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Sunday, December 03, 2006
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Gehry at Storrs, cont'd In a comment, Bill R. says that the Frank Gehry building chosen for a new arts complex at the University of Connecticut -- a group of buildings attacked and then defended in the pages of the local paper by a couple of Storrs faculty members (for the defense, scroll down to Scathing Online Schoolmarm) -- looks like "a pile of wreckage." He agrees with the U Conn professor of geology who writes that the university's many plain red brick buildings nicely reflect generations of steady as she goes Yankees, and the place should stay simple and bricky rather than elaborate and steely. The geologist even writes that if the weird and wacky Gehry thing goes up, he might leave the area. It could "perhaps even precipitat[e] my move out of the Storrs neighborhood where my wife and I raised our family." This threat makes UD wonder about this man's Yankee credentials. He wishes to speak for the plain and simple New England aesthetic, and the morality that goes along with it, but put one project up that he doesn't like, and he moves? Cotton Mather would thunder against it in the pulpit, scrawl FOR SHAME on its curving walls, and damn Gehry to hell. He wouldn't move. The morality part of this involves modesty and public spiritedness. ... I'm quite conservative when it comes to public architecture, especially when the building draws attention to itself at the expense of the human community. Phallic, fecal, Nazi or crucifix designs would clearly not be acceptable for an American public building. Strange list, that, suggesting there's much to unpack in this pilgrim... I mean, okay, he's conservative in regard to public art; but consider what he thinks of as radical. Phallic. If phallic's unacceptable, you lose most of our cities' skylines. Fecal seems to me too underepresented in our architecture to worry about. I can't recall a case of an architect making a presentation by saying that the building proposed means to represent a pile of shit. You don't see a lot of swastikas on American public buildings either. I suppose if Ralph Luker's Hitlerian chair endower (see below) were given free rein, the person might ask that the Nazi Studies building be constructed in the shape of a swastika. But the idea wouldn't fly. Crucifixes, and crucifix shapes, are of course legion on the public buildings we call churches. As I say, a list almost as bizarre as Gehry's design, suggesting that the writer has it in him to appreciate the sort of radical break with convention Gehry's construction intends. Here's one view of a model of the thing:  Vintage Gehry, and very out of place among the pilgrims. And yet why not? The red brick uniformity of Storrs is a bore. A jolt will do it good. --------------------------------- --------------------------------- ...psst: speaking of phallic, get a load of gehry's japanese seafood restaurant... 
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