About Social Media Today
Like a lot of great architecture, for example New York's Guggenheim Museum by Frank Lloyd Wright, this school building for the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art reminds you of something you know- even if you're not quite sure what- and it creates something new. Is that
Japanese calligraphy in the shadows of the facade?
A building as a walking machine, a la Le Corbusier and Archigram?
Archigram, Walking City, Ron Herron, 1964If so, he offers great hope. This is the most optimistic building I've seen from him.
This is the most moving of Thom Mayne's works. Is it a walking elephant? It could be a
rhino.
Mayne's concave curved metal reflects light in more interesting ways than the vertical panels we used to see from him. They soften the work. The concrete and metal may still be raw, but the whole is more refined than his earlier projects, and assembled less crudely. Funny how Mayne thought it appropriate to be industrial and hard-edged in colorful, curving, sensuous L.A. (as at his Caltrans Headquarters), and in a gritty part of New York he goes softer on us. This feels feminine, as does his lacy "Phare Tower" which will also glisten, in Paris. So since when has a New York streetscape looked so Parisian?
Mayne responded well to the Empire style across the street to create the satisfyingly symmetrical but not mirrored streetview. His slant recalls the Mansard roof of the earlier building. These varying tones
make the wall as porous, in a modern way, as the older building's solids and voids. With a surfeit of steel and glass projects in New York, this one stands out.
But did I say feminine? Yes. Mayne's curtain wall hangs like a skirt over those concrete legs.
That, the curved metal reflecting light, the movement, and the corner of this project
recall Frank Gehry and Gehry's "Fred and Ginger" corner in Prague.
But ultimately, it's the reflection of the light that animates the exterior. Mayne's perforated metal sheets and hard forms dissolve in ways that Gehry's don't, in that way they call attention to themselves but don't, whereas Gehry's always do.
In the post 9-11 world, Mayne's Cooper Union building is a collector for manna from heaven. It filters the manna down and lightly sprinkles it on you when you stand in front of it gazing at its glimmer; or perhaps in an undoing of the way the powder and ash spread throughout the boroughs on 9-11, this manna is meant to flow out onto the entire city.
This behemoth disappears into ethereal beauty, a slide that connects the heavens with our heads, our eyes, our bodies, our legs and the earth we walk on. The students and designers who will work inside will feel the inspiration.
This "Moby Dick" of a building sears itself into your memory and will create obsessions, as obsessed as Mayne himself is. The manna will also fall on you in the great like-the-inside-of-the-great-whale stairway,
to be seen here in a future post. I wasn't allowed to photograph inside the building. And although the lobby walls are glass and inviting, inside are the many dark corners and hidden spaces that Thom Mayne likes to provide, especially for youth and students.
With all the discussion in New York and elsewhere, of how fortress-like our public buildings would have to be, Mayne gives a civilizing answer. This work projects strength, but the glassy ground floor remains open and accessible. It is a fortress, because the institution is strong, but the walls - its separation from the city and the world - are porous, confident and inviting.
