MOVING PARTS

Every architect works best at a particular scale: that of the detail, piece of furniture, interior space, exterior shell, site plan, or city plan. French architect Pierre Chareau excelled at the peculiar in-between scale of the device, an element larger than furniture and smaller than a room: the staircase, the sliding door, the screen, the storage cabinet. As a handsome retrospective at The Jewish Museum makes clear, it’s these devices, with precise mechanical functions, that animate his designs.

Chareau’s masterwork, the Maison de Verre in Paris, remains a favorite for architecture students who are seduced by its tricked-out fittings and ultra-modern feeling. It’s a house that doesn’t feel domestic, a kind of architecture that exceeds construction to produce effects that are eery – both bodily and emotionally. Its richest rooms are its secondary or “servant” spaces, where the shower stalls, closets, stairs, entryways and shafts are. In these parts the building engages its inhabitants like an organism, a living thing.

The exhibit includes illustrative video clips, in which a straight, plainly-dressed, 30-something couple enact daily life in the house, silently, and to unintentionally comic (or maybe just French?) effect. She climbs up a folding staircase, and He closes the hatch behind her. He enters through a revolving door, and She locks the door behind him. She leaves a coffee cup in a chamber in the kitchen cupboard, and He retrieves it from behind. They interact with the building in a proscribed, ritualized way.

The exhibit is exquisitely designed by Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Other shows they’ve designed, like the Charles James retrospective at The Met, have been overly cerebral, obscuring the raw power of the objects on display. Here their strategy is lighter and more agile, and the high technologies they employ (i.e. a monitor “scanning” a virtual model of the Maison de Verre like an MRI machine, and VR headsets showing views from inside the house and garden) are put to good use. The Maison de Verre defies easy description through photographs and orthogonal drawings. Only by visiting it, seeing it in film, or through VR, can one see it quickly and clearly as a whole. Rather than a single structure, it’s best understood as a web of smaller movements. It’s a building that’s like a dance.

December 29, 2016 by Nalina Moses

A few years ago Thomasville launched The Ernest Hemingway Furniture Collection with four lines called “Paris,” “Kenya,” “Key West,” and “Havana,” inspired by the great writer’s travels. The pieces, exaggerated versions of regional styles, had a real appeal. (The company still sells Hemingway furniture in some of these styles, but now it’s only classified by room.) The furniture richly evoked the mythology of the writer. And it was just a beginning. Thomasville could have followed with “Ketchum,” “Pamplona,” and “Oak Park.” Hemingway had so many lives, so many incarnations. Every reader can sift through them and choose the Hemingway she likes best.

After reading A Moveable Feast, “Paris” became my favorite. That memoir, in which Hemingway describes his life there as a young writer in the 1920’s, was completed in the late 1950’s, decades afterwards. In the book Hemingway remembers Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And he remembers his (first) wife, his (first) son, and his work. He rented a small, unheated garret for writing, and climbed the steps each morning with empty copy books, pencils, and a pocketful of oranges. He struggled over the empty pages all day, and the oranges sometimes froze before he could eat them. This Hemingway, remembered softly, is the one that appears in Woody Allen’s movie Midnight in Paris, and he’s entirely winning. The movie gives us a Stein, a Picasso and a Fitzgerald that are convincing, but it’s Hemingway, played by Corey Stoll, that really springs to life. He stares boldly and impassively at whomever he’s with, and speaks in slow, absolute declarations that are at once stylistically accurate and richly satirical. He’s always drinking and challenging men to boxing matches, but we don’t see any of the consequences. We only see the young man.