ROOF PARTY

When I visited the newly-renovated Harvard Art Museums (HAM), a woman stepping out of one of the galleries stopped and groaned, to no one in particular, “Wait, where am I? I can’t tell where I’ve already been and where I’m going." That’s because the new building isn’t concerned with shaping a coherent museum experience, or with housing artworks, but with the heroics of its own architecture.

The renovation, by Renzo Piano Building Workshop, combines three smaller, older university art museums: the Fogg, the Bush-Reisinger, and the Sackler. Those structures sat quietly in the maze of one-way colonial-era streets around campus. The new building takes the gracious, colonnaded, three-story Romanesque courtyard of the Fogg, about the size of a basketball court, as its entry. It’s this space that visitors step into from the street, where they queue for tickets, and where they linger at cafe tables before leaving. A new floor of small galleries rings the atrium above, and, above that, two new floors of offices and classrooms. The heightened atrium is capped with a glass and steel pyramid that, in its grandeur, recalls I. M. Pei’s entrance pavilion to the Louvre.

Each of the small, square galleries is lit dimly, crammed with artworks, and offers only limited views to the streets outside. So one staggers from one back out into the atrium and then onto the next, never quite certain of where she’s headed. The glass roof is strangely charismatic, pulling attention up, away from the galleries. Thought it funnels sunlight into the atrium, most of the galleries remain in shadow.

It’s not the galleries, or even the atrium, but the glass pyramid that’s the heart of this building. It’s been finely and extravagantly detailed, with a web of white steel ribs, ties and struts supporting sloped glass panels, in a display of technical wizardry that’s become Piano’s signature. But when viewed from up close, on the balconies of the upper floors, the framing seems dense, much heavier that what’s required to support the glass. And when viewed from the atrium it obscures any view to the sky. The pyramid would be best observed from above, by a bird. It does little to serve the art, and art-lovers, below.

Photograph by Peter Vanderwarker, courtesy of Renzo Piano Building Workshop.

April 25, 2015 by Nalina Moses

December 08, 2011 by Nalina Moses

The Carpenter Center is Le Corbusier’s only building in North America, and one of the few modern buildings in Harvard Square. It’s both conspicuous and invisible. Set on a narrow, seventeenth-century block between two staid brick university buildings, it’s freakish and liberating. It doesn’t feel like an institutional building and it doesn’t even feel like a building, really. It feels more like a device for moving students in and out of its studios and galleries, a machine for coming and going.

The building is spectacularly porous. It has no center; in plan it’s two lung-shaped volumes connected with ramps that pass all the way through and spin off centripetally to the sidewalks at each side. Strangely, for a great modern building, there are no canonical photographs of it, and no single point of view from which you can see it as one whole thing. Approaching it on the sidewalk, you see the ramp and one half of the building, or the building cleft into two dissimilar parts. When I visited the Mill Owner’s Association Building in Ahmedabad I realized that Le Corbusier’s buildings, no matter how good they look from the outside, don’t lend themselves to one image. Instead they generate images for the moving visitor cinematically, and, in the case of that building, spectacularly. I could not leave the Mill Owner’s Building – I walked through it again and again. At the Carpenter Center, where I spent time roaming the galleries, I felt as if I were leaving it and then entering it again and again.

December 07, 2011 by Nalina Moses

If I had my own girl band I would call it The Glass Flowers, after the famous ones at the Harvard Museum of Natural History. Two Dresden glass blowers, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, crafted about 4,400 of these teaching models, for nearly 800 different species, between 1886 and 1936. The figures are uncanny in their fineness and faithfulness. All of the tiniest parts – filaments, pollen, petioles, stipules – are there, translated into glass. The effort that went into fabricating these models is mind-boggling. The Blaschkas must have gone mad, or at least blind.

The models are accurate in fact but not in spirit. There’s no doubt that all the parts of each plant are present and rendered with perfect accuracy. In fact, the glass flowers seem more complicated and biological than real flowers. But there’s something funereal about them. They’re lying on their sides in low, dimly-lit glass vitrines, coated with a fine layer of dust. And they’ve been painted with soft, matte colors, so that they don’t have the lush sheen of real plant parts, or even of glass. Their lifelessness is especially noticeable with familiar varieties. The daisy and the banana are at once real-looking and patently false. If Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs but the sex back in flowers, the Glass Flowers sucks the sex right out of them. They’re fascinating and inert.

December 06, 2011 by Nalina Moses

Like movies stars, buildings from our past are often smaller than we imagine. That’s true of the ones in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I attended architecture school. I was visiting last weekend, seventeen years after I graduated, and the whole place felt much more welcoming than I remember. It was a clear afternoon and the leaves, which had turned gold, set off the brick buildings and cloudless sky brilliantly. I circled the Yard on streets barely wide enough for two cows to pass, with university buildings lined up along them just like in a storybook village.

But one building remained as large and looming, as truly monstrous, as I remember it – Sever Hall. This undergraduate classroom building is a classic by the great nineteenth-century American architect Henry Hobson Richardson. It sits back several hundred feet from the street, like a grounded ocean liner. It’s grave and god-fearing, with an aspect of discipline and renunciation. Its fortress-like brick facades are broken with small, deep windows and elaborate ornamental terracotta bands. (What happened to these masonry traditions? Did they simply vanish?) I remember Cambridge as a place that offered no respite, imaginatively or physically, whose structures were arch and overbearing. While the city no longer feels that way, Sever Hall still does.