Artillery Magazine

Tag: Zaha Hadid

  • Making the “Un-Private” Public – and Urban

    Making the “Un-Private” Public – and Urban

    In many ways, Monday evening’s “Un-Private Collection” panel/conversation at Disney Hall, featuring The Broad Museum’s principal architect, Elizabeth Diller, of the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro firm of architects, and moderated by the distinguished architecture critic, Paul Goldberger, was the capstone of the series – certainly to date, and possibly for some time to come, assuming the series continues in some form over the next few years. “Un-Private” might well describe the Broad Art Foundation’s ‘art practice’ over most of its life up until The Broad Museum’s debut: ‘private,’ but functioning as a quasi-public/institutional ‘lending library’ with some limited public access. Diller was joined by Eli Broad, seated next to her in the center, and flanked on her left by the Broad’s Director, Joanne Heyler.

    The Broad/DSR’s problem was two-fold – the second half of it essentially self-imposed by Eli Broad upon himself, in keeping with his ambitions not just for his Museum, but for the Bunker Hill neighborhood and the downtown area generally. The first problem was to exteriorize functions that had been distinctly ‘interior’; to make public what had previously functioned as a discreetly functioning private lending institution. The second was to contextualize it within a distinctly urban public space and, not incidentally, augment that space’s importance and vibrancy. The jury may still be out as to whether that second goal will actually be achieved; but Paul Goldberger noted that a hotdog cart had recently staked claim to a patch of sidewalk outside the Museum, which in New York street terms, was something of an endorsement of its viability as a locus of urban activity. So far the demand for admission tickets has been almost overwhelming (fully booked through January); and attendance is at capacity.

    Diller was originally surprised that her firm was invited to submit a proposal to the Broad team. “We thought we had absolutely no chance.” She summed up the principal challenges. “One was Eli. The others were architectural.” She characterized Eli’s secondary agenda in much broader terms, as an “intention to urbanize downtown L.A.” – not necessarily easy to do with what might have been conceived as a storage facility. It was the first aspect she dealt with, by “attack[ing that functional problem] head on” – to “make the storage facility the center of the building.” Another problem was its high-profile street site – its closest neighbor being, Frank Gehry’s glamourous Walt Disney Concert Hall. Goldberger (whose biography of Frank Gehry was recently released) commented, “You can’t fight with it; you won’t win.” Diller’s approach was to work with the specific configuration of the site – in contrast to Disney Hall’s dazzling and sometimes reflective surfaces, making it “more modest, not as exuberant;” “much more about absorbing light,” which was consistent with the practical objective of bringing light and people into the building. (It felt just a bit ironic to be listening to this discussion from Disney Hall.)

    Diller, along with Goldberger and Heyler, then went on to discuss the way that light would be filtered into the building – through the construction of its honeycombed ‘veil,’ taking advantage of its 45 degrees off true-north orientation and creating idiosyncratic views and perspectives from behind its windows, along with a full acre of column free space on the third floor. All took some satisfaction at the contrast between the ‘drama’ of the entrance and the escalator up and a coexisting conviviality and serenity at the third floor. “I hope you never do anything crazy up there,” said Diller.

    Diller, whose practice almost up until the time of the firm’s 2003 Whitney Museum retrospective had been largely conceptual, was even more surprised to have been ultimately selected. She noted, though, that she and Broad had met at the retrospective – which also took place at the same time work had begun on the firm’s first museum, Boston’s ICA. Heyler, in turn, has now shepherded three museum projects to completion, having been involved previously with both the Renzo Piano BCAM project at LACMA and the Zaha Hadid-designed Eli and Edythe Broad Museum at Michigan State University.

    The audience had to be struck at the conviviality and serenity that seemed to rule on stage at Disney Hall. Diller gave full credit to Eli for having “imagined it in his brain,” to begin with; but the process of designing and building the Museum was surely harrowing. Diller and Broad locked horns only briefly at the very end, but not entirely in jest. Asked what they might have done differently, Eli responded, “Well, it was a bit over budget….” Diller shot back, “I wish you’d dialed up the budget a bit.”

    Watching Diller and Heyler alongside Broad, and bearing in mind the Hadid-designed museum at MSU, I couldn’t help thinking about another woman’s pertinent advice—now a catch-phrase: Lean In. Broad certainly imagined and enabled this vision; but Diller and Heyler (along with a small army of designers and builders) were charged with executing it. It was exhilarating to bear witness to this acknowledgment of an achievement that was clearly as much their own as Eli Broad’s.

  • Some Enchanted Evening – Così fan tutte

    Some Enchanted Evening – Così fan tutte

    Mozart, like other great artists before and since, offers us a topological mirror in which to test and tease our perspectives on the universe and our fragile foothold in it.  The evocative power of his greatest work is a sublime irony, felt all the more acutely as the civilization in which it blossomed has devolved into a death star.  You feel it most poignantly in moments like the E major trio at the end of the second scene of Così fan tutte, “Soave sia il vento…. Ed ogni elemento benigno rispona ai nostri desir.”  (“May the winds be gentle…. And every element respond benignly to our wishes.”), where the voices of the sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, and the ‘philosopher’ buffo classico, Don Alfonso, rise and sway over the rolling thirds. 

    I have had the opportunity to hear and/or see many productions of Così over the last few decades – staged, filmed, radio broadcast, and recorded; but few have matched the symbolic power, wit and elegance of last night’s Los Angeles Philharmonic production (by Christopher Alden, in collaboration with Zaha Hadid, with costumes by Hussein Chalayan) at Disney Hall, the third in the Philharmonic’s three-year Mozart/Da Ponte trilogy project.  Although the vocal performances came nowhere close to eclipsing the very best (Schwarzkopf, Ludwig, Fleming, von Otter, Lott, and some of the gifted baritones that have sung Alfonso and Guglielmo, set a very high bar), the principals – all well-experienced in the roles and Mozart opera generally – were all superb; and Rod Gilfry (Don Alfonso), Philippe Sly (Guglielmo), and Rosemary Joshua (Despina) were particularly outstanding.  It didn’t hurt that Miah Persson (Fiordiligi) and Roxana Constantinescu (Dorabella) are both gorgeous and carried the Chalayan costumes beautifully.  The Philharmonic was in gorgeous voice, too (even with Maestro Dudamel and Bradley Moore, on harpisichord continuo, dragooned into the drama by Alfonso’s stage antics – they coped beautifully). 

    It’s hard to say whether it’s an eye-of-the-hurricane notion of calm amid chaos underlying the concept of the Alden-Hadid production (Hadid’s set design was supervised by Saffet Kaya Bekiroglu), or a more abstracted notion of radical contingency in which personal orbits are alternately at odd tangents with one another or in seemingly parallel universes.  (A ‘circling the drain’ metaphor occurred to me, too.)  The torqued ellipsoid spiral in what looked (under the shifting lights) at one moment like concrete, and like some pearlescent laminate at another, owed something (I thought) to Richard Serra’s Torqued Ellipses (the Toruses, too), but also to the torqued and shifting planes of Gehry’s Disney Hall itself – the whole of it seeming to echo those ‘gentle winds’ – and the Philharmonic’s gorgeous woodwinds, rarely more beautifully displayed.  Whether the eye of a hurricane, an umbilicus tethering its hapless lovers, or a death spiral, the set (which spilled out into the orchestral space with yet another elliptical curve pooling flat onto the stage) beautifully supported the deceptively cynical Da Ponte farce that Mozart’s music somehow manages to make transcendently magical.          

    Alden moves the characters almost like tokens or mathematical markers in a table game.  They seem to rotate around the curving set, as if by some remote control as much as under their own power, emerging or disappearing at one end of the spiral or another as if in a labyrinth.  Hewing closer to an ‘umbilicus’ scheme, Chalayan dresses the lovers in what look like summer camp clothes.  The men in shorts and butter yellow and blue chambray shirts, the women in schoolgirl pleated gray and white skirts and chalky Egyptian blue and salmon camp shirts.  Don Alfonso and Despina, by contrast, are all business – stylishly booted and dressed in squarish black jacket and pants.  Alfonso and Despina are always the hidden magic in this show and Alden (facilitated by Chalayan’s costuming) underscores this aspect, making of Alfonso a dissolutely capricious Oberon, and Despina into an extremely capable Puck.  They’re also a lot less hidden:  Alfonso/Gilfry commands every part of the stage (including a part of Dudamel’s podium at a couple points, breaking an interior fourth wall) and a seat just over the curving wall of the set (where he props up his legs and sprawls across a raised pedestal or console, munching from a bucket of popcorn); Despina/Joshua commands the spotlit center stage for her lecture on the fickleness of men and the pointlessness of fidelity, “In uomini…”  It’s not surprising, given their blistering vocal and acting talents, that they practically steal the show.  (I’ve always thought the character’s name is far from coincidental – between sea and (under)world; of the spine/undercarriage and the world of the dead.)  It should be emphasized, though, that all of the singers move with exceptional grace – and on steeply raked and banked surfaces that can’t be easy to negotiate, especially in boots or heels.  I almost wonder if Alden had some assistance choreographing the show.  

    The costumes morph as the opera progresses – ‘summer camp’ clothes giving way to ‘trench (warfare?) and frock coats’; and the set itself morphing and even ‘respiring’ by way of Adam Silverman’s genius chiaroscuro play of light and shadow moving across the set like storm clouds.  (Many a museum show might profit from this design magic.)  I think there may be some hydraulics beneath those embankments, too; but the rising and falling curves did not distract from the music.  For all the Minimalist, post-Beckett look of the production, it did not (eat your heart out, Robert Wilson) feel minimalist.  Set, choreography and overall production supported an idea of continuous curvilinear, rotational movement:  the tricks space play on our minds and the circuitous tricks our minds and perceptions play on us.  In this rendering of Da Ponte’s libretto, betrayal is simply one point on fidelity’s funhouse slide.  (“So wanton, light and false, my love, are you, / I am most faithless when I most am true,” was the way St. Vincent Millay put it.) 

    The universe is not a particularly hospitable place, and we almost take solace in its sublime indifference to human fates.  (“A philosopher laughs while others are weeping.”  The Phil’s translation of (I think) “Quel che suole altrui far piangere fia per lui cagion di riso….”)  After the solace and exhilaration of Friday evening’s Philharmonic performance, though, I couldn’t help thinking that a universe bereft of Mozart might be an order of cosmic betrayal even the universe might not be ready to endure.