Photo by Boulder architect Mark Gerwing

Siting quietly amongst its more noisome arts neighbors, the relatively new Clifford Still Museum in Denver is a wholly different kind of museum. Designed by Allied Works Architecture, the museum was designed to house explicitly the work the abstract expressionist painter.  Instead of the generic and changeable nature of the galleries of a typical museum, the architects have crafted a design that directly responds to the work of the artist.

The entire first floor houses the administrative and educational functions as well as the main entrance located along the side of the building facing a small park space. The entry sequence this sets up – street to park to entry to lobby, up stairs to galleries – creates a pleasing rhythm from outdoor sunshine to darkened lobby to top-lit galleries.  Along the way, the predominantly horizontal emphasis of the overall building gives way to a pronounced vertical articulation in the materials and detailing.

This vertical emphasis, found in the interior rails and details as well as the vertically-ribbed concrete, echoes the vertical lines found in so many of Still’s paintings.  This synthesis of building elements with the specific artworks is the sensitive study of an architect taking full advantage of designing for a specific artist and is a far cry from the more generic gallery space of most museums.

However, what is most striking about the gallery space is the slightly labyrinthine arrangement of spaces with wide diagonal views between rooms.  As the galleries offer a roughly chronological procession through Still’s career, these openings allow you to view each period in the context of the preceding and future work.  This lends an overall dynamic spatial quality to what might be an otherwise boring, unilateral maze-like march.

The top-galleries pull this assembly all together and clearly concentrate the viewer on the works of art rather than the museum itself, a not-so-familiar trend in cultural institutions these days.

I highly recommend a visit, both for the artwork and the museum, a paired ensemble that like any great performance, makes it look easy.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

His drawings of re-imagined urban landscapes are stunningly beautiful even in their dark, vaguely dystopian vision. His most widely read work, Anarchitecture: Architecture is a Political Act, is so visually striking that its message is easily lost amidst the revery of the drawings and models on display.  But make no mistake, Woods’ work was not just so-much eye-candy.

Crucial question – what is an inconsistent pattern? The cities of an experimental culture will be formed on inconsistent patterns, and will produce them.  These will be their chief products, the result of a way of living driven by the need for clarity on shifting landscapes of the ephemeral.

I attended undergraduate and graduate schools of architecture during the height (or maybe bottomless, self-flagellating, pit) of post-structuralist architectural theory.  Architects, insecure in their creation of forms, looked under every academic, esoteric rock to find some secure impetus to justify the nature of the work – imposing forms upon others.  I won’t go on about the absurdity and idiocy of the near-abandonment of 3,000 years of architectural history and practice for the tawdry attractions of French philology.  It happened, I witnessed it, even dipped a toe in it.

“Politics of construction: who designs, who builds, who owns, who inhabits?”

Woods’ work shattered it.  He, among others, placed architecture back in the realm of buildings, the act of building, and the meaning of actually making buildings.  And the images he produced cemented that argument with an outrageous glorification of forms, color, plasticity and imagination.  Though his vision of shattered cities and expropriated spaces were often dire and almost always devoid of people, what comes through is the joy and beauty of making.  That may sound contradictory to what I said above, but it is not.  Great architectural ideas have never been planted so firmly as when they are not merely texts or images, but the synergistic amalgam of both, like LeCorbusier’s Toward an Architecture and Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

I would avidly place Woods’ Anarchitecture in that lofty neighborhood.  He was the most important and influential unbuilt architecture of the last century.  Not too bold a statement I think, and not befitting enough of his animating vision.

by Boulder architects M. Gerwing Architects

and the steamy heat fogs the windows and the only thing left to draw is the place itself.

These are from various sketchbooks over twenty years or so.  Boston had a great many spots that were a nice respite from the damp and cold, Chicago a good number, but Boulder’s 40+ coffee shops must top the latte-location/capita list.

The weather in Boulder is so rarely bad that not a lot of coffee-shop-drawing has taken place for me in the last 12 years.

Do I have anything to say about the architecture or design of these places?  Not really, I go there to take a break from the studio and do some mindless sketching.  Although, all the way, I have learned a lot about coffee shops, their feel and atmosphere and how they have changed with the onslaught of mobile computing.

This bridge, in central Kansas, crosses a small river not far from the original path of the Oregon Trail.  On this day it was dripping from a recent rain and the sky was an eerily-threatening monotone of gray.

These were shot on a medium format late 1950′s Zeiss Ikon Nettar folding camera recently given to me by my uncle.

Thanks Pete.

A number of years ago, we won a little competition to design a winter-time cover for a large basin-type fountain in a small park in Chicago.  The fountain is named after Nelson Algren, the novelist and occasional screenwriter who wrote vivid, sentimental-free stories of the bartenders, prostitutes and gamblers of  Chicago.  When I lived in Chicago, I lived around the corner from one of his haunts and this fountain is just down the street from my first real experiences in the city.

The project was to be paid for with a combination of funds and like so many of these endeavors it stalled, stumbled and finally died.  Or so I thought.  It looks like interest has revived and we may be finally giving birth to this little project.

Here are some of the texts and images we produced for the original competition entry:

The Nelson Algren fountain sits in a long overlooked triangle at the center of a rapidly changing neighborhood in Chicago. It is not the Gold Coast or Lincoln Park, it is not Bronzeville or Uptown. It is not even at the heart of Wicker Park or Bucktown. It is overlooked because it sits in-between, because the triangle that it sits in is the result of the streets around it, not designed to be a place of its own.
The proposed project is for a seasonal cover for the neglected fountain that makes a claim for that place.  It claims this place for the people that work around it and pass through it every day. It is a visual analogue to Algren’s stories, a recording of the lives of the people in the neighborhood around him. Not portraits of the city’s great and powerful, but of the people that do the city’s work. The cover consists of a series of painted steel frames that support lexan panels holding acetate screenprinted portraits of people in the neighborhood. Text from Algren’s work Chicago, City on the Make, rings the base of the panels that extend just beyond the edge of the existing basin surround. Internal backlighting at night creates a beacon, shining through the back of the images and allowing them to keep watch over the triangle. Each year or as required, the images will be replaced. An ad hoc photo booth will be setup and allow anyone to come in and have their portrait taken and added to the panels. Over time the changing face of the neighborhood will be reflected in the panels.

This little sequence, where Max’s room turns into a forest, is one of the reasons I became an architect.

Thank you Mr. Sendak.

“That very night in Max’s room a forest grew

and grew-

and grew until his ceiling hung with vines

and the walls became the world all around”

This is still basically what I do everyday – imagine another world within the world.

Where The Wild Things Are

Story and Pictures by Maurice Sendak, 1963.

Happy New Year everyone

New tracts, west edge of Denver, Colorado, 1974

Many of Adam’s most arresting images are those of the new housing encroachments on the landscape throughout the 1960′ and 70′s.  The stark, high-altitude light of the Front Range puts into sharp focus the stark isolation of the suburban dream contrasted against the expansive emptiness of the western sky.

Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1968

I first ran into Adam’s work through the many books of photography that he produced.  The New West, Summer Nights and West from the Columbia are but a few of the more than twenty books of thoughtful, sometimes disturbing, but always beautiful  images.

From the South Jetty, Clatsop County, Oregon

I strongly recommend the exhibit.  It is simply presented and the images are arresting and intriguing in a way that the books can only hint at.

North of Keota, Colorado, 1969

Robert Adams

The Place We Live, A Retrospective Selection of Photographs

Sept 25 – Jan 1, Denver Art Museum

(all photos by Robert Adams, from What Can We Believe Where? )

JMW Turner's Approach to Venice

My travels in the Third World have been few and brief, and I understand folk’s descriptions of those environments and their sense of “foreign-ness” when confronted with those cultures.  My fascination with Venice comes not from that kind of cultural displacement, but rather the uncanny feeling of simultaneous comfort and unease that waterborne Venice seeped into me.

I arrived in Venice from land-locked central Kentucky, with its clear blue skies, rolling bluegrass and crisp buildings.  The hazy atmospheres of hot and humid Cumberland summer afternoons were temporary and seasonal.  When writers describe Venice as the floating city, they don’t just mean its position in the middle of the Lagoon and its water courses.  Most of my early mornings in Venice were spent wandering around the labyrinthine city through an air thick and redolent with sea.  This seemed not so much as fog, as the sea itself, still sleepily gathering itself from a night dispersed in the air.

This ambiguity between sea and sky was all the more strange to me for the lack of land that in my experience defined each of the other.  There is no land in Venice, not in the sense of land as I knew it.  You may walk on stones or bricks, but this was not the earth.  The built environment of Venice was not carved out of the wilderness nor did it exist as an antidote to the agricultural fields that make so much of Kentucky.  Venice is built from tiny islands, out of the sea itself, to the point where no notion of those islands exist. It is not of the earth.  For me, that was about as foreign as a place could be.

JMW Turner's Venice Looking East from the Guidecca Sunrise

Walking around Venice it suddenly occurred to me that all the buildings that I was seeing, the houses and churches, squares and bridges, all of it, was from someplace else.  All of this stone and marble and brick is from another place.  The link between the materiality of buildings and a place didn’t exist in this marine world.  I live in Colorado now and unsurprisingly we build with a lot of timber and stone.  The color of the brick in Louisville where I grew up is the same as the local mud on the banks of every stream.  Venice is built out of solid stuff, heavy cut stone and thick courses of brick.  And it sits improbably on the water.  I now know where all these materials came from but you don’t feel it as you live and breath in that place.

JMW Turner's The Grand Canal

I have written quite a bit about my studies in vernacular architecture and how the buildings of a place are influenced by the materials and climate and terrain of that specific locale. But what makes Venice?  You can trace the historical forms of the buildings and research their origins in form and material, but they do not feel natural to that place.  Venice truly is other-worldly in that sense and that may go along way in explaining my love and unease with the place.  In all its peeling stucco and crumbling masonry, it is a perfect jewel – of this world, but apart from it.

http://www.mcadenver.org/index.php/programs/Mixed_Taste_Summer_Series

The idea of this is to attempt to ferret out the strange and serendipitous connections between two disparate topics.  Two short talks are presented on two completely different topics.  Last Friday that was Chef Jorel Pierce discussing his passion for the making of blood sausage, and Geoff Manaugh, of BldgBlog fame, talking about urban spelunking.

And what comes of this?  After the two presentations, a number of audience members asked questions, some specific to each talk, others trying to form connections between the topics.  As each presenter tried to address the questions, they were often a bit stretched to make parallels between the talks, but they were game to give it a shot in front of the approximately 60 folks in the audience.

I quite like this kind of event – a kind of intellectual and funny exquisite corpse project.  I certainly will not make it to all of the summer’s offerings, but you can bet “Suburbia and American Gin” will be on my list.

Oh, and they have cocktails available as well.