Michael Graves died a couple of days ago and I feel a loss from it that is bigger than I expected (that is if I had thought about it at all). I think that I have only been in one building designed by Graves, the Capistrano Library. It was one of the most interesting interiors I have ever been in. As good as a Frank Lloyd Wright house and, unexpectedly, almost as completely designed, right down to the table lamps. Even more unexpected was that the library was packed on a mid-week late afternoon.
It was a soft thrill, for lack of a better way to describe the hour or so, walking through and around the building. Good architecture – which, for purposes here, I’ll define good as original, thoughtful, and appropriate to its location – influences us in a positive way. Most architecture is neutral, but Graves was anything but neutral. He designed the stuffing out of everything. I once talked to a City Planner who had worked in the Portland City Hall, one of Graves’ signature buildings, and he said that it was an almost impossible place to work and I believe him. I just not sure that I care how well it works as a machine but how well it works at enriching Portland.
Architecture, good architecture, great architecture – which isn’t always good, certainly Frank Lloyd Wright’s great building weren’t always good – has nurtured my life as long as I can remember. It is a gene, or interest, that I think I got from my Daddy, maybe when he took me to see Frank Lloyd Wright. It was one of the few things we did together and that has emphasized its importance. I don’t particularly care what style the architecture is, I love buildings from Baroque to Mid-century Modern, from the San Francisco City Hall complex to the Oakland Museum. The Capistrano Library is one of my favorite buildings, just walking around it has enriched my life, and I bet that it still enriches the community of Capistrano. That is a nice legacy.
After a day of football playoffs, mostly droning in the background as we did other things, Michele and I sat down to watch the Golden Globe Awards. I love the Golden Globe Awards and I love the Academy Awards, both for the same reasons, the meritocracy of the awards. This year’s Golden Globes, however, seemed to be especially interested in diversity which made it even more interesting to watch. Selma did not do as well as I had hoped but it is hard to argue against Boyhood.
For me, the best part of the show was Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. For the third year in a row, they managed to make fun of the people they were there to honor and still honor them. I guess they will be not be back next year and I miss them already.
I especially liked their Bill Cosby rape riff. Cosby is a showbiz icon and, to go after him like Tina and Amy did, in a bit about Into the Woods, takes nerve. The kind of nerve that only great comics have.
Another distinctly pertinent bit was at George Clooney’s expense – and by extension, most of the people there. George Clooney married Amal Alamuddin this year. Amal is a human-rights lawyer who worked on the Enron case, was an adviser to Kofi Annan regarding Syria, and was selected of a three-person U.N. commission regarding rules-of-war violations in the Gaza Strip. So tonight, her husband is getting a lifetime-achievement award.
This joke seemed even more pertinent when I read the New York Times reporting of it this morning. As he accepted his award, Mr. Clooney joked about celebrities using the night as a chance to apologize for all the “snarky” things they said about one another in hacked Sony emails, but he too turned serious when talking about his new wife, Amal, a human rights lawyer, saying that it was “humbling” to be in love at last and that he was proud to be her husband. She wore a Dior haute couture sheath...
That’s it, the New York Times didn’t tell us what George Clooney wore but, for some reason they thought it was of major importance when describing Amal Alamuddin. Our culture, if the New York Times is any indication, has a long way to go before it catches up with Amy and Tina.
Chest by Carlo Bugatti, bronze by Rembrandt Bugatti, sketch of Jean Bugatti design for Ettore Bugatti Type 57 chassis.
I’ve written about the Mullin Automobile Museum before and I am a little concerned that writing about it again will drive readers away, but this time we were there for The Art of Bugatti so I’ll concentrate on the show’s stars, the Bugatti family and Ettore specifically. The cars were almost the same as our other trips – in 2010 and 2012 – but this time Michele was with Malcolm and myself. The exhibits included more furniture by Carlo Bugatti, more bronzes by Rembrandt Bugatti, a Bugatti Royale by Ettore Bugatti, and a new car body in the style of Jean Bugatti. The furniture and bronzes were interesting but the main attraction, for me, is still the cars.
Bugattis are unique cars, all Bugattis really, especially The Royale which is a super-star of a car. Only six were ever made, each one completely different, and each one is now worth more than your house (I don’t care how much your house in worth, The Royale is still worth more, unless you have over 10,000 sq. ft. with a great view of downtown Hong Kong). Still, the story behind the car is even more fun.
Fittingly enough, the story of The Royale started at a dinner party, in Paris, to honor a minor royal from Britain. It was the Roaring Twenties, before the Crash, the rich were very rich, and the party was opulent. Ettore Bugatti would be the perfect guest at any glittering party like this, he was both a pratician by birth and by nature. His factory, in Molsheim, Alsace-Lorraine, was more like a small principality – with aviaries, kennels, stables, vineyards, museums, a distillery, and a boatyard – and Ettore ruled it like a prince. Bugatti, who liked to be called Le Patron, would ride around his principality on horseback, making sure everything was being done perfectly.
Born in Milan into an artistic family, young Ettore had gone north to Elsass-Lothringen in Germany to serve his apprenticeship in the automobile biz after art school. However, Ettore was not the kind of person to work for somebody else for long and he designed and made his first car at home, on his off hours. It was light and agile, at a time when people thought a car had to be heavy to hold the road, and Ettore used it as a demonstration of his abilities to get financing to start his own factory.
1908 Bugatti Type 10 Petit Pur-Sang
By 1909, Ettore had a small factory and it was here that he made his first race car.
Type 23 Brescia Bugatti in German Racing White
As an aside, in 1900, at the Gordon Bennett Cup, a race run on public roads between Paris and Lyon, it was suggested that each country have its own racing color. Britain was given Green, France Blue, Germany White, and the USA Red (Italy didn’t have any cars entered and was not assigned a color but, later, Red was taken away from us and given to the Italians where the color does seem more at home). As an aside to the aside, by the end of the 1930s, the German cars of Mercedes and Auto Union, encouraged and partially financed by the Nazis, had become all dominating. At the Grand Prix of Tripoli in 1935 – I think – the French and Italians secretly agreed to cheat the dominating Germans. They fixed the official scales to read heavier than the actual weight so that the German cars would weigh in as too heavy (the requirements at the time included a maximum weight 750 kg for Grand Prix cars). Sure enough, at the official weigh-in, the German cars were just slightly too heavy. That night, the Germans sanded all the white paint off of their cars and, the next morning, the now silver cars just qualified. Germany’s official racing color has been Silver ever since (I have since read that this story may be more fable than fact but I read when I was about 15, in a book called Kings of the Road by Ken Purdy, so I’m holding on to it). End asides.
Bugatti Type 35C
Before WWI, with his factory in Elsass-Lothringen, Germany, Ettore Bugatti’s racing cars were white, but, after the war, Elsass-Lothringen in Germany had become Alsace-Lorraine in France and Bugatti became famous in a livery of the French racing color, course bleue. However, what ever the color of a Bugatti, they were light and agile with powerful engines. Often they were beautiful, especially the later cars designed by Ettore’s son, Jean.
For most of the 1920s and into the early 30s before the German cars dominated racing, Bugatti made the best race cars in the world. His Type 35 is generally considered the most successful race car ever made, having won over 2,000 races, but as importantly, each Bugatti was a piece of Art. For Ettore Bugatti considered himself every bit as much an artist as his father the architect and furniture designer, Carlo, or his younger brother Rembrandt, a famous sculptor. Every piece on a Bugatti car was lovingly designed and made on the premises; the engines were designed with an eye as to how they looked as much as how powerful they were. Everything was machined and polished, even the bolts which were often square, were made by Bugatti (and could be marveled at while sipping some Bugatti wine).
Bugatti 35C compressor, intake manifold, and steering boxExhaust pipes on Bugatti 4.9 Liter Type 54 racecar rebodied by O. UhlíkDetail of mechanical brakes on a – probably – Type 35 racing at Laguna Seca
Ettore Bugatti had strong ideas on automobile design and he often swam against the current. He made cast aluminum wheels with cast in brake drums. The combination was lighter than conventional wheels and brakes, but it required much more machine work and they were still not as interchangeable as conventional wheels. Even though Duesenberg had been using hydraulic brakes since 1921 and they were proven to be more effective, Bugatti continued to use mechanical brakes, in part, because they looked so much better with wonderful little cables, pulleys, and levers.
When Ettore Bugatti came to this dinner party, he was both famous and arrogant and he had the good fortune – good fortune for us, maybe bad fortune for Ettore – to sit next to the guest of honor. According to legend, over dinner the guest of honor said Monsieur Bugatti, everyone knows you make the best racing cars in the world; but for a town carriage of genuine elegance, one still must go to Rolls-Royce. It would have been fascinating to sit across from the haughty Bugatti who thought his way was the only way – in everything – and the British matron who thought that Darwin had conclusively proven that the English race was at the top of the evolutionary ladder and should thereby be ruling the world.
As might be expected, Ettore was especially disdainful of large cars like Rolls Royce and he once said of W. O. Bentley, the designer of the Bentley, a big and heavy car, I have the greatest respect for Monsieur Bentley. He builds the strongest and fastest lorries in the world. Then and there, Ettore decided to build a luxury car to compete with the Rolls. It would be fit for kings, so even though the factory designation was the Type 41, it would be known as La Royale. Unlike most Bugattis, it would even have a hood ornament. La Royale required something imposing to compete with Cadillac and Rolls Royce and Ettore choose a sculpture by his brother Rembrandt.
Rembrandt Bugatti sculpture in silver on top of a La Royale
As an aside but, really, more than an aside, Rembrandt Bugatti was Ettore’s younger brother and was famous for his animal sculptures. I am not much of a fan of this kind of sculpture, which I think of as Rodinish, but, unlike Auguste Rodin who did sculptures of archetypes, Rembrandt’s sculptures were of real animals and they reflected the personalities of those animals. He loved animals and that love shines through his sculptures.
Rembrandt Bugatti horses in bronze
He loved animals so much that during the First World War, Rembrandt moved into the the Antwerp Zoo. It was hard to get enough food to keep the animals healthy and some animals were killed to feed others. By the middle of the war, most of the animals were emaciated. Watching this happen to his beloved animals, along with financial problems brought on by the war, so distressed Rembrandt that he committed suicide in 1916. End aside.
Bugatti Type 41, La Royale Coupé de ville Binder
The underfed elephant standing on her hind legs that Ettore used on the Royale, was an animal from the Antwerp Zoo, sculpted during the war and was one of the animals that so distressed his brother,Rembrandt. This touches me in a way that the cars can’t, this human, brotherly, gesture ten years after his brother’s death.
A silver elephant standing on its hind legs needs a colossus of a car under it and La Royale would be bigger, heavier, and faster than any other luxury car in the world. The Rolls Royce that Ettore’s dinner-mate probably rode in had a 7.6 litre engine producing 95 horsepower and a wheelbase of 144 inches. The Royale had a 12.7 litre engine making almost 300 horsepower, a wheelbase of 169.3 inches. It weighed over 7000 pounds.
As big as it was, La Royale was all Bugatti. It had the typical cast and machined Bugatti wheels cast with built-in brake drums, the engine was huge but it was still a straight eight – with a custom Bugatti designed and Bugatti built carburetor – it had a traditional Bugatti live axle front suspension, and Bugatti’s horseshoe grill. Maybe most important of all, certainly the most idiosyncratic, it had mechanical, rather than hydraulic, brakes (driving the Royale must have been hard work, image stopping a 7,000 pound car without power brakes, without even hydralic brakes, image trying to steer it).
As grand as La Royale was as a statement of Ettore Bugatti’s mechanical and design skills, it was a colossal failure as a business proposition. The car was very expensive, nothing had been spared in making it, and La Royal came out just in time for the worldwide depression of the 1930s. Only six La Royales were built and surprisingly, all six cars still exist (in 1985, I was lucky enough to see all of them together at the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance).
Michele with Bugatti Type 41, La Royale Coupé de ville Binder
The Royale that we saw on display at the Mullin is known as the Coupé de ville Binder and it survived World War II by being hidden from the Germans in the Paris sewer system. Volkswagen now owns Bugatti and this La Royal is on loan from the Volkswagen Museum where it usually resides. This may or may not be ironic, depending on your point of view.
A couple of weeks ago, maybe a month now, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo, the President of Ferrari, was fired. My first reaction is that it was a good move because the Ferrari Formula One Team is doing miserably and Montezemolo is part of the problem. They need fresh blood. Formula One is a constantly evolving sport and Montezemolo who is 67 doesn’t have any new answers.
Rather than taking a chance with young drivers – and engineers – who are on their way up, like Red Bull, which has won four Championships in a row, Ferrari has hired great drivers and engineers on the way down. When a company is not gambling on the future but trying to safely replicate the past with the people of the past, is can only be mediocre and that is a great description of Ferrari’s Formula One program under Montezemolo. But, according to the F1 gossip, that is not why he was fired. The FIAT Board fired Montezemolo because they want to increase production to increase profits and Montezemolo wants to keep Ferrari exclusive.
In the 60s, 70s, and into the 80s, there was a camera store on the corner of Maiden lane and Kearny, Brooks Camera. Brooks Camera which was started by Julius Bloch – who escaped Nazi Germany in 1936 – was the best camera store on the West Coast, maybe the nation. It was always packed, always! Like 10:00 Tuesday morning packed. It was the kind of place where one could buy a Kodak Brownie, a brand new Nikon, or an obscure camera part (I once stood in line behind a guy who bought, not one, but two Pierre Angenieux lenses for his Bolex movie camera, saying I am on my way to Vietnam here is my NBC account number).
In different ways and at different levels, both Enzo Ferrari and Julius Block had a vision to create a company that was the best at what it did. That is what Capitalism or Entrepreneurship does best, create the money and arena to create new products and better services out of a visionary’s dream. Ferrari or Brooks would not have existed in a Command Economy. However, the new products and better services only continue to be created when there is still a Vision. When Bloch retired, he left Brooks Camera to the employees, but they didn’t care about the vision, all they cared about was making money.
I have no idea what will happen to Ferrari, but Brooks Camera is gone. The employees turned the operation into a series of discount camera stores to increase earnings and the world, apparently, doesn’t need another discount camera store. Still, that is often not the case and that is the problem with Capitalism. Usually, after the founder/visionary leaves the company he or she founded, making money becomes the company’s reason for being. Often, when the company has a large market share, is rich enough, or has a deserved sterling reputation, it can lever that into making lots of money. For years, after Alfred Sloan left General Motors, they made more money with GMAC – General Motors Acceptance Corporation which loaned money for people to buy cars (and, eventually, houses) – than they did in actually building and selling cars.
For General Motors, making money became the goal – the overriding goal – and, in that environment, weighing the cost of replacing millions of ignition switches against the cost of potential lawsuits from criminal negligence, made good sense. When making money becomes the goal, making good products, innovation, or providing good jobs – among other socially desirable goals – becomes secondary, although the companies often do make lots of money. However, they no longer make the world, our world, richer, they only make the shareholders richer.
As an aside, Ferrari still makes wonderful cars – great cars – but they are no longer the reflection of Enzo Ferrari, il Commendatore. If you want a car that is the reflection of one man’s vision, you would have to buy something like a Pagani Huayra, the creation of Horacio Pagani, with its stunning exterior and spectacular steampunk interior. End aside.
Michele is showing her pictures at Sweeties. They are beautiful but I am not sure what to call them, let me explain.
About a year ago – maybe a year and a half, maybe eight months ago – Michele got a Sunprint kit for Granddaughter Charlotte. If you know Michele well, you will know how hard it would be for her to not get a Sunprint Kit for herself. It just hit all her hot buttons. Anyway she did and she started playing with it right way (when I say playing, I mean playing in the deeper sense, as in playing the piano).
The process is simple: place something on a piece of bluish, sensitized, paper and put it in the sun, then develop it in water. What happens is the bluish paper fades in the sun leaving only the shadows blue. In the water, the shadows turn white and the exposed paper turns blue, reversing the exposed image.
It didn’t take long for Michele to get interested in the mid-reversal.
She first took the paper out of the water and tried scanning the dripping wet paper, trying to control the paper with paper towels and rags. The she tried photographing it with her iPad, and – finally – using a camera on a tripod. After about a year, the mid-process scans and photographs were hidden away in the computer and the finished – but not as interesting – Sunprints graced every available horizontal surface.
Then Michele started printing the mid-process images – eventually on Epson Hot Press Bright, 100% cotton fiber, acid-free, lignin-free, paper – and they were beautiful. Framed, with hand torn edges, they make a striking show.
Michele’s artist statement says, I am not big on change, even though as the iChing claims, change is the only thing we can be certain of, so it is in my nature to try to hold on to memories and bits of beauty. One of the things I love most is my garden, if you can call it that, since it is really just a tamed bit of woods in Portola Valley. I’ve noticed that every day the garden changes, just a little; something new has bloomed, something else has withered away.
Thinking we might soon be moving from our home, I started using sunprint paper as a way to record the flowers in my garden. As I did this I became fascinated with transitory images that emerged as the water hit the paper. It is a brief moment when dark and light comingle as they exchange places. These giclée prints freeze that moment during the processing of impermanent images of impermanent blossoms that grace our impermanent residence on this ever-changing planet.
Reading that statement and looking at my pictures of Michele’s opening at Sweeties, below, reminds me that we are both trying to do the same thing, freeze that moment.
Michael Graves died a couple of days ago and I feel a loss from it that is bigger than I expected (that is if I had thought about it at all). I think that I have only been in one building designed by Graves, the Capistrano Library. It was one of the most interesting interiors I have ever been in. As good as a Frank Lloyd Wright house and, unexpectedly, almost as completely designed, right down to the table lamps. Even more unexpected was that the library was packed on a mid-week late afternoon.
