Battlefield Bushwick

Slowly an unsuspected offensive is penetrating the interior of Brooklyn, strategic pawns are placed in battle formation, driving the natives from the current frontier of Bushwick. Here the signs of battle mark the façades of old warehouses that have fallen into disuse. Now, they are scarred by brush strokes like blood streaks of large murals announcing the arrival of the gentrifying army: the artists. The first stage of the battle is written in paint and graffiti. The infiltrators slowly appropriate the expressive building-high typical murals of the local Spanish-speaking inhabitants, claiming their part of the underused territory. And, like every battle, also this one has its war reporters, observing the movements of the next battalion dispatched to the battlefield. The main carrier for the movement was tracked down to be the L-train when the pioneering artists had to leave their strongholds of SoHo and the East Village – that they had established in the 1960’s until the 1980’s – and crossed the East River to Williamsburg in the 1990’s. These hip and creative pioneers were closely followed by a migration of young settlers attracted by the wealth of the large open loft spaces the artists had uncovered in the old industries of Bushwick. The ever more affluent settlers took over the abundant vacant industrial remnants until it now clashes hard with the homogeneous residential core of Bushwick, just beyond the Morgan and Jefferson stops of the L-train.

But, unknowingly, the creative vanguard is in fact a kamikaze force, now rebelling against and deserting their initial offensive. By revealing the dormant wealth of space of the area, they opened it up to speculation and immediately lost it to the rearguard of opportunistic developers. However, they are not alone in their rebellion. Like in every great battle, an active resistance has openly taken on the fight: community organizations reclaim their rights and take a stand for the local residents. Perhaps now, in the tumult of battle, an image emerges of what Bushwick could be, a vital and mixed community rather than a container for a succession of homogenous Dutch, German, Italian, Puerto-Rican, hipster communities. It is in the skirmishes of battle, in the blur of clashing troops, that the community regained its strength and vitality.

Thomas Willemse

April 2013

A Composition of Contradictions - The Glass House

If I wanted to describe Philip Johnson’s Glass House, I would start out describing the well-known image of how it is set free and transparent in front of a backdrop of large trees, but would find myself talking about its dependence and ties with its neighbors and barriers to this landscape. Or I would indicate the minimal furniture set in the liberated open interior, but would end up admitting their fixed position to enable the habitation of the house. Or I could describe the essential, almost universal, simplicity of the glass box, but would be led to talk of how it is tailored to the person of Philip Johnson as both its designer and resident. It is clear after this enumeration that this hailed monument of Modernist architecture has risen out of contrasts and counter-movements and is, perhaps, not this pristine object we all imagine it to be, but rather a composition of contradictions.

The entrance of the Glass House compound is set as a careful scene, with Johnson as the stage master, deciding what is to be revealed and what not. It grew as a personal autobiography where Johnson added his latest folly when a new aesthetic had seized him. You first encounter two of Johnson’s later contraptions: ‘Da Monsta’, a sculptural estranging force as gatekeeper, and a tiny library set in the middle of the slightly sloping meadow. However, the winding entry road bypasses the library and leads you through an evergreen thicket of trees to arrive at your first encounter with the Glass House: its gray asphalt parking lot, lined by a rocky wall obscuring most of the house. It is clear that the rocky wall – which was raised from former small walls that delimited the old fields – is compensating for the openness of the house to conceal the cars. One wonders why these cars, as an unwanted part of the composition, were not left somewhere beyond the evergreen trees at the street. But it seemed as if Philip Johnson was reluctant to create something so immaterial as a house of glass and had a need to compensate both its shortcomings in enclosure and lack of mass as reflected in the rocky wall and the brick guesthouse. The Brick House marks the other end of the parking lot and creates a massive counterform for the Glass House since their simultaneous construction in 1949, and provides yet another aspect that the rigorous aesthetic principles of the Glass House apparently prevented: a space for its heating. Its long façade faces the Glass House and is equal in length and composition with a door right in the middle, except that a blind brick wall here replaces the abundant glass. In stark contrast with this massive bunker, you suddenly find yourself facing the Glass House. Where you expected an intangible structure, hardly intruding in the landscape, you encounter the heavy black metal columns and cornice, firmly set on the ground with a brick base. These heavy elements underline the strongest contrasts with Johnson’s inspiration of the transparent glass Farnsworth House by Mies van der Rohe. Even though you do not localize it at a first glance, you feel an undercurrent of something held back, this is not a free, light object of crystallized transparency that has gently landed here, but is inseparably part of a larger composition bound to earth. This is not just because of the literal technical and proportional association with its brick counterpart, but even more because of its setting on an unnatural horizontal plane in the landscape. Contrary to the implantation of his later works in the compound, where Johnson used the rolling fields to insert his architectural experiments – placing the library on a small hill or disguising the painting gallery as a grass tumulus – he flattened the slope to a completely horizontal lookout, delimited by a fine white border that, contrary to the house, does distance itself a few inches above the ground. This on the one hand creates a useful space around the house, but unfortunately also sets it apart from the landscape of the valley of the North Stamford Reservoir. Because of its dependence on the larger arrangement, the Glass House is not the free exposed observation post it could have been in this extraordinary setting. The clutter of other structures, walls, the white border, etc. prevent it to become the true crystallized free object it should have been.

When you pass the transparent door and enter the interior, the austere simplicity of the idea for the house – replacing all walls by the largest glass panes possible – makes it a unique vantage point on the valley right in front of you. However, Johnson’s obsession with the aesthetics of his architecture makes him give precedence to his exterior shell in which later habitation has to find its place. Since the glass does not replace the wall, but the landscape becomes – as Johnson put it – the wallpaper, the filtering function of the wall had to be on the one hand extroverted – the Brick House, the rocky wall, etc. – but also interiorized to the furniture that, rather than being free in the completely open space becomes a fixed answer to the surroundings. Despite the perfect symmetry accomplished in the exterior façades, the interior is not liberated of answering to the orientations of the landscape, to this painting instead of uniform wallpaper. This leads to a similar ambiguity as before, all the liberating achievements of the simple exterior shell have stronger restrictive repercussions imprisoning the occupants in a highly demanding bare box. As for the outside, Johnson also anchors his interior strongly to the soil trough the massive brick floor, hinting at the kinship with the Brick House, but also bringing in an unexpected kind of geometric decoration that he would fully embrace in his later work, especially in the interior of the NYU Bobst Library in Manhattan. The earth colors of the brick together with the black frame form a counterforce to the openness and are anchored at the circular bath cell, which is the only element reaching from the floor to the ceiling and bringing with its hearth a strange element of homeliness to this hard interior. It is in these elements that we can truly find Philip Johnson’s strong personal grip on the design, as both architect and future resident, who tailored the house to his personal needs, bringing extra ambiguity to the minimal ideals of its conception. And this is perhaps the only justification to call the glass pavilion a house, or as Frank Stella expressed it:

“Philip Lived here, and it’s livable, it’s just not livable for everybody.”

However, after some time this open structure of his weekend house became even too demanding for him and later he moved his bedroom to the brick guesthouse.

Today, after the demise of the only man who could live there, the house is left as an empty shell in the very ambiguous company of Johnson’s later follies. When you go there now the spell is broken and this dream and image of free and open architecture is held back by the strong imprint of Johnson’s ego with almighty formal control, but sadly he resolved all newly created architectural challenges of the new form, outside of the shell inflicting its surroundings and interior.

Thomas Willemse

April 2013

The Glass House

Converging Lines

Lines have ever crossed on the raised steel structure of the High Line: first the railway lines, they became a green course, were overlaid by the linear paths of the park and are now crossed by the even more meandering lines of Sunday strollers. However, not only physically do lines intertwine at the High Line, the very conception of the park forms a convergence of different courses that have been guiding landscape design.

In 1934 the freight train line of Manhattan’s western industrial district was elevated 30 feet in the air, restoring 10^th ‘Death’ Avenue to its proper name. Here, a first remarkable consideration for the street life is reflected in the route of the trains, cutting through the building blocks instead of covering the streets in dark shadows. The increase of interstate truck trafficking led to the abandonment and amputation of the southern part of the line in the 1960s. In 1980 the last train left the tracks that gradually disappeared under a thin layer of banal weeds, grasses, wild flowers and here and there a small shrub – one of the many abandoned, rusty and overgrown ruins of the industrial era. However, we would soon learn to love these brutal, course metal skeletons through an exceptional precedent in Germany: the recovery of the ruins of an enormous smelting factory in Duisburg by landscape architect Peter Latz. Here, fragile white blossoms appeared between the robust metal girders of the factory, slowly purifying the polluted soil and at the same time softening the scene for an adventurous public park. Ten years later in New York, community activists embraced both the new postindustrial landscape imagery and the ecological aims – enriching the new emerging landscape vision with a strong social impetus. By 2004 the Friends of the High Line community organization have convinced the city government to convert the structure into a park and a design team was selected: James Corner’s office Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The meeting of these different threads that have given a new direction to landscape design – the postindustrial imaging, the (urban) ecological and social movements – created a skein that could have only been disentangled by James Corner’s landscape vision and translated into a beautiful streamlined design by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

The design is extremely simple: a mile – 1.6 kilometers – long linear path winding between the ‘spontaneous original’ vegetation, emphasizing in every point the uniqueness of its particular context. The single line is the essential reduction of a park, but the elevation of the structure, making it move through the building blocks, clearly sets it apart from the streets and gives it that one characteristic we all look for in parks: a place of escape and refuge, distancing ourselves from the city. Although the High Line is not an idealized picturesque landscape image, as that other world-renowned park in the city, it also thrives on the contrast with its surroundings, just like the large trees of Central Park become all the more impressive because of the looming skyscrapers towering above them. But for the High Line the city becomes part of the park, the reconnection with nature becomes a rediscovery of the city, moving through the blocks, through a canyon of skyscrapers and penetrating the lower levels of old industrial warehouses. In this light the designers have grasped every divergence in the smooth course of the old railway tracks and its relation with its surroundings to stage an impressive and, until now, unknown vista on the city. At least in this respect it refers back to the varied naturalistic scenes of Central Park, and starts at Gansevoort Street with a woodland to the open and exposed grasslands a bit further, until it reaches the enclosure of some buildings, providing a microclimate for the ‘Chelsea Thicket’ opening to the required grass lawn that ends in a chasm where the path lifts above the suddenly lush vegetation. These landscapes are then seamlessly sewn together, following the curves of the railway tracks and emphasizing the flow in every single aspect through the use of one single element: the line.

The paths become a virtuous play of concrete lines, now going up to form a bench, then diving underground embracing an early crocus flower, but always making a smooth transition. This play of new lines running parallel to, and sometimes crossing the remaining rails, captures the true identity of the park as a place of flows and reinforces this character along its entire length. But on top of this ‘spontaneous’ natural layer, reminiscent of the former condition, and the new lines of the concrete paths, the extra park program needs to be fitted in. Here the ingenuity and careful feeling for the context of the designers emanates from the evident way in which the railway bedding can accommodate a stage, a sundeck, a viewing spur and other unique spots. The continuous elevated line is punctuated with interventions at every opportunity, following from the shape of the viaduct, or the surrounding urban context. These are also the excellent opportunities to engage with the streets below. The 14^th Street entry, for example, illustrates the care with which the stairs are inserted between the beams with a long landing over the street revealing the legs of the visitors, but at the same time bringing light to the street level. Also the materials reflect the transition and adaptation: a glass railing keeps the continuous park landscape open, a new rusty ‘Corten’ steel plate is inserted when cutting though the soil, and below the steel of the old viaduct glass opens to the street below. Through these subtle transitions the park can engage with the streets without abandoning its own status. However, in its engagement with the adjacent buildings it is even stronger. The penetration of the Chelsea Market building forms a rougher gap in the sleek continuum of the park, giving breathing room for artists and performers. The new Whitney Museum at the Gansevoort Plaza by Renzo Piano will hopefully exploit this opportunity even more.

After this short reflection on the rich aspects of the High Line I have to acknowledge the designers’ exceptional attitude and skills in the way they were able to retrieve the memory of the old railway, incorporating the spontaneous ecological diversity and carefully inserting a social program carried by the community. The High Line rightly deserves its high status as an exceptional postindustrial park that interweaves lines from ecology, conservation, its urban context and community, but most of all its own landscape identity.

Thomas Willemse

March 2013