|
Seven
Days
April
2003
Donald Maurice Kreis
Ada
Louise Huxtable, the dean of American architecture critics, declared
six years ago that our nation was in "near-total architectural
retreat. In her book The Unreal America, the former
New York Times critic complained of a pervasive "architecture
of facile illusion, of image over substance, of artifice over art."
Huxtable
was railing against "Disneyfication" and fakery” -- Michael
Graves using the Seven Dwarves to support a pediment, the faux
Sphinx at a hotel in Las Vegas, the false nostalgia of instant
'neo-traditional' communities like Seaside, Florida, as seen in
the movie The Truman Show.
Six
years later, the retreat continues, at least in Vermont. This is
the ineluctable conclusion to be drawn from the fact that a pair
of imitation barns along Interstate 89 — the rest area in Williston
— was recently proclaimed one of the best new buildings in Vermont
by the state's chapter of the American Institute of Architects in
its annual awards for excellence.
"Think
of opera," suggests Michael Wisniewski, having been warned
in advance that this critic shares Huxtable's proclivities. It took
the Burlington architect more than a decade to shepherd his design
for the new restrooms and tourist information centers through the
review and construction process. So he might be forgiven for comparing
the experience to hours of shrieking Wagnerian Valkyries.
But
Wisniewski actually is making a different point: that many operas
achieve musical greatness despite truly goofy librettos. So, too,
with a contemporary public building designed to look like a barn:
According to the architect, the story might be ridiculous, but there
is still an opportunity to achieve Mozartean elegance in the structure,
the attention to detail and the use of materials.
There
is a little Mozart here, though more would be welcome. That composer's
genius was to achieve a kind of soaring, lyrical melodic beauty
using forms and concepts invented by earlier composers. Their architectural
equivalent would be icons like Louis Sullivan, Ludwig Mies van der
Rohe and, more recently, Frank Gehry.
Sullivan
helped ignite modern architecture a century ago by proclaiming that
form must follow function. At the I-89 rest stops, it does. Wisniewski's
buildings are designed with three distinct modules: a big, church-like
barn for the information center, a low pavilion containing the bathrooms,
and a second, smaller barn-like structure housing mechanical facilities.
Alas, form forgets function when it comes to the cupolas, which
are vestigial. Though windowed and opened to below, they do not
function as nighttime beacons as Wisniewski had hoped. Nor do they
ventilate, as cupolas do on real barns. In fact, ugly metal exhaust
chimneys stand next to the cupola of each mechanical module.
A
generation after Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe proclaimed on behalf
of modern architecture, "God is in the details."
The Miesian deity would approve of Wis-niewski’s public restrooms,
particularly in comparison to their dismal, demolished predecessors
at the site. The floor tiles are perfectly aligned with the wall
tiling, as opposed to the more typical random juxtaposition. A band
of multicolored tiles just above eye level adds a splash of life,
and clerestory windows high over the sinks admit ample natural light.
(Unfortunately, the trough-like sinks appear to have been specified
out of a catalog of prison fixtures.) And there are three rather
than two restrooms. The middle one can be opened when another is
being cleaned, or when a whole busload of bloated bladders descends
at once.
Gehry's
Guggenheim Annex in Bilbao, Spain, has famously advanced the progress
of architecture, with its wild shapes encased in racy titanium shingles.
The forms of Wisniewski's project are as traditional as Gehry's
are sculptural, but at least Wisniewski and his clients -- the Vermont
Agency of Transportation and the state's Department of Buildings
and General Services -- share Gehry's commitment to using innovative
and high-quality materials.
Few
visitors will notice that the beams supporting the roof are high-tech
glue-laminated wood, but such cost-saving measures are what make
pleasantly soaring spaces possible when building taxpayer-funded
structures. Plus, these laminated beams are likely to maintain their
sleek veneer without developing the cracks typical of traditional
timber framing.
The
cedar-clad walls of the buildings are generously punctuated with
large rectangular windows that evoke the glass 'curtain walls' of
Park Avenue skyscrapers more than the rural vernacular. Or do they?
"I love it when old barns are peeling away," Wisniewski
says, referring to the decaying process that often leaves whole
walls of these crumbling structures exposed.
To
create this sense of "peeling," the ground-level windows
spanning the western facade of both buildings are slightly recessed
from the cedar wall above them. Since a splendid panorama of the
Green Mountains lies to the east of the buildings, all this glass
also reflects the radical notion -- at least in the genre of highway
rest stops -- that visitors might enjoy checking out a glorious
view while passing through. This is ultimately more valuable than
a sly homage to entropy.
One
thing that must be said about icons of 'form follows function,'
glass-and-steel modernism is that humor and whimsy were not their
muse. Le Corbusier designed 'living machines' instead of houses,
expecting people to comply with his scientific notions of habitation.
The post-modernism of the 1980s and '90s, which Huxtable rails against
as cheap and superficial, can also be regarded as an effort to throw
a little life at all this stolid principle.
Having
run its course, post-modernism has left a pleasant penumbra: In
Prague there is a Frank Gehry building nicknamed "Fred and
Ginger" because it resembles a dancing couple. In Williston,
Wisniewski and Vermont landscape architect Keith Wagner custom-designed
picnic tables to look like tractors, with paving stones laid into
the ground so as to suggest the path each tractor has plowed. A
series of raised furrows, crowned with apple trees, extends the
farming allusion while serving as a barrier between the picnickers
and the highway.
An
optimist who is familiar with architecture will see the ghost of
Charles Moore at work. Moore was a restless spirit and surely a
modernist. In 1965, his famous Sea Ranch condominium on the California
coast gave American architecture an iconic example of how abstract
forms -- especially when clad in weathered natural wood -- can seem
to grow naturally out of a stunning landscape. Moore took his inspiration
from local agricultural buildings, just as Wisniewski does.
Faux
tractors as picnic tables in Williston, to say nothing of
information counters engineered to resemble combine harvesters,
are pleasingly ridiculous. The trouble is that architecture has
moved on, even from the place Huxtable found so disturbing in 1997.
Back with a vengeance is the notion that architecture can innovate
and that new buildings need not resemble old ones. Witness the recent
decision in New York to eschew a skeletal replica of the destroyed
World Trade Center in favor of Daniel Libeskind's garden of bold
new forms growing out of the subterranean 'bathtub' left behind
after 9/11. Even in staid New England, there is widespread affection
for the new Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT in Cambridge. There, architect
Steven Holl ignored the neo-classical milieu and created a daring
structure that resembles a kitchen sponge on end.
Something
like that -- a building form the leaf-peepers would really
remember upon their return home -- could have happened along the
interstate in Williston. "My very first proposal was two parallel
curved stone walls that rose out of the ground and contained all
of the service spaces and bathrooms," Wisniewski recalls. "This
primal form penetrated and ran through a flat-roofed glass-box envelope
for all the public space before exiting and diving back into the
ground. Kind of an unholy marriage between Robert Frost's 'Mending
Wall' and your friendly Texaco Service station."
Why
wasn't this intriguing concept executed? "The silence was profound
when it was presented," the architect says. "Sadly, the
model is long gone; only the memory remains."
Wisniewski's
creation still amounts to a pleasant pee in fantasyland, the triumph
of an idealized image of Vermont conjured for tourists. But critics
cannot be blamed for preferring architecture that "engages
and reveals necessity and beauty in the language of our time,"
as Huxtable put it. Let's hope for some of that in next year's crop
of award-winning Vermont designs.
back to top
|
