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8 comments

1 missliberties  Dec 5, 2014 8:46:36am

I am proud of those who stood up for integrity over clicks and walked out. Good for them.

This country desperately needs good journalism which is vastly different than instant tweets made by instant jerks.

2 KerFuFFler  Dec 5, 2014 11:14:27am

I stopped going there to read when Chait left.

I had upon occasion read a few other articles there, but too many of the writers there took eleven pages to say what could easily have been said in one, especially Leon Wieseltier.

One of the most exasperatingly verbose articles I ever encountered there was by Sarah Williams Goldhagen, their architecture critic. Below are excepts from her piece on Zumthor, a prize winning architect. Goldhagen neglected to share photographs of his work clearly preferring to present us with the many thousands of words instead…*

*I have added boldface to mark words or phrases that triggered the sensation that I needed to dislodge a fur-ball——gak gak gak! (She used the word ‘rigor’ or ‘rigorously’ seven freakin’ times without ever giving an example!)

Then as now, most of Zumthor’s work was off the beaten track, not only literally but metaphorically, little known to the general public although admired by professionals. What drew me to make the trek to his work was what, from pictures, appeared to be its conceptual rigor, its unabashed monumentality, and an attention to detail so fanatical that every threshold, corner, and joint seemed to become an opportunity to rethink the way hands make buildings.

He was drawn to the works of Richard Serra, Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer, and later Robert Irwin. Different as these artists’ works are, they exude a visceral monumentality not unlike what Moholy-Nagy promoted for architecture. Minimalist sculpture and land art also require a conceptually and physically active viewer: to understand these works, you must move around, considering their changeable and various aspects over time and space and culture. For Zumthor, contemporary art offered relief from the reification of technology into the quintessential symbol of modernity. His thinking ran counter to that of a heavily populated retinue of prominent modernists, led by their voluble mouthpiece, the Swiss-born critic Sigfried Giedion—postwar architecture’s Clement Greenberg, and similarly monomaniacal.

Zumthor began to imagine art and spaces built up from everyday materials into a rigorously conceived universe of shifting scales and prospects, ensnaring the viewer into looking and thinking, looking and walking, looking and seeing, looking and touching, smelling, hearing, sensing.

St. Benedict reveals Zumthor’s sources of inspiration and prefigures themes that two decades hence he continues to explore. The stark, singular volume of the exterior recalls the planar expanses of Moholy-Nagy’s Haitian forts and Serra’s mute steel sculptures. St. Benedict’s familiar and restricted array of materials operates on multiple levels, intimating Zumthor’s subsequent compression of ever more layers of meaning into ostensibly simple forms. The wooden shingles operate on three levels. Functionally, they constitute a practical choice for exterior sheathing in a land of harsh winters, because they are inexpensive and can be replaced individually without disturbing the overall surface. Experientially, these shingles confer a palpable sense of a building’s scale and means of construction: since they are so small—smaller than those on a typical shingled house—that the user can imagine grasping one in her hand. Visually and associatively, this sheathing integrates St. Benedict’s unfamiliar form into Graubünden’s picturesque but slightly ramshackle landscape of farmhouses and chicken coops, a respectful reference to the locale that bypasses mimicry and nostalgia.

The thoroughly astonishing Thermal Baths in Vals is Zumthor’s most famous and most revered building. Equaling St. Benedict in its stark monumentality, the Baths differs from its predecessor in almost every other dimension: scale (it is much larger), composition, organization, materials, construction methods, and relationship to site. Zumthor’s buildings bear no signature style. In Vals, rising out of a steep, wildflower-covered slope is a rectangular stacked-granite monolith, punctuated by three differently sized square apertures arranged in a contrapuntal rhythm and variously open and glazed. The aesthetic, materials, and construction methods of the Thermal Baths are, as in St. Benedict, drawn from the building’s surroundings, but in this case the referent is not architecture but nature. Interior and exterior walls, which sheath the building’s concrete core, are stacked into place with elongated, thinly sliced slabs of volcanic granite gneiss quarried from a cliff less than a kilometer away. The elements of his architecture—strong forms, rigorous compositions, layered fluid spaces, a tightly controlled palette of materials, and explicit details—are orchestrated only in situ, with the particularities of the commission, the building’s projected use, its role in the cityscape or landscape, and the historical and contemporary character of its site.

The Thermal Baths, like St. Benedict, draws materials, forms, and methods of construction from its locale’s built traditions and the site’s topography, geography, and climate. Yet neither building melts into its surroundings, because the design of both, like all of Zumthor’s projects, is guided by a rigorous, painstakingly formulated set of rules. “I like to believe,” Zumthor explains, “there is an inner order to a well-made thing.” His is an aesthetic that seeks internal formal unity. Rules underlie projects from their overall aspect to their smallest detail; rules direct the structure and the means of construction; rules govern the choice of materials, their relationship to one another, and their role in the overall composition. Yet never are these buildings arid, pedantic, or complacent. Once the rules for a project’s design are settled—in the lumberyard-like maze of the Swiss pavilion for the Hannover Expo in 2000, the number of rules climbed to twenty-two—Zumthor loosens up. “My happiest moments,” he jokes, “are when I can violate my own rules.” Compositional surprises are many.

Zumthor’s work addresses cultural debates that include but are not limited to architecture. Proponents of postmodernism who embrace différence, hybridity, liquidity, and other empirically suspect concepts of disjuncture and power imbalances are unmoved by Zumthor’s rigor: to them, the search for an “inner order” or formal unity guided by rules reveals nostalgia, for the totalizing rationalism of the Enlightenment perhaps, or the hegemonic power of Western logocentrism. The Thermal Baths and other projects have been portrayed as one man’s anachronistic, Lear-like railings against the world, soggy with yearning and standing in useless protest against contemporary life. It is true: other notable architects grapple more directly with the social and political issues that currently preoccupy us—global warming, globalization and cultural identity, the impact of digital and other kinds of imagery on our understanding of the world. Yet nothing in Zumthor’s work is retrogressive or irrelevant. His architecture simply addresses something different, the actually existing moments of everyday life. He does not deny or reject the fast-paced and damaged world in which we live, and which we are attempting to better. Instead he celebrates the occasional human capacity in precisely such a world to make objects of exceptional clarity and rigor, and to create atmospheres and environments that can clarify, sharpen, and expand human consciousness.

The Kunsthaus prefigures these highly acclaimed successors in that it, too, is entirely wrapped in a single material and permits no windowed apertures. Yet compressed into its translucent skin is layer upon layer of meaning and experience. This begins with its material, which is not a single perforated surface but frosted glass panels arranged in overlapping layers. These panels are multiply arresting. Cool, frosted glass is typically used in interiors, so its appearance on a multi-story public building sparks the viewer’s curiosity and unexpectedly suggests a sense of domestic intimacy. And this glass comes not in large-scale plates, as one might expect in a glazed façade, but in torso-sized panels fastened to one another with metal clips, further establishing an immediate sense of bodily connection with the viewer. The effect is similar to the shingles of the much smaller St. Benedict: the panels confer upon the four-story building a human scale; their fastenings inspire the viewer to imagine how it was constructed. Finally, behind the Kunsthaus’s exterior skin is more than just the foot-shuffling apparitions of restless users, as in the dramatically torqued tower of the de Young, and also more than stacked floorplates, as in the de Young and the New Museum. An interior staircase sits directly behind the Kunsthaus’ main glass façade, and so veiled views are offered of the building’s floor plates, of the connections between the floors, and of users’ movements between floors as they make their way to and from the exhibition spaces within.

The Kunsthaus exterior sparks the viewer’s associative experience of other interior and exterior spaces, as well as his or her phenomenological experience of putting together and using other objects and buildings. And yet the viewer also sees in the Kunsthaus an abstract, rigorously controlled composition, a dense rhythm of jagged breaks of stepping risers playing off overlapping edges of layered glass panels. Zumthor’s aesthetic may have been in part inspired by minimalism, but this architecture is anything but minimalist, conceptually or aesthetically. Simple volumes and familiar materials are packed into compositions thick with meanings. How many contemporary buildings provoke one to ponder human movement as it marks the passing of time, the elements of nature and human fabrication that constitute the materials and craft of building, the construction of objects by hand and by machine, and, at last, the fragile and enduring value of human culture?

3 Eclectic Cyborg  Dec 5, 2014 11:34:26am

Isn’t this the place where Stephen Glass worked?

4 KerFuFFler  Dec 5, 2014 11:47:57am

re: #3 Eclectic Cyborg

Isn’t this the place where Stephen Glass worked?

Yup.

5 Islamo-Masonic Vourdalak  Dec 5, 2014 12:06:02pm
vertically integrated digital media company

What is that buzzing that I hear?

6 Ace-o-aces  Dec 5, 2014 1:10:13pm

re: #4 KerFuFFler

He was once employed as Andrew Sullivan’s fact checker (not joking).

7 Romantic Heretic  Dec 5, 2014 1:14:40pm

To me this whole thing demonstrates how much of a role that luck plays in becoming fabulously wealthy, and how those who become so become delusional about how much of a role they personally played in events.

The whole idea of “I’m rich therefore I’m God” is an idea we have to purge from our culture.

8 Randall Gross  Dec 5, 2014 8:10:25pm

TNR represents a rift in the Progressive space time continuum, they never asked for forgiveness but my understanding is that they sinned. There are some really good writers resigning who wrote long intense articles where every word counted. Along with them are others who are practiced in the art of pathologically obtuse verbosity.


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