One of the wilder stories I found while researching the Art in America essay on LDS architecture was of the first known photographs of the interior of a temple, which only happened in 1911. That feels late in terms of photography, especially because all four of the Pioneer-era temples in Utah–in St. George, Manti, Logan, and Salt Lake City–all opened in the late 19th century, when photography would have been possible. But though several hundred non-Mormon guests were invited to tour the Salt Lake temple before its dedication in 1893, there was no effort to share images of the interiors of temples with nonbelievers.
the Annex was the glass conservatory filled with plants on the south side of the temple. it was removed after 1941. photo c. 1911, by Gisbert Bossard, as published in Dialogue (Fall 1996)
Which is why in 1911 Gisbert Bossard, a disaffected 21-year-old convert from Switzerland thought the Church would pay a lot of money for the 80 or so photos he secretly made by sneaking into the SLC temple while it was closed for maintenance. Bossard got in with the help of a groundskeeper who tended the conservatoryful of live plants in the room that represented the Garden of Eden, and seems to have had the run of the place. Some of his photos included the offices of the church leaders on the temple’s top floor, and the Holy of Holies, a prayer room off the celestial room reserved only for the president of the Church–and Jesus.
Where to even start when I’ve been at it for so long?
Interior of Buckminster Fuller’s US Pavilion from Expo ’67, with a lunar lander and satelloons to the left, and Alan Solomon’s curated show of American painting to the right, as seen in USIA director Jack Masey’s book, Cold War Confrontations
Surrender Dorothy, a classic, early 80s view of the Washington DC LDS Temple from the Beltway, which someone almost immediately flagged as resembling Oz. Ganked from the Washington Post or wherever
A few months ago the editors at Art in America asked if I’d like to write about Mormon architecture for a religion-themed issue. I was like, “Do you want the spectacular space-age temples; the scrappy DIY pioneer rusticity; the mass-produced, suburban Mormcore cringe; or the unprecedented grappling with historical preservation?” And they said, “Yes, absolutely.”
The article is now online. “Building Mormonism: The Fascinating History of LDS Architecture.” Honestly, it feels like it could be three articles, and three more would come out of it. The more I dug and looked, the more interesting and revelatory stuff I found about the way the Church has approached its physical spaces and structures over its almost 200-year history. There’s probably a dissertation to be written on the early 20th century mandate to include a basketball court in every new meetinghouse. Or on the building missionary program that tried to optimize expertise and volunteer labor when demand for churches outstripped the local members’ construction skills. Or the impact on the built sacred environment of having a trans woman lead one of the most ambitious architectural eras in the Church’s history. [I think she’s already writing that last one herself.]
c. 1904 stereograph, The Mormon Temple at Kirtland, Ohio, image via LOC
I’ll add links to resources I found especially useful, and images of the buildings mentioned in the piece, so check back. In the mean time, I would have been lost without two blogs and one book: Historic LDS Architecture, where Bridger Talbot has been posting original research, photography, and travelogues since 2014 ldsarchitecture.wordpress.com went dormant in 2012, but is still full of photos and accounts of visits to architecturally notable church buildings. Places of Worship: 150 Years of Latter-day Saint Architecture is Richard W. Jackson’s 2003 historical survey of all the worship places of the LDS Church, and an institutional history of the Church’s Architecture Department, where he worked for many years. scottcsorensen.templephotos on Instagram provided a steady drip of inspo, and also a sense of perspective, that there was someone else spending even more time thinking about Church architecture than I was. And of course, whether that is comforting or Content Warning @TexturesofMormonism is the go-to source for recognition of the Church’s 70s and 80s homogeneous aesthetic.
Cyklopen Kulturhas, 2013, Stockholm, design by Viktor Marx
If the Eames House was not available, I decided it would be fine to live in a gas station felt like an appealingly modernist alternative. I’ve kept a list, to which I also added a decommissioned Minneapolis skyway, a temporary MoMA fire escape, and a reconstituted world’s fair pavilion or two. I would also add a greenhouse. There used to be a most excellent abandoned greenhouse on the roof of a building which you could see from the Roosevelt Island tram. Perhaps, I thought, Lacaton & Vassal could help me persuade the family, who, it turns out, really do not want to live in any of these repurposed industrial structures.
Cyklopen ground floor and mezzanine, image: archilovers
Now there is another. [shoutout Geraldine for the heads up] From 2011 until 2013 Stockholm architect and organizer Viktor Marx worked with Cyklopen, an autonomy-minded community organization, to rebuild their gathering space, which had been firebombed by neo-nazis. The result, Cyklopen Kulturhas is as spectacular as it is utilitarian.
The 2-storey, 459 sq. m. structure was optimized for safety, for flexibility, and for the self-sufficient group’s donated labor. A laminated lumber core was raised by hand, Amish barn-style, and ringed with upscaled scaffolding, on which the greenhouse-style tinted polycarbonate skin was hung. The upper floor, aka The Box, is enclosed and climate controlled; the open ground floor and mezzanine space are not. Let’s say it’s responsive to the climate.
Cyklopen 2 concept art showing Tetris-style tint design, also how The Box fits
There is room to spend a little more than almost no money to bougie up the place without, I think, losing the adapted reuse credibility. Solar panels. Radiant floors. Some Kieran Timberlake-style Bosch Rexroth extruded aluminum beams. [It’s fascinating that even with some formalist similarities, KT’s Cellophane House was optimized for the diametric opposite factors to Cyklopen: high end components were pre-constructed offsite, then shipped and craned into place in midtown in a few days, with stupendous logistical complexity and expense.]
Ultimately, I find what is holding me back from living the gas station/greenhouse/shed dream–besides the family buy-in, obviously–is the suburbanity, the single family house-ness of it all. I am a city person. We are city people, and a site where I could reasonably build a Swedish anarchist Bifröst greenhouse is nowhere near a subway–at least since MoMA built that Jean Nouvel supertower on the vacant lot next door. So I will add Cyklopen to the moodboard in my heart, and wish the original a bright and impactful future.
Where has this Pierre Jeanneret teak and steel and glass bookcase been all my life? The Central State Library, you say? Can you loot three more to match?
Suddenly I’m rethinking my moral objections to the emptying of Chandigarh for the aesthetic enrichment of the bourgeoisie of the west. [oh wait, I already rethought it.]
The lot essay says Jeanneret’s “crenelated shelves of the Central Library display case recall the undulating glass panels and alternating railings of the interior architecture he had designed.” Hmm. Here is a photo of the cases installed in the library.
Interior views of the Central State Library, Sector 17, Chandigarh, India by Pierre Jeanneret, photo: Jeet Molhothra, via CCA
Walker Evans, [House with Gridded Panel and Palm Trees], Oct. 14, 1958, tempera on panel, 16×20 in., collection: metmuseum.org
Walker Evans the photographer also painted. Yesterday, art historian/hero Michael Lobel tweeted a selection of Evans’ paintings from the Metropolitan Museum, which holds the artist’s estate and makes copyright claims on it.
The quickest way to describe Evans’ painting is to say he was in the School of Jacob Lawrence. There are 17 paintings by Evans at the Met, plus photos of one–and probably two–others, plus one by his second wife. All are stylized, spare, and flat, painted in tempera on paper or panels. Unlike Lawrence, who often includes figures and crowds in his tempera paintings, Evans’ are landscapes and homes, and buildings, empty of people.
Stephen Prina, As He Remembered It, 2011, installation view, Secession, Vienna image: Wolfgang Thaler
You may remember Stephen Prina from such blog posts as Stephen Prina’s Exquisite Corpse: The Complete Paintings of Manet helped inspire the 1:1 scale certificates of authenticity for Facsimile Objects.
I remembered him today as Stephen Prina made two housefuls of Rudolph Schindler furniture and then monochromed them all the 2011 Color Of The Year, PANTONE® 18-2120 Honeysuckle.
What I’d forgotten about As He Remembered It, Prina’s 2011 show at the Secession in Vienna, besides the title, was that it was based on a memory from the 1980s of stumbling across a Schindler built-in desk that had been painted pink, and which had been ripped from its original site, and put on display in a La Brea Avenue shop window.
Screenshot of SITE’s WillieWear Showroom and a building they scavenged, from James Wines’ GSD presentation. photos: probably Andreas Sterzing
SITE founder James Wines spoke at Harvard GSD last night for the first–but hopefully not last–time in his 90 years. [It was great, and available online. s/o Alexandra Lange]
Though SITE is most frequently brought up in an architectural context for their BEST Products stores, a project that jumped out at me from Wines’ talk was the 38th Street showroom he and SITE partner Alison Sky created for WilliWear, the groundbreaking ’80s street fashion label of designer Willi Smith. SITE and Smith both had a love for found materials, salvage, junk, and the fabric of the city. Wines talked about how Smith took him on inspo trips to seedy gay clubs on the West Side, and then they’d jack construction material, hardware, plumbing, fencing, bricks, you name it, which ended up artfully installed in the showroom.
Those do look like shackles, but perhaps they’re just abandoned stevedore gear from the piers? Screenshot of a model in SITE’s WilliWear showroom, from James Wines’ GSD talk
SITE’s simple genius was to #monochrome it all out, painting everything a highly aesthetic, and flattering backdrop grey. A runway rulebreaker, Smith used the showroom for fashion shows, too, which, Wines giddily announced, included much nudity.
Screenshot, ibid.
SITE has used the monochrome strategy in other contexts, to great effect; Wines mentioned how it helps make the public notice each other, and to look good to each other. He didn’t mention Warhol, though, or the Silver Factory, which had a similar effect almost twenty years earlier.
And he didn’t mention if a young Cady Noland worked as an intern at WilliWear, or as a fashion reporter cutting her chops covering these performance art-like shows. But this urban hardwarescape is definitely putting off a Nolandian vibe, which is something I’d not considered before.
Cady Noland, The Clip-on Method, Summer 2021 exhibition at Galerie Daniel Buchholz
Wise also didn’t mention SITE’s design for the Willi Smith retrospective at the Cooper Hewitt. Which, the much-anticipated show opened, haplessly, at the beginning of March 2020 and existed–I can’t say it was open or closed–until the end of 2021. I can’t find any photos; maybe no one saw it in person?
He did mention Rauschenberg as an American Arte Poverist and an inspiration, which Hilton Als had just mentioned, too, in his review of the JAM show at MoMA: “if there is a Black aesthetic it’s about making do, and using what little you have to express who you are.” JAM was Smith’s era, but it’s not clear if it was Smith’s jam; there don’t seem to be any mentions of JAM or Linda Goode Bryant in the Willi Smith Community Archive (yet).
Screenshot of Willi Smith’s office by SITE, featuring what is now called the De-Arch Desk, made of brick, mortar, paint, and glass, from James Wines’ GSD presentation
I did not see the Willi Smith desk turn up in Miami last year. Wines recreated the pile of scavenged bricks and glasstop desk from Smith’s office for Friedman Benda. It is/was available in an edition of 10, though I think he’d respect a bootleg. If you want to head out to a construction site tonight, I’ll bring the car around.
Stone House, 1972, by Tadashi Yamamoto and Masatoshi Izumi, Mure Japan, image: Yoshi Makino/Cereal
Searching for Isamu Noguchi ceiling is highly recommended.
In 1972, the Noguchi’s longtime collaborator, Masatoshi Izumi, built a house next to the artist’s at their stonecutting yard in Mure, Japan. Izumi, who descends from a long line of stonecutters, worked with a plan by architect Tadashi Yamamoto to realize Stone House. Jared Frank wrote about it for Cereal Magazine:
This salvaged cylinder [made from local aji stone, and the basalt core of the first sculpture Izumi and Noguchi created together] still bears the scars of its violent removal, and is the physical and spiritual core of Stone House. It supports a slender truss system that floats over the walls. Painted red at Noguchi’s urging, the grid is flagrantly hi-tech in contrast with the low-tech stonework. Equal parts Superstudio, Cedric Price, and Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture Without Architects (1964), Stone House is a compelling, one-of-a-kind synthesis of competing trends in late modernist thought and design. To this day it remains both timeless and distinctly 1972. Noguchi appropriately dubbed it a “modern temple.”
I went to Noguchi’s Museum and house in Mure when we went to Naoshima in 2006, but I did not know to put Stone House on the itinerary. [1 hour of google map searching later update: it is not next to Isamu-ya, Noguchi’s reconstructed Ed0-era house. I feel better about missing it.] [and one minute of googling a year later update: Izumi passed away in 2021.]
The bedroom of Isamu Noguchi’s studio/house in Long Island City, as photographed by Hans Namuth in 1962 for the New York Times Magazine. via noguchi.org
Since 2020, when the last of a series of worse real estate developers finally removed what was left of the site-specific waterfall and aluminum louvered ceiling Isamu Noguchi designed in 1957 for the lobby of 666 Fifth Avenue, we thought New York had lost its last Noguchi ceiling.
No. There is another.
Isamu Noguchi photographed in his live-work space in Long Island City by Dan Budnik in 1964. The bedroom is in upper left. image: Noguchi Museum Archives via theartnewspaper
The Art Newspaper reports that the Noguchi Museum will restore the artist’s studio and house in Long Island City, and open them to the public for the first time.
Included in that house–really, a living space carved out of a 3,200 sq-ft factory/studio–is a light-diffusing drop ceiling in the bedroom that reminds me of the Fifth Avenue installation. It’s visible in the photo up top by Hans Namuth, for a two-page NYT Mag feature on Noguchi’s novel live-work design, as clipped and saved by the Noguchi Museum.
Noguchi and a Japanese carpenter whose name only comes up in reference to this project, Yukio Madokoro, built a loft bedroom of polished fir plank flooring cantilevered across 6.5 ft high cinderblock walls. It is enclosed by fiberglass shoji panels, and lined with plywood and Transite walls. [Transite is a corrugated panel of asbestos concrete, so maybe go ahead and don’t restore those, Noguchi Museum?]
But “The unusual ceiling,” according to the Times, “is made of long cardboard mailing tubes. It covers fluorescent lights, giving a soft, over all glow of light” that complements the columnar paper lamp in the corner, which would “soon be available commercially.” Indeed it would. It would take a few more decades for Shigeru Ban to bring us cardboard tube architecture, though.
10 minutes later update: OK, it destroys the entire premise of this post, but there are two Noguchi ceilings in New York: one made, and one found. As Amy Hau’s history of the Noguchi Museum points out, the artist chose to keep the original industrial metal ceiling in the space that is now the museum shop/cafe.
A bronze model, dated 1967, by Viennese sculptor/architect Fritz Wotruba for a church, originally commissioned by Dr. Madelina Ottilinger for an order of Carmelite nuns. The nuns rejected the design, and Ottilinger and Fritz G. Mayr persevered to have the church built elsewhere in Vienna. It was completed in 1976, after Wotruba’s death.
Remarkably, the chapel seems to follow the bronze model, only in concrete slabs. It’s like Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Building, but without the restraint. Perfect for being exorcising the site of an old Nazi barracks.
If I can figure out who brought this to TEFAF, I’ll add it here. [Update: Thanks to Dr. Schwartz, who emailed to report it is at Sascha Mehringer, of Munich. TEFAF runs through June 30th.]
Diego Giacometti, Patère, 76.5 cm long, patinated bronze, from the collection of Hubert de Givenchy via Christie’s
Turns out the Givenchy-Venets still had some Giacomettis to sell after 2017. Of the 1,000 or so lots at Christie’s Paris next month, it feels like half are tables and objets by Diego Giacometti.
It would be weird, franchement, to have the little bronze portraits Giacometti made for the graves of Givenchy’s many dogs.
Diego Giacometti’s window hardware for Hubert de Givenchy’s chateau, just the one window, tho? at Christie’s
But since none of the copies Givenchy made of anything is for sale–not his Miro, nor his Picasso, nor his Giacometti tables he had made after he sold the originals–I think the real get here is up top: the Giacometti five-hook coat rack, or patère. It would be perfect in your mudroom, a room which, out of respect for the dead, I believe Givenchy never called a salle de boue. RIP.
This is a screenshot of a twitter ad for a Shell Loyalty Lab in an undisclosed location.
I have not clicked on the video in the Shell Loyalty Lab ad that is appearing at the moment on my twitter feed. So I cannot say for certain whether the mirror-finished truncated cube structure perched on pylons in an ostentatiously “undisclosed location” is by Doug Aitken, was curated by Desert X, or is in Saudi Arabia.
Doug Aitken Mirage, Desert X 2017, image probably by Lance Gerber
But the aesthetic and conceptual and spectacularizing fact pattern that makes any or all of these things possible, if not downright plausible, in some combination, should give everyone involved in those ventures pause. If I was making work that quickly co-opted by the fossil fuel companies destroying our planet, would I cash the check in the name of critical engagement? is another question I don’t have a lot of confidence in the answer to.
Maraya (Mirror) Concert Hall, Al Ula, architects: Gio Forma, Milano
Of course, the same thing could be said, and has been, about Desert X Al Ula, and the entire tranche of advisers, dealers, and museum directors involved in the KSA’s artwashing and cultural complicity, and yet it persists.
The best case scenario, of course, is that this is all a reference to the monolith, and will thus soon disappear from our consciousness. A worse case is that the monolith was some kind of prequel sponcon, which got temporarily hijacked by its own virality, and Shell’s campaign is now back on track. I guess if there’s a Shell Loyalty Lab at Burning Man, we’ll have our answer.
I cannot tell whose instagram dezeen ganked this image of BIG’s dusty Orb from, but now this brings it home, unfortunately, to satelloon territory, where Ingels really embodies my own ambivalence with this spectacular form perfectly.
Oh wait, but it was Bjarke Ingels who took the mirrored monument to Black Rock City in 2018. Now it all makes sense, unfortunately. I will prepare my apologies to Mr. Aitken, just in case.
Bring your conservator! image: GSV last month, slightly altered
I have never been able to understand* why the Whitney hates the Whitney so much that they moved out, but they do, and they did. And now, as Katya Kazakina reports at artnet , there’s talk of selling it when the Met’s lease runs out in 2023.
[June 2023 UPDATE: They sold it to Sotheby’s, for around $100 million, a pittance for an iconic UES townhouse.]
If you lived here, you’d be home now. image: GSV, 2018
Of course, there was talk of selling the building in 2008, too, when the plan to build in the Meatpacking District was a thing. Those rumors were floated and batted down immediately, but also repeatedly, in the Times. Now, with the Met a mess and not exercising the purchase option Kazakina reports was in their original 8-year lease, and the Frick just subletting while its own building is renovated, the question is no longer, “Is it for sale?” but “How much could they get, and who would buy it?” [Or as Kazakina actually put it, “Now, the multi-million-dollar question is: If the building is sold, can it be developed?”]
my 2008 shoutout to Elmgreen & Dragset the first/last time the Whitney went on the whisper market
Kazakina’s list of hypothetical buyers includes a random country, Sotheby’s new owner Patrick Drahi, a future Larry Gagosian foundation, or a condo tower developer** who’d want to turn Marcel Breuer’s museum into “a really ritzy gym.” Which is all well and good–or spiraling levels of cringe, depending, obv–but which also misses the most obvious solution: turn Breuer’s Whitney into a house.
