Don’t get us wrong—we’re all for adaptive reuse! But what better fun is there than debating the demerits of this or that eyesore? You can expect plenty more fun and critique in issue #32, which is currently at the printers. You can get your copy by starting a subscription.
Wrecking Ball: Museo Soumaya
By far the museum’s most grievous offense is how brazenly it seeks to be noticed.
by Ana Karina Zatarain
On my first visit to the Museo Soumaya—designed by Fernando Romero to harbor the disjointed art collection of his father-in-law Carlos Slim, at that time the richest man in the world—I was filled with the callow arrogance that characterizes first-year architecture students. It was the summer of 2011. The museum had recently opened in Mexico City to the public and to the sneers of a handful of my professors, who considered the amorphous building to be not only an egregious affront to the sacred doctrine of Form Follows Function, but an ode to mediocrity, vulgarity, and nepotism. Dressed in all black and believing myself the most sophisticated of nineteen-year-old intellectuals, I walked up the museum’s steps, making my way through a crowd of delighted tourists as they snapped photos of its garish silver facade.
I don’t remember much from that first visit, but in the years that followed, I would assure anyone who would listen that it was the most appalling piece of architecture I had ever come across. This was an unoriginal sentiment. Mocking the Museo Soumaya as a crude altar at which only philistines worship has long been a favorite joke of the Mexico City art and architecture scene.
Read our inaugural Wrecking Ball column here.
The Poverty of Ornament
The exhibition’s global scope is commendable, but, in spite of itself, all roads in Clamor lead west.
by Allison Hewitt Ward
In Palermo, Sicily, there is a palace chapel, the Cappella Palatina, that presents a remarkable clamor of stylings: Norman architecture, Byzantine saint mosaics, Islamic muqarnas with distinctly secular figuration. To the modern eye, each motif could be isolated and, alone, be cause for fascination. But their meaning lies in their improbable unity. Having conquered the island and its Muslim population in 1091, the Normans commissioned this cut-and-paste chapel in 1140 to contain the contradictions of their conquest and legitimize their upstart presence in the Mediterranean. The ornamentation, nodding to the great empires of the Byzantium to the north and Fatimids to the south and the local descendants of a prior Abbasid conquest, establishes the political diplomatic function of the structure. Ornament, inseparable from architecture and civic life, has a role to play. It is embedded in social necessity.
The Clamor of Ornament at the Drawing Center in Soho takes an opposing view, arguing for contingency over necessity.
Read more about our current stylistic impasse here.
A Tale of Two Park Avenue
A covert exchange between a deranged novelist and storied Manhattan architect
by Leopoldo Villardi
Passing under a glitzy geometric ceiling mosaic and through ornate bronze revolving doors at Two Park Avenue, Ayn Rand went to work on her novel The Fountainhead. The building was designed by Ely Jacques Kahn and built when tall towers were rapidly springing up across New York City—this was the era of Hugh Ferriss’s fantasies first published in Pencil Points. Yet, unlike the abstract stepped masses depicted in those charcoal renderings, Two Park Avenue is a polychromatic gem.
Rand’s destination was the top floor, where Kahn’s architecture office provided sweeping views of the Manhattan skyline just blocks from the Empire State Building. The two had come to an arrangement: unknown to her colleagues, Rand offered to work as an unpaid typist in exchange for the opportunity to be among architects, which, as she explained to Kahn, would help her write a compelling novel about the profession.
Read more about Rand’s architectural inspo here.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and Thomas Phifer.
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