Global Contemporary Architecture Maya Lin Christo JeanneClaude Frank

Global Contemporary: Architecture Maya Lin, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Frank Gehry, and Zaha Hadid Only two of these artists are actually architects as we usually think of them. But Maya Lin and Christo & Jeanne-Claude create public spaces that become almost architectural.

Maya Lin, b. 1959, Athens, Ohio * required work Vietnam Veterans Memorial, National Mall, Washington DC, 1982, granite

You should already know a lot about the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, but here are the bullet points: • • Located in a significant spot: on the National Mall, in sight of the Washington Monument and near the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. Created less than 10 years after the end of the Vietnam War in 1975; there was still a lot of anger and controversy over the war, and especially over the question of whether we had been defeated; Maya Lin’s design is chosen in a blind contest; when her identity is revealed – a young, Chinese American woman, still a student at Yale – this angers some veterans groups. Some veterans groups are angered by her design as well. They see the black granite, the position below ground level, and the abstraction vs. a heroic figure, as shameful and defeatist. Once the memorial opens though, Lin’s design quickly wins over the public and most veterans; she had created an interactive, involving memorial, one more focused on the specific lives lost than on the heroics of generals or generic everyman soldiers. People found solace in being able to touch their loved ones’ names, and in being able to pay their respects and even mourn communally.

• • • Lin viewed the site as she was planning her design; she imagined the war as a wound to the land, a cut that would have to heal. The memorial consists of two walls of stone set into the ground at a wide angle; the viewer walks down a gently descending path that is at its deepest point below ground level at the apex. The walls are of highly polished and very reflective black granite; they are carved with the names of the 58, 307 veterans whose lives were lost in the war; the carved names reveal the matte interior of the stone so they seem more solid than the reflective stone; as some say, the names seem to belong to a world we can’t enter; we also see ourselves, the sky, the clouds, the ground, etc. reflected around the names. The wall serves, in effect, as a giant grave stone, with offerings of flowers and flags frequently left by families and other veterans; for a long time (and maybe still) the memorial was manned by volunteers who would use guidebooks to help you find a specific name; names are listed in the chronological order of casualty, alphabetically within a given day; the chronology starts and ends at the apex. At some point after the memorial was built, to appease critics, a flagpole and a realistic sculpture of soldiers was added; Lin was not happy, but the additions are far enough from the memorial not to distract.

Christo, b. 1935 in Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude, b. 1935 in Morocco to a French father, d. 2009 in NYC. They met in 1958, had a son in 1960 and began collaborating on art works; they settled in New York in the mid 60’s. Christo continues to work, now alone.

* Required work The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 1979 – 2003, mixed media installation, Christo And Jeanne-Claude

Khan Academy: Nearly thirty years after the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude first conceived of The Gates, this logistically complex project was finally realized over a period of two weeks in New York’s Central Park. Each gate, a rectilinear three-sided rigid vinyl frame resting on two steel footings, supported saffron-colored fabric panels that hung loosely from the top. The gates themselves matched the brilliant color of the fabric. The statistics are impressive: 7, 503 gates ran over 23 miles of walkways; each gate was 16 feet high, with widths varying according to the paths’ width. Despite a brief exhibition period—February 12 th through 27 th 2005—The Gates remains a complex testament to two controversial topics in contemporary art: how to create meaningful public art and how art responds to and impacts our relationship with the built environment.

The Gates respond to spaces designed by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux within the dense urban grid of Manhattan. The artists complicate an environment that was, in fact, entirely invented in the mid 19 th century to express the Victorian ideal of the pastoral and picturesque landscape. The Gates were tied to the paths that meander through the park. This was done for two reasons: to avoid drilling thousands of holes into the soil and potentially harming the root systems of adjacent trees, and because Christo and Jeanne-Claude were inspired by the way the city’s pedestrians navigate its paths. The Gates reinforce and highlight pre-existing routes within this manmade environment. Critiques of The Gates that are rooted in the issue of the artwork’s relationship with nature are therefore curious since the Park itself is not an untouched natural space. This installation alters the experience of seeing and walking along the paths that run throughout the park. The title alludes to a threshold, a point of exit and entrance. In fact, in some places, the structures form an oval. There is no starting point and no end point and moreover, no favored point from which to view the work. It is an installation made for the pedestrian in motion and not a static object that asks us to stand still before it.

The Gates cost 21 million dollars and both the artists and the supporting institutions (the City of New York and the Central Park Conservancy) were quick to emphasize that Christo and Jeanne-Claude financed the project themselves and that the installation was free to the public. The artists sold preparatory drawings related to The Gates, and other works, before the exhibition opened; they rely on this method to independently fund their projects since they do not accept sponsors. Though the City and the Central Park Conservancy did not use public money to support this project, their approval and support were seen as an invaluable currency by many critics. It is important to remember that Christo and Jeanne. Claude’s favorable turn with the powers that be was 26 years in the making. The artists submitted proposals, attended meetings, and made presentations throughout this period, persisting even after they received a 251 -page official rejection only three years into their campaign. Many consider the 2001 mayoral election of Michael Bloomberg—a Christo and Jeanne-Claude collector—as the turning point in this saga. The artists are accustomed to bureaucratic battles

It might seem odd that Christo and Jeanne-Claude invest so much time, effort, reputation, and money in creating ephemeral non-collectible artwork. Yet they are completely devoted to this kind of artistic practice: “The temporary quality of the projects is an aesthetic decision. Our works are temporary in order to endow the works of art with a feeling of urgency to be seen, and the love and tenderness brought by the fact that they will not last. Those feelings are usually reserved for other temporary things such as childhood and our own life. These are valued because we know that they will not last. We want to offer this feeling of love and tenderness to our works, as an added value (dimension) and as an additional aesthetic quality. ”

Christo and Jeanne-Claude began by wrapping things … The Pont Neuf in Paris, 1975 – 1985 … … and the Reichstag (parliament building) in Berlin, 1971 – 1995 (next two slides)

They stretched a curtain across a valley in Rifle, Colorado, 1970 - 1972

They surrounded islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami, Florida, 1980 -1983 (more islands than are visible here)

The Gates in NYC were Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s last project together before her death in 2009. This project they had conceived of together decades before, but Christo completed it in 2016. From his website: For sixteen days – June 18 through July 3, 2016 – Italy’s Lake Iseo was reimagined. 100, 000 square meters of shimmering yellow fabric, carried by a modular floating dock system of 220, 000 high-density polyethylene cubes, undulated with the movement of the waves as The Floating Piers rose just above the surface of the water. Visitors were able to experience the work of art by walking on it from Sulzano to Monte Isola and to the island of San Paolo. Lake Iseo is located 100 kilometers east of Milan and 200 kilometers west of Venice.

Frank Gehry, b. 1929 in Toronto, based in LA * required work Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, Spain, 1993 – 1997, titanium, limestone, glass, steel

Khan Academy: Prior to the mid-20 th century, art museums in Europe and the United States were mostly designed in variants of the neo-classical style … stately stone structures, distinguished by pedimented fronts, long colonnades, and lofty rotundas. The 1959 Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with its spiraling concrete ramps, was one of the first museums to challenge this tradition. By the 1980 s it had outgrown its Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Fifth Avenue home, and Thomas Krens, the museum's director, began developing plans to expand the museum's reach through the establishment of satellite branches.

Among these projects, the 1997 branch in Bilbao, Spain, has been the most highly regarded. It shifted the direction of museum design. The Guggenheim Bilbao was also part of an ambitious urban renewal program conceived by the Basque regional government. … Various wellknown architects were invited to design new structures … Comparisons to the Guggenheim Museum in New York would be inevitable. Krens urged Gehry to “make it better than Wright” and the Bilbao museum recalls the earlier building in various subtle ways. From the absence of historical references to the focus on a central rotunda or atrium …

Gehry, who started his career in the 1960 s, developed a personal aesthetic gradually, discovering exhilarating ways to shatter and re-assemble architectural forms. As most architects do, he began with the structure's most basic program. After determining the size and shape of the interiors, he melded the forms together, arranging them into a lively sculptural whole. Though his earlier work, sometimes categorized as Deconstructivism, featured everyday building materials like chain link, corrugated metal and plywood, by the late 1980 s Gehry had refined his vision, using more costly surfaces to produce unexpectedly sensuous designs. Aided by sophisticated computer software, his most daring projects evoke aspects of the Italian Baroque style. Like the drapery folds that animate some pieces of 17 th century figurative sculpture, Gehry's more striking works juxtapose elements that bend, ripple and unfurl.

The titanium skin of the structure reflects weather and light conditions. (Think of the polished limestone casing on the Great Pyramids. )

Eli thinks I’m nuts, but how can you not see a connection to the Nike of Samothrace? How much more windswept could a building be? (And remember, she was perched on the prow of a ship – a memorial fountain. )

The sculpture: Soft Shuttlecock by pop artist Claes Oldenburg.

The main entrance is at the foot of a narrow residential street (below). Arriving visitors descend through a broad stepped limestone plaza passing from a slender notch into a soaring 165 -foot atrium. A complex and somewhat chaotic interior, this twisting glassand-steel volume combines irregularly-shaped limestone and plaster walls, glazed elevator shafts, and vertigo-inducing catwalks.

The central atrium serves as a circulation hub and orientation gallery, providing access to approximately 20 galleries on three levels. While the sequence of “classic” galleries are predictably rectangular, other exhibition spaces have surprising shapes, with angled or curving walls and occasional balconies. Particularly memorable is the so-called “boat gallery. ” Gehry compares the shape to a fish (a reoccurring motif in his work). Ideal for large works of sculpture, this vast space contains an installation by Richard Serra.

The Guggenheim Bilbao opened to the public in 1997. The reception to Gehry’s unorthodox design was nothing less than ecstatic, drawing international acclaim from fellow architects and critics, as well as from tourists who throng here. Herbert Muschamp, The New York Times architecture critic called the undulating structure a “miracle. ” The benefit to the city's local economy was immediate and substantial and numerous cities have tried (but not always succeeded) to match its success, commissioning similarly dynamic structures from high-profile “starchitects. ”

Zaha Hadid, 1950 – 2016, an Iraqi-born British architect, the first woman to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 (Frank Gehry won it in 1989). * required work MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, Rome, Italy, 2009, glass, steel and cement

I’ve include a few images of this museum in the next slides, but your best bet is to watch the Khan Academy video, 5: 21. It’s quite good. Pay attention to the connections to Rome and Roman art, as well as to modernist influences. (I’ll do a quiz for this pp as a separate pp. ) https: //www. khanacademy. org/humanities/ap-art-history/global-contemporary/v/hadid-maxxi