Roma incontra Il Messico. Uno speciale contributo per celebrare i centocinquanta anni di indipendenza del territorio centroamericano e un’ indagine sul ruolo dell’arte nel paese

Roma incontra Il Messico. Uno speciale contributo per celebrare i centocinquanta anni di indipendenza del territorio centroamericano e un’ indagine sul ruolo dell’arte nel paese.


Mexican-revolutionary-1
Autore sconosciuto (attribuita a Casasola) Zapata con fucile, fascia e sciabola, Cuernavaca, 1915 ca

Palazzo delle Esposizioni
Via Nazionale 194, Roma.
Info: www.palazzodellesposizioni.it

L’arte messicana arriva a Roma, incrociando presente e passato, combinando le produzioni artigianali di civiltà antichissime, con le  immagini fotografiche della rivoluzione dei primi decenni del 1900 e ancora con le creazioni contemporanee di Carlos Amorales. Un’esperienza a trecentosessanta gradi che sa stimolare la mente andando alla ricerca di punti di contatto nell’evoluzione della cultura e del pensiero messicano.

Leggi la recenzione intera alla Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




A Singer’s Notes 26: Fall Festival at Shakespeare & Co. and the Madwoman of Cambridge

From Shakespeare & Company's Fall Festival

Fall Festival at Shakespeare and Company

It could be a tough crowd, but it isn't. It could be a dull crowd, but it isn't. It could be an old crowd, but it isn't. What it is is noisy, what it does is participate. What it feels is true. They carried King Lear out on a cot-like device, and she was dressed in white. She was sleeping...the sleep of the blessed, the first fruits of them that slept. At her side a diminutive girl made a piping Cordelia. There was an immediate hush, the wild beasts were stilled. We heard the words we have heard so many times coming out of adult mouths with adult ideas behind them: "We too will sing like birds in the cage..." This time it had enough simplicity. This time in spite of all the incongruities, it was real. There are a lot of swordfights. The text may be rearranged inelegantly, but as I heard Roger Rees say once, "Some of the best Shakespeare I have seen came from American high school kids.”

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller

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Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective, at The Guggenheim Collection, Venice through January 9, 2011

A-e-sailing-gloucester-c1935-0
Adolph Gottlieb at the Tiller, Provincetown, 1949. The Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation.

Adolph Gottlieb. A Retrospective
The Guggenheim Collection, Venice
September 4, 2010–January 9, 2011

Curated by Luca Massimo Barbero, Catalogue with essays by Luca Massimo Barbero and Pepe Karmel

This exceptionally important and beautifully realized exhibition is not only the first retrospective of the work of Adolph Gottlieb in Italy, it is the first full retrospective of his work anywhere in quite a few years. One can hardly say that Gottlieb is a forgotten artist, because there has been a steady flow of exhibitions following his death in 1974 through the eighties, nineties, and up to the present day, more at major private galleries rather than museums, and none as ambitious or as scholarly as this. On the other hand it appears that Gottlieb's reputation has weakened in recent years, especially among the general public, among whom Jackson Pollock has become a sort of louche patron saint of Abstract Expressionism, or "Ab Ex," as MoMA now encourages us to call it, more through biographical scandal and sensational controversies over his oeuvre than a serious appraisal of his work — not that the Boston College exhibition about the Matter sketches was not serious and important work. Hence, in our conversation about the show, Philip Rylands, the director of the Guggenheim Collection, was surely right in pointing out that the principle goal of the exhibition is the re-assessment of Gottlieb's pre-eminence among the "Abstract Expressionists" — something that was never in doubt during the peak years of both the movement and his career.

The exhibition succeeds admirably in convincing the visitor of the quality of Gottlieb's work, not only in the mature periods for which he is best known, but before and after as well. However, further issues emerge from this, above all the question of how well Gottlieb and his 

Read the full review article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller




Avatar

[caption id="attachment_5237" align="aligncenter" width="460" caption="Avatar"][/caption]

Until reading Manohla Dargis’ review in the New York Times, I had no intention of seeing Avatar. But her article affected me: I felt disturbed and violated. Her opening sentence: ‘With “Avatar” James Cameron has turned one man’s dream of the movies into a trippy joy ride about the end of life â€" our moviegoing life included â€" as we know it,’ is why. Those words in parentheses, an obliging repetition of the advertisements, obliterated my initial dismissiveness. So too, did its place as #24 in IMDb’s Top 200 List (well ahead of Citizen Kane and Sunset Boulevard). To say ‘Just another bullshit blockbuster to disregard’ is irresponsible in this case. 20th Century Fox and James Cameron are serious â€" $280 million is no j oke, not even to them (it boasts of being one of the most expensive movies ever made). The aim for the filmmakers of Avatar is to revolutionize cinema through science fiction, to finish what George Lucas and Steven Spielberg began. They are desperate to do so in part because audiences are thinning. People look at their computers â€" and their even smaller portable gadgets â€" to watch the latest films, either downloaded through torrents, or streamed through websites. The intention of getting people to the cinema is noble (at least on the surface), but the product is decidedly ignoble.

What is meant to distinguish Avatar is its 'revolutionary' visual effects. It is a perverse return to the “Cinema of Attractions.” Audiences no longer cower at the sight of a locomotive roaring forth, then disappearing out of the frame as they did in the Lumière days (see Maxim Gorky's The Kingdom of Shadows); nor are they terribly impressed by more modern illusions â€" explosions and UFOs have become quotidian, and as impressive on the computer as at the cinema. So they have made a picture that is entirely digital, a special effect in 3-D (ipods do not yet have that capability) lasting 2 hours and 46 minutes. The performance capture of live figures does give the computer-generated images (CGIs) an increased sense of realistic animation (and at least acting is not made entirely obsolete), but with the recent success of Fantastic Mr. Fox (Wes Anderson | 2009), filmed in archaic stop motion, one wonders just how important these graphics are to cinema. The aesthetic is that of the scenes that interweave play in an advanced video game like Halo. Perhaps the filmmakers should concentrate their efforts on the gaming industry instead? The unusual (for me) 3D showing was interesting, but ill-suited to such a long feature. Focus is much more conspicuous due to the floating planes which sometimes force the viewer to confront out of focus objects in the foreground. It had a nauseating effect after a while.

A story is attempted, too. Indeed, Dargis calls James Cameron, who wrote and directed the film, ‘a masterly storyteller.’ Hardly (press here for IMDb’s summary). An underdog hero stands up for an underdog society, with the usual garnishments of rivalry, romance, betrayal, greed, redemption &c. But all this is very much in subordination to the video game aesthetic, the futuristic flying vehicles, robots and alien dinosaurs provide the absorbing action. A combination, and, in parts, blatant plagiarism of The Matrix, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park films, as well as the video game mentioned above, Halo.

The characterization is really dreadful. Our protagonist, and narrator via video log, Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), is an idiot without depth, only a bit of cheap and exploitive sentimentality make him sympathetic (his disabled condition, his assumed bravery as a marine). His scientist cohorts (led by Sigourney Weaver), to borrow an expression from the film, are ‘limp-dick’ nerds. The bad guys (played by Stephen Lang and Giovanni Ribisi) are racist imperialists, inspiring no ambivalence whatsoever. I, personally, was glad of the dramatic relief provided by a young lady who walked up the aisle, using her mobile phone as a flashlight, in order to find her cheating boyfriend. She screamed: ‘You bastard!’ He told her to shut up, grabbed her, and dragged her out of the theatre. They could be heard arguing for several minutes.

Little attempt is made at developing individual Pandoran characters. In fact, they are the typical, patronizing Western representation of the “Noble Savage” â€" innocent, pure in lifestyle, happy, but ineffectual and vulnerable to contamination from outside influence. And it is only the outside influence of a white man that can save them. They are treated as spectacles, like Ishi. We think: ‘Listen to their cute pidgin English; more amusing still, hear that unusual language of theirs; how adept they are at foraging with bow and arrow; see them walk around near naked, only loin cloths and gold leaf shielding their private parts (and what a terrific rack Neytiri has!).’ This is classic Orientalism. Us: them. The same thing that allows people to dismiss important films like Nanook of the North (1922) by Robert J. Flaherty as racist. (Flaherty was an important influence on Robert Gardner, whose work has been recently discussed in these pages: http://berkshirereview.net/2009/12/robert-gardner-human-documents-eight-photo..." target="_blank">here and here). Because James Cameron’s natives and their world are digital, he is not called a racist (not because they are fictional or fantastic â€" they bear many traits of hunter gatherer societies).

Cameron does make certain attempts at thematic depth, but these are all either flawed or facile. The most interesting of these is his application of Romantic elegies of nature to his fantasy world. Unfortunately, he makes shallow, vulgar, even perverted, this potentially intriguing idea. The special link his natives share to the land and its creatures is sexual â€" they forcefully mount beasts and physically connect to them by way of weird organs at the tips of their hairs. They make faces and sounds like those that signify a human orgasm. For Cameron, blithe sensual appreciation of the natural world is only cinematically articulable through bestiality.

The film also issues rather more pedestrian comments on nature: its beauty, and the threat to it of human folly. Dargis makes an interesting, though demeaning, comparison to Terence Malick (The Thin Red Line, The New World), whose works are largely characterized by their thematic focus on nature. But Malick is an artist and philosopher. He asks large questions and reflects on them without presuming to know the answers. Cameron does not even bother to ask a question. He only makes obvious statements. He’s no auteur, despite his affirmation to the contrary.

Why did Avatar cost so much? Computers needed to be bought, and so did the digital artists and token actors, and James Cameron needed to be compensated for making accessible his great vision. It also makes for a good advertising campaign: ‘What’s expensive, must be good,’ is common reasoning. Recently, the BBC reported that the makers of a YouTube video called Panic Attack, showing gigantic robots destroying Montevideo, have been given $30 million to make a feature film. Their impressive short was made on a $300 budget. Are these millions really necessary, even for this computerized imagery?

Avatar is another bullshit blockbuster to disregard, albeit a dangerous one. For a movie to be technically advanced and expensive to make is not enough. There needs to be substance. Avatar is hollow and horrendous, a ‘papier mâché Mephistopheles.’

Brahms Symphony No. 2: Tonu Kalam conducts the UNC Symphony - A Christmas offering from the Berkshire Review

[caption id="attachment_9123" align="alignright" width="212" caption="Tonu Kalam and the UNC Symphony Orchestra"]Tonu Kalam and the UNC Symphony Orchestra[/caption]

We thought this extraordinarily sensitive and intelligent performance of Brahms' Second Symphony from Chapel Hill, North Carolina would be an appropriate seasonal treat for our readers. Listen for the accents which add tension and enliven the broad tempo of an approach which is basically lyrical and analytical, as well as the pointing of the harmonies and the expressive transitional passages. You can easily understand what inspired Dvořák in this symphony.

Tonu Kalam, Music Director and Conductor of the UNC Symphony Orchestra, was mentioned recently in our Marlboro retrospective article. His outstanding work should really be more widely known, and it is a privilege to make it available in the Review. An excerpt from his biography is not out of place here:

Prof. Kalam was born of Estonian parents and has lived in the United States since the age of two. Trained as a conductor, pianist and composer, he studied with conductor Max Rudolf and composers Leon Kirchner and Andrew Imbrie. His summer credits include fellowships at Tanglewood and Aspen as well as many years at the Marlboro Music Festival, where he conducted the Beethoven Choral Fantasy on five occasions at the invitation of legendary pianist Rudolf Serkin.

He has appeared as guest conductor with the North Carolina Symphony, the Madison Symphony Orchestra, the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, the Shreveport Symphony Orchestra, the ProMusica Chamber Orchestra of Columbus, the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra, and the East Texas Symphony Orchestra, among others, and has served as Music Director of the New England Chamber Orchestra in Boston. He was a prizewinner in the first Baltimore Symphony Orchestra Young Conductor's Competition and was also a finalist in the prestigious Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductors Program.

In 1994 Prof. Kalam made his European debut conducting the Estonian National Symphony Orchestra in Tallinn and he was immediately reengaged for festival appearances the following year. He returned to Europe in 1997 to guest conduct Finland's Oulu Symphony Orchestra and in 2004 he made his fourth Estonian appearance in the "Tubin and His Time" festival.

Tonu Kalam has conducted over 135 opera performances for companies such as the Shreveport Opera, the Lake George Opera Festival and the Nevada Opera. For seven years he was Music Director of the Illinois Opera Theatre at the University of Illinois and he has also filled short-term appointments as visiting associate professor and director of the orchestra programs at the University of Miami in Florida and St. Olaf College in Minnesota. As an educator, he has conducted all-state, all-region and all-county orchestras in New York, North Carolina, Texas and Montana, as well as the Mallarmé Youth Chamber Orchestra in North Carolina.

In 1984 Prof. Kalam began a long-term association with the renowned Kneisel Hall summer chamber music festival in Blue Hill, Maine, where he spent 13 years in various administrative and musical capacities, as Executive Director, Summer Program Director, Artist-Faculty pianist, and chamber music coach. In addition to his conducting activities, he performs regularly as a pianist and chamber musician.

Thanks to our West Coast Editor, Steven Kruger, for bringing this to my attention, and to Christian Brown for making it available.

MTT conducts the SF Symphony in Cowell, Mozart (with Gil Shaham), and John Adams' Harmonielehre

[caption id="attachment_9109" align="alignright" width="360" caption="John Adams, Composer"]John Adams, Composer[/caption]

The San Francisco Symphony
Davies Hall, San Francisco
December 11, 2010
Michael Tilson Thomas, Conductor

Cowell - Synchrony (1930)
Mozart - Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, (1775)
Gil Shaham, Violin
Adams - Harmonielehre (1985)

Last week's program at the San Francisco Symphony carried a sense of celebration with it. John Adams was in attendance, giving luster to the orchestra's new performance and recording of his "Harmonielehre" under the direction of Michael Tilson Thomas. (Edo De Waart taped the piece in his final year as Music Director, when Adams was composer-in-residence.) There has always been a tendency to rally around the orchestra in San Francisco â€" cultural boosterism being one of the old-fashioned charms of this now rather important city, which sometimes still thinks of itself as a town and behaves like one in its enthusiasms â€" and John Adams is a local hero in the orchestra's history. But the spontaneous applause I heard on Saturday seemed to go beyond these boundaries. It is a though, from the standpoint of an audience, Adams were being hailed for having rescued contemporary music â€" and indeed, he just may have.

In our lifetime there have always been two listener-alienating afflictions affecting most new music: noise (which is not the same as loudness) and coldness (which is not the same as being bleak). Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" gave composers a template for experimentation with the former, and Schoenberg's 12-tone system an "out" from any consideration of emotion-related harmonic progression.

Interestingly enough, though, Stravinsky's own music stops far short of "noise" â€" indeed, it is possible to hum one's way through "Le Sacre" and unravel its climaxes by memory â€" unsatisfying as it might be to listen to anyone making the attempt! And Schoenberg's own music seldom seems as cold as his system of composition suggests it should. Other composers playing on the field of modernity haven't always been so lucky, as periodic resurrections of their attempts reveal.

Henry Cowell's "Synchrony" began the evening and is a case in point. Cowell is best known for his "tone cluster" experiments, compositions featuring one's fist or elbow hitting numerous adjacent notes on the piano. You can't very well do that with most instruments in an orchestra, so Cowell explores Stravinskian polytonal dissonances instead and then gets the shock value he wants from thematic traffic jams, like Ives.

"Synchrony" begins with a long solo trumpet theme, whose chromatic twists suggest the English horn solo in the Prelude to Act III of "Tristan". It has a haunting quality, and everything devolves from it. The piece avoids coldness, as most American music from the era fortunately does. We are not yet in Roy Harris country, but something "open" says we are allowed to feel. That said, much of the writing which follows seems derivative of "LeSacre", as though bits of Part II were being played at a faster clip than usual, and Cowell's extended climaxes blare in a chaotic manner which Stravinsky manages to avoid. At the most grating moments, I was reminded that Ives usually had recognizable patriotic songs, hymn tunes and public ditties completing each other's sentences, so to speak. The elbow-bumping themes here remain strangers, we care less about their destination, and their struggles become traffic noise.

Like much American music of this period, "Synchrony" sometimes sounds French. The "Ivesian" moments could have been penned by Darius Milhaud, and some high writing on flute and piccolo might have been composed by Pierne or Roussel. These are influences one readily hears. But I think "Synchrony's" most important legacy may lie in its influence upon Leonard Bernstein. The "running basses" and explosive percussion moments in the piece bring to mind the "Symphonic Dances From West Side Story". Cowell seems to have given composers permission to be energetic in this way â€" but it took twenty-five years and a Leonard Bernstein to know what to do with the energy.

Saturday's program balanced itself out with Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 5, performed extrovertedly by Gil Shaham, perhaps too much so. (The "Turkish" last movement deteriorated into a silent movie pantomime, where Shaham would back away from the orchestra in arm-cloaking mock terror, each time an orchestral tutti occurred.)  MTT and the orchestra were consistently lumpy and too loud, and I missed in Shaham's sonority and general approach anything beyond sheer accuracy and a bit of camp.

The slow movement cadenza, to be fair, was rapt, but there is little "moonlight" or glow in Shaham's tone â€" -indeed, a touch of the serrated knife seems to inhabit his sound. Somehow, the obvious theatrics between soloist and conductor fit the mood of a festive evening, and the concerto was well received. But it will take more love and attention for Mozart in San Francisco to be memorable. This was pops.

"Stunning" has to be the proper word for being hit over the head by seven of anything. John Adams' "Harmonielehre" whams the listener repeatedly in e-minor as it begins, and the composer's harbor fantasy of a freighter morphing into a rocket-ship under the Bay Bridge is vivid from the outset. Indeed, throughout the work one never loses a sense of metallic bigness, as though the audience were present in an enormous, hollow-sounding shipyard. There are many clangorous works to be found in contemporary repertory, or course: those of William Mathias, for example, but seemingly none that manage to convey sonorous warmth at the same time. An underlying emotional accessibility is the key to Adams, and an awareness of the sensory nature of beauty.

Adams does not hesitate to veer away from his pulsing shipyard triads into the high string and brass world of Sibelius and Rautavarra. And while he doesn't set before the listener exactly what one would call melodies, from moment to moment one senses the "emotional intelligence" emanating from chords which could have been composed by Korngold or even Howard Hanson. As in the best cinema from the 1940s, Adams' music never stops being a psychological running commentary. There is a bit of "film noir" to it.

The slow movement of "Harmonielehre" begins very much like the Sibelius Fourth Symphony, a sort of bleak and claustrophobic sinus-headache depicted in music. Gradually, Adams eventually manages to unfold an enormous climax, similar to something in Shostakovich, but more sonorous and better orchestrated from below than Shostakovich. Somewhere in the mix, a bit of Hugo Friedhofer's music to "The Best Years of Our Lives" seems to make itself felt, and the movement fades away like the slow movement in Shostakovich's Sixth.

In the last movement, one finds oneself again in Rautavarra's sonic world. There are high string and bells and the sense of things sinking below the waves. For a while the music cycles in a Philip Glass manner, but this is not a piece of music which could be conducted by an automatic tennis machine. Too many things are coming and going to produce tedium. Ultimately, Sibelian  horn sonorities familiar from "Karelia" and "Night Ride and Sunrise" help build the foundation for a final assault, and this very contemporary piece somehow triumphantly concludes in E-flat.

Michael Tilson Thomas is in his element in music like this, and "Harmonielehre" was superbly and excitingly delivered. When released on disc, this performance will definitely be the recording to have. Beyond the excitement of the moment, though, I sensed a joy and relaxation in Davies Hall, born of the fact that the audience was there to hear a fondly anticipated piece of music. That sense of audience acceptance and anticipation for a contemporary piece of music had disappeared by1985, when Adams composed "Harmonielehre".

This listener can recall Charles Wuorinen, then composer-in-residence, telling Davies Hall audiences from the stage in the early 1980s that they had better learn to like his dodecaphonic music, since it was the future and was, in any case, what they were going to get. Tough toenails! It was about as convincing to listen to as a DDR official still touting the latest Five Year Plan, and almost as creepy. Those days are thankfully over. I don't know that "Harmonielehre" will be adopted by ageing conductors as the swan song of their careers, like a great Bruckner Symphony, but it is in the repertory and deserves to be, and we owe a debt of gratitude to the fact of its composition.

Dodecaphony is dead. Long live John Adams!

Frank Gehry in Sydney

[caption id="attachment_9085" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Models of the Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building, designed by Frank Gehry. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller. "]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

A year ago, when Frank Gehry was commissioned to design the new business school for the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) he was asked if he liked the proposed site. His response â€" “I like the problem” â€" was both diplomatic and revealing, for UTS, the youngest of Sydney’s four major universities, exists in a part of town with a lot of likable problems. Like NYU, UTS is an urban university with no real campus. This lack is no problem if you have a Washington Square Park, an expansionist attitude and a Greenwich Village to compensate, but UTS is stuck in a defiantly unlovely part of Sydney. Even if it had the beautiful lawns and gracious old buildings of the nearby University of Sydney, UTS would struggle to maintain a physical identity among the dense but generally mediocre surroundings to the west of Central Station. In a sense UTS’ problem is a condensed version of central Sydney’s more persistent malaise; it is not a place where people linger. While Ge hry might seem an obvious choice for any university looking to promote, as the current jargon goes, “stickiness,” UTS and Gehry are in fact an ideal match. As his now-unveiled design for what will be known as the Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building reveals, he has solutions to their problems.

[caption id="attachment_9076" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Gehry's canvas. The site of the Dr. Chau Chak Wing building along Ultimo Road. Montage © 2010 Alan Miller."]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_9088" align="alignright" width="400" caption="UTS' infamous late brutalist landmark. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller."]UTS' late brutalist tower[/caption]

It is a paradox that the most famous architect in the world (even Rem Koolhaas would never make The Simpsons) remains, at least in my view, misunderstood. Even thirteen years after its shock of the new, it’s not hard to find pundits and architects still shaking their heads about “the Bilbao effect,” as though Gehry’s building somehow invented a phenomenon which, if it is worth mentioning at all, is at least as old as the Parthenon. What I find most interesting about Gehry is his continual progression, his unbroken commitment to finding his architecture within himself. This individualism has been happily at odds with the several variously ephemeral architectural tendencies during his career â€" 80s postmodernism, 90s deconstructivism, today’s parametric design. Gehry only became famous fairly late in his career, after he had honed his game against the backdrop of the historicist post-modernism of the 1970s and 80s. While consciously avoiding pomo like the plague, Gehry nonetheless managed in early projects like his own chain link wrapped house (1978) and the the Chiat-Day Headquarters (1985-91, with its triumphal entrance gate formed by Claes Oldenburg binoculars) to assimilate, perhaps unconsciously, the “rough and tough and frontier” context of Los Angeles with the humor and cultural references of the best postmodern architecture. The result was, and remains, completely sui generis.

[caption id="attachment_9078" align="aligncenter" width="400" caption="The anti-postmodernist. Frank Gehry plays "Frankie P. Toronto" in "Il Corso del Cotello" a performance piece by Coosje Van Bruggen, Frank Gehry and Claes Oldenburg, Venice, 1985."][/caption]

From the earliest Venice Beach houses (some of them on sites as unlovely as UTS), Gehry’s work has expressed a sense of movement. By revealing the prosaic stud work underneath the skin of the American home, Gehry tried to capture the evanescent beauty of unfinished buildings. In a gradual progression, advanced by ten years of toil on the unbuilt Peter B. Lewis House (1985-95) outside Cleveland (which Gehry credited as “the equivalent of a MacArthur Grant”), and perhaps culminating in Bilbao’s literally billowing titanium scales, Gehry became interested in all sorts of movement; the wiggling of a fish, the drapery in a Bellini Madonna and Child, the “luffing” of sails on a sailboat.

[caption id="attachment_9116" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="There are plenty of Gehryian forms to be found in the bush around Sydney. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller."][/caption]

As his commissions have become more public, Gehry has tried to design “porous buildings,” buildings which break down the barriers which exist within institutions and between institutions and their cities. In Sydney, Gehry has, bene trovato, managed to find things to celebrate on his harsh little site. With no choice but to go vertical, the Wing Building has been explicitly designed as a “tree house.” The basic parti is surprisingly simple â€" a group of mini-towers stacked in a rough pyramid. This form intrinsically allows generic spaces â€" the offices within the towers â€" to generate more public areas in the irregular cracks between the towers. The logic is especially evident on the ground and first floor plans, where the bases of the towers shape a flowing social space over two levels. While architects imitate Gehry at their peril, we can all learn from his expertise in combining generic and particular space, a combination which seems to chara cterize many contemporary building typologies. Gehry has done this in many different ways during his career. At Bard’s Fisher Centre (2003), for example, the stainless steel scales of the entry and foyer give way with charming matter-of-factness to simple plaster boxes at the back of house.

[caption id="attachment_9077" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="View of model showing east elevation to Ultimo Pedestrian Network. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller."]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

On the outside of the Wing Building there is wit in the way a large building seems to have been squeezed like an accordion onto a little site. Is this a big or a little building? The ambiguity is intriguing. Gehry sensibly realized that the new business school will never be seen in its entirety from any viewpoint in the cluttered context, and designed the exterior as a series of “vignettes.” Each elevation takes on a different personality (the Sydney climate generally suggests that a building treat the four cardinal directions in four different ways, and I hope as Gehry’s UTS design develops that each elevation is further modified to respond to the climatic context as subtly as it currently responds to its urban surroundings). Gehry has tried hard to activate the site. What one might call the dominant elevations face east and west. To the east a roughly tripartite brick facade opens onto the optimistically named Ultimo Pedestrian Network. The “wrinkly,” drapery-l ike central portion frames the kind of pleasant outdoor space UTS desperately needs. On the west side, facing onto Omnibus Lane, and looking through a gap toward Harris Street, tilting planes of glass are intended to reflect the urban surroundings. On the narrower northern and southern elevations, the building is also “porous” with a small plaza and cafe opening to the north-west and the main entrance off Ultimo Road tucked into a fold on the southern side. This description makes the spaces seem more fragmented than I suspect they will be in the flesh (and fleshy this building shall be). Internally, the sinuous lobby should link it all into an unbroken whole, while on the exterior, the building turns the corners between the four distinct elevations with a typically Gehrian flow.

[caption id="attachment_9081" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="The western elevation, viewed from Harris Street. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller. "]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_9086" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="A vignette, looking east down Ultimo Road. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller. "]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

Gehry’s emphasis on the practical nature of his practice â€" “architecture is a service business” â€" makes is difficult to generalize about where the Wing Building fits into his oeuvre, but the design does seem to belong to a series of recent works preoccupied by the tectonic qualities of particular building materials. While the Disney Concert Hall (1987-2003!) was revised from stone cladding to stainless steel with barely a change in form, it would be difficult to imagine, for example, the IAC Building (2007) on the Hudson River in anything but glass, or the 2008 Serpentine Pavilion in anything but wood. For Sydney, Gehry has written an essay in brick, and I’m pleased that he made such an unconventionally conventional choice. The brick occupies a unique place in the Australian psyche, both for public buildings and, most interestingly, for houses, where a brick finish has long been considered so desirable, indeed so necessary to the idea of a proper house that the very Aussie concept of brick veneer â€" in which a perfectly good timber house is clad in a nonstructural layer of brick â€" was invented. It will be fascinating to see how Gehry chooses to detail the brick walls, which must achieve some pretty sharp curves while accommodating punched openings. Unlike the smooth, billowing brick forms of the Vontz Center in Cincinnati (1997-99), Gehry intends the buff colored brick of the Wing building to have an “animated,” corbeled finish. A full-scale mock up on display at UTS suggests that the constraint of stacking rectangular bricks into complex curved forms could result in an extremely beautiful texture, and a real innovation among Gehry’s material experiments.

[caption id="attachment_9079" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Full scale study of the brick facade. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller. "]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

[caption id="attachment_9087" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="The Australian brick tradition. The Ultimo TAFE (1911) is within view of Gehry's site. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller. "][/caption]

Beyond the building itself, I appreciate the way Gehry’s presence in Sydney allows a writer on architecture to, for once, write about, well, architecture. After a year of agonizing about the politics, spin and obfuscation of the now rubber-stamped Barangaroo fiasco (two fast facts: the entire eleven story Dr. Wing building is budgeted at $150 million, a 200 meter pedestrian tunnel at Barangaroo will cost Mr. Taxpayer $286 million), it is refreshing to talk about bricks, glass, doors and walls for a change. Gehry justifies his architecture in the language of architecture, not as the harbinger of progress or wealth or utopia, but as the continuation of a noble tradition of making people feel better in physical space.

The solidity of Gehry’s practice extends to the way he presents his buildings. Gehry travelled to Sydney with physical models and two dimensional scale drawings, formats which, unlike the ubiquitous computer rendering, allow the architect no room to hide, no room for fudging. The several enormous models, at scales ranging from 1:1 to 1:500 were sturdy and beautiful in the Gehry office style. One could tell that they were working models, designed to be taken apart and reconfigured as necessary. Gehry emphasizes the importance of brain-eye-hand coordination for architects and though it may sound fuddy duddy I fear that this delicate link has been endangered by the contemporary tendency to design buildings on a computer, rather than, as Gehry does, with the aid of one. Too often a physical model takes the form of a perfect, filigree object spat out of a laser printer at the end of the design process. I know in my own architectural education the quality of a design was direc tly proportional to the number of process models, even if one occasionally and literally bled for them.

[caption id="attachment_9082" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="1:50 model of the building's interior. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller. "]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

Beyond their usefulness for the architect, it is impossible to overemphasize how expressive a handmade physical model can be. Models are perhaps the only way to create a conversation between the architect and a general public untrained in the reading of plans and uncritical in the reading of digital renderings. Even though Gehry’s forms are complex, he presents them with a precision which allows those interested to see into his design process. This was obvious on the afternoon of Gehry’s public interview with ABC television, which was followed by a mass stampede towards the arrayed models.

[caption id="attachment_9080" align="alignright" width="400" caption="Façade model. Photo © 2010 Alan Miller."]Dr. Chau Chak Wing Building by Frank Gehry[/caption]

Sydney’s Gehry building (as I’m afraid it will ever be known) is a major coup for UTS and the city. Universities love to call their building programs, however meek or blatantly expansionist, transformational, but there is no doubt that UTS and its neighborhood are at the beginning of a transformation at the hands of architecture, with the university’s many projects in turn dwarfed by the promising Central Park development on the other side of Broadway. What is remarkable, given the history of university building programs, is that UTS seems to have cracked out the bulldozers for buildings which are so resolutely contemporary and so unapologetically urban. Gehry could have been describing UTS’ approach as a whole when he said that his building “doesn’t pander to the fabric. It talks to it but doesn’t talk down to it.” It is this sense of engaged acceptance of one’s surroundings, worthy of Ozu, that unites architect and client on an obscure little site at th e edge of inner Sydney’s edge.

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The ABC Radio's By Design program conducted an excellent interview with Gehry while he was in Sydney, available as a podcast here.

[caption id="attachment_9090" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Could the Wing building be a worthy descendant of that ultimate brickfest, the Institut de L’Art et d’Archéologie (Paul Bigot, 1927) in Paris? Photo © 2010 Alan Miller."]nstitut de L’Art et d’Archéologie (Paul Bigot, 1927) in Paris[/caption]

The Institution is Immaterial: Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse by Alan Miller

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The Musée d’Orsay contains two scale models of the Palais Garnier (1875) which must rank among the greatest of all time. Within the museum the models terminate the former railway station’s main axis, forming a kind of culmination. Along with Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851), unlikely to be mentioned in a Parisian museum, the Garnier is perhaps the definitive building of its century. The first model, implanted beneath a glass floor, shows the building in its urban context, clearly demonstrating that the great opera house precipitated for its neighborhood the Full Haussmann. The second model, built to a highly detailed scale (perhaps 1:100) for such a large building, is cut through in longitudinal section like a doll’s house, revealing the famously ornate lobby and hall as relatively minuscule inhabited planets orbited by a dark matter cloud of unnamed rooms and fly towers. Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse, a fly on the wall portrait of the Paris Opera Ballet, seems the cinematic equivalent of that sectional model, but it would be more accurate to say that it is simultaneously both models. The film uses its all access backstage pass, its sore toes, sweat and heavy breathing, to achieve the purpose of the contextual model, the definition of an institution within a city.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Alan Miller

Marlboro at 60 - a Look Back, with a Schedule of Touring Concerts 2010-11

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Scenes from Marlboro

So much is out of joint in the United States, that it is easy to fall into the direst of pessimistic attitudes. When I find myself sinking too deep into thoughts of decay and dissolution, the first thing to buoy up my spirits is the ubiquity of chamber music in this country. This is only an impression, but in no other place in the world does it seem so easy to find chamber music on any given weekend. I am writing from the Berkshires, of course, a small region with an extraordinary concentration of summer chamber music festivals. But even now in November, an hour's drive will almost invariably lead me to chamber music, which has become a fixture among regional arts centers, music programs, churches, museums, liberal arts colleges, and universities, and not only in the Northeast.

Read the full article on the Berkshire Review, an international journal for the Arts!

Michael Miller