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Souvenir
hunters rejoice: The gift shops at the Tate Modern are open. No
more will visitors to London
be forced to return home with Big Ben snow domes and Union Jack
crockery. Now, the smart traveler can stock up on make-your-own
Tates-flat-packed polypropylene kits where tab A folds into slot
B to create a "quirky desk tidy" in the strident form of the new
museum: the massive block of the Tate's host building, the decommissioned
Bankside Power Station, bisected by its high chimney and capped
with attic "lightbeams" by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre
de Meuron. There are also pencil boxes in the shape of the building,
pins and stickers, and a dramatic testimonial, Power into Art, the
final chapter of which, "Tate Accompli," de-tails the Blighty-wide
relief that this long-awaited project has at last created a world-class
home for modern art in Central London.
But what exactly
the Tate Modern has accomplished is unclear. On the plus side, it
is a fantastic addition to the cultural parade of the revived Bankside
district-what one Tate guide describes as
"London's chief pleasure ground" since the 16th
century, "noted for gambling, bearbaiting, brothels" and other edifying
diversions. Visitors can now make a whole day of rambling from London
Bridge, past the Clink Prison Museum, through the vaults of Vinopolis
("England's first attraction devoted to the manufacture and consumption
of wine"), to the half-timber Globe Theater mocked-up in the shadow
of the Tate. Then a quick buzz through the museum, to grab a coffee
and some been-there, done-that gifts, before ambling on west to
the new IMAX theater at Waterloo and a slow sunset revolution on
the London Eye, that great, troubled Ferris wheel.
Used in this
way-as a pit stop-the Tate is exemplary. There's no admission fee:
just pop in and check out the ahh-inducing Turbine Hall (75 ft.
by 115 ft. by 500 ft.), ride up to the top floors to see the unequaled
views of London across the way (gray river, gray buildings, gray
sky), and move on. For the patient and the brave, there's even art
hidden away in some of the busy little galleries; there's some art,
even-big art-packed too close for comfort in the back third of Turbine
Hall. But that's not really what the building is about. Hit one
of the three shops on the way out; a Tate tote? I'll take two.
For a long
time it has been understood by museum visitors and administrators
that the collecting and viewing of art is no longer the point of
such institutions. Spectacle, togetherness (Bring a date to the
Tate?)-whatever the draw, it ain't art. Visitors to the Tate already
have it down. In early June, a few weeks after it opened, the lawns
on the Thames side were carpeted with art-lovers, lounging prone
between the groves of young birch, ar-ranged in perfect de Stijl
counterpoint. A bagpiper wearing an Astroturf suit entertained.
At the river's edge, gawkers watched workers put the final touches
on Norman Foster's Millennium Bridge, built to link the museum to
St. Paul's across the way. The bridge would open, swing violently,
and close a day later, the victim of light winds and optimistic
engineering. Back to the drawing board.
Though nothing
in the Tate induces nausea the way the bridge did at its dancing,
bucking debut, it is tempting to make the same suggestion. Yes,
the building-and here I speak of Sir Giles Gilbert Scott's mid-century
monument to power-is stirring. Cleaned up, emptied out, it is what
visitors mostly see, and what they are reacting to when they say
"The Tate is magnificent!" Bankside is and was mag-nificent; the
Tate Modern is a missed opportunity.
The problems
are related to scale, that tricky thing, and I fear this may have
been a no-win situation for Herzog and de Meuron. Their other celebrated
work has all been wonderfully microscopic: simple concepts arranged
in simple forms, sung in simple details. The firm's selection in
the 1995 Tate competition-over 70 others-had all the hallmarks of
a safe choice: boxes put the Modern board members at ease. Other
entrants had attacked the old building, removing the front facade
or even the prismatic 325-foot high smokestack, but Herzog and de
Meuron left it pretty much as it was. Smart, but then you have to
turn it into a museum for modern art, one of the biggest and busiest
in the world. There is nothing in the firm's earlier work to suggest
that they could get a handle on a building of this size, and indeed
they could not. They made their signature simplicity bigger, what
some wags might want to call "maximalism," though in fact it is
just minimalism writ large. Everything-rails, mullions, benches,
corridors-just got larger or longer, with no addition of secondary
detail, no realization that, when a thing gets bigger, volume cubes.
In the galleries, squished into a narrow zone so Turbine Hall could
remain a rapturous void, the art, arranged by theme with term-paper
ingenuity ("Still Life-Object-Real Life"), gives the white boxes
the counterpoint that all white boxes crave. But elsewhere, in the
public spaces, the long empty landings, the dark empty passages,
poverty is the reigning motif. You know how it wouldn't look quite
right if you saw a giant dwarf? That's the Tate in a nutshell.
Add to this
disturbing caricature of bigness the complete failure of the circulation
system and you understand why the action is all outside. The Tate
is a huge 367,000-square-foot thing on seven double-height levels-3,750
tons of new steel, 218 miles of new wire, one million paper espresso
cups. The building is served by a single line of narrow, plodding
escalators, a bank of tiny elevators, and a winding, clunky stair.
The escalators give out at level five, so there is a pack on the
stairs leading up to the posh Members' Room (long couches, long
sun deck, long faces) on level six and the 200-plus capacity Cafe
on level seven. Short of monorails dashing about in the Turbine
Hall, or an army of Sherpas on the stairs, bigger, faster elevators
and escalators-scaled up, not merely enlarged-or the odd ramp here
and there might have done the trick.
Have these
guys never been to a soccer game? Or to Charles de Gaulle Airport?
If museums are going to attempt to serve up art for the mega-masses,
architects are going to have to look to stadiums and airports and
train stations and those other tiresome buildings that make quick
work of moving people. But that would have required the Swiss-Mein
Gott! Mon Dieu! Mamma mia!-to introduce some subtlety into the cross
section of the building: a ramp or two, intermediate levels, something.
(The total lack of such devices lends some credibility to the rumor
that, in their collaboration with Rem Koolhaas on a new Ian Schrager
hotel in Manhattan, Herzog and de Meuron are handling the elevations
while Koolhaas's team draws the sections.) The Tate Modern's one
ramp, hundreds of feet long and 75 feet wide, leads from outside
the west end of the building down into the bottom of Turbine Hall.
It's a beautiful thing, but not so useful for circulation-it serves
only a small bus stop-or recreation. A misplaced sense of dignity
(in the new museum? Now, really!) kept the architects from providing
any place for the crowds to gather and eddy and sit, to make that
ramp the indoor Met steps it so clearly wants to be. So be it. The
bridge, when it reopens, will limit the need for entry from that
direction, channeling people directly into the museum's front door-into
a small vestibule where they will be taunted by the glassed-in escalators
serenely bypassing that floor. To reach them will require, as it
does now, a trot out onto the Turbine Hall mezzanine (now the lair
of that horrendous Louise Bourgeois spider) and a clamber down a
floor and a half of steep steel steps. There, not having picked
up a ticket (or in any other way made use of the endless bank of
bloated kiosks), the converging streams, bus loads from the west
and bridge loads from the north, will join into a single flow and
squeeze through a set of standard-width double doors to reach the
galleries above.
When they built
it, did they not think we would come? Mercifully, relief waits right
there: the main gift shop-over 5,000 square feet of it-bright and
inviting and spacious and close. It may be enough just to hang out
there a while, in gentrifying proximity to art.
 By
Christopher Hawthorne |
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Somewhere
between
Art and Architecture
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Boundries
by Maya Lin
Simon & Schuster
224 pp.
$40.00
|
Maya
Lin's boundary-blurring work continues to grow and diversify.
|
One
day about two years ago, I went over to New York University's Grey
Art Gallery to see some recent work by Maya Lin. Though still best
known for a design she completed when
 she
was barely old enough to drink-the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in
Washington, first sketched out during the spring of her senior year
at Yale-Lin has spent almost two decades working steadily to ditch
the prodigy label. She's split her time among public-art projects,
small-scale studio works, furniture design, and architecture, all
of which are on elegant display in Boundaries, her first book.
I visited the
gallery on a weekday morning, and, except for the ticket taker and
a drowsy security guard, I had the place to myself. The pieces in
the show used a variety of basic materials to mimic natural forms.
There was Avalanche, a huge pile of crushed glass (13 tons of it,
I learned later) heaped in a corner, and a series of wax molds lining
a long wall that represented the phases of the moon. On my way out,
I picked up the exhibition postcard. It showed Untitled (Topographic
Land-scape), an undulating field of long, thin pieces of compressed
wood-as if the surface of a rolling sea had been cut into strips
and left in the sun to dry. There was something both soothing and
energizing about the image, and when I got home I tacked it up on
the bulletin board next to my computer.
I remember
thinking at the time that it was too bad more people hadn't discovered
the show. (The way Lin was blurring the boundaries between computer-generated
and natural forms was clearly a kind of breakthrough. And the spareness,
stillness, and lack of ego in her works offered a refreshing balance
to the ironic self-indulgence then ruling the art and architecture
worlds.) But I also felt a proprietary connection to the exhibit.
I knew Lin's secret, and I was happy to keep it contained in a 4-inch
by 6-inch card inside my apartment.
Then something
strange happened: I started noticing that card in other people's
offices, on refrigerators, on bulletin boards. It seemed to pop
up all over the city, in the same way that after you learn a new
word it begins to appear in every article you read. Nobody I knew
had mentioned seeing the show, or even having heard about it, but
here was sudden evidence that others (editors, architects, grad
students) were having the same kind of reaction to the image that
I had. It was the very opposite of the way we usually experience
art: Instead of crowding into a blockbuster show and discussing
some dead artist's work until we've wrung every bit of vitality
from it, we were responding to Maya Lin in a series of individual,
contentedly mute encounters.
I shouldn't
have been surprised, actually. As Lin herself notes in Boundaries,
she's always tried to create spaces of quiet personal connection,
even in the most crowded and exposed settings. Her works are like
cathedrals constructed of nothing but confessionals. Indeed, the
most remarkable achievement of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is
that in commemorating one of the most politicized, analyzed, and
agonized-over conflicts in our nation's history, Lin's design allows
visitors a private, direct audience with their own memories of the
war.
The book, which
explores the increasingly hybrid nature of Lin's career, is itself
something of hybrid. It is not a scholarly text, not a memoir, not
a flashy vanity project, but it has elements of all three genres.
Until now Lin has been reluctant to talk about the controversy that
surrounded the construction of the Vietnam Memorial; in Freida Lee
Mock's 1994 documentary Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision, Lin was
clearly uncomfortable discussing the topic. Even discussing the
purely aesthetic aspects of the design has seemed an ordeal. Now,
nearly 20 years later, some of that infamous resistance has melted
away. The book includes a diary-like essay on the difficulties of
getting the memorial built that Lin wrote at the time but put aside.
A fascinating document that mixes eloquence and bewilderment, ambition
and naïveté, it appears here for the first time in print. "The fear
or insecurity that I would always live in the shadow of my first
work has quietly left," Lin writes. "With enough work out to see
the continuity from project to project, to feel myself in a way
made whole in the work, I can talk about the memorial along with
my other projects and not be threatened by it."
But at the time
Lin must have felt as if her world had been torn from its moorings.
After her college graduation she immediately moved down to Washington,
throwing herself into the middle of a federal approval process whose
every twist and turn became politicized. The granite for the memorial
couldn't come from Canada or Switzerland, she was told. Why not?
Because Vietnam draft dodgers had fled to those countries. Some
veterans criticized the design as being "too Asian," a decidedly
loaded charge. Others chose more aggressive language. "The fact
that I was from an Ivy League college," Lin writes, "had hair down
to my knees, further fueled this distrust of the design and suspicions
of a hippie college liberal or aesthetic elitist forcing her art
and commentary upon them." In the end, the memorial, dedicated in
1982, was largely true to Lin's original vision and today remains
the most affecting and most visited of all the memorials on the
Mall.
Boundaries
then moves on to a description, and some beautifully reproduced
images, of Lin's more recent works. These include two other monuments,
both of which incorporate water: the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery,
Alabama, completed in 1989, and the Women's Table, a tribute to
coeducation at Yale, from 1993. Next are some stunning reproductions
of her architectural projects, in which Lin says she is "approaching
an idea of simple": an apartment for the software millionaire Peter
Norton and his family in Manhattan; a house in Massachusetts; the
Museum for African Art in New York City; the Langston Hughes Library
in Tennessee. Also included are site-specific installations, furniture
commissioned by Knoll to mark the company's 60th anniversary, and
artworks.
In the end,
the book sheds more light on the connections between her works than
on their variety. As Lin notes, there is an Eastern emphasis on
simplicity and quietude that runs through all her projects; another
common thread is her sense that she is an outsider in nearly every
way, a sentiment reinforced by the book's title. "I feel I exist
on the boundaries," she writes, "somewhere between science and art,
art and architecture, public and private, east and west."
Anyone who still
thinks of Lin merely as the young woman who designed that memorial
in Washington will find Boundaries a revelation, as well as a useful
catalog of her quickly diversifying body of work. For a more satisfying
treatment of Lin's work, though, her silent legions of fans will
have to wait. The writing in Boundaries never matches the elegance
of the imagery. Transitions are awkward. Phrases and quotes from
one chapter reappear in the next, apparently unintentionally. The
book ends with a frail proposal for a global "Last Memorial" that
Lin admits is "in its earliest stages."
And an editor
should have suggested cutting one particular passage, which makes
Lin sound not just preoccupied with her own work but surprisingly
callous: "I never wanted to be typecast as a memorial designer.
In fact, I used to dread it whenever some large-scale disaster would
happen because I inevitably would get a fax about whether I could
design a memorial." One would usually expect the words "dread" and
"disaster" to share a sentence for entirely different reasons.
An irony of
Boundaries is that Lin, who in her large-scale projects has been
so active in seeking out collaborators-and so willing to give them
credit for their contributions-has chosen not to share the writing
duties here. A couple of chapters, or even just an introduction,
by a professor or critic would have given the book a great boost;
failing that, a more active editor could have given the prose some
needed polish. Indeed, if anyone out there is preparing a new monograph
or a biography of Lin, that person's job has gotten a little easier,
for two reasons. Not only does Boundaries make a pretty strong case
for the growing importance of Maya Lin's work, it also suggests
that the artist deserves a chronicler whose name is something other
than Maya Lin.
 By
Ken Coupland |
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Screen
Space
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A
monthly column of Web design and resources
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Understanding
USA
Information-architecture guru Richard Saul Wurman has pulled off
an ambitious undertaking,
 subdividing
reams of statistical information publicly available about the USA
into 13 categories, then assigning each category to a different
design team. The results, while predictably somewhat mixed, offer
readers an unprecedented overview of a mass of otherwise incomprehensible
facts and figures. A blatant promotion for the book of the same
name, the site for Understanding USA is snappily presented (check
out the sexy rollovers on the contents page). Only one problem here:
unless you download the pdf text, the inferior resolution of even
state-of-the-art computer screens renders most of the data in the
text illegible, giving you just enough to read-and frustrating you
just enough-that you might buy the book. Paradoxically, the site's
very limitations actually make it a perfect promotional tool.
ArchiNed
True to its moniker, this unofficial "architecture site of the Netherlands"
serves up a timely over-view of the Dutch building-design scene.
With weekly news briefs, monthly features, and links to scores of
leading local firms, ArchiNed also posts information on competitions,
lectures, and exhibitions. While most of the editorial content is
available in English, the sites for individual offices are usually
in Dutch. One exception is the well thought-out home site for MVDRV,
the iconoclastic young studio whose crowd-pleasing Dutch pavilion
for Hannover's Expo 2000 is amply documented in photos. Among other
highlights: photo essays on the sad state of famed Modernist Eileen
Gray's ruined Villa E.1027 in the French seaside resort of Cap Martin.
Sensebox
Sensebox.com does one thing and does it well, posting direct links
to all schools and universities-both American and international-that
offer programs in graphic design and visual communications. Using
a Web site's hipness as a yardstick, you can quickly gauge the with-it-ness
factor of a slew of schools (the Danish School of Art and Design
site is a standout). Although listings have recently been updated,
it's a fallow area: the site once launched a monthly award, determined
by user vote, for best design, but the last contest was held almost
a year ago.
Buckminster
Fuller Institute
Keepers of the late, great futurist's righteous flame, the Buckminster
Fuller Institute tirelessly
 promote
his vision of a sustainable world. To that end, BFI's virtual home
boasts an impressive archive of full-length documents that include
some of Fuller's most popular published works, as well as goodies
like the complete text of his marathon lecture, "Everything I Know."
The site also has an online store hawking Fuller's famous distortion-free
Dymaxion world map, along with an array of ingenious, inexpensive
toys and models either personally designed by Fuller or based on
his principles.
hi,
Res
Few studio sites say "right now" as winningly as this portfolio
for an up-and-coming British new-media outfit. Hi, Res recently
attracted plenty of media attention
 with
an online exhibition of "anti-banners" that deconstructed those
omnipresent advertisements, giving the show's launch an effective
boost. The site itself brilliantly carries through the studio's
slogan-"pixel pusher to the stars"-with an acid palette and ASCII-driven
graphics replete with neo-constructivist lettering and orthographically
rendered, animated "bots." Don't miss "All Star Image Chefs," a
hilarious, electro-funk-inflected audio and animation loop.
Advance
for Design
A laudable initiative by the American Institute of Graphic Arts
(AIGA), forged to grapple with the organization's increasing irrelevance
at the onset of the electronic age, Advance for Design has in recent
months been creating quite a stir. Its ob-jective: "to establish
a new community of design practitioners who are challenged to design
for a world that is increasingly digital and connected." Formally
unveiled at the association's Las Vegas blowout late last year,
the initiative boasts an A-list of 70 well-known founding members.
With a sprightly interface courtesy of San Francisco-based Vivid
Studios, the site is a glorified pitch for AIGA membership on the
one hand and a bold manifesto about the dilemmas facing today's
graphic-design professionals on the other.
Eveo
Trumpeting the advent of "a new visual format," eveo.com posits
a user-generated content
community based on the production and online distribution of "eveos,"
"personal, engaging short videos" that the company intends to syndicate
over the Web. Now, there's been a lot of talk about this sort of
thing catching on, what with short attention spans, often slow-to-download
Web sites, the indie film phenomenon, and all. But take a step back
and you can see that-even with a slew of budding Fellinis in tow-eveo.com's
business model is problematic. Online content providers have been
money-losers thus far, and the audience for these engaging but trivial
shorts appears minuscule. Still, a tasteful and distinctive interface
encourages you to take this highly problematic concept seriously.
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Book
Shelf
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|
New
and notable boods on architecture, culture, and design.
|
The
Designer's Lexicon: The Illustrated Dictionary of Design, Printing,
and Computer Terms
By Alastair Campbell
Chronicle Books, 320 pp., $22.95
As graphic design has become an increasingly technical discipline-the
computer having largely replaced scissors and paste-the amount of
terminology and jargon has predictably surged. The Designer's Lexicon
provides defin-itions for 4,179 terms, divided into such categories
as Computer, Internet, Photography, Typography, Prepress, Paper,
Printing, Finish-ing, and General. Be baffled no longer.
Shaping
the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe, 1890-1937
Edited by Eve Blau and Monika Platzer Prestel
Verlag, 271 pp., $78.50
Blau and Platzer analyze the cities of the Hapsburg Empire as complex
cultural spaces in which competing political and national identities
drove an explosion of architectural ideas. Examinations of Prague,
Vienna, Budapest, and other cities illustrate that even the International
Style was, like other movements, characterized by regional variations.
Eden
by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles
Region
By Greg Hise and William Deverell
University of California Press, 248 pp., $17.95
Photographs of pre-war Los Angeles generate nostalgia for an arcadian
landscape that is no more, but this book conjures an even more wistful
idyll: a City of Angels that never was. Could there be anything
more heartbreaking than this unrealized 1930 master plan for L.A.
parks, playgrounds, and beaches, co-written by the landscape dream
team of the Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew & Associates? That
the plan was trounced by funding woes and politics is no surprise;
that it was allowed three years to gestate into its full splendor
is. Reprinted in quaint-but-fuzzy fascimile, the plan is grandi-ose
and doomed by today's standards, but the authors of the introduction
insist it can be a model for future visions of the public realm.
Flying
Furniture
By Peter Smithson
and Karl Unglaub
Walther König/D.A.P.,
192 pp., $40.00
Design: Axel Bruchhäuser
Peter Smithson, pioneer of New Brutualist ar-chitecture in Britain
during the Fifties and Sixties, presents his work on mobile or movable
furniture in a quirky and informative way. The accompanying furniture
designs of Modernist heroes such as El Lissitzky, Jean Prouvé, Ludwig
Mies van der Rohe, and Gerrit Rietveld provide great source material
that will inspire designers to create their own visionary prototypes.
The
Social Life of Information
By John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
Harvard Business School Press, 329 pp., $25.95
Jacket Design: Mike Fender
Amidst the hype surrounding the "new economy" and its electronic
engine, the authors call for an ethical assessment of what ICT (information
and communication technology) is doing to society. They encourage
us to behave like good urban planners, to look at the surrounding
institutions and physical environments even as we're looking forward.
To hear Seely Brown in person, you may want to check out the Corporate
Design Foundation's conference, "A Dialogue about Community: The
Social Side of the New Economy," November 13-14, Washington, D.C.
For more information, e-mail: admin@cdf.org or telephone 617-350-7097. |
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