild them as a special assignment. They are installed around the property at transition points between different spaces and buildings.



Dig those chairs on the left! They are exhibition copies but rad nonetheless.



Wright was a solid piano player: the Taliesin West gift shop even has a CD with recordings of him performing for sale. The real highlight here, in the living room/entertaining space is the choice piece of fur draped over the piano.



This screen was a gift to Wright from an apprentice and shows an aerial view of the entire grounds of Taliesin. The orchard at the top-center had been planned by Wright but wouldn't be built until after his death.



Wright and Olga kept separate sleeping quarters. Pictured above: the architect's bedroom. Not pictured above: the two separate beds he had in the room — one for afternoon naps, the other for overnight sleeping.



This ferocious black dragon is hooked up to a gas line and spews fire when presented with an open flame. Wright, alas, never had the chance to see it. It was a gift to Olga after his death.

Santiago Calatrava's Liège-Guillemins TGV Railway Station

Santiago Calatrava's Liège-Guillemins TGV Railway Station in Liège, Belgium, 2009

Back from Brussels and back in business. I'll be writing gallery reviews, BRAFA fair coverage, and a Brussels guide appearing in the next few days. In the meantime, here are photographs of Santiago Calatrava's railway station in Liège, Belgium, which opened last year. A helpful press official explained that Calatrava decided to make the building mostly open-air because (1) visitors are likely to make only brief visits, since European high speed trains are rarely late and (2) because public, enclosed spaces tend to attract the wrong crowd. (On a marginally related note, I'd like to celebrate the fact that Wikipedia has entries for just about every stop on high speed European railways, which are navigable via a special table in each article.)

Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool's Stay at P.S.1 Extended!

Leandro Erlich, Swimming Pool, 2004, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

Originally scheduled to close in April, Leandro Erlich's Swimming Pool will be staying at P.S.1 until September 14, 2009, the museum is reporting on its Twitter!  Judging by conversation in the space on a visit in December, it is the ideal place to procure your next Myspace or Facebook photograph.


Leandro Erlich, Swimming Pool, 2004, at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center.

"At last the skies above are blue"

Nicolai Ouroussoff reviews Bernard Tschumi's BLUE (yes, it's spelled in all capital letters) Condominium and has only positive things to say of the nearly-completed building sitting down on the Lower East Side. He writes:

"Encased in a matrix of blue panels, [BLUE's] contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings. ... [I]t nonetheless captures an aspect of the city that is slowly fading from view: its role as a sanctuary for misfits and outcasts, a place full of dark corners and unexpected encounters. If only such people could afford the price tag.

It's difficult to know where to begin with this. BLUE, as far as I can tell, runs directly opposite to the "gritty disorder of its surroundings." Ouroussoff parallels its color with that color "still found on some old East Village storefronts" as evidence. Other than that, it's hard to construct even the most remote analogies.

While the official BLUE web site (visit to listen to Ella Fitzgerland sing "At Last" to you, just another reason to consider moving in: pure taste and class) states that Tschumi was working to "... capture the energy of the diverse population and eclectic buildings of the Lower East Side", I'm at a loss to find the connection. In fact, I think you would be hard-pressed to find any local resident - even among the hippest - that could or would want to make that case. Rather, it stands out in sharp contrast to everything around it (even the Hotel on Rivington, which Ouroussoff derides), a hulking, awkward, colorful block of steel placed down in a neighborhood quite unaccustomed to such ostentation. (I will admit that from the street, post-construction, it's humble and understated, making it possible to walk by without even realizing you're underneath the seventeen story behemoth.)

Clearly New York is changing, and - like so many things - it would be silly to sit around and bemoan that too seriously. Gentrification won't stop. We can demand a kinder, more tasteful, and humane process, however. BLUE is the opposite of that. Ouroussoff elides the potential "sanctuary" role of the city with an elite, expensive apartment building in his praise, which is a terrifying thought. Interestingly, there's a subtext in his review that he may not intend. "Big canted columns are set just inside the facade, as if bracing the rooms against some invisible force," he writes. It sounds more like a fortress than a sanctuary, shunted off from the realities of the city and its surroundings in all of his imposing, blue glory: paradise surrounded by poverty.

What's sad is that it didn't have to be this way. Tschumi designed the Lerner Hall student center at my alma mater, Columbia. Though it's hated by many (especially students: admittedly, the giant walkways that he designed leave little room for any real activity - it is fun to see Tschumi working here to maximize every square inch for the developers that hired him), its simple modernism is elegant, fitting beautifully into Columbia's planned campus. Transparent, open, and inviting, it seems likely to endure. An apartment building is obviously a very different project, but it still feels like a missed opportunity to produce something more magical and fitting with its surroundings. Maybe he's just planning ahead. As the tenement buildings (and housing projects?) come down over the next twenty it might look charming next to the steel and glass that replaces it.

Really, I think we're just arguing for different things. To repeat myself:

"[The] aesthetic experience seems to require the surrounding poverty, which lends authenticity... the more dramatic the contrast between inside and outside, the greater the fun. They recall that Situationist slogan allegedly seen on an alley wall in Paris after the 1968 riots: 'Club Med—A cheap vacation in other people's misery.'"

Of course, the experience hardly comes cheap these days.