On my most recent visit to new york city I have once again been saddened and shocked at the pace of progress turning the city into a corporate profit driven carnival for the ultra elite. This is best summed up by the MoMas imminent plans to demolish the brand new quirky american folk art museum to be replaced with Diller Scofido + Renfros gleaming glass squashcourt galleries for performances and installations, not paintings. (paintings apparently take too much time to understand and dont provide a ted talk jolt of dopamine to todays museum goers) Then there will be the new tower by Jean Nouvel programmed to be flexible space meaning no walls to hang traditional art upon. Concrete glass and steel boxes stacked into the clouds is the name of the game of architecture now, populated by happy computer rendered hip people engaging in Fun. Concrete glass and steel the production of which around the world produces more climate altering carbon than all cars put together. Meanwhile the masterpieces of cut and carved stone of the city melt away in the acidic air. Stone, which has already been manufactured for us in infinite abundance by billions of years of geology,can be quarried locally and transformed into inspiring, lasting edifices, if only we still taught craftsmen how to do it. No, the architects of today who i went to school with during the last days of hand drawing and model building before computers and laser cutters dumbed them all down only know how to do glass concrete glass and steel, driven by their self loathing and the almighty dollar to make the latest greatest shiniest thing. Grind up the quarries of stone into gravel to feed the concrete plants and melt beaches worth of sand into immense sheets of glass. They dont have a clue how to properly join two pieces of wood let alone heft a trowel of mortar or a stone chisel. They ignore centuries of development of how to make lasting buildings because they are certain they can do it better with their superior computing power, deploying a compendium of predictable, conformist architectural and cultural ideas all aimed at giving us some sort of cultural utopia, unaware that the etymology of utopia means no place. That is exactly what MoMa is creating for art: the greatest collection of modernism on the planet is bring relegated to rotating storage. As the wrecking ball makes its first thunking swing in May ghosts of Penn Station will wail out on 53rd street.
Posted on: Sun, 30 Mar 2014 13:55:37 +0000
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