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Donald Maurice Kreis
If you are still grieving over the destruction of
the World Trade Center, this spring would be an excellent time to
make a visit to New York City. Such a trip would be restorative
and inspirational to any architect who cares about civilization
- but not because of some commemorative light show, or some heady
Peter Eisenman memorial on Staten Island.
Rather, a few miles north of Ground Zero, the newly
opened American Museum of Folk Art contains more architectural truth
and beauty in its tiny 30,000 square feet than Minoru Yamasaki managed
to embody in millions of square feet of trade towers. Go to East
53rd Street to discover the most remarkable public building constructed
in Gotham since Wright's Guggenheim.
Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, the Folk Museum's architects,
always manage to design buildings that cannot be photographed adequately.
Thus, while the Folk Museum looks inviting enough in an appropriately
lavish 10-page tribute in the February issue of Architecture, what
is essential about this project remains invisible to the eye.
Paradox cannot be pictured. And the architecture of
Williams and Tsien is about reconciling that which, in the hands
of lesser designers, would be irreconcilable dualities. (Hence the
title of the monograph about Williams and Tsien: Work/Life.) Thus
the Folk Art Museum, whose facade is comprised chiefly of richly
textured panels that look dark but are called white bronze, is actually
as bathed in light as any art museum could be without baking precious
works in the sun's direct rays. And this is a building that is stolidly
respectful of the New York grid - Williams and Tsien are roughly
as interested in blobs as Mies was - but still one that manages
to leave the visitor happily disoriented. Spatially, the Folk Art
Museum has its own reality in each dimension - a distinct universe
so compelling that one simply forgets about the rigid Cartesian
principles that prevail next door at the Museum of Modern Art or
across the street at Saarinen's CBS Building.
Here's an especially pleasing paradox: To meet Tod
Williams and Billie Tsien is to discover two of the most amiable
souls in the world of celebrity architecture: You'd like them as
your architects, but you would also feel comfortable with them on
your school board or your softball team. (Tsien looks like she can't
catch or throw, but Williams was an athlete at Princeton.) But their
architecture is scary.
The conventional wisdom, which the architects do not
entirely dispel, is that Williams the former Richard Meier associate
is the space-maker and Tsien the former visual artist is the materials
adventurer. But this isn't Oklahoma!, Williams and Tsien are not
Rodgers and Hammerstein and it's just too facile to treat spaces
and materials like they are music and lyrics.
However they do it, Williams and Tsien seem to revel
in evoking vertigo, an outrageous condition given their obvious
love of materials and their strength. So much of the Folk Art Museum
is comprised of meticulously cured concrete, polished under foot
and rusticated on the walls, and everywhere there is concrete, wood,
plaster, glass, various metals and even an intriguing turquoise
plastic resin these materials are employed so sensitively that they
appear to have found their natural state. But Williams and Tsien
will not let you forget that you are not standing on Manhattan schist
but are, in fact, defying gravity.
From a landing on the museum's topmost fifth floor,
one can see light penetrating the heart of the building through
a giant atelier window. Look down and one sees that the concrete
stairway, entirely open, has a landing three stories down that does
not quite meet the building's superstructure. Immediately adjacent
is a window that seems to offer a panorama of solid ground. In fact,
one can clearly see that this is merely roofing because, looming
immediately beneath, is the completely open space of the first floor
gallery. Thus the building exudes a sense of strength but disquietingly
makes one wonder why it is not collapsing. To similar effect is
a secluded and secret stairway connecting the fourth and fifth floors
- walk down and there is solid wood underneath, walk up and one
sees that there is disquieting space between the steps, open all
the way to the third floor.
A thousand details like this are what cumulate to
achieve this project's overall effect - an architecture that is
dignified, elegant impossible to ignore and utterly thrilling. It's
as if one could read and appreciate Shakespeare on a plane while
flying upside down with a daredevil pilot.
When you visit, the museum staff will suggest that
you begin at the top floor and work your way down. If you do that,
and if you are an architectural adventurer not familiar with the
concept of folk art, at some point it may strike you as bizarre
that so serious and modern a work of architecture has been commissioned
to display the creative efforts of people who worked outside the
artistic establishment. You would expect the American Folk Art Museum
to live in something with shingles and shaker woodwork.
The epiphany comes on the second floor gallery, where
part of the museum's Henry Darger collection is on display through
late June. Darger's paintings, some two-sided and 12 feet long,
principally depict little girls with male genitalia embroiled in
a variant on the Civil War, waged over the issue of child slavery.
The beautiful and haunting images illustrate Darger's 15,000 page
epic, In the Realms of the Unreal.
Darger, who died in 1973, was a mentally ill recluse
whose art was discovered only when Darger moved out of his sordid
Chicago apartment to die in a nursing home. His emphatic and unambiguous
instructions, upon learning that someone other than himself had
seen the physical evidence of his inner life: "Throw it all
away."
That these instructions were ignored, and that Darger's
work is on display at a place that will soon literally be surrounded
by the expanding Museum of Modern Art, raises every possible disquieting
question about where art ends and things like perversion, voyeurism
and, indeed, the quest for human survival itself all begin. Darger
personifies a brand of folk art known as "outsider" art.
The questions his work raises are also applicable, though less pointedly,
to the weathervanes, duck decoys, wall decorations and other creations
on display at the museum that, like Darger's pictures, were not
made with a gallery in mind.
These difficult and serious issues are very appropriately
enshrined in a difficult and serious building. Suddenly the white
bronze cladding is at once a protective shield, a decorative emblem
and also, possibly, something like the drawn shades that keep the
insides of the porn shop invisible from the street in less genteel
neighborhoods. Inside, the sun through the atelier window becomes
the light of truth and love admitted into the very center of some
dark realities. Just beneath the window, on a big white wall that
is a few disquieting degrees from vertical, the threatening shadow
of the native warrior Tammany stands with its bow at the ready,
cast by a big 1890s weathervane. Which part of this is art? The
wall? The shadow on the wall? The object? The light itself?
The American Folk Art Museum a small building, easily
explored over a lunch hour. And, thus fortified, one is somehow
better able to walk down 53rd Street to nearby Fifth Avenue and
confront the obscene void one sees by looking south at what was
once a famous vista on the twin towers. That void, we know, is the
absence of art.
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