September 5, 2014--Best of Behind: Inspiration From the Gutter

This first appeared September 17, 2007--

About a year ago we found ourselves in Springfield, Illinois. We were driving east en route to New York from Wyoming and put in there less out of an interest in things Lincoln than because there were tornado warnings posted in the area.

We were lucky to find a hotel room; and while hunkered down with little to do we read about the local attractions. Of course to be visited there were Lincoln’s law office, the old state capital building where he served in the legislature, and the home from which he left to assume the presidency and to which his body was returned.

Also in Springfield, we read, was one of the earliest of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Prairie Style structures, the Dana-Thomas House, commissioned by the silver-mine heiress and socialite, the widow Susan Lawrence Dana who had total control of her inherited fortune and spent much of it to satisfy her taste for the avant garde. Thus she turned to Wright who, at the time, represented the cutting edge of American architecture. Completed in 1904, the guide book claimed, the house is a fully realized example of his organic architecture and reflects the flat landscape of Illinois and the influence on his work of Japanese prints. She wanted something primarily for entertaining and therefore the public rooms got the most attention.

Since we were serendipitously in the land of Lincoln and Wright we planned to visit both homes the next morning if we survived the twisters.

Lincoln’s place was a little less modest than I had imagined, having been raised on stories of his growing up in a log cabin. But he had become a successful lawyer after all and in his middle years could afford to stretch out a bit, especially considering his height and wing span. And as further evidence of his relative prosperity, he did manage to get himself elected president.

The Dana-Thomas House was a very different sort of place—immense and lavish in its entirety. In fact, the docent-guide spent more time pointing out every lamp, vase, and sconce than talking about Wright’s expansive and paradigm-shifting architectural vision. The focus was on the totality of his design, how he not only planned every fresco and piece of fretwork but also all the furniture and even Mrs. Dana’s clothing.

Just how total was Wright’s aesthetic control was revealed once we got to the barrel-vaulted dining room—clearly entertaining central. He not only took complete command of the design of the chairs and table and dishes, glasses and flatware; but by basing his furniture designs on what appeared to me to be monastic models, he also was insisting on determining exactly how guests would be forced to physically sit for hours around that stoic table.

To get a sense of just what such an evening would feel like on my body, when the guide wasn’t looking I slipped into one of the rectory-style chairs and realized that if I had been forced to sit there for more than ten minutes I would need to be taken to the hospital and placed in traction.

I began to wonder what might be the intrapsychic source of what could only be thought of as Wright’s architectural sadism. Was this an expression of some inner urge to frappe the rich that bubbled up from memories of his deprived childhood? All I knew, and this was confirmed when I asked to see examples of the severely boned clothing and shoes he designed for his patroness, was that though everything that met the eye on both the interior and exterior cried out for featured inclusion in any serious history of 20th century American architecture, this was not a place in which to actually live or to be comfortable. It was a place to be admired in hushed, worshipful, and painful tones.

I was reminded of the Dana-Thomas House just last week when I read a review by the NY Times architecture critic, Nicolai Duroussoff, of a new condo being built on the city’s rapidly gentrifying Lower East Side. Though reluctant to seem a shill for Bernard Tschumi’s 17-storey, very commercial, so-called Blue Building that is nearing completion, Durousseff nevertheless couldn’t control himself. He wrote:

The building avoids the ostentatious self-importance that infects the design of so many of the new luxury towers. Encased in a matrix of blue panels, its contorted form has a hypnotic appeal that is firmly rooted in the gritty disorder of its surroundings. It reminds us that beauty and good taste are not always the same thing.

The building twists and bends, growing and bulging from the compressed “footprint” out of which it soars. Every square foot downtown after all is precious. There is so much squeezing and compressing that, to quote Duroussoff again, “The entire composition appears wonderfully off balance.”

And where did our architect find inspiration for this piece of real estate art?

Much of the inspiration comes as much from the gutter as from museum walls. The building’s milky blue colors bring to mind the cheap illuminated plastic signs still found on some old East Village storefronts.

And what might it actually be like to live in the off-balance, gutter-inspired Blue Building since it is after all still supposed to be a home? Read on:

As you reach the upper floors, the apartments get increasingly idiosyncratic. Exterior walls tilt backward or forward; rooms are tucked into what seem like leftover spaces. Big canted columns are set just inside the facade, as if bracing the rooms against some invisible force.

Sounds to me as if it would be a great place to hide in a tornado.