"My Architect" Goes for the Gold

In a couple hours I'll be one of over 25 million people glued to their television sets to see how many Oscars Lord of the Rings is going to win in the 76th Academy Awards. But I'll admit that the Best Picture contest doesn't hold my attention this year - though my vote would go to Lost In Translation if I were a member of the Academy, partly because it's an underdog film, but also because it's an independent film, which I guess is what makes it an underdog. Instead I'll be waiting patiently through the enormous amounts of filler that occupy the ceremony every year for the Best Documentary category.

And the nominees are:

Balseros, the story of seven Cuban refugees in 1994,
Capturing the Friedmans, following the Friedman family after the father and son are charged with child molestation,
The Fog of War, Errol Morris's portrayal of Robert McNamara re-examining his role in the Vietnam War,
The Weather Underground, about a radical group in the late 1960s called The Weathermen,
My Architect: A Son's Journey, Nathanial Kahn's five-year voyage to discover his father Louis I. Kahn's legacy, the subject of this post.


National Assembly Building. Dhaka, Bangladesh.

On a recent trip to New York City I caught My Architect at the Film Forum. The sold-out crowd, like me, seemed to find the film amusing and touching, as Nathanial Kahn traveled from one Kahn building to another, talking with people who worked with his father before his death in 1974. Instead of going into the well-known circumstances behind Louis I. Kahn's death (found in a Pennsylvania Station bathroom and unknown for three days) or his made-for-TV-like personal life (three children from three women), I just wanted to comment on the film's portrayal of Kahn's architecture and the implications of the film's success, although the personal life of the architect is an inseparable part of his architecture and vice-versa.

First, Kahn presents his father's buildings, from the Trenton Bath House to the National Assembly in Bangladesh with many in-between, in a way I can only describe as loving. His fondness for his father comes across in the photography and circumstances, especially as Nathanial roller blades in the Salk Institute's plaza as he tries to find a way to get in touch with his father, even if he experiences the space in a manner potentially unsuitable from its intention. The only questionable presentation of one of his father's buildings is when the Kimbell Art Museum is unfortunately filmed with a fish-eye lens, betraying its classical symmetry, repetition and the contrast of the vertical lines with the barrel vaults.

Secondly, the popularity of the film among the general public may have repercussions in the public's taste in architecture. Kahn's dramatic buildings touch a nerve in people, particularly when they are surrounded by the blandness of much of the American built landscape. Aside from the obvious contrast between Kahn's architecture and the norm, his buildings stand in stark contrast to much quality contemporary architecture. Kahn's work has a weight that is missing today, as architects strive for lightness in their designs. If My Architect has any effect on current practice, it would be to change the tastes of clients. Not to say that no architect today values mass over transparency and lightness, but there is clearly a trend away from architecture poetically rooted in its place as strongly as Kahn's buildings do.

As I noted earlier I'll be rooting for My Architect, which I believe will win, not just because I'm biased as an architect, but because Kahn's film stands out among the other four. Three films deal politically with the 1960s and one deals with a subject (child molestation) that might turn off most Academy voters. What is left is the story of a man trying to discover his father by experiencing his life, his architecture.

Lee Bontecou at the MCA

On display at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago until the end of May is a retrospective of sculptor Lee Bontecou. Her sculptures and drawings were popular in the 1960s and 1970s, but since she has rarely exhibited and has existed in a way that works for her but not necessarily for the art world that admires her. Teaching art in Brooklyn, Bontecou can spend years on individual works, immersing herself at times, but without rushing to finish a piece to appease curators, gallery owners or sellers.



Untitled, 1966. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

When I viewed the exhibition on its opening night in early February I was primarily impressed by the intricacy of each piece. Each sculpture works at both the macro and micro scales, in other words from across the room and close-up to the viewer. Nature is a definite influence in her work but also is engineering and, in particular, war machines. The last gives her art a (unintended, perhaps) political resonance that seems just as appropriate now as it must have been in the early 1970s.

Significance, or Why I Love Chaco Canyon

Due to a recent fire at a CTA substation, this morning I was able to start and finish an essay while on the train from Places, titled, "Fixing Historic Preservation: A Constructive Critique of 'Significance'" by Randall Mason. While the essay's main points (lack of critically thinking about a place's meaning by preservationists needs to change, significance is not fixed but evolves over time, and multiple voices need to be heard concerning preservation decisions) were not lost on me, I framed these points through one example in particular that the author briefly mentioned: Chaco Canyon.



Ever since I happened upon a local PBS presentation of "The Mystery of Chaco Canyon" I have developed an interest in the Anasazi (Pueblo ancestors) and a greater interest in ancient architecture. Effectively narrated by Robert Redford, the short film was preceded by "The Sun Dagger", both masterminded by Anna Sofaer, an artist whose life was changed upon her discoveries in Chaco Canyon. In the earlier film, Sofaer rigorously documented astronomical markings that she discovered on Fajada Butte, itself a solar marker in the otherwise flat landscape around Chaco. Through papers and presentations, she proved the markings to be both solar and lunar markers, finding the Solstice Project to help and further the study. The later film picks up where the first left off, attempting to show that the Anasazi used solar and lunar cycles to locate pueblos in and around the Canyon.



I highly recommend reading the research papers featured on the Solstice Project's web page, but returning to Mason's essay, he uses Chaco Canyon as an example of how meaning is subjective and may create problems with significance. Originally made a historical monument because of the historical ruins - particularly Pueblo Bonito - and scientific research into the Anasazi, the place has become a sacred place for descendents of the builders and a hot spot for New Age worshippers drawn to the locations supposedly powerful aura (Needless to say I have yet to travel to Chaco but plan to sometime in the next year or two, if anything to experience the place and to draw my own conclusions). Chaco is unique in that these three meanings are in favor of preserving the site, but other places definitely won't be so lucky, as values of preservation need to be weighed against economics, politics, and other interests.



An additional piece of information not present in the essay is the atypical preservation of Chaco Canyon. Since scientific digs were harming the ruins it was decided that the site would be left as is, in effect allowing time and nature to have its effect upon the structures. Given that the Anasazi built the structure as if they grew from the ground, I find this fitting, regardless of the fact that stone was brought from miles away.



In 1988, Chaco Canyon became one of UNESCO's World Heritage sites, one of only twenty sites in the United States. Click here for more information and links.

WTC Memorial Competition Show-and-Tell

A couple nights ago I attended an exhibition of local entries to the World Trade Center Memorial Design Competition at the Graham Foundation. From the 5,201 entries submitted (less than half of the original 13,000+ registrations), 135 entries came from Illinois, as indicated by the LMDC's web page which recently posted all the submissions (accessible by link above), browseable by country and state or searchable by name. Roughly 70 of the 135 Illinois entries came from the Chicago and its metropolitan area, with about 20 entrants agreeing to show their submitted designs in a one-night-only exhibit. Notable names included local architects Stanley Tigerman and John Vinci and the Graham Foundation's director Richard Solomon.



Two things struck me as I looked at the designs, both concerning the difficulty of the endeavor: first, the difficulty of the jury deciding between 5,201 entries and second, the difficulty of each entrant, or team, as they tried to create a physical response to the grief and terror of the 9/11 events with extremely tight programmatic restrictions (these restrictions became even tighter during the duration of the memorial selection process and will continue in the same direction as all the interested parties try to sort out the future of the site). These thoughts were reiterated by people I talked to that night and (to a lesser extent) by finalists Brian Strawn and Karla Sierralta as they gave a brief presentation on their design, Dual Memory. Although young (they are both graduate students at the University of Illinois at Chicago), their sincerity in trying to find an appropriate solution to an event that didn't affect them directly but reached them - like much of the country and world - mainly through images and words was refreshing. Explicating the subsequent seven-week process illuminated some much-aligned facts: the $100,000 stipend each entry received divvied up 3/4 equally amongst the model builder, renderer and animation artist, with the remaining 1/4 to the competitors. These facts help to explain the consistency in presentation among the eight finalists.



Consistency in presentation was not limited to the finalists' submissions, though, as I learned from my friend Brandon that the design guidelines dictated the exact sizes, locations and orientations of required drawings and text. These guidelines achieved two intentions: first, to allow members of the jury not versed in reading architectural drawings a means of comparison that would lead to comprehension and second, to allow the jury to handle the 5,201 entries in a timely fashion. Furthermore, I believe the required consistency played down the role of presentation that can win or lose a competition, focusing the jury's reading of the submissions to their ideas, something else refreshing.