The Guggenheim New York: Where You're Part of the Show
I almost didn’t pay to go up the spiral in the Guggenheim Museum’s big Rotunda, thinking that the experience couldn’t possibly be worth the entry price, because I had already taken my pictures, I didn’t want to see the art, and I could see the ramp from the (free) lobby. But I watched the people above watching me below; this was new. I had not seen pictures of people in the space. It is always presented as this empty formal composition; a dead sculpture. Above me it was like Whack-a-Mole: where was the next head going to appear? People were drawn to the view, compelled to look across and down just as I was compelled to look up.
Bringing my attention back to the ground floor, I saw that the bench that curves out from the wall was packed with people jealously guarding their spots. I realized that the ledge above their heads acted as shelter, protecting these people from the seven-story height and allowed them to be both a part of the experience and separate from it. Looking down, the polished concrete floor had thin metal rings, circles, laid in it of the same metal as the understated “Guggenheim Museum” title cast at the base of a curving, cantilevered wall outside. I wondered at the permanence of these two decisions, especially the rings because they create an infinite, unchanging pattern, a tattoo.
Once I was up a couple of levels and could see across, up, and down into the entire building I started to understand the space’s appeal. I was part of an interactive, shared experience; we were walking up the spiral looking at art, standing at the balcony’s edge feeling exhilarated, looking and being looked at because we were part of the unofficial and ongoing museum-goers exhibit. And because you cannot watch someone without yourself being watched, the result is a communal experience instead of an exploitative one.
The way the room’s intimacy is achieved is so subtle that most visitors probably never think to question it. The small diameter at the base of the spiral that gradually opens up to the sky; the shelter provided by the floor of the spiral above for the walkway of the spiral below; the size of the circles in the floor— the diameter proved to be slightly smaller than standing in the middle of one with my arms out to either side; a key-hole shaped doorway low enough that I could touch the top of it without effort (I am 5’4”); the repetition of the circle size, using it as a module both for the bubble skylights and for half-columns.
It is the use of the half-columns that most impressed me. Within the main space are two giant support columns that stand from the ground floor to the roof—one houses the elevator, but I don’t know about the other. To keep these structures from overwhelming the main space, Wright added half-columns the same diameter as the floor circles to the side that receives the most human contact and attention, that facing into the spiral. This simple gesture gives the human body something to respond to and, when you’re looking at it from across the room, a vertical line that your eye will follow from floor to ceiling. He even makes one of the half-columns emerge through the spiral at the lower floors so that it becomes a half-column inside the entry ramp.
Exhibit space is created between rib-walls, which are long in a direction perpendicular to the ramp and the exterior wall. Here, the floor steeply slopes up to meet the exterior wall beneath what were meant to be a skylights, but for archival reasons are fluorescent lights above glass. The rib-walls meet the exterior wall below the “skylights,” leaving an opening so light spills into adjacent exhibit spaces.
Sitting on one of the wooden circular stools Wright designed, I watched a little red-haired girl rush past, breathlessly asking her dad if they could visit again soon and listing the activities she wanted to do on that trip. Her harried dad, trying to keep up with her, replied bewildered, “Sure, but we aren’t finished with this visit, yet.” It might be the modern art that she was so excited about, but somehow I don’t think Rothko appeals to a five-year-old as much as Wright does.
From my stool, the building’s structure was completely clear. The rib-walls grew taller, getting shorter in their long direction, not sticking so far into the ramp, and curving towards one another and in towards the center in pairs, until they formed parabolic arches to support the glass dome. Horizontal concrete bands connected these pairs to keep them stable, completing the frame from which the spiral ramp cantilevered. It was as simple and elegant as that, and yet instead of a static composition it was alive with people and afternoon sunlight, a living sculpture if ever there was one.
A Public Library in a "Pedestrian Mall"
I’ve been suspicious of the new Cameron Village Regional Library, located at the end of Cameron Village Shopping Center, since they started construction. Driving by during assembly I wondered if it would be a positive place when finished worrying that it might resemble a bland corporate headquarters instead of a civic monument. When I left for Europe last summer, the exposed steel frame was too open to know what the enclosed space would be like.
When I returned, I was unsure of the merits of the two-story, green-glass façade and the aluminum shade devices above the second story. The frosted-glass awning over the sidewalk didn’t ease my misgivings. The building had office-park leanings during the day, and Architectural Record-cover aesthetics when lit from the inside at night, but I decided to reserve judgment until I could experience it for myself.
I made the pilgrimage in my car, despite its location only four blocks away, because that’s how most of Raleigh will experience the library for the first time. From the street, it is a long box, with two narrow, brick wings on either side of a projecting glass front, and in the middle, popping up through the roof, is a glass box with a deep eave.
After parking in the lower garage, I wasn’t sure how to get up to the library as no signage existed to direct me. The street sidewalk was visible, but it looked like there might be an entrance at the far end of the garage towards the alleyway. (There wasn’t.) At the surface parking-lot entrance from Clark Avenue’s sidewalk, I was greeted by a sign bolted to a freshly whitewashed brick planter that declared, “SHOPPING CENTER PARKING FOR PATRONS ONLY.” And then in smaller letters, “VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED AT OWNER’S EXPENSE.” This sign made it clear why the library has its own small parking lot separate from Cameron Village. It should read, “LIBRARY PATRONS STAY OUT.” Or maybe more accurately, “BUY SOMETHING OR LEAVE.”
The sign reveals the pedestrian mall illusion; you aren’t really supposed to park your car and walk from shop to shop on the wide, brick sidewalks, or (god forbid) from the shops to the library. You’re supposed to use the acres of asphalt, parking your car directly in front of the shop you are to visit and afterwards drive to the next shop on your itinerary. This expectation is exceedingly clear when trying to walk from the street sidewalk to the shopping center sidewalk, as I did, where there is no choice but to use the driveway, hoping the cars won’t hit you as they enter. Cameron Village would do better to welcome library patrons (and real pedestrians), to convert them to shopping center patrons, though it is more likely that the same people are both at different times.
The pedestrian experience improves a little upon approaching the building. The library’s parking lot extends up to the patterned sidewalk, perhaps mistakenly so given the concrete planters and black lines negating where three parking places had blocked the entrance. The awning, in combination with the three-foot-high lights lining the sidewalk, almost has the sheltered feeling of an arcade. But the automatic sliding-glass doors of the entry and the vestibule fail to differentiate the building from a grocery-store.
On the inside, however, the external hostility and the glass façade’s dominance are surprisingly absent. Instead, the building is open around a dramatic three-story atrium housing an attempt at a grand stair and a glass elevator. Glass railings along the upper balconies allow views into the adjoining spaces.
On the second floor, at the south end of the atrium, the façade is a comfortable companion due its separation from the activity of the parking lot and the sidewalk. Looking out from this spot, you can see that the useless-looking shade devices work quite well because of their airplane-wing-shaped fins. Indirect light is abundant, both from the shaded windows and from a continuous light-shelf above that doubles as a soffit.
On the north side of the second floor is a view-window that looks out over the access alley and the two apartment buildings on the other side of it, with their little lawns. The “view” is dominated by power lines and the concrete corridor. Cherry Huffman Architects probably didn’t realize this would be the view, but the result is an honesty of context. This is where the building is; this is what a lot of Raleigh looks like. Here is a civic building that acknowledges its context allowing for discussion of the built environment.
During my visit, middle-school kids were excitedly positioning themselves in various locations opposite each other and on different levels to explore how they could be physically separate but visually connected. Though over-scaled, the interior of the new library is shockingly communal, contrary to the inhospitable Cameron Village Shopping Center and Raleigh’s lack of a public realm.
