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April 28, 2002
Michael Neumann
The Jewish Left and Palestine
April 27, 2002
Dr. Susan
Block
Adelphia
Going Down:
Cover Ups, Censorship
and Naughty Accounting
Jordy Cummings
Stuck Inside the Journalism School
Pyramid
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Set
This Flag on Fire!
April 26, 2002
Tom Turnipseed
Act
Now to Stop the Killing
of an Innocent Man
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Anti-Bribery
Law Takes a Hit
Tariq Ali
Letter to a Young Muslim
April 25, 2002
Francis
A. Boyle
Home
Brew? Biowarfare,
Terror Weapons and the US
Adam Federman
"And the Earth Wept"
Bush at Saranac Lake
Stanton
and Madsen
US
Media Interests:
Champions of Profit, Propaganda and Puffery
Aaron Hawley
Cop a Buzz Day in Vermont:
Education v. Incarceration
David
Vest
Code
Red: Politics and Wordplay at the Vatican
Bernard Weiner
Time Out! A Pause for Longer-Range
Thinking
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Standing
with the Peace Movement
April 24, 2002
David Vest
State of Politics in France:
Code Bleu
Jean Fallow
A20
in Seattle:
Cops Get Rough, Again
Kevin Alexander Gray
Help Save the Life of an Innocent Man:
Ask for Clemency for Ricky Johnson
Tanya
Reinhart
Jenin,
the Propaganda Battle
Todd May
Drowning Children, Palestinians and American
Responsibility
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Loneliest Road
Nir Rosen
The Broken Home:
Revisiting Israel
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
A
Big Blow to Big Tobacco
April 23, 2002
Brian Wood
Where Is the Aid for the Victims in
Jenin?
John Chuckman
I,
George:
Gomer as Claudius
Norman Madarasz
French Presidential Elections
Absenteeism and Le Pen
Dr. Susan
Block
Bernard
Parks, Goodbye:
A Farewell to My Chief
Joan Smith
Who Will Rid Us of
These Pedophile Priests?
April 22, 2002
CounterPunch
Wire
EPA
Ombudsman Resigns
in Protest
Dave Marsh
DeskScan: What's Playing
at My House This Week
Ron Jacobs
A20
in DC: Taking the
Message to the Beast's Belly
Kathy Kelly
An Open Letter to
Israeli Soldiers
Irit Katriel
Word
Games and Body Bags
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
We Come for Peace
Daniel
Bar-Tal
Is
There a Way Out?
Occupation, Terror
and Understanding
David Wilson
A Week of Coups, But Now
The Freedom Train Hits Town
Shaik
Ubaid
Today
I Was a Palestinian
April 21, 2002
Michelle Campos
Suckered Again in Israel
Mike Leon
200,000
in DC Protest Say:
"We Are All Palestinians Today"
C.G. Estabrook
Sex and Power in Catholicism
Kathy
Kelly
Gimme
Some Truth Now
A Walk Through Jenin
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April 28, 2002
So Long Frank O. Gehry?
By Gavin Keeney
While in Los Angeles, in 1998, Frank Gehry's architecture
was required viewing. The Gehry tour included: 1/ The Chiat-Day
thing (1991), with its gigantic Claes Oldenburg binoculars marking
the entrance to the parking garage; 2/ Rebecca's (1985), the
Venice club-restaurant that resembles nothing less than the underside
of the Santa Monica Pier; 3/ The nameless parking garage in downtown
Santa Monica swaddled in chain link; 4/ Gehry's residence (lost
somewhere in the vacuous grid of greater Los Angeles); and 5/
Edgemar (1989), a curious pile of forms topped by an open-air
box fashioned from Cor-Ten steel I-beams, this latter item perhaps
signifying the bleak prospects of the mini-mall syndrome of which
it is part and parcel despite its self-conscious 'edginess'.
At this time Edgemar contained: 1/ A restaurant; 2/ An architectural
bookstore; 3/ An ice cream parlour; 4/ An exhibition hall; 5/
A gift shop; 6/ A beauty salon; 7/ Some other forgettable stuff;
8/ An upper echelon of tiny offices for aspiring media companies;
and 9/ A cavernous sub-grade parking garage. In-between all of
this was a rather non-descript concrete plaza with a few tables,
chairs, umbrellas, and a ramp beloved by skateboarding teenagers.
Gehry's studio, a notorious redoubt for aspiring young architects
(many from the chic Southern California Institute of Architecture),
is also in Santa Monica. The studio's equally renowned model
shop, where Gehry's preliminary crumpled-paper forms are worked
up into a somewhat more presentable product, was, in 1998, considered
a kind of 'Siberia' for interns--one could disappear into that
wilderness and never be heard from again. For non-rising (frustrated)
interns there was a weekly, Gehry-free session at the Chateau
Marmont bar at 8221 Sunset Boulevard, where, no doubt, the latest
rumors from Siberia were aired. Or, tired of all that, perhaps
the conversation drifted to the re-telling of tales about celebrity
architect Richard Meier's sexcapades in the construction trailer
high above Los Angeles, where he lolled like a movie star on
location, throughout the 1990s, as bulldozers destroyed the chaparall-covered
hilltop in Brentwood where the new Getty Center was under construction.
As the Getty ploughed ahead, approaching a one billion dollar
price tag, Gehry's own Disney Concert Hall (designed between
1988-1991) was ostensibly, intractably stalled for lack of cash--something
current Gehry projects consume mountains of. Sometime in the
late 90s, however, a benefactor finally stepped forth and downtown
L.A. will soon inaugurate yet another wild bit of stand-alone
architecture. This one will be set on a giant podium (concealing
yet another parking garage) and surrounded by a garden. Gehry
decided, late in the game, that the foliage of the plants would
look terrific reflected in the Bilbaoesque metal-clad facade.
Given the episodic nature of L.A. architecture, this newest bit
will at least feign a user-friendly ambience unlike Arata Isozaki's
Museum of Contemporary Art (1986), with its anti-urban anxiety,
its throw-away Marilyn Monroe curve, and its sterile and foreboding
plaza with surveillance cameras.
It was Gehry's now bankrupted and sold American Center in Paris
(1994), the lithesome Fred and Ginger Building (1996) in Prague
(with Vlado Milunic), and the extravagant Bilbao Guggenheim (1997)
that put the Canadian-born, L.A. architect on the map--not
these homegrown confections. His reputation is now 'sealed',
as it were, like a grand jury indictment. Gehry is now architecte
du jour for new museums and left-leaning civic structures
worldwide. Once called "the most psychoanalyzed architect
in the world", Gehry can now afford the very best psychoanalysis
in the world--something quite necessary should he suffer the
same inversion of reputation now eating away at the fortunes
of the other big star architect of the 1990s, Rotterdam-based
architect Rem Koolhaas.
Gehry broke free of the regional stranglehold of L.A. architecture
with the completion of the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein,
Germany, in 1987. Two years later he won the coveted Pritzker
Prize, the equivalent in architecture of a Nobel Peace Prize.
(Vitra is actually an ensemble of buildings, strewn across post-agricultural
landscape, and includes Zaha Hadid's iconic, bright-red Fire
Station.) The collision of angular and curvilinear tectonic forms
of the Gehry portions was striking, then, and architecture critic
Martin Filler ably noted that Gehry was, in fact, triangulating
with two other legendary expressionist structures in the hinterlands
where Germany, France, and Switzerland meet. According to Filler,
Gehry's Vitra pays homage to Le Corbusier's Notre-Dame-du-Haut
(1955), at Ronchamp, in the French Jura, and Rudolf Steiner's
Second Goetheanum (1920s), near Basel. The neo-expressionist
label has followed Gehry ever since, even if his buildings are
perhaps more properly neo-surrealist pace André
Breton's diktat that Surrealism gives "free rein" to
fantasy. As such, one must ask, after neo-Marxist critic Manfredo
Tafuri, if these buildings are not actually "emblems of
an intellectual bad conscience" (Architecture & Utopia).
Perhaps this will be the first line of inquiry when Gehry hits
the analyst's couch in the near future; that is, if he is not
already the most famous architect-analysand in the world.
Curiously, Gehry was first branded a deconstructivist architect
in the 1980s. As deconstructivism is a particularly virulent
strain of post-modernist architecture based on formalist language
games, Gehry denied the association. Of the two dominant streams
of architectural post-modernism--1/ The semiologically bastardized
version promulgated by British critic Charles Jencks and 2/ The
all-enquiring deconstructivist type derived from French post-structuralism
and represented by architects such as Peter Eisenman, Bernard
Tschumi, and Daniel Libeskind--Gehry's middle work mostly resembled
the latter though it never quite fit the pigeon hole.
Over-exposure, not to mention under-exposure, is the artist-architect's
worst best friend ... Ubiquity breeds contempt (if not envy and/or
ennui). Repeating one's self ad nauseum, or recycling
one's triumphs, is a sign of impending bad weather. Gehry's new
Manhattan Guggenheim, proposed for a site at the edge of the
lower East River, is, fortunately, hopelessly stalled (as was
the Disney Concert Hall?) pending the outcome of the twin financial
misfortunes of New York City and the cash-strapped Guggenheim
Empire (grossly over-leveraged by 'CEO' Thomas Krens).
Neither of these problems is irreversible,
however, given the recent resurgence of noblesse oblige
amongst the rich and chattering classes--the same that loved
the Bilbao Guggenheim. Perhaps the Guggenheim elite will cut
a deal with the City and push the new museum across New York
Harbor to Governors Island, a prestigious, unclaimed bit of New
York real estate and former Coast Guard station. The future of
the island, an as-yet-unresolved gift to New York from the Clinton
Administration, was batted about by the Giuliani Administration
without ever coming to closure. Now that Giuliani is 'history',
and his scheme for casinos and other "public-private"
development on Governors Island has been universally panned,
a "cultural campus" of one sort or another is the preferred
option. Unfortunately, for both the Guggenheim and Frank Gehry,
a titanium-clad, neo-surrealist museum would clash terribly with
the colonial and neo-colonial architecture of the island.
That said, one cannot help but point out Gehry's recent, albeit
minor contribution to Condé Nast's image problems ...
I recently went to the Condé Nast HQ on Times Square,
for lunch, with an editor of House & Garden. The main
course was the Frank Gehry designed cafeteria (2000)--a bizarre
'salad' made out of leftover bits from Bilbao. (Entrée
to this luscious enclave is strictly by invitation.)
The building is billed as "green"
architecture, a term denoting environmentally-friendly building
technologies. It's greater bulk is by Fox & Fowle, a New
York architecture firm of little distinction. The cafeteria was
swarming with twenty-somethings (interns?) and swirly-twirly,
signature Gehry forms. Along one edge of the careful clutter
of tables and banquettes, tucked here and there into a rather
small amount of space, Gehry inserted an impressive wave wall
of reflective material that resembles a funhouse mirror. The
editor told me that they invited a Feng Shui expert to see the
new building after it was built, ass backwards, so to
speak. (Expect most Condé Nast publications to continue
to hemorrhage money.)
It seems everything is wrong, not the
least the NASDAQ electronic billboard on the west-facing, black
rotunda at the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. This particular
piece of nonsense wraps the Times Square side with flashing electronic
images. One upper suite within this section also happens to be
the graphic art department for Condé Nast publications
(Vogue, House & Garden, Architectural Digest, The New
Yorker, Vanity Fair, etc., etc.). Gratuitous imagery, indeed!
The BID (Business Improvement District) that runs the newly renovated
and sanitized Times Square has decided that high-voltage signage
is what people (i.e., tourists) wish to see as they wander aimlessly
up and down Broadway.
The absurd expense of this garbage, the
mega-wattage required to light up the acres of billboards, is
highly questionable. Gehry's contribution to this bad joke is
admittedly minimal, and private, toxic metal tidbits notwithstanding,
but it is prototypical of current architectural jouissance,
that so-called "free rein of fantasy" again, but, hey!,
in this case it's New York, New York--the place so self-important
'they' named it twice.
Gavin Keeney is a landscape architect in New York. He
edits the web "anti journal" Serious
Real. He can be reached at: ateliermp@netscape.net
OUTTAKES
Gehry,
Not @ The Guggenheim--A "review"
of the 2000 Gehry retrospective at Frank Lloyd Wright's New York
Guggenheim
Gehry projects on the Guggenheim
Web site--Leftover stuff from the exhibition
Vitruvio--Swiss
site for architecture, including links to Gehry memorabilia.
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