Living in a Windmill

During our week in Brittany, we drove numerous times along the coast between Cancale and about halfway to Mont-St.-Michel before heading away from the coast towards our tiny village of Bazouge-la-Perouse, east of Combourg. On this rocky, windy coastline were countless windmills, or I should say former windmills, most of which had been successfully transformed into houses or other useful purposes. According to our guidebook, The Rough Guide to Brittany and Normandy, a century ago Brittany had five thousand working windmills. That's right, five thousand. So it's not surprising that some of them have survived into the age of nuclear power in France and have been refunctioned.

It makes complete sense that these buildings should continue to have a useful life. I mean, they are solidly built stone structures that could endure indefinitely. It's nice to see that they haven't been allowed to turn into ruins (though I do like ruins).

Driving past them day after day I began to appreciate the myriad ways in which they had been transformed. Most simply have had a conical roof applied to them, as below:

















In this photo notice the miniature windmill standing in front of the house. It's not a mailbox, just a lawn ornament of a sort: [ha ha! as if the French would have anything so tacky as a lawn ornament!]
























Other windmills have had rooms added onto them; here you can see the addition in the rear:

















This one is my favorite: made to look really grand (for a former windmill), it has symmetrical exterior staircases on either side of the enlarged entryway; an enormous addition on one side; and even a balustrade around the roof so to create another level of usable space:





















Now if only I could figure out how to get invited inside one of these fantastic structures...

Pergamon Museum, Berlin

Happy Birthday to me!






This is where I spent my 45th birthday -- the Pergamon Museum. Fourteen years after visiting Pergamon in Turkey, I finally got to Berlin to see the giant altar -- an entire building, really -- that the Germans removed from its site and reconstructed here. The whole museum is named after it.

In fairness, one can't really say that the Germans "stole" it; they acquired it from the Ottoman Turks by an agreement (presumably a cash transaction). Still, it's pretty depressing to go all the way to Pergamon and find an big empty foundation slab where the Great Altar of Zeus is supposed to be. (Pergamon's well worth a visit even with the altar's absence, if you find yourself in Turkey.)

It was the same in Greece with the Parthenon statues (the "Elgin marbles," named after the man who "acquired" them), except that Greece is no longer part of the Ottoman Empire, and the modern Greek state wants the Elgin marbles back. (I would love to see that happen, but it's much less likely than the fall of the Berlin wall was.)


The Pergamon altar -- known as the Great Altar of Zeus -- is dedicated to all the Olympian gods; the enormous frieze surrounding the podium depicts the epic battle between the Olympian gods and the Titans (giants). Worshippers would climb this monumental staircase, and enter through the colonnades at the top to find the altar itself, surrounded by a portico and open to the sky.

The Germans -- who were heavily into classical archaeology and helped turn it into a discipline and a profession instead of just an amateur pursuit -- did much of the exploration of the Greek Hellenistic and Roman sites in Turkey and elsewhere. This museum in Berlin also has a very impressive gate structure from Miletus.

When you get to the top of the staircase, you pass through the double colonnade into a courtyard containing the actual altar. That court is surrounded by friezes representing the myth of Telephos, son of Hercules – one of many Greek myths. It’s about fate, seduction, attempted infanticide, intervention of the gods, incest barely averted – all the elements that make Greek mythology so compelling.

The Pergamon Museum does a good job of explaining the significance of both friezes for the kings of Pergamon, who used the stories to legitimize and reinforce their own right to rule.























"Dude, don't eat my head!"

Yenidze Cigarette Factory, Dresden

This photo, taken from the streetcar, shows a famous Dresden landmark -- the Yenidze Cigarette Factory, built 1908-1909. Its style emulates a mosque with its "minaret" and a bulbous, pointed dome. This is an example of "orientalism" in architecture -- deliberately exotic, and turning Middle Eastern culture into a stereotype.

The Schloss Pillnitz, outside Dresden

Ten kilometers (about 6 miles) east of Dresden is the Schloss Pillnitz, which was the summer palace of the Saxon monarchs, located in the little village of Pillnitz.

The Schloss sits directly on the Elbe, with vast grounds surrounding it, landscaped both in the formal French style and, in one corner, in the English landscape garden style.

The “English garden” included a small circular temple which was a copy of Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome – the English were very much the conduit for Italian Renaissance architecture throughout Europe, because of the popularity of their gardens and garden follies. The “English garden” was enthusiastically adopted in places like Germany and France, where the “French garden” (i.e., the formal garden) was the dominant type.

The grounds of the Schloss Pillnitz boast a camillia that is over 200 years old and 13.2 meters high. It was brought from Japan in 1776.

A flood in 2002 was the biggest one since 1845. The palace's location on the Elbe River makes it particularly susceptible to such disasters:

(Newspaper photo is courtesy of my husband's cousin Gero, who took us on the Dresden excursion.)

Dresden

April 2-5, 2009

After two months in Berlin and our day-to-day activities (working, taking our son to and from school, etc.) we began an intense period of tourism, starting with a four-day visit to Saxony (eastern Germany near the Czech Republic) with visits to Dresden, Dessau, and Wörlitz. The city of Dresden was the seat of government of the Saxon kings in the 18th century, when they built lavish palaces and churches, and amassed impressive collections of art objects and curiosities.

Dresden is an amazing city, and definitely worth a visit. It clusters along both sides of the Elbe River, and the city preserves a wide green belt along both banks of the river for miles in each direction. We were in Dresden on a gorgeous, warm spring weekend, and these banks were filled with sunbathers and picnickers. It is rare to see so much prime real estate being left open for public enjoyment, and not grossly privatized and overdeveloped. The public transportation in Dresden is great, making it a very easy place to visit.

Our current six-month sojourn in Germany has been a real learning experience for me, because in the past I have been much more interested in Italy and the Mediterranean, France, and England (in that order). I had only spent 24 hours in Germany before this year, with a one-day visit to Stuttgart (in 1996) to see the 1927 housing exhibition called the Weissenhofsiedlung. (I also spent a week in Vienna in 1998, which was my main exposure to German-speaking culture before now.)

Dresden gave me a delightful introduction to the German Baroque, which was the architectural style favored by European monarchs in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the center of the Old City in Dresden is the palace of the Saxon princes and a number of other structures, the most impressive of which is called the Zwinger, built in an ostentatious and bombastic High Baroque style (which personally I find very appealing). Formerly a royal structure, the Zwinger now houses several museums, including the impressive Old Masters gallery, home of Raphael’s famous “Sistine Madonna.”

Of course Dresden was horribly destroyed in the Second World War. Tens of thousands of civilians perished in the Allied bombing of the city, an attack which took place after Germany’s defeat was imminent. (Civilian casualties have been estimated at anywhere between 25,000 and 250,000, according to Wikipedia.) The destruction of Dresden is widely regarded as a war crime, the subject of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (based on Vonnegut’s own experiences as an American prisoner of war in Dresden).

Overlaying the Baroque history of Dresden and its World War II trauma is the long period of DDR rule – the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (German Democratic Republic, or GDR, in English) – otherwise known as East Germany. The East Germans built tons and tons of ugly, enormous apartment houses and public buildings, the most banal kind of architecture imaginable. The East German government did not see fit to rebuild the city’s main cathedral, called the Frauenkirche (the Church of Our Lady).

Much of historic Dresden was rebuilt in the 1990s, after the reunification of Germany in 1989; it is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Although the rebuilt Frauenkirche incorporates as many stones as possible from the 18th-century one (they appear much darker than the new stones), the vast majority of it is from new materials.

Dresden also boasts much contemporary architecture, like this Deconstructivist fire escape.

By the way, the Frauenkirche was NOT destroyed directly by the bombing of Dresden; it collapsed later as the result of a chain reaction. Many Germans sought shelter inside the church during the bombing and they survived, the church did not collapse on top of them.

The Socialist government of the DDR was not very interested in restoring monuments from the feudal past or from the Church. However, they DID restore the Zwinger, which like the Frauenkirche is largely rebuilt from new materials. The Zwinger was and is a beloved Dresden landmark. A commemorative plaque on the Zwinger declares, “This masterpiece of Baroque art was destroyed by the Anglo-American terror attack of February 13, 1945.” It goes on to say that it was “lovingly reconstructed” by the DDR and the power of the workers. Its reconstruction was finished in 1964.

Besides this plaque, there is very little else in the city that commemorates or even mentions the widespread destruction of Dresden at the end of the war. History has a very strange status in Dresden – all the historical Baroque structures are reconstructions of the past two decades, while the great horror of the war that was experienced by so many in Dresden is almost completely erased. It’s a little strange.

Modern Ruins

Shown below: ruin of the "Orangerie." It's completely derelict, and this seems to be the only piece of the building that still remains; it's just down the road from the Zwinger. The old archaeologist in me couldn't resist investigating it, but I still haven't found out anything else about it.

The Gentrification of East Berlin

From what I can tell so far, after five days in Berlin, most people in this city live in large apartment houses like the one we are currently occupying (see previous post, below). Though we are living in what used to be East Berlin, I have seen much of the western part of the city, having ridden through it three times in the first three days. The uniform character of the city’s residences – five- to seven-story buildings throughout – characterizes both East and West. Most of them seem to have been built between the late 19th century and the early 20th (up through the 1920s); they vary in terms of architectural detail, but maintain the medium-rise building heights, regular fenestration, and similar building profiles that you see in these photos.

(Note: having recently ventured further east, I noticed a lot of 11-story apartment blocks from the Communist era, but rarely anything taller.)

Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin wall, it’s getting hard to tell the difference between the two halves of the city. During the Communist era East Berlin was extremely neglected, but most of the former East Berlin apartment buildings have been renovated and look like they would be at home in any well-heeled city in Europe or the U.S. But occasionally you will run across East Berlin buildings that have yet to be refurbished, and here you can get a sense of just how extreme the renovation has been.

Although I ran across several such structures in about a one-hour’s walk through Prenzlauer Berg one morning, they are by no means typical. It is more common to find entire blocks which have been completely renovated, or there might be one single unrenovated structure in the whole neighborhood.

One famous such neglected outpost in P’Berg is this squat, with an anarchist bookstore next door. A large sign on the façade reads, “Kapitalismus normiert, zerstört, tötet” (“Capitalism homogenizes, destroys, kills”), and there are many similar smaller signs of protest.

Several things seem to be going on here, both in the gentrification and in the protests against it. Both represent the desire to make and to preserve memory, to create a version of the city that conforms to an ideal, and to protest against a competing (“inauthentic”) version of the same city. Four decades of Communist rule produced an East Berlin that was visibly different from its western counterpart; for many this was not the authentic city, but for those born and raised in the Communist era, the changes wrought by the past two decades of West German capitalism seem inauthentic. (Of course we all know how suspect the terms "authentic" and "inauthentic" are, but I use them here deliberately.)

One of my husband's German friends looks with disdain on P'Berg because it has changed so much from the old days; it's the German equivalent of a Yuppie-ville. But there is some resistance, evidenced by this squat.

Our Berlin Apartment, Part 2

My previous post showed several interior views of the apartment we are renting in Berlin; the landlord did not provide exterior views, and upon arrival it was pretty clear why. In this photo you can see the front door facing onto the street; the graffiti surrounding it reflects the generally run-down condition of the building’s exterior. This is not all that unusual for Berlin, which I’ll say more about in another post.

The graffiti and peeling paint contrast with the building’s former grandeur, hinted at by the half-caryatids that are part of the architectural detailing above the main door. Everyone in Berlin lives in these large apartment blocks, visible from the street, which surround vast garden spaces. From the street you would never know these gardens are here; they provide most of the green spaces to which urban dwellers have access. (Though Berlin, of course, has enormous forests and tracts of green space within the city, which I am only starting to learn about.)

The view from our apartment does not look directly onto the Kollwitzplatz, as I assumed when I wrote my last post. That is actually a view of the garden behind our apartment building (and shared by all the buildings on this block).

Here are N & E on our first evening in Berlin, enjoying a snack in the cozy kitchen. We have two bedrooms, one living/dining room, a small kitchen, and a small bathroom (which also contains the washing machine). The space is so much smaller than our house in Missouri, but it has everything we need; it’s refreshing to be reminded of how little one actually needs in terms of space and stuff (what, no blender? no juicer?). It makes me realize that all of our belongings back in Missouri could all just be given away to charity and we would, for the most part, be just fine with only the limited amount of stuff we brought with us for these 6 months. And of course, no car.

One of the coolest things about our location is that the Kollwitzplatz is the site of two weekly farmers' markets, Thursday evening and Saturday morning. In this photo you can see what the street looked like outside our building last Saturday. They have everything from fresh eggs, fruit and veggies to prepared food and crafts. On Thursday evening we can get Persian food from one of the stalls -- hooray!

Our apartment is on the 3rd floor (which would be considered the 4th floor in American parlance) and we walk up 76 steps to get here; there’s no elevator. Upon our arrival, I realized (to my horror) the chief drawback of a suitcase weighing 69 pounds…the poor guy who brought it up the three flights of stairs for us was the 18-year-old son of N’s cousin’s boyfriend. (We live in a ranch house, okay? That means one story, no stairs between the house and the car...)

If it weren’t for N’s cousin (A), her partner, and his son, this transition to life in Berlin would have been much harder. A has done so much for us – from cleaning our apartment in preparation for our arrival, providing towels and bed linens (which our landlord didn’t), picking us up at the airport with TWO cars – one for luggage, one for people – wow, I just don’t know what we would have done without them.

The Passenger (film review)

The Passenger, directed by Michelangelo Antonioni and starring Jack Nicholson, is a captivating portrait of a reporter who impulsively trades places with a dead man. What kind of person would do such a thing, and why? And will he get away with it?

I don’t want to spoil the film for you, but I will quote the Netflix plot synopsis: “Disenchanted with his life, Locke [a reporter covering an insurrection in North Africa]…assumes the dead man’s identity, not knowing that he was a gunrunner for the insurgents. By the time Locke realizes that he’s put himself in grave danger, it may be too late.”

The Passenger expresses so well many of the themes that are important to Antonioni, and they recur in his films over and over. I will explore some of these themes here, but first some background. Antonioni directed 37 films, of which I have now seen 8; my favorite ones are noted with an asterisk:

Cronaca di un amore (Story of a Love Affair), 1950 (his 12th film, but the first full-length one)
*L’Avventura (The Adventure), 1960 (first in the so-called Trilogy) (Criterion Collection; commentary by film critic Gene Youngblood)
La Notte (The Night), 1961 (second in the Trilogy)
*L’Eclisse (Eclipse), 1962 (third in the Trilogy) (also in the Criterion Collection)
*Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert), 1964 (some sources say this belongs in the “Trilogy” instead of La Notte, which I can see; and some say those four films make up a Tetrology)
*Blow-Up, 1966 (Antonioni’s first English-language film)
Zabriskie Point, 1970 (Antonioni’s first U.S. film)
*The Passenger, 1975

1. The first common theme is pursuit. In L’Avventura, a young woman disappears from an uninhabited island while there on holiday with friends. Her best friend (played by Monica Vitti) and her fiancé (Gabriele Ferzetti) search for her, and for the rest of the film are seen travelling around Italy chasing after clues and falling in love. In Blow-Up (Antonioni’s first English-language film), a photographer (David Hemmings) tries to solve a murder that he thinks he has captured evidence of in his photographs. In The Passenger, David Locke (Nicholson) is being pursued by many different people and organizations, but is far from figuring out who/what they all are. (As a reporter he’s praised for being very observant, but it turns out he’s actually not very smart.)

2. The second theme that Antonioni explores in The Passenger is trust and its corollary, betrayal. These themes, as expressed through romantic relationships, are essential to nearly every Antonioni film I have seen, though in none so prominently as in The Passenger. (Like I said, Locke is very observant but not actually very smart…)

3. The third prominent theme in The Passenger is identity. David Locke assumes the identity of the dead man, David Robertson. He takes up with a young woman whose name is never given; she is listed in the film credits simply as “Girl.” (She is played by Maria Schneider, who had starred in Last Tango in Paris just 3 years earlier.) The fact that we never know her name underlines the fact that we have no idea who she is; we know nothing about her, and neither does Locke. She says she is an architecture student. Locke trusts her implicitly, but it’s not clear why; because of his trust for her, it’s easy for the viewer to be lulled into trusting her too.

4. Fourth: observation, the camera, the window, the gaze. This complex of issues permeates all of Antonioni’s films, and it’s part of what makes them so amazing. They become visual puzzles. In The Passenger Locke’s character is said to be observant, but as viewers WE need to pay close attention too. Antonioni demands a lot from the viewer, which is part of what makes his films so compelling. He thus thematizes the role of film director (the one controlling the gaze of the camera) IN the film’s structure and its narrative. David Locke in The Passenger is a television correspondent, and as such, he’s behind the camera, interviewing subjects, all the time. In one scene, the subject (an African “medicine man”) takes hold of the camera and turns it on Locke; the loss of control clearly discomfits Locke. But Locke is not the first Antonioni protagonist who works with a camera: Thomas (the Hemmings character) in Blow-Up is a photographer, and photography is central to the plot of that film.

In The Passenger, Antonioni at times frustrates our desire to observe and, hence, our desire to know. People and situations are often filmed through a window, and during the climactic final sequence, the camera focuses on what's happening outside the Hotel de la Gloria (through Locke's window) rather than the drama that is -- silently -- occurring within. An earlier crucial scene is filmed through water (a public fountain) so that we can’t be sure exactly what has happened; one man is seized in a restaurant by a group of four men, but what happened to his companion? Why wasn’t he seized? Was he complicit in the capture?

Unlike a lot of directors, Antonioni does not call attention to every detail; it’s easy to miss some of his clues. And a lot of questions go unanswered, and mysteries are never solved. In L’Avventura the girl who goes missing (Anna) is never found, and no explanation is ever given for her disappearance. In The Passenger, we can never fit all the puzzle pieces together.

Much of the dialogue is about seeing; Locke repeatedly asks the girl, as she looks out the window, "what can you see? what can you see now?" And he tells her this story:

“I knew a man who was blind. When he was nearly 40 years old he had an operation and regained his sight….At first he was elated, really high—faces, colors, landscapes. But then everything began to change. The world was much poorer than he had imagined. Noone had ever told him how much dirt there was, how much ugliness. He noticed ugliness everywhere. When he was blind, he used to cross the street alone with a stick. After he regained his sight, he became afraid, he began to live in darkness, he never left his room. After three years he killed himself.”

5. The fifth theme that intrigues me in Antonioni’s work is architecture. He juxtaposes historically “important” buildings with the ugly modern architectural landscape of Europe (Italy in L’Avventura, Spain in The Passenger). The main male character in L'Avventura is an architect; the girl in The Passenger says she's an architecture student. (Not to mention that she meets Locke in a building designed by Antoni Gaudi.) I think it has a lot to do with being Italian, surrounded by "great" architecture from the past and seeing the rapid transformation of the country in the post-war period. This really merits its own separate blog entry.

(Note: I taught L'Avventura in my "Architecture in Film" course two years ago, and was disappointed that students didn't like it very much, for a number of reasons. One, they generally don't like any foreign-language films; two, Antonioni demands so much from the viewer in terms of interpretation -- for people who think being asked to read subtitles is a burden, this is evidently beyond the pale! Three, his pacing is much more slow and deliberate than the kinds of American, Hollywood films they're used to watching.)

The Passenger is a must-see film (as are L’Avventura and Blow-Up). (Red Desert is great, but not yet released on DVD so harder to get a hold of). I’ve never described myself as a Jack Nicholson fan, but I never cease to be amazed by his talent as an actor (despite some films I’ve hated, including As Good As It Gets and The Witches of Eastwick). As my husband put it recently, “there’s really noone else like him.”

I have to say, too, that there's noone else like Antonioni. I just love his subtlety and his sense of understatement. In The Passenger, there's virtually no dialogue in the first 20 minutes, and after that it builds only gradually for another 20 minutes. His films are so utterly visual, yet the characters are incredibly nuanced psychologically.

SPOILER ALERT…Continue reading at your own risk

If you haven’t seen The Passenger, I strongly suggest you watch it BEFORE you read what follows, as I would hate to ruin what is surely one of the great pleasures of the film, i.e., figuring it out for yourself. (If you have Netflix you can watch it instantly online.)

I keep referring to Locke as very observant but not very smart, because he trusts the Maria Schneider character and never for a minute suspects her motives. This despite the fact that he saw her in London, before running into her in Barcelona. When he tells her that he believes in coincidences, it’s actually like Antonioni waving a big red flag that says “Don’t believe in coincidences! There’s no such thing!” Of course, the fact that this gorgeous woman 15 years his junior is attaching herself to him is one explanation for his failure to question her, but another factor is his own short-sightedness. On first viewing, one might not suspect her of being a spy, or of being an accomplice in his murder; but after the film’s conclusion it’s hard not to think that she was either working for the African government that was looking for Robertson, for a European government, or for the insurgents. But she seems to have gone even farther than that, persuading Locke to stick with the plan he unwittingly got himself into. But even that’s not entirely clear. Doesn’t she believe that he’s not actually Robertson? Why doesn’t that matter to her?

And on the subject of identity: Locke's wife, Rachel, finally catches up with him at the ironically named Hotel de la Gloria, just moments after he's been killed. When asked if she recognizes him, she says, "I never knew him." Surely she recognizes that this man who went by the name Robertson WAS her husband; her statement connotes a much more fundamental lack of knowledge, rather than a lack of recognition.

Architectural Loss (Notes from Los Angeles)

The Final Chapter of 217, 219, and 225 Bicknell Avenue


One powerful and sad experience I had this summer was the final visit to my home of 14 years in Santa Monica. Final, because the building is slated for demolition this summer. All the tenants were evicted as of April 1, 2008, with demolition scheduled for that month. Then it got pushed back to May, then June, and when I left on July 8 it was still standing, looking melancholy in its state of abandonment.

The building, a complex of 13 units arranged around a courtyard, was probably built in two stages: the first in 1940 (10 single-story units), with an addition in the 1960s or 1970s consisting of 8 garages with three units above them, closing the courtyard off from the street. (I say probably because this is just an educated guess). In the 1940s, Santa Monica was largely a vacation destination, a seaside community of beach cottages. The building had no insulation against the weather, leading me to suppose it was intended only for short-term vacation rentals (though I don't know this for a fact). The building is two blocks from the beach, so it would have been a perfect location for vacationers.

My apartment, a one-bedroom unit, was in the rear, right-hand corner; in this photo taken of me in 1998, the door to my apartment is visible.

The courtyard was so beautiful. There were three lemon trees, which bore fruit year-round. The black-and-white photo shows my friend Marc's younger son (who is now 12) climbing in the largest of these lemon trees. There was an enormous apricot tree, which bore abundant, sweet fruit. There were fig trees, jacarandas (the purple-blossomed tree that is so popular all over Southern California), roses; most of the ground-floor units had individual plots for flowers. The red-haired baby in the next photo is Olivia (now 11) when I was babysitting her; she toddled in this courtyard during the first week that she was walking.

When I lived in Santa Monica (1988 to 2002) the owner was Edna Hummer, a nice old lady who loved the building and took incredibly good care of it. Gardeners came weekly to mow and water and prune. Today the lawn is turning brown, with large patches of dirt.

Sometime after I moved away, perhaps 2003 or 2004, Mrs. Hummer sold the property to Tony Dow (of "Leave It To Beaver" fame) whose intention from the outset must have been to develop it. Property values in Santa Monica were skyrocketing -- had been doing so for decades -- and it's a miracle that this little gem of an apartment complex survived as long as it did. Under rent control it was not generating much revenue for its owner, though evidently enough for her to be satisfied. Mr. Dow, though, seems to have much higher expectations for financial return. So he finally evicted everyone and is planning to erect seven condominiums, each of them close to 3,000 square feet (which, incidentally, is larger than the average single-family house). All those beautiful trees will be destroyed, not to mention a real relic of Santa Monica's past. I will never watch "Leave It To Beaver" again.

Joan Didion on Architectural Demolition

Just before my visit to Santa Monica I read Joan Didion's memoir The Year of Magical Thinking. In it she describes the destruction of a house she lived in in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter Quintana:

“In point of fact the house in Brentwood Park from which I had seen the red flashing light and thought to evade it by moving to New York no longer existed. It was torn down to the ground and replaced (by a house marginally larger) a year after we sold it. The day we happened to be in Los Angeles and drove past the corner of Chadbourne and Marlboro and saw nothing left standing except the one chimney that allowed a tax advantage, I remembered the real estate agent telling me how meaningful it would be to the buyers were we to give them suitably inscribed copies of the books we had written in the house. We had done this. Quintana and Friends, Dutch Shea, Jr., and The Red White and Blue for John, Salvador, Democracy, and Miami for me. When we saw the flattened lot from the car, Quintana, in the back seat, burst into tears. My first reaction was fury. I wanted the books back.” (pp. 133-134)

The Eames Case Study House #8 (Notes from Los Angeles)

Member Appreciation Day (Sunday, June 15, 2008)

Sunday I made my first visit to the Eames House, more properly known as Case Study House #8, which I have wanted to see for years but never actually visited. The house is located on Chautauqua Blvd. in Pacific Palisades, in a meadow on top of the bluff overlooking the ocean. When the house was completed in 1949 this area was still considered “the boonies,” pretty far away from Los Angeles in the days before freeways. It’s still in a fairly hidden enclave, surrounded by enormous houses (one on top of Casa del Mar looks to be close to 20,000 square feet!). The Eames case study house, by comparison, is 2,300 square feet between the house and the studio, which are located in two separate buildings (1400 sq. ft. in the house, 900 in the studio) connected by a generous patio.


My old architectural history professor at UC Santa Barbara, the late David Gebhard, was interested in the Case Study House program, and talked about it a lot in his classes. The Case Study House program was an attempt to popularize modern architecture, to make it more widely accepted, more mainstream. It was sponsored by the magazine Arts and Architecture, chiefly by its editor, John Entenza; the magazine commissioned the houses, which were paid for by clients. These were meant as prototypes for suburban housing. Most of the Case Study Houses had open plans built in flexible systems with interlocking outside/inside spaces, and were designed for what Gebhard called the “mobile, efficiency-minded and consumer-oriented mass culture.” The program completed 23 Case Study Houses between 1945 (when they were commissioned) and 1962. The Eames house was one of four Case Study Houses built in this wooded tract on palisades overlooking the ocean; next door was the Entenza House, designed by Charles Eames and Eero Saarinen (his old friend from Cranbrook). Another Case Study House on this block was designed by the Viennese architect Richard Neutra.

As a building type, the glass-enclosed pavilion was suddenly huge in American architecture in the 1940s, due to the influence of German Bauhaus architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, who immigrated to the United States in 1937. He had developed the pavilion as a recurring theme, most notably in his Barcelona Pavilion (1928-1929). In 1945 he designed the Farnsworth House (completed in 1951) in rural Illinois, and under his influence, Philip Johnson designed his own famous Glass House (1949). Both of those were meant as one-of-a-kind “masterpieces,” high-end examples of a kind of luxury home with a certain austere, minimalist aesthetic. The Eames House, on the other hand, was built inexpensively and, although unique, was intended as a prototype for middle-class dwelling. It was assembled from pieces ordered from catalogues; its ready-made structural elements contrast with personal décor of the interior. Here in the Eames house, the Miesian vocabulary takes off in a lot of directions, incorporating a Mondrian-like color palette in contrast to the monochromatic predecessors. As in Mies and Johnson’s houses, we see transparency and opacity at play. Instead of looking anonymous it looks very personal.


Those who work in the House say that because of the glass walls, after being there for a little while you forget the building is there; you feel like you're in nature, surrounded by trees. (The house is bordered by towering eucalyptus trees.) On the tour one of the guides told us the Eameses said that after they had lived in the House for a few years, it "disappeared" for them.


Entenza hoped the Case Study Houses would be not merely single performances but plans which could be repeated. Their critical success promoted public acceptance of experimental design; in 1962 Esther McCoy wrote,

“The banks had previously taken the view that a house with glass walls, open plan, no dining room, kitchen facing the street, flat roof, and slab floor was a poor investment and had no resale value. That all Case Study Houses were excellent investments is proved by the prices at which they have been resold. Three Case Study Houses sold recently fetched 90 to 125 percent above the original cost.”

The house’s historical significance was confirmed by its National Landmark Status, conferred in 2006.

The event I went to on Sunday (see photos) was a Members Appreciation Day, the only day of the year when visitors (i.e., donors) are permitted inside the house. The rest of the year, visitors may only tour the exterior of the house. The Eameses’ daughter, five grandchildren, and numerous great-grandchildren (as well as one great-great-grandchild!) were present at the event, and were very generous and gracious hosts. They as well as various docents and employees of the Eames Office (at 850 Pico Blvd. in Santa Monica) were on hand to answer any questions and converse with donors for a large part of the day.

Charles and Ray Eames First-Day-of-Issue Ceremony (Tuesday, June 17, 2008)

Another first – I had never been to a first-day-of-issue ceremony, and this one (held at the Eames Office) turned out to be a lot of fun! The U.S. Post Office issued a beautiful set of postage stamps with 16 different Eames designs, from architecture to furniture to film and textile design. This U.S. government ceremony began with the “presentation of colors” (flags of the nation and the state of California being walked up and down the aisle) and the national anthem (sung by Melodi Dalton, an appropriately named soprano with the San Francisco Symphony), followed by brief remarks by the postmaster and the mayor of Santa Monica; and finally Eames Demetrios, the chairman of the board and grandson of Charles & Ray Eames making a brief thank-you speech. There were so many people and so much going on! One line to buy stamps, another line to get your first-day-of-issue cancellation stamp on your stamps and envelopes and memorabilia, and another line where you could collect the signatures of all the family members present. Most of those present for the ceremony were Eames fans, but there was also a small clique of hard-core philatelists who had their systems for creating first-day-of-issue memorabilia honed to a science. These folks had made their own cards and envelopes and had developed elaborate systems of cataloguing their creations once cancelled; the mind-boggling thing about it to me was that they weren’t necessarily fans of Charles and Ray Eames, just serious stamp collectors! They would travel to these first-day-of-issue ceremonies whenever they could, and trade their cancelled memorabilia with other stamp collectors they meet at conventions.

Links:

For more information on Charles & Ray Eames, see:

"The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention," exhibit at the Library of Congress

veerle's blog (lots of great photos, especially Eames furniture)

Great Buildings Online

Wikipedia essay

Bibliography:

Esther McCoy, Case Study Houses, 1945-1962. Originally published in 1962 under the title Modern California Houses. Los Angeles: Hennessey & Ingalls, 1977.

Elizabeth A.T. Smith. Case Study Houses 1945-1966: the California Impetus. Taschen, 2006.

Random Reflections on L.A. (Notes from Los Angeles)

Architecture and Public Spaces:

This summer I am extremely fortunate to be spending a lot of time at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where I am conducting research so that I can turn my dissertation into a book. Not only does the GRI have a fabulous research library and Special Collections, but it's also a fantastic space. This photo shows one of the beautiful pergolas where you can sit outside and have lunch or coffee -- though I'm spending most of my time inside the Research Institute (which is also lovely; hopefully I will follow up with a blog entry about that soon). But that's not all I've been up to; here are a few other things I've experienced over the past week:

On Sunday we were driving past Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall (downtown – on our way home from dim sum in Chinatown) – and my friend’s 10-year-old son said “it looks like an extreme skatepark.”

The UCLA campus is one of the most beautiful spots in Los Angeles – it has lots of very old plants and trees, lots of outdoor sculpture, and a nice, somewhat unified architectural ensemble. (Why didn’t I go to school here??) I spent the day here yesterday, in the Arts Library, and visited the relatively new Broad Art Center; in the space that *used* to be the Arts Library, there's now a cafe.

Exhibitions:

The Getty Research Institute mounted a small exhibition on the work of Viennese architect and writer Bernard Rudofsky, whose 1964 book Architecture without Architects fueled an interest in vernacular architecture on the part of architects in the 1960s and '70s. Following in the tradition of fellow Viennese architect Adolf Loos, Rudofsky took a strong interest in fashion, dress, and ornamentation, with an eye to critiquing contemporary Euro-American trends and tastes; he even designed a line of women’s shoes.

I missed the exhibit on Bob Dylan at the Skirball Center, which ended on June 8; but I am planning to take my son to the Skirball to see the Noah’s Ark exhibition when he comes in July.

The Armand Hammer Museum in Westwood is mounting an exhibit on the Southern California architect John Lautner, it opens July 13. (5 days after I leave! bummer!) You may know his work if you saw the 1984 Brian de Palma film “Body Double;” his 1960 house called the Chemosphere, in Hollywood, is featured (it’s where the murdered woman lives). Another one of his houses was used in the James Bond film “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971), and another one in “Twilight” (1998).

Film:

On Sunday night I got to catch a film at the new and improved Aero Theater on Montana Avenue in Santa Monica. For most of the time I lived in Santa Monica (1988-2002) this was an independent theater showing nightly double features for $5 -- the best deal around. Then it fell on hard times and was losing money, the quality of programming suffered, and everyone was afraid it would have to close its doors. It was finally acquired by the American Cinematheque and reopened in January 2005 after being beautifully restored and given state-of-the art equipment. Now it has a very exciting schedule of rare, recently restored, and special interest films, which we used to drive to Hollywood to see (at the American Cinematheque's original venue, the Egyptian Theater). On Sunday we saw "Breezy," a 1973 film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring William Holden and Kay Lenz; it was a real period piece, and gave me a new appreciation for Holden as an actor.

Performances:

Last Friday at Highways Performance Space and Gallery in Santa Monica, I attended a moving event called "Action Conversations," directed by choreographer Victoria Marks. The performance was created by artists, activists, and veterans recovering from PTSD; they worked together in a 15-week workshop, creating a performance that deals with the experiences of veterans trying to reenter civilian life and the encounters between veterans and civilians. The event was important in creating dialogue between vets and civilians, and bridging the gap that usually prevents us from understanding one another. There was one moment that required audience participation in a call-and-response format, with these words: "We risked our lives in Troy/Iraq, and the Peloponnese/Afghanistan and in Ionia/Kuwait." Having recently taught The Iliad, I thought a lot about the parallels they were trying to draw here, in a way I'd never thought about them before. The concept of a "hero" in the ancient world is so different from today's Christian-influenced concept; Achilles was no moral paragon, but a "hero" nonetheless. Food for thought.

Restaurants:

Speaking of food, I was walking along Westwood Boulevard yesterday and passed a restaurant called India’s Oven, I knew that I knew it, but not in Westwood. I picked up the menu and it said “originally located at Pico and Fairfax,” and I realized this was the awesome Indian restaurant I used to go to, back in the late 1980s (when they used to serve everything on Styrofoam!). During the 1992 Los Angeles Riots (which some people call the L.A. Uprising) I was watching the live news coverage on TV (like everyone else in L.A.) and at one point saw it – India’s Oven, on Pico Blvd., one of my favorite restaurants at the time – with flames shooting out of its windows. After that it appeared in West L.A. – no more Styrofoam – and I don’t know how it ended up in Westwood. I see they still have Ras Malai on the menu, my favorite dessert, so I’m going to have to eat here!

MAK Buys Schindler House

This was in the New York Times yesterday:

"The nonprofit MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles has acquired R. M. Schindler’s renowned Modernist Fitzpatrick-Leland House, shown above when it was built in 1936, perched on a cliff near the intersection of Laurel Canyon Boulevard and Mulholland Drive, the center said. The three-level L-shaped house, with its interlocking volumes, was a gift from Russ Leland, who bought it in 1990 and spent years restoring it to its original design. The MAK Center said the house would be used for its new Urban Future Initiative program, which grants two-month residencies to researchers from around the world exploring urban issues like sustainability, immigration and social justice."

(In the "Arts, Briefly" column, compiled by Felicia R. Lee, June 4, 2008)

The MAK Center in Los Angeles is an offshoot of the MAK (Museum fur Angewandte Kunst) in Vienna, Austria. Since Schindler was an Austrian architect, who relocated to Los Angeles in the 1910s, the MAK has taken a particular interest in his work.

Two-month residencies in the Fitzpatrick-Leland House? The chance to live in a modern masterpiece? I have a new life goal...

The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton (book review)

Today I started reading The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton (2006). It’s an impressive, expansive text about the emotional and psychological impact of architecture and the man-made environment – and ultimately of beauty itself – on us human beings. I’m enjoying this book immensely; it makes reference to lots of writers, intellectuals, and artists, displaying the author’s breadth of interests. The best part of the book are the images – he shows everything from Mies van der Rohe’s Tugendhat House in Prague to Botticelli’s Madonna and Child with Eight Singing Angels – and that’s just in the first chapter. His book uses images to communicate visually in a manner that almost stands independent from the text, much like Le Corbusier’s Vers une architecture (Towards a New Architecture) or Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.

Unlike Venturi or Le Corbusier, Botton is not an architect. Nor is he an architectural historian, or an academic of any sort. He seems to be just a smart guy who writes mass-market books for an intellectual audience on such esoteric subjects as literature, status, travel, architecture, and love. He also writes novels. So I guess he’s just a writer; or is he an independent scholar, or a public intellectual? And where are the boundaries between those categories? Anyway, here’s an excerpt from the first chapter of The Architecture of Happiness:

“The house has grown into a knowledgeable witness. It has been party to early seductions, it has watched homework being written, it has observed swaddled babies freshly arrived from hospital, it has been surprised in the middle of the night by whispered conferences in the kitchen. It has experienced winter evenings when its windows were as cold as bags of frozen peas and midsummer dusks when its brick walls held the warmth of newly baked bread.

It has provided not only physical but also psychological sanctuary. It has been a guardian of identity. Over the years, its owners have returned from periods away and, looking around them, remembered who they were.”

I think the same might be said about the cities and towns we call home.

Atonement, a Novel, by Ian McKewan

A month or so after teaching Adam style architecture (18th-century Neoclassical English manor houses) and English picturesque gardens – and 8 months after visiting Stowe Landscape Gardens in Buckinghamshire and the Chiswick House and Gardens in London – I began reading Ian McEwan’s Atonement for my monthly book group. Those who have read the novel know that one’s interest is quickly absorbed by its sensational plot, and eventually by the troubling ambiguity of the narrative voice; but my own interest hovered around McKewan’s early discussions of the English manor house and its picturesque garden, complete with architectural follies like the ones I’d been talking to my students about just a short time before. In Chapter 2 McKewan gives us an overview of the house and grounds (which he locates in Surrey) that are the setting for the first half of the novel, which takes place in 1935:

“Morning sunlight, or any light, could not conceal the ugliness of the Tallis home – barely forty years old, bright orange brick, squat, lead-paned baronial Gothic, to be condemned one day in an article by Pevsner, or one of his team, as a tragedy of wasted chances, and by a younger writer of the modern school as ‘charmless to a fault.’ An Adam-style house had stood here until destroyed by fire in the late 1880s. What remained was the artificial lake and island with its two stone bridges supporting the driveway, and, by the water’s edge, a crumbling stuccoed temple.” (Ian McKewan, Atonement, p. 18)

McKewan returns to his description of the grounds in Chapter 7, which starts like this:

“The island temple, built in the style of Nicholas Revett in the late 1780s, was intended as a point of interest, an eye-catching feature to enhance the pastoral ideal, and had of course no religious purpose at all. It was near enough to the water’s edge, raised upon a projecting bank, to cast an interesting reflection in the lake, and from most perspectives the row of pillars and the pediment above them were charmingly half obscured by the elms and oaks that had grown up around. Closer to, the temple had sorrier look: moisture rising through a damaged damp course had caused chunks of stucco to fall away. Sometime in the late nineteenth century clumsy repairs were made with unpainted cement which had turned brown and gave the building a mottled, diseased appearance. Elsewhere, the exposed laths, themselves rotting away, showed through like the ribs of a starving animal. The double doors that opened onto a circular chamber with a domed roof had long ago been removed, and the stone floor was thickly covered in leaves and leaf mold and the droppings of various birds and animals that wandered in and out. All the panes were gone from the pretty, Georgian windows, smashed by Leon and his friends in the late twenties. The tall niches that had once contained statuary were empty but for the filthy ruins of spiderwebs. The only furniture was a bench carried in from the village cricket pitch – again, the youthful Leon and his terrible friends from school. The legs had been kicked away and used to break the windows, and were lying outside, softly crumbling into the earth among the nettles and the incorruptible shards of glass.

“Just as the swimming pool pavilion behind the stable block imitated features of the temple, so the temple was supposed to embody references to the original Adam house, though nobody in the Tallis family knew what they were. Perhaps it was the style of column, or the pediment, or the proportions of the windows. At different times, but most often at Christmas, when moods were expansive, family members strolling over the bridges promised to research the matter, but no one cared to set aside the time when the busy new year began. More than the dilapidation, it was this connection, this lost memory of the temple’s grander relation, which gave the useless little building its sorry air. The temple was the orphan of a grand society lady, and now with no one to care for it, no one to look up to, the child had grown old before its time, and let itself go. There was a tapering soot stain as high as a man on an outside wall where two tramps had once, outrageously, lit a bonfire to roast a carp that was not theirs. For a long time there had been a shriveled boot lying exposed on grass kept trim by rabbits. But when Briony looked today, the boot had vanished, as everything would in the end. The idea that the temple, wearing its own black band, grieved for the burned-down mansion, that it yearned for a grand and invisible presence, bestowed a faintly religious ambience. Tragedy had rescued the temple from being entirely fake.” (pp. 68-69)

Through his elaborate description of the island temple, McKewan advances his work in many ways: A, he describes the scene where the novel’s central crime(s) will take place on the night that the twins run away (and he even manages in passing to associate it with delinquent behavior); B, he uses architectural history to position the Tallis family within the landed aristocracy who were the patrons for these Adam style houses in the 18th century (though only one half of the family is aristocratic; the other belongs to the nouveau riche, descended from a grandfather “who made the family fortune with a series of patents on padlocks, bolts, latches and hasps”); C, McKewan creates a metaphor for the Tallis family’s descent (continuing a time-honored theme in British literature, the degeneracy of Britain’s aristocracy); D, he alludes to the situation of the children in the novel, who suffer because of the adults’ neglect, much like this temple has been abandoned by its parent, the vanished Adam house.

When I read about the McKewan’s island temple I couldn’t help thinking of the so-called “Temple of Love” on the grounds of the Chiswick House, a garden folly built to imitate the Roman Pantheon but on a much smaller scale. During the 18th century, Englishmen who went on the Grand Tour brought back with them an interest in ancient Roman and Italian Renaissance architecture, and garden follies such as this one were their attempt to show off their continental knowledge and taste. (In Atonement, the Tallis property also boasts of a half-scale reproduction of Bernini's Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini in Rome.) I saw many such follies at Stowe Gardens, too, and it’s clear that McKewan has as well, for his description of the crumbling stucco, broken glass, and rotting leaves and animal droppings capture the experience of visiting some of these structures. The Pantheon, built out of Roman brick-faced concrete, has lasted almost 1900 years, but follies like the ones at Stowe and Chiswick House, many of which were made out of wood and stucco, would surely be gone by now if it weren’t for rigorous preservation and restoration work. (The Oxford Dictionary of Architecture defines a folly as "an eyecatcher, usually a building in a contrived landscape, often otherwise useless.")

The Tallises’ new house, a Gothic Revival structure dating from c. 1895, is considered tasteless, gauche, and quite inferior stylistically by comparison with the Adam house. Plus it’s badly designed. (McKewan refers to a fireplace that has been “unlit since its construction – a fault in the architectural drawings had left no provision for a flue or chimney,” pp. 117-118). The irony is that today almost anything that old is considered architecturally interesting. By 1999, the year of the novel’s postscript-like final chapter, the house has been sold and turned into an inn called Tilney’s Hotel. The artificial lake no longer exists, and the island temple has also disappeared. Part of the grounds have been converted into a golf course, another accurate detail if Stowe Gardens are any indication. When we visited Stowe last summer (July 2007), some of the grounds had been turned over to a golf course, and we had to compete with the golfers in order to walk over to the so-called Temple of Venus. (I should add that the golfers were quite courteous in deferring to the tourists.)

(golf course at Stowe Gardens)

The architecture of the home also defines the novel’s hero, Robbie Turner, the son of the Tallises’ cleaning woman. He and his mother, Grace, share a small bungalow on the grounds, a bungalow that was given to Grace by Daddy Tallis, a liberal aristocrat whose generosity is resented by his wife, Emily. Jack has paid Robbie’s tuition at Cambridge, and has offered to pay for the talented young man to go to medical school, too; Robbie insists on making it a loan rather than a gift.

The novel is essentially about class, as suggested by the contrast between bungalow and manor house. What I appreciate most about this novel is McKewan’s subtlety on the subject. While he spills hundreds of pages of ink dwelling on the “crime” of the 13-year-old Briony, and just a few on the complicity of the 15-year-old Lola, he does not dwell at all on the culpability of the real villain, an adult male who is both aristocratic and quite wealthy. The level of authorial attention is inversely proportional to the gravity of the crime, and I think McKewan does this intentionally to make his point about class in England. This man commits a most heinous crime, yet passes entirely without suspicion. The Tallises never suspect him for a minute, both because he is their guest and, more importantly, because of his social class. They believe the criminal must be from the servant class – to believe otherwise is utterly unthinkable. If Robbie Turner were innocent, then the culprit must be another servant, without question – even Robbie (or so the unreliable narrator would have us believe) shares that bias.

The novel also thematizes the tragedy of children who have been neglected or abandoned by their parents, a tragedy that cuts across class lines. Robbie’s father had abandoned him and his mother when the boy was 6 years old; at one point Grace reflects that “his [Ernest’s] lack of curiosity about his son was inhuman” (p. 83). When the novel begins, the Tallis household has been disrupted by the visit of Emily’s sister’s three children – Lola, Jackson and Pierrot – due to their parent’s divorce; Hermione has run off to France with her lover, and their father has retreated to an ivory tower. Reflecting on the nine-year-old twins, Cecelia is struck by “how hopeless and terrifying it was for them to be without love, to construct an existence out of nothing in a strange house” (p. 94). And the three Tallis children – Leon, Cecelia, and Briony – are left largely to their own devices by a father who is more often absent than not, taken away by his career and his lover; and a mother who is incapacitated by migraine headaches and general ineffectuality. On this theme, too, McKewan’s subtlety registers at exactly the right pitch.

I thought a lot about Arundhati Roy’s novel The God of Small Things while I was reading Atonement. Both novels focus on children – their perceptions of the adult world, and their later efforts to understand and come to terms with their childhoods. In fact both are told from the perspective of a young adolescent girl and her relationship with siblings and particularly a cousin – a female cousin – who suddenly comes into the picture, to whom tragedy befalls. Those tragedies befall in part because the adults are not paying attention, they are too immersed in their world. And there are lots of tragedies (like the molestation of the brother in The God of Small Things) that are overlooked because of the larger tragedy that claims everyone's attention. The God of Small Things was so powerful and beautifully written! It was painful to read, but I couldn't stop reading it because of the beauty of the prose.