Tag: architecture

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	62 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	This is the best, or at least weirdest, cabinet I have ever seen. Probably the most Gothic.  And the least practical. An entire cathedral, tipped on its side!  No putting that against the wall, that’s for sure.

UPDATE APRIL 2021: The Met has pulled the plug on its Breuer experiment, reducing its New York City empire to the classic mothership and The Cloisters. I liked what it was doing in the Breuer building, but the silver lining is the Frick is now playing in that space.

The first thing you should know about my take on the Met Breuer, housed in the former home of the Whitney Museum of American Art, is I really really really dislike the building.  The iconic, Brutalist, Marcel Breuer art fortress says to me very loudly and in no uncertain terms, “Don’t come in here. You are not welcome.” It looms over the sidewalk.  It has one big wonky window like Polyphemus’s eye.  That’s it.  It’s a Cyclopean building.  A monster.  Hide under a sheepskin on your way out or it’ll devour you.

You have to cross a narrow bridge over a crevasse to get in, upping the feeling of peril. Then once you’re in the lobby, the harsh concrete and spotlight-y lights feel like some kind of an art world police state, with you as the object of interrogation.  “Admit it!  Talk!  You like MONET.  Confess and maybe we’ll go easy on ya.”

One of the reasons I love the Whitney so much today is simply that it’s no longer in this building.

So, I have a bias.

The second thing you should know is, according to the Met, the architect’s name is pronounced BROY-er, not brewer.  Just in case you wondered.

With the Whitney’s move to the Meatpacking District, naturally questions arose as to what to do with the Madison Avenue fortress.  Fortunately (maybe?) the Met stepped in and leased it, making it the Met’s second satellite location after The Cloisters.  Otherwise they probably would’ve turned it into an H&M or a fancy food hall or something.

Thus far, the Met has used the Breuer building to…well, to let its institutional hair down a bit, it seems.  None of the permanent collection has moved.  Rather, it  leverages the space for special exhibitions. They tend to the modern or contemporary, which is good given the space. And yet, the Met’s also done some fairly fascinating surveys, leveraging the strength of its encyclopedic collection but doing things they might not want to do, or even be able to do, in any of the spaces in the mother ship on Fifth Avenue.

When I visited, one show consisted of four video installations, which were okay.  Certainly video works well in the cavelike Breuer space.

Ettore Sottsass, Design Maverick

The other show, on the designer Ettore Sottsass, exemplifies what I mean about letting the Met go a little bonkers installation-wise.

Sottsass first found fame designing an iconic Olivetti portable manual typewriter, in super-sexy lipstick red, with a case that could double as a waste-paper basket.  It’s adorable and brilliant, and the Met shows it off alongside other modern designs meant to be cheap and cheerful, like a One Laptop Per Child laptop.

But on top of that, they introduce it with a…colorful quote from Sottsass.  I have been visiting the Met for over 20 years, and I really don’t think I’ve ever seen that word in a wall text there before, much less in big type as a key quote.

Sottsass had a long career designing things of all types, including the outdoor furniture that uses classical capitals and columns in the photo above.  This also provides a typical view of Met Breuer gallery space, with its slate floors and the waffle iron ceiling.

Ettore Sottsass also went on to found the short-lived, exuberant, 1980s “Memphis” design movement, exemplified by his wacky, colorful room divider here. 

Creativity Unleashed

Cleverly, the Met juxtaposed some chunky Memphis jewelry with 4,000 year old Egyptian pieces (that looked really good by comparison).  They did things like that throughout.  Sottsass designed some glass art pieces he called “Kachinas,” and the Met displayed them next to Hopi dolls from its collection.  They displayed some of Sotsass’s nifty, colorful, tall, ceramic towers with a Frank Lloyd Wright architectural model, some Shiva Lingam, and a Chinese jade Neolithic ritual object.  Throughout the show, these sorts of unexpected pairings helped illuminate Sottsass’s work, providing a look at objects that might have inspired him, or at least creating a novel context for his pieces.  I really enjoyed it.

Creative combinations of works in a dialogue across thousands of years and diverse cultures is something places like the Brooklyn Museum have been trying for some time, not always successfully.  The Met seems to be using the Breuer to experiment with that approach to curating a show.  And I think they’re doing it really well so far.

My Bottom Line on the Met Breuer

So what’s my bottom line on the Met Breuer?  I’m not going to say everyone should drop everything and go.  The building might be interesting, but I still don’t think it’s a welcoming or pleasant place to see art.  But I can’t deny the creativity that’s going into the Met’s programming at the Met Breuer.  The staff has done some tremendous shows there so far, full of…spirit.  If having the Breuer lets them think about their collection in novel ways, and tell new stories about art, I value that highly.  Hopefully some of the Met Breuer spirit will eventually find outlets in the Fifth Avenue HQ, too.

For Reference:

Edification value
Entertainment value
Should you go?
Time spent	43 minutes
Best thing I saw or learned	The surveillance show undermines its cautionary purpose by outlining a lot of frankly very silly spying technologies developed over the years.  The CIA apparently spent $15m trying to surgically wire a feline for sound, to approach and unobtrusively listen to conversations.  Sadly, “Acoustic Kitty” failed by being run over by a taxi on its first test deployment.  Truly cat-astrophic.

There were once 49 armories and arsenals in the Naked City (according to Wikipedia).  Today 24 remain. One of the survivors now serves as a leading-edge arts and performance space.  This is that one.

What’s an Armory anyway?

As the city grew, open air parade and training grounds for the militia (what we now call the National Guard) became increasingly scarce.  So the government built a slew of armories and arsenals starting in the early 1800s and extending through to the early 1900s.  These buildings often looked like castles or fortresses, and could take up their entire city block.  Some of them included vast, open, interior spaces for practicing bayoneting and such. 

Each military company used its armory as a sort of clubhouse, too, and so they became encrusted with awards, portraits, and other memorials to great men who served.  Nowadays some armories remain in active use, but many have been decommissioned.  The Park Avenue Armory, completed in 1888, served as the home to the Seventh Regiment.  Adopted by a nonprofit, it underwent a massive restoration that continues to today, room by room, opening to the public in its new role in 2007.

A Castle for Art

Today the Park Avenue Armory is a fortress for the arts, both visual and performing.  Many of the ground floor ceremonial rooms are open, and they contain wonders — ancient silver trophies, beautiful decoration and light fixtures.  They are glorious feats of interior design, featuring Tiffany and virtually all the other great designers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

And then there’s the Drill Hall.  It’s an amazing space — 55,000 square feet with not a column in sight — to have at the disposal of art.  But at the same time, it must be daunting as an artist to get commissioned to do something there.  I read that once about the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern–it’s hard to do justice to the space.  Just so with the Park Avenue Armory.

Just by way of comparison:

• The Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in London measures 500×75 feet, so 37,500 sq. feet, and it rises to a height of 115 feet. 
• The Drill Hall at the Armory is shorter, with “only” an 85-foot ceiling, but much larger in area, measuring 55,000 square feet. 
• And just to round out the size-off, Grand Central’s main hall measures 33,000 square feet, with a 125-foot ceiling.  Bottom line, the Drill Hall is BIG.

Hansel and Gretel

The current Park Avenue Armory show, called “Hansel and Gretel,” typifies the difficulties of filling the space.  Ai Wei Wei along with architects Jacques Hertzog and Pierre de Meuron collaborated on a commentary on the surveillance state.  They did so via a complex technological deployment whereby visitors wander around in a very dark Drill Hall, while drones whir overhead (on tethers so they can’t decapitate anyone if they malfunction), and infrared cameras capture images of visitors which they then project onto the floor of the hall in real time.  You see photos of yourself, in grainy black and white, with red boxes picking out your appendages and such.

It’s…interesting?  But there’s no reason for it to be in the Armory, as opposed to a much smaller place.  I felt lost, wandering in the dark, waiting for something more exciting to happen.  And the darkness defeats the Drill Hall’s grandeur, the whole point of going there.

Caveat:  Perhaps the experience is more compelling when the Drill Hall is full of people.  I went on a weekday afternoon and it was quite sparse.

Following the wander in the dark, visitors then enter the smaller historic rooms where they have a gift shop, a tiny snack bar, and a bunch of tablets that tell more about the history of state surveillance, drone strikes, etc.  Which you can do at home, for free, here.

Bottom Line

I’m happy that I’m reviewing the Armory itself and not the Hansel and Gretel installation (my review: skip it!).  Everyone should visit the Armory.  The restored meeting and administration rooms positively glow.  If you can take a guided tour of the building I heartily recommend that.  And whatever they fill it with, assuming the lights are on the Drill Hall will take your breath away.

Wandering through these historic, once-dusty rooms, I imagine the era when our municipal and national security depended on forts along the waterfront and arsenals inland. When the worst we had to worry about were invading naval fleets or anarchist insurrections.  I don’t want to sugar coat other problems of the past, and I would never downplay the threat of anarchists.  But from the perspective of security (and surveillance, too), I envy those simpler, more innocent times.

For Reference: