permanence and (im)perfection

From top: 15th century bowl with 18th century porcelain yobitsugi repair, mid-17th century stoneware cup with kintsugi, 19th century tea tea bowl with kintsugi, mid 15th century bowl with maki-e repair.
All from the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution

12th century Korean ewer with replaced spout. V&A museum

All images of western repaired objects below from Past Imperfect, a blog by Andrew Baseman

My favorite items from Past Imperfect are unequivocally the glassware with prosthetic bases

First: kintsugi, I'm rather taken with the concept. Kintsugi ("gold joinery") is a traditional Japanese method of repair for cracked and broken ceramic ware. Lacquer is used to reattach broken pieces, the resulting "veins" of adhesive are then coated with silver or gold powder. Yobitsugi and maki-e are related techniques, the first utilizing "alien" pieces of ceramic to fill in for missing fragments, the latter replaces loss with areas of solid, decorated lacquer.

From a beautiful almost overwhelmingly sensitive essay by Christy Bartlett in Flickwerk:The Aesthetics of Mended Japanese Ceramics interpreting the exquisitely subtle aspects of Japanese aesthetic philosophy:

Not only is there no attempt to hide the damage, but the repair is literally illuminated... a kind of physical expression of the spirit of mushin....Mushin is often literally translated as “no mind,” but carries connotations of fully existing within the moment, of non-attachment, of equanimity amid changing conditions. ...The vicissitudes of existence over time, to which all humans are susceptible, could not be clearer than in the breaks, the knocks, and the shattering to which ceramic ware too is subject. This poignancy or aesthetic of existence has been known in Japan as mono no aware, a compassionate sensitivity, or perhaps identification with, [things] outside oneself.

Quite a while ago I wrote briefly on the related Japanese sensibilities of wabi and sabi. The terms wabi-sabi taken together identify and connote appreciation of qualities such as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. (These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to their Western counterparts: values based in Classicism, perfection, rationality and the heroic.) I was dumbstruck when I first learned of these concepts. This dialectic or opposition appeared to explain one of my longstanding issues: a certain loneliness I'd felt growing up, in part because most everything I found aesthetically interesting, pleasing, or desirable seemed to be the farthest thing from what was all around me. (This was Queens in the 1970s and 80s. I carried with me a sense mild alienation most of the time.)

I have to clarify that it is the idea of kintsugi— mending as transformation, a sort of reified transience— rather than the physical ceramic objects themselves that truly seems beautiful to me.//

From the philosophically suffused, rarefied aesthetics of kintsugi to the stalwart thrift and ingenuity of necessity: Interior designer Andrew Baseman's blog, Past Imperfect, the art of inventive repair is a great find for anyone interested in the beauty of mended objects. Andrew's blog focusses on his collection of artfully repaired items, mostly 18th and 19th century western artifacts. Professing a longstanding appreciation of "make-dos"— folksy or crude homemade repairs— Baseman prefers the term “inventive repairs” for describing and appreciating the embellishments on the pieces. His collection is a parade of charming, quirky, even mystifying, everyday items from the past made even more so by the eclectic methods employed in mending physical mishaps. These objects lie somewhere outside but near the boundaries of "folk art." They seem to be animated with a spirit that pristine examples don't necessarily hold, a paradoxical demonstration of perseverance and resilience.

The Romance and Pain of Penn Station

UPDATE: One of the original watercolor renderings of the proposed Penn Station by Jules Crowe, 1906
(New-York Historical Society)

A terrific shot of the station during WWII,
with an amazing graphic installation by Raymond Loewy
images by Peter Moore
The"clamshell" ticket counter was an attempt to update the station.
I don't not like it (even if a double negative conveys my hesitance).
It reminds me of Saarinen's TWA terminal and is very much of its time.
It was a total surprise to discover that the demolition did not disrupt essential day-to-day operations: commuter service and access to the tracks and platforms were in full operation throughout. Image by Peter Moore
An advertisement from a 1968 Progressive Architecture Magazine showing Charles Luckman Associates' model of what fills the space of the former Penn Station: the Madison Square Garden Center complex.

This fascinating and embarrassing artifact, a brochure issued by the LIRR about the demolition,
construction and what was happening, breezily informs riders "you'll have one of the most modern, spacious,
cheerful and functional terminals in the nation." (municipal art society)

On October 28, 1963 New York began its long painful farewell to McKim Mead & White's monumental Pennsylvania Station. The supremely majestic nine-acre structure of travertine marble and granite, its columns more than 6 stories tall, didn't go quietly. It took 3 years to hack up and cart away, with parts haphazardly dumped in the NJ Meadowlands, like the remains of a Mob hit.

I can't help but see many of the demolition images as documenting a crime, and I don't mean figuratively. There truly is something unsettling, obscene even, in the partially exposed steel framework, a slow-motion dismemberment, the tremendous hulk lurching under the raining blows from workmen.

Photojournalist Peter Moore and his wife Barbara documented the "unbuilding" process in thousands of images. A selection of these became The Destruction of Penn Station, a book issued in 2000, described as both romantic and painful.

Critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote at the time,

"The tragedy is that our own times not only could not produce such a building, but cannot even maintain it..." "It confirms the demise of an age of opulent elegance, of conspicuous, magnificent spaces, rich and enduring materials, the monumental civic gesture, and extravagant expenditure for esthetic ends."

I'll be working on an exhibit about Penn Station in the next couple months, so I've been going over the arc of its archetypal moral tale: elegance and beauty sacrificed to base money interests. In reviewing all with fresh eyes I was astonished to find myself almost being able to understand the decision to replace it.

The very fact that Penn Station carried the standard of "conspicuous space" and "extravagant expenditure" made its demise, in the era of the Jetsons, inevitable. It had been on a long slide down toward becoming what even the New York Times called "a grimy monument to an age of expansive elegance." Under years of careless structural intrusions and minimal upkeep, with the automobile stripping the glamour —and convenience— from railroad travel, Penn station was a cavernous empty space with an expensive maintenance ticket. It was a glaring anachronism at 50, still evoking starched collars and walking sticks when the public was thinking about space travel, Tang, and GoGo boots. I could almost—almost— see what it was they were thinking.
. . . . . .
See several stunning images, and a few harrowing scenes of carnage.

pietra paesina

Pietra paesina, also called “landscape stone,” “ruin stone,” “ruiniform marble,” and “Florentine marble” among other names, has been collected for centuries. The “marble” is in fact a type of limestone which when cut into slabs and polished reveals natural veining of iron oxides that resemble –with minimal poetic license–mountainous landscapes, castles, and ruins.
Displayed as natural objects of contemplation in European Renaissance wunderkammer the marble was also incorporated into decorative panels in architecture or furnishings. The stone was sometimes further embellished with painted detail, which, to me, seems sacrilegious.

Ruiniform marble hovers between natural specimen and artifact, abstract configuration and narrative. Its markings are angular, geometric, almost Cubist, vividly etched, yet undefined at the same time. Many stones have the suffused colors of a foggy twilight but some, like the specimen third from bottom, give off the sonorous (yes, sonorous) golden warmth of classical ruins.

How wonderful (in the true sense of the word) it must have been that first time to cut into something solid and “see” the spiritous atmosphere, to peer into something small and see distant wide vistas.

Images: St. Francis exorcising demons from Assisi, Giotto, c.1297; View of Delft, Vermeer, 1659-60; my specimen, which I had framed, was purchased a few years ago from Claude Boullé Galerie 28, Rue Jacob, in Paris.; 3 sample pietra; at bottom is another variant of pictorial stone, Cotham marble, quarried near Bristol, whose striations usually evoke natural landscapes of trees and stormy clouds.

Pancras envy

I read with some envy and wistfulness about the reopening of St. Pancras Station in London (images second row) as the new 'home' of the Eurostar.
Why would I care about a train station in London?
Well, first I am inordinately fond of the city, despite the weather and the fact they charge you for matches, and I haven't been since Fall 2005. Mostly though its because London manages to renovate and repurpose old buildings with flair. I seem to recall coming upon various old piles that had been meaningfully and usefully integrated into modern life (Borough Market, Tate Modern come to mind first). Usually with nice signage, too.

There's something so vigorous and ...heartening... about a sleek, well-planned new transportation station. Somehow it makes you think there are people in government who see the bigger picture. Something like, 'Ah, the city is working. Somebody's manning the deck. good. progress.'

I never feel that in New York.

Work was begun on St. Pancras station in the eponymous parish section of London in the early 1860’s. A working class slum, Agar town, and the churchyard of old St. Pancras were demolished for the construction. Dickens described it in Dombey and Son (as quoted in the Guardian)

Houses were knocked down; streets broken through and stopped; deep pits and trenches dug in the ground; enormous heaps of earth and clay thrown up; buildings that were undermined and shaking, propped by great beams of wood ..."

It must have been a ghastly affair. I believe they had to submerge or divert a river (the Fleet). Also, a full 8,000 graves had to be removed from the construction site. Supervisor for the exhumations was a 26-year old architect's assistant from Dorset named Thomas Hardy. Yes, that one.

St. Pancras train station opened in 1868. William Barlow's single-span train shed of iron and glass spans 240 feet and is more than 100 feet high at its apex, and was the largest enclosed space in the world when it was completed.

Adjoining the magnificent station —and acting as its public face—was an imposing and sprawling brick edifice. Designed by George Gilbert Scott in a lavish High Victorian Gothic revival style it opened on May 5th, 1873, as the Midland Grand Hotel. Turreted, balconied, arabesqued and decoratively voussoired to within an inch of its life, the Midland Grand operated until 1935. Thereafter it wheezed through much of the 20th century as the office headquarters of British Transport Hotels. After suffering many indignities of a 1950s vintage, including lowered ceilings, it sat vacant since the 1980s.

I think it was about 2000/01 that I wangled my way into a private but abbreviated walk-through of the place, that was, by that point, called St. Pancras Chambers (see my pre-digital photos 4th row down). Scott (the architect) had designed everything down to the drawer pulls. Embellished and illuminated, it was magnificent in its ponderousness and even more evocative in its ruined deshabille.

The Jefferson Market Library, nee Courthouse, in Greenwich Village, at bottom, is a smaller sibling I would say. I had always thought of it as the only representative of Lean Bacon Revival style in NYC. (photo by steve spak.)

Now St. Pancras Chambers will be a hotel again, and, as is the wont of the capitalist market, "luxury lofts." The firm managing the overhaul, oddly named the Manhattan Loft Company, has created a rather nice and detailed animated timeline of the building in the Ken Burnsian manner.

I'm liking what I see as the logo for the residential project (top). Anyone have info?

It seems now is the renaissance for all things Victorian, no? Refreshing I think.
British architectural historian Sir John Summerson once described the Midland as “nauseating”. And certainly for a good deal of the 20th century "Victorian" was an epithet not given in kindness. An interesting take (on Vulpes Libris ) on why Victorian architecture became so reviled by mid century-- at least in the UK:

At its finest Victorian architecture is bullish, ebullient and self-confident … and perhaps that was the problem. It reminded us of our lost past. Simon Bradley probably puts his finger on it fairly accurately when he says:

“The great buildings of Victorian Britain, so confident and optimistic, had become poignant reminders of former glories, like swaggering family portraits squeezed into the commonplace house of a penurious descendant.”

.....

Now I've rashly gone and ordered Simon Bradley's book.
....
Evidently some live art event was staged there (part of a series held in derelict buildings of London).

the Forgotten Ideal

My friend John lent me a book last week, Hudson Valley Ruins by Thomas Rinaldi and Robert Yasinac. It took me several days to get beyond the academic publisher production values to finally see the beauty that this book is. Encyclopedic research — breadth and detail of truly heroic proportions — is spun into sensitive and occasionally haunting narrative.

The forgotten ideal referred to above is, the authors say, the 18th and 19th century conception of the Picturesque which had all but gone out of favor in the 20th. Ruins and relics that had once been valued, even cherished, were seen as blight or nuisances at best.

The Picturesque, as I personally interpret it, is successor to aspects of Romanticism. The Romanticism of the Keats/Shelley/Byron is a melancholy of majesty-- a meditation upon Antiquity. The temporal aspect is a transportive state of mind. Washington Irving noted, "I longed to wander over scenes of renowned achievement...to meditate on the falling tower...to escape, in short, from the commonplace realities of the present." (As quoted in Hudson Valley Ruins)

Proponents of the Picturesque rhapsodized the beauty, the "sublimity," of the interaction of the forces of man and nature. Americans of the 19th century were especially proud of the country's vast landscape-- which, to them, embodied the potential and the freedom of the "young and vigorous" nation. The effects of wear of were prized for their evocation of the fleeting passage of Time. Ultimately, though, the eccentricities of the Picturesque seemed to become too easily subsumed by Victorian sentimentality and the "charm" of a passing scene:

... That beauty of ruins that is so rare with us in America— the nameless charm that.... always surrounds an old decaying structure that has played its part in the world, and seems resting and looking on dreamily, only an observer now, not an actor. –William Cullen Bryant, from Picturesque America (1874), as excerpted in Hudson Valley Ruins

In the 19th century, Rinaldi and Yasinac say, the Hudson Valley was lauded as the Rhine of the New World. And as the inspirational beauty of the valley became dotted with the moldering remains of Revolutionary-era forts and Dutch colonial manors-- all the better. The "modern" ruins of the recent industrial past hold a fascination too. Rinaldi and Yasinac discuss cement factories, mills, railway remnants, valve companies, pill manufacturers and ice works. They reveal a particular aspiration, I think, when they fleetingly touch on the appeal of industrial and utilitarian structures for artists like Charles Sheeler (see the authors' very Sheeleresque image above) and Bernd and Hilla Becher. The authors detail with equal enthusiasm a Wharton family residence, the Anaconda Wire and Cable Co. (a notorious former polluter*) and an old Dutch barn. I just love the masses of information in this book, told with a Humanist sensitivity.
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A quote about Ruskin particularly struck me:

Ruskin promoted the idea that the process of aging and weathering was what perfected good architecture. That age was a building's "greatest glory." He wrote of "the mere sublimity of the rents, or fractures, or stains, or vegetation which assimilate the architecture with the work of Nature... (emphasis is mine)

I talked about this last year in my post about inexhaustibility and wabi-sabi. I'd found a comment by British designer Russell Davies, “One of the things I hate about the design of most things ... is they're all designed to be new.” Obvious, but somehow I hadn't quite thought about it that way. And that pinpoints the problem I have with much of the really bad iterations of Modernism, and, (shiver) "Fedders" architecture– they won't make good ruins.

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* "I seen all kinds of oil and sulfuric acid, copper filings; my gosh, they were coming out of that company like it was going out of style. I've seen lubro oil and I've seen #2 oil. All over Anaconda, off the dock, you could see this stuff coming out....This was entering the river on a daily basis, you know." First hand commentary about the Anaconda Company from PBS/NOW documentary, The Hudson: America's First River

Images, from top: The Course of Empire: Desolation, Thomas Cole, 1836; Alsen's Portland Cement Works, Smith's Landing; Oliver Bronson House, Hudson, NY. From Hudson Valley Ruins

“inexhaustibility”

By chance I came across this obvious but supremely insightful comment (there must be some fabulous German term I need to know meaning “obvious, but insightful”) by one Russell Davies, designer: “One of the things I hate about the design of most things ... is they're all designed to be new.” This immediately brought a number of thoughts together for me. It encapsulates the problem I have with a good deal of bad Modernist architecture, especially those of the Brutalist persuasion. I've hated Brutalism from the moment I set eyes on this particular building. When I 'knew' it, the building was about 25+ years old and was a disaster to be in and around. Corbusier and Rudolph, et al., had envisioned a gleaming Utopia. Unfortunately the bloom is off that “radiant” rose. Modernism in general and brutalism in particular do not age well--stained and chipped concrete just do not belong in Utopia!

One of the comments with Davies' post about the process of 'things aging gracefully' mentions the Japanese terms wabi and sabi. I learned of these a few years ago and was astonished (and oddly relieved) to have found a definition (a codification!) of the vague aesthetic ideas and ideals that I held but never pieced together and could never explain satisfactorily. Growing up, I often related to things around me as "the farthest thing" from what I would find appealing. What I was, what I liked, was opposite to a large part of what I found around me. (This was Queens in the 1970s and 80s, which explains a lot, and I will return to that in another post .)
Here is a quote from Andrew Juniper on wabi and sabi:

The term wabi-sabi suggests such qualities as impermanence, humility, asymmetry, and imperfection. These underlying principles are diametrically opposed to those of their Western counterparts, whose values are rooted in the Hellenic worldview....an aesthetic sensibility that finds a melancholic beauty in the impermanence of all things.

Another essay about w-s I just read today adds in the term "inexhaustibility" saying, "the object resounds ... with endless possibilities and nuances, at once hidden and successively revealed." That goes far in describing some of what I felt at Ellis Island in 1976, and explicating the sense of loss upon my return after the renovation. Ruins (which I think deserve their own post) embody w-s. I think it makes sense to me now.

hearing things

This is the Ellis Island in 1976; at top is some forgotten room, bottom, the main waiting hall. I was eleven, on a special viewing of the place with my parents and I had my little Instamatic camera along. We were taking part in a dedication ceremony marking the beginning of the restoration effort. These are the only 2 images I have from that day. I remember seeing a lot of random discarded furniture in empty rooms, and vines covering windows and actually creeping into the interior along one passageway. Every step reverberated. I thought I could feel the past in the rooms.

I went looking for these because I recently purchased "The Destruction of Lower Manhattan" by Danny Lyon. Roaming the blocks of the lower west side that were being razed (1966-67) to make way for the World Trade Center, Lyon darted in and out of buildings, documenting the dereliction and subsequent demolition. The images-- the whole book-- is pretty loose. His commentary has a "wow, man, far out" sensibility (because it was the 60s and he was high on peyote a good deal of the time) but nevertheless there is something he was feeling (perhaps because he was high on peyote a lot at the time...) that really resonates with me. This peculiar metaphysical, almost spiritual quality of connection-- independent of time. Of being able to hear something in the buildings themselves, as though the beams and plaster could communicate through the intervening years, to you, right now.