Category Archives: Architecture

Thinking About Creativity While Seeing An Art Extravaganza

Architecture, Art, Travel

Every child is an artist until he’s told he’s not an artist. John Lennon

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist. Pablo Picasso

Creativity is intelligence having fun. Albert Einstein

On our last day in Paris, we went to the David Hockney show at the Foundation Louis Vuitton in a building designed by Frank Gehry. It was a major show by Britain’s most influential contemporary artist, in a building by, arguably, the most influential architect of our time, but for me, our lunch was the artistic high point. Before we saw the show, we had lunch at Le Frank, the museum’s cafe, run by Jean-Louis Nomicos.

Much, maybe most, food is a combination of ingredients. Not usually, but often, I would prefer the ingredients separately. I don’t want a great tomato buried in a hamburger; I would rather have it on the side. The same goes for pickles. Once, maybe twenty years ago, at a Chinese restaurant in the old Westfield Center in San Francisco – I’m pretty sure it was M.Y. China – I had a Kung Pow Chicken that had been deconstructed into its component parts. It was delicious and I still remember it.

I had my second deconstructed dish at Jean-Louis Nomicos’ Le Frank, a Caesar salad, with caramelized chicken with a hat of fried parmesan cheese. I loved it. It was delicious, especially the solid core of the Romaine lettuce slathered with a very thick Ceaser dressing. Sitting outside with Michele on a warm afternoon, next to a garden overlooked by a golden Takashi Murakami sculpture, eating this deconstructed Ceaser salad, it is hard to ignore that I am extraordinarily fortunate.

I’ve already said that Frank Gehry designed the Fondation Louis Vuitton building, but I want to emphasize that because the building influences a large part of the museum experience, including my deconstructed salad. The Fondation Louis Vuitton says the structure is characterized by a combination of solid “iceberg” volumes and expansive, glass “sails”. According to several sources, the sails are glass to get around Parisian height-restricting zoning laws, but the basic deconstructed motif goes back to, at least, Gehry’s early days in Southern California.

Frank Gehry’s house, designed in 1977. Photo by IK’s World Trip.

We all have watched athletes degrade, but it is harder to see mental degradation, including creativity, but the degradation is there. I still remember a study on age and creativity done by the University of California – Berkeley in the very late 1950s, while I was in college, majoring in Industrial Psychology. I don’t remember all the creative fields that were in the study, but I do remember that Chemistry was the field that its practitioners peaked earliest at about 28, and Architects peaked the latest at about 46. Frank Gehry has peaked.

The design process for Fondation Louis Vuitton started about 2001, which means that Gehry was about 72. Wandering through this Frank Gehry building, it is hard to think this is the high point of Frank Gehry’s career. Outside, the iceberg and sail motif is fairly easy to read, but inside, it gets very confusing. But more germane, the building does not seem that original. It just seems like a less coherent rehash of what Frank Gehry has been doing repeatedly for the last fifty years.

That is not to say that this Gehry building isn’t interesting; it is. It just isn’t as interesting – or as influential – as buildings he designed forty years ago. One nice touch, though, is that we tourists are allowed on the roof, where we can get a view of tourist Paris one way and business Paris the other way, although neither view is unrestricted.

I think of David Hockney as an LA artist, partially because he was painting in LA when I first became aware of him, and partially because his colors seem so LAish. LA is also where Hockney first got interested in photography, and I think his photography, with its manipulation of perspective, is fabulous.

As an aside, about twenty years ago – plus or minus – Michele was taking a photography class in which she did a photo collage of Point Lobos. During the critique of the class, the teacher mentioned that Michele’s photograph was like David Hockney’s Pearblossom Highway. When she told me she had been compared to David Hockney, I was sooo jealous. End aside.

The David Hockney show is billed as a retrospective of the last twenty-five years of his work, and it is exuberant and accessible (and the galleries were full of art aficionados, making it hard to see the huge pieces). Wandering the show, which was huge, I was reminded of a Dorothy Parker quote: First you write for yourself, then you write for your friends, then you write for money. Much of the show seemed to fall into the third category. Again, that is not to say that the later Hockney works were not terrific; they are, they just seem a little perfunctory.

What I especially liked were Hockney’s portraits, which I hadn’t seen before, and it also gave me the chance to take my own portrait of a very bored guard. All in all, it was a great show and a great way to end our stay in Paris.

Arc de Triomphe

Architecture, Travel, War

No, I am not going ten thousand miles from home to help murder and burn another poor nation simply to continue the domination of white slave masters of the darker people the world over. Muhammad Ali

After much of the day wandering around the area, we ended up at the Arc de Triomphe. The Arc de Triomphe was built – well, started, anyway – by Napoleon Bonaparte to honor the French Army and to celebrate French military victories. It was intended as a grand monument to celebrate the glory of France and its soldiers during the Napoleonic era. 

It made me sad. I half expected to be angry, if anything, but this impressive monument just made me sad. France was not bigger or stronger after its love afair with Napoleon, its borders were the same as they had been in 1792, but it had lost about half a million soldiers (estimates vary wildly). That’s about half a million dead people, mostly young men, for nothing. Well, a little man’s ego, I guess, but other than that, nothing.

By way of disclosure and to be fair, over the years, France has added other sections? items? memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with an eternal flame, to the Arc de Triomphe.

But, in the end, the Arc de Triomphe is still a memorial to war, to killing, to death. And today, with Russia and Israel trying to kill as many people as they can, it seems especially gruesome.

A Paris Neighborhood & Jane Jacobs

Architecture, Cousins' Trip, Travel

It took me some years to clear my head of what Paris wanted me to admire about it, and to notice what I preferred instead. Not power-ridden monuments, but individual buildings which tell a quieter story: the artist’s studio, or the Belle Epoque house built by a forgotten financier for a just-remembered courtesan. Julian Barns

The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities

During our short stay in Paris, Michele and I stayed in a small hotel that had been refurbished, sort of near the Arc de Triomphe. It was in a mixed, gentrifying neighborhood. For me, it was the best part of the trip. We took a cab from the train station to the hotel, but just before we got to the hotel, the driver pulled over in what I would call a seedy area and said something in French that meant, I think, “Here is your destination.” It wasn’t, and after some pseudo-conversation which included pointing at various smartphone pages, he said something like “Oh” in French, turned the corner, and drove another three blocks to our hotel.

It was no longer 100°F, but I was still whooped when we first got to Paris. I opted for a day of doing nothing. Michele wandered around the neighborhood in the morning and then returned to the hotel to pick me up for lunch at Restaurant Le Merrill. Restaurant Le Merrill is just a run-of-the-mill French restaurant, which means the lunch was super. Then we spent the afternoon wandering around the area.

As we wandered around this neighborhood, I kept thinking of Jane Jacobs. This neighborhood is exactly what she had promoted. Around the middle of the last century, urban planning became a hot topic, involving the demolition of slums and their replacement with large, planned developments. In the United States, Frank Lloyd Wright designed and promoted Broadacre City, and in France, Le Corbusier designed the Radiant City. Robert Moses, an urban planner in New York, was one of the most powerful advocates of large-scale projects that destroyed vibrant neighborhoods.

As an aside, among other atrocities committed by Moses in the name of civic improvement, the Cross Bronx Expressway displaced nearly 4,000 families, not counting the families impacted by the increased noise, as it cut a seven-mile gash through the Bronx. End aside.

In the United States, at the time, areas considered slums ripe for improvement due to narrow streets and old, often rundown, buildings included North Beach in San Francisco, the North End in Boston, Georgetown in Washington, and Greenwich Village in Manhattan. All four of those areas are now considered highly desirable places to live, partially due to Jane Jacobs. Greenwich Village and its planned destruction by the proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway is where Jane Jacobs stopped Robert Moses and changed urban planning forever, well, at least for the past 75 years. At the time, Jacobs was dismissively referred to as a “housewife”; now she is considered one of the most influential people in urban planning in the 20th century. She wrote a book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which basically said that everything Robert Moses said and did was wrong.

Jane Jacobs said that destroying a rundown neighborhood was wrong, a crime. As I recall, she believed that the tuberculosis rate in a neighborhood was a more accurate indicator of a community’s health than the condition of its buildings. She thought neighborhoods were organic, writing, Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. 

She was for wide sidewalks, narrow streets, and diversity both in its buildings and inhabitants.

In Paris At Notre Dame

Architecture

I’m not a religious person. But, when I look at a beautiful cathedral, what brings awe, what induces awe is the idea that architecture, you know, a beautiful cathedral, a beautiful building. Jason Silva

Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling. Greta Thunburg.

I’m going in. whispered Michele Stern, while looking at the South Apse of Notre Dame Cathedral, in a voice similar to Luke Skywalker’s as he dropped into the trench of the Death Star on his final run.

First, the plan was to stay at Michele’s parents’ retreat – it actually says retreat on the front door – in Ireland as a home base to travel around the country. Then Susan Rayfeld, one of Michele’s second cousins, invited us to her part of the world, Die, France, for the cousins’ Re-u. Michele wanted to go, and I suggested that, since we were going to be in France anyway, let’s go to Paris to see the renovated Notre Dame. Thinking about it in California, traveling around France in close to 100°F sounded easier than it really was.

First, we took a train to Paris. In both Europe and Japan, fast trains are a primary mode of transportation, and they should be in the US too. They are cheaper, almost infinitely easier to get on, more comfortable to ride, and we can watch the countryside almost silently glide by.

From about the time we got off the plane in Barcelona, Spain, Michele started trying to get us tickets to Notre Dame to no avail. Everybody – and, believe me, contrary to what everybody says, Paris is stuffed with people, mostly tourists in July – wants to see the refurbished Notre Dame. The Authority has implemented a random ticket release program, theoretically making the distribution of tickets fairer. In our case, it didn’t work, and we were never able to get tickets. Rick Visnes had suggested Sainte-Chapelle as a place to see, so on the first day, we wandered down there to see if we could get in.

The line at Sainte-Chapelle was impossibly long, but close to Notre Dame, so we wandered over to Notre Dame to check out that situation. There were two lines: one for people with tickets, moving very slowly, and another for walk-ins, moving at a fast shuffle. We fast shuffled right on in.

When I first saw Notre Dame at the 2018 Re-u, I was unimpressed. By the time I visited Paris, I had already seen many European cathedrals; some, like Notre-Dame de Reims, are bigger and much higher, while others are more distinctive, such as the Orvieto Cathedral or the Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Strasbourg. Notre Dame in Paris had a neglected, grubby feeling, especially compared to the Panthéon, which seemed alive, surrounded by new posters celebrating Simone Veil, a Holocaust survivor who led the battle to legalise abortion in France and who was the first president of the European Union.

Now, after the post-fire cleanup, the cathedral looks new, bright, and even sassy.

After we shuffled into the cathedral, we continued shuffling down the side Ambulatory, past the Transcept, around the Ambulatory behind the Choir, and then back out, by the obligatory – but not officially named – gift shop. We were packed in like sardines, giving the Ambulatories a feeling of being misnamed. It seemed as if our fellow tourists, those who aquired tickets, were allowed in the Nave, so the whole cathedral was packed. The packed cathedral was both annoying and, with a background of sacred music, alive and sacred.

Leaving Notre Dame, I was reminded that Europe is predominantly Christian and that Christianity is deeply rooted in European culture. Over the last two millennia, the two have coevolved together. From a tourist’s viewpoint, Europe doesn’t seem to have the rabid Christianity that some Protestant sects have in the US, but European culture is deeply rooted in Christianity, and Notre Dame, being a national French institution, is part of that. I’m glad we had a chance to see it in its new glory.

We saw Notre Dame on the Fourth of July and finished the day at a club called New Morning, with an American institution, Jazz. The Jazz Band featured Branford Marsalis on saxophone, Joey Calderazzo on piano, Eric Revis on bass, and Justin Faulkner on drums. They were excellent.