The Holl additions in Kansas also raise an important issue which is not discussed enough in a climate of "Starchitecture": how new buildings can feed into the "vernacular".
My sense is that any building as intellectually rarefied, and aloof from practical building considerations, as the Nelson-Atkins additions can have little to say to local building culture. Most critics agree that Holl has succeeded here in bleeding out the unwelcome physicality from his building (in the early twenty-first century we regard brick and stone buildings with as much distaste as high-fat meals) to leave behind only those twentieth century nostrums: "space and light" (see, for example, Cathleen McGuigan's piece in Newsweek). The vast majority (eg. Blair Kamin in The Chicago Tribune) luxuriate in its liminality: the magic revealed when it is poised, at dusk, between light and dark. So what is there for the local vernacular to feast on?
Kamin insists that Nelson-Atkins is "important for the broader direction it suggests". But suggests to whom? Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post is of the opinion that Holl's achievement is not easily repeatable, comparing it to something like Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim, which he feels is repeatable. This is plausible, given that the origins of the mature Gehry style lie in what Hal Foster characterised as "a funky LA vernacular" of "cheap materials associated with commercial building - exposed plywood, corrugated metal siding and chain-link fencing."
No comments:
Post a Comment