My friend Darren Herman helped me think about this post. He sent me this deck along with some thoughts. This slide from Darren’s deck is a good place to start this discussion:

It is true that the vast majority of consumer web apps have been and continue to be monetized with advertising. On mobile that is less true, but becoming more true every day.

There are all sorts of ways to generate advertising revenue online. Here are the entries under the advertising category in our revenue model hackpad:

This list is most certainly not exhaustive but it does cover the most common advertising approaches and you can see how many there are on the Internet. There has been a lot of innovation in this sector in the past 18 years since the first banner ads were created and sold.

The famous Luma Partners slide shows just how complex the online ad market has become over time.

And this market map is by no means exhaustive either. Online advertising is a big and complicated business.

I would break up advertising into two big buckets; ads that are sold and ads that are bought. The first is a relationship business, requires a direct salesforce or a salesforce that you can tap into, and will bring a higher revenue per impression in most cases. The latter is a data business, automated by machines and software, is a volume game and will bring a lower revenue per impression in most cases. Much of the online advertising market is moving inexorably toward the latter category, for good and bad.

The reaction to this move away from high value “brand” advertising to commoditized and programmatic advertising is native ad formats and advertising models. I have written about native advertising at AVC before and am a big fan of this approach. Examples of native advertising are promoted tweets on twitter and radar and spotlight on tumblr. In both examples, the ad unit is the same atomic unit of content as the users create in the service. I think we will see more and more of this as the value of the impression is driven lower and lower in the programmatic model.

When you think about an advertising revenue model, you need to think about one of two things; scale or niche. Scale means hundreds of millions of impressions a month or more. Niche means a valuable audience that advertisers will pay a premium for. But even if you are going for the niche approach, you will still need to have a lot of impressions. Here is why:

Advertising is sold many ways, including:

CPM: Cost per thousand impressions

CPE: Cost per engagement

CPA: Cost per acquisition

CPC: Cost per click

Sponsorship: Fixed cost for a fixed program

[thanks to Darren for that list. I took it directly from his email to me]

With the possible exception of Sponsorship, all of these methods will converge to the same number. For example if you sell a click for $1/click, and one out of every hundred page views turns into a click then you are selling a page view for $1/100 (1 cent), and that turns into a $10 CPM (10/1000).

CPMs have been in decline for years on the Internet. That’s because the Internet keeps on creating more and more inventory. There is no scarcity. And as a result the supply/demand clearing price just keeps going lower and lower. Ten years ago, a $10 CPM was acheivable. Today, you will be lucky to get a $1 CPM. A $1 CPM means that 10 million impressions will generate $10,000. That’s enough revenue to sustain a one or possibly two person business but not much more. You will need at least 100 million impressions and ideally more than 1bn impressions per month to have an interesting advertising supported business at scale. 1bn impressions is a lot of users using your service a lot.

Niche will work at slightly less scale. If you have a unique and valuable audience, you might be able to get a $5 to $10 CPM. So you will need 100 million impressions per month instead of 1bn impressions. That’s still a lot of super valuable users engaging a lot.

If you are going with a scale model and you have a service that has that level of inventory to sell, then you have the choice of building a sales force inside your company or using a third party to sell your inventory. You don’t need just one third party. You can use many of them. That’s where the Luma slide (above) comes into effect. There is an entire industry built to take the inventory you give to a third party and put it through endless machines and algorithms before it is shown to an end user. I will not get into this in more detail here but Darren’s slide deck, which I linked to above, has some good information on that. When you use a third party to sell your advertising you can give away anywhere from 50% of ad revenue to 20% of ad revenue. Most commonly it is somewhere in between.

If you are going with the niche or native approach, you will need your own sales force and you will need to hire a leader for that sales force (a VP Sales or Chief Revenue Officer) who can build and lead that team. The sales leader is a critical hire. There are people who do this for a living, who really understand how to put a team together and generate advertising revenue predictably and reliably, and they are highly compensated and are worth every penny. Do not skimp on this if you are building your own sales force. You may choose to build your own sales force if you are going with a scale model, but you don’t need to do that right away.

In the interest of keeping this post a reasonable length, I will end here. I highly recommend diving into the comments where we will discuss and debate this post. I will conclude by saying that an advertising model is a viable revenue model option if you are building a service that has a lot of scale. But if you don’t have millions of users a month, you should think hard before going in this direction. There is a limited amount of ad dollars out there (except CPA budgets which are in theory infinite) and more and more services trying to tap into them every day which is why advertising rates on the Internet seem to be in permanent and systemic decline.

The post Online Advertising Explained appeared first on The Faster Times.

The MAK Center at the Rudolph Schindler house in West Hollywood is about to complete a three-evening series of rare architecture film screenings. The series is curated by Thom Anderson, director and writer of Los Angeles Plays Itself, which contrasts cinematic depictions of Los Angeles against its architectural and human realities.

The salty Anderson, currently a professor at California Institute of the Arts, was an excellent choice of curator for “Architecture and Cinema: New and Rare Films,” whose final evening of screenings is Nov. 8.

Last month, he paired Maillarts Brücken (Maillart’s Bridges), a documentary on the bridges and structures of Swiss civil engineer Robert Maillart, with Une Ville á Chandigarh (A City at Chandigarh), a social-realist commentary on the modernist capital of the Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, where the influence of Le Corbusier is stronger than any other place in the world.

His wry, rambling and detached observations when introducing the films nevertheless betray a passion for the work. While connecting Le Corbusier’s legacy to several Los Angeles developments such as Park La Brea, Wyvernwood and Village Green, he said of Chandigarh: “I’ve heard the rooms were small…but then, people were shorter then…many architects are famously short, including Frank Lloyd Wright…perhaps we need taller architects for our times…”

The juxtaposition of the films is a contrast in narrative style, more than of architectural style.

Bridge over the River Arve, Robert Maillart

In Maillarts Brücken, Heinz Emigholz literally lets the bridges speak for themselves. The 25-minute film has no narration whatsoever. Instead, we spy the graceful arch bridges through arabesques of branches, as in a nature documentary. With only the sounds of babbling brooks and chirping birds, and the occasional automobile to accompany us, the “you are there” feeling of discovery is palpable. The decision to show this film on a flimsy screen in the outdoor courtyard of the Schindler House provided an extra dose of unplanned verisimilitude, as the evening’s Santa Ana winds whipped pine needles down in front of the idyllic Swiss scenes.

Salginatobel Bridge, Robert Maillart

The bridges are at once strikingly modern, considering they were all built before 1940, and yet eternal, as they occasionally carry aqueducts with a sculptural strength reminiscent of Roman times. The occasional overgrowth of green moss affirms their permanence and soothes their chiseled lines, endearing us as much to the structures as the discovery of Nazi swastika graffiti on their undersides feels like someone shouting in our ears.

Secretariat building, Chandigarh, Le Corbusier (Mark Hadden)

In A City at Chandigarh, the narrative is the focus of the film, and if it’s not shouted, exactly, political commentary is always at our side, gripping us tightly on the arm like a brittle doyenne. Swiss filmmaker Alain Tanner visited Chandigarh in 1966, while it was still under construction, and, through narrator John Berger, best known for the BBC-TV series Ways of Seeing, takes every opportunity to agitate for the social change that he clearly feels has not radicalized the landscape the way the architecture has. He’d get his chance with the student uprisings of France in 1968, which he later fictionalized in a later collaboration with Tanner, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in The Year 2000.

Every opportunity is taken to ponder aloud at the aspirations of Nehru’s India, while contrasting the irony of the starkly modernist forms rising from the muck as they are built by armies of women carrying wet poultice in wicker baskets on their heads, as they have done for 4,000 years.

“Why don’t they ask for more?” Berger asks of the Indian people.

Perhaps in an effort not to appeal condescending, equal skepticism is reserved for the West.

“Why learn French? Why learn mathematics? The Empire is over. Rub your belly and groan, and they will understand.”

Not strictly a condemnation of a rationalist Western imposition on an unruly subcontinent, Tanner and Berger’s commentary also looks approvingly at the adaptations of the locals. The orderly column grid of a building in the central square is festooned with colorful family-run shops offering tailoring, foodstuffs and an array of minor services. It’s certainly more inspiring than the images the world began to associate with Corbu’s “Tower in the Park” visions as applied to public housing in the West, epitomized in the destruction of Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis – the violent intersection of first-world ambitions, second-world resentments and third-world maintenance.

Of course, there are throughlines.

The contrast between chaotic, steamy and shambolic India of Ville and cool, civilized Switzerland in Brücken sets the tone of contrast between the films and their subjects, but other aspects of the films work against the conflict. Maillart and Le Corbusier shared a belief in the expressive power of concrete. The interior of the architecture school at Chandigarh is not so different from Maillart’s water filtration plant in Rorshach, which both take advantage of swooping, board-formed concrete ceilings and curved beams.

Filter building, Rorshach. Robert Maillart

Architecture School at Chandigarh, Le Corbusier

There is a notion of progress in the work of both men; in Maillart it was all about solving structural problems with daringly shaped concrete forms; in Le Corbusier, it was largely about using daring concrete forms to set down a new social order. Late in his life, Corbu must have been surprised that India would be the place where the Radiant City came closest to realization). The effort to impose order and conquer nature is evident in both as well. In Maillart’s case, the challenge is to span gorges with graceful structures that somehow look like they’ve always been there. For Le Corbusier, challenges of extreme humidity and intense sunlight drove him to create elaborate shading devices calculated for the precise orientation of each building. But in Tanner and Berger’s telling, the prime effort of Chandigarh is to impose order on, and conquer the mess of humanity, in a place where circumstances demand adaptations Westerners can barely comprehend.

Sunshades, Secretariat, Chandigarh, Le Corbusier. (Mark Hadden)

The last part of the series promises to be just as politically charged, if not more so. Anderson will show The Future Will Not Be Capitalist by Sasha Pirker, a portrait of the French Communist Headquarters by Oscar Neimeyer and Our Cities, Our Rights, Jean-Louis Bertucelli and Henri Lefebvre’s 1975 manifesto on the “battle for urban space,” which promises to have an eerie resonance in the age of Occupy. Anderson cryptically suggests that the Schindler House showing of Our Cities, Our Rights, may be the last ever, as the film was never transferred to DVD and one of its last known prints will be running through the projector.

For those who missed the first two sessions at Kings Road, there will be at least one more opportunity to get some Architecture a la Anderson – Reconversão, Anderson’s own chronicle of the work of Portuguese architect Eduardo Souto de Moura, will be shown at REDCAT on Nov. 19.

Architecture and Cinema: New and Rare Films shows at the MAK Center at Schindler House, Kings Road, West Hollywood, CA, Nov. 8

Reconversão shows at REDCAT, Disney Hall, Los Angeles, Nov. 19

The post Play It Again, Thom appeared first on The Faster Times.

Regen Projects, by Michael Maltzan

Art is of course, sold here too. Galleries have thrived here for decades in places such as Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, Venice, and downtown. But new venues for selling art, characterized by impressive size and a degree of architectural distinction, have been cropping up all over the vast metropolis. Like other building types, the leaders of the pack have been spreading horizontally as standalone buildings, as if lording this traditional advantage of Los Angeles over their crowded Manhattan compatriots. The 21,000 square-foot Blum & Poe gallery by Escher GuneWardena near Culver City has been credited with kicking off the current wave in 2009.

Regen Projects ’ space by Michael Maltzan has just opened to much fanfare, having moved from West Hollywood to the until-very-recently no-man’s (but many-trannie’s) land of Santa Monica Blvd. east of La Brea. Its opening show included luminaries such as Catherine Opie, Anish Kapoor, Matthew Barney and Raymond Pettibon.

Not to be outdone, Perry Rubenstein, a recent New York transplant, has opened a 7,000 square-foot space by wHY Architecture just a few blocks up Highland Ave. from Regen, with an opening Shepard Fairey / Neil Young show.

Perry Rubenstein’s exterior is as onyx-black – like a box of very expensive cologne – as Regen’s is alabaster. The reflective double glass doors – which are reminiscent of the rolled windows of some rapper’s Bentley – practically serve to prevent the eastern sunlight from frying the receptionists. Nevertheless, they seem “very L.A.”

Reflective exterior doors at Perry Rubenstein gallery.

Inside, the walls are typically white, but there are several other twists that add character to the space. There are two main spaces, with an interstitial gallery, office and service space in between. To the south of the central space is an open-air planted space, with outsize 16-foot doors leading to each of the three other spaces. Soon, the courtyard will be graced by a staircase leading to a roof with stunning views of Hollywood and its titular sign, says Kulapat Yantrasast, principal of wHY.

The main gallery space at Perry Rubenstein.

“The outdoor space provides a transition between the two main galleries in a way that is chapel-like,” he says. “Perry wanted a gallery that is truly L.A., not an L.A. gallery that tries to look like it is in Chelsea. He wanted the L.A. indoor-outdoor spirit to be there, and for the rooftop to be a public space. He wants people to enjoy the art, but also to enjoy their time in the gallery.”

The smaller gallery at the rear of the building.

The team is scrambling to finish the staircase in time for a showing of Mike Kelley’s “Deodorized Central Mass With Satellites,” comprised of brightly colored hanging clods of stuffed animals and a constant spritz of air freshener, like the inside of some insane Frankensteined grandma / real estate agent’s El Dorado. The recently deceased local artist created a garish satire of superficial American consumer values, which struck owner Perry Rubenstein as being a particularly fitting show for his Los Angeles outpost.

The courtyard provides a "chapel-like" interstitial space between the two galleries.

“Mike Kelley captures not only the essence of culture, but American culture specifically,” Rubenstein writes on the gallery’s blog. “He has a grasp on this modern consumerist culture in a way that is perhaps still barely understood by the culture itself. No wonder his work traveled so easily to Europe where the perspective on American habits and trends tends to be much more aware through the benefit of distance, outside of the seduction of context.”

Life, art, and architecture in Los Angeles often happen without the “seduction of context.” A French Chalet sits next to a Tudor manse, which sits next to a Spanish revival. No personal fantasy goes unrealized. Yet, even here, the practice of restraint is the architect’s great challenge when displaying art is the main object.

“The gallery design is like a matchmaker, allowing art and people to connect, without placing much between them,” Yantrasast says. “The architecture should not be overbearing, like a father looking down and saying, ‘why aren’t you two getting along?’”

Yantrasast had to find a subtle way of distinguishing the space, in a city not known for subtlety, for a gallery expected to hold challenging and brazen art. He found it while standing on the roof. The skylights in the gallery are in the exact shape of the chamfered rectangle “O”s of the Hollywood sign.

The skylights in the gallery are fashioned in the shape of the Hollywood sign's "O."

“It just came to me when we were up on the roof looking right into the Hollywood sign, which looked so close,” he says. “I thought the ‘O’ shape would be perfect for the room size we were planning down below. It is also quite subtle as we insert this ‘O’ within the wood rafters of the roof structure.”

Having lived in both cities for almost an equal amount of time, my perception that Los Angeles has an inferiority complex with respect to New York, and that New York was indifferent to its West Coast cousin, has changed over time. I no longer get the sense that Los Angeles is trying to compete with New York, but it’s interesting to observe how many cheap shots about L.A. being a “cultural wasteland” persist to this day, even in the pages of the New York Times, which should know better. These days, the anxiety seems to be mostly back East.

The courtyard will host a stairway to the roof, which promises to be a popular event venue.

But I also share the Times’ surprise that the Jerry Bruckheimer-like ambitions of New Yorker Jeffrey Deitch and his controversial reign at the Museum of Contemporary Art have gotten such a chilly reception from the L.A. art scene’s established players, including John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, Opie, and Ed Ruscha, who have defected en masse from MoCA’s board in protest. If anything, his fixation on “blockbuster,” crowd-pleasing shows would seem to be perfectly at home in the stereotypical superficial L.A.

The roof deck promises to be a popular event site.

Perhaps something is happening. The physical concentration of humanity that makes New York so great has created a real-estate market increasingly hostile to art production, if not consumption. While people have always headed west to sooth their wanderlust, reinvent themselves and seek the sun, it now seems the art world is experiencing a shift of gravity substantial enough to put down roots in L.A.’s rapidly densifying, dizzying soil.

“Everyone in New York is talking about the L.A. art scene,” says Perry Rubenstein’s Los Angeles director, Jennifer Holmes. “It seems like there is an energy here.”

When Yantrasast created the two gallery spaces, he said he wanted to “diminish the hierarchy” between the smaller and larger spaces by placing the open courtyard between them. Through projects like these – one throwing down roots for a West Coast outpost of a powerful New York gallery, another planting one of Los Angeles’ most reputable galleries into the city’s scruffy midsection – it seems that two other hierarchies are being diminished: the absolute monarchy New York has held over the art market in the United States, and the preference of galleries for Los Angeles’ tonier Westside.

Then again, returning to the convenience of the stereotype: Asked how Perry Rubenstein and wHY came to choose the space, a former photo lab, Yantrasast says, “The great thing is, it has a lot of parking.”

The post The Seduction of Context, Diminished Hierarchy, and Plenty of Parking appeared first on The Faster Times.

TWA Flight Center, JFK Airport, NYC, 1961 (Wally Gobetz photo)

Eero Saarinen was the architect of some of the most iconic buildings of the 20th century, doing as much as anyone to define the Jet Age. He may also have been the ultimate Organization Man. The clients for whom he designed major buildings read like the acronymic roll call of the titans of industry – TWA, CBS, IBM, GM.

The graceful, primordial forms of his TWA Flight Center at John F. Kennedy (Idlewild) International Airport in New York, the Dulles International Airport terminal in Chantilly, VA, and the Jefferson Expansion Memorial (Gateway Arch) in St. Louis are symbols of American postwar optimism as potent as a ’57 Cadillac or Jackie Kennedy’s wardrobe.

Gateway Arch, St. Louis, d. 1947, b. 1965 (Bev Sykes)

Lesser known is Saarinen’s work for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the CIA, during World War II. Saarinen created innovative 3-D maps, backlit panels for transparencies, bomb disassembly manuals, and the war room that was later satirized in Dr. Strangelove. He never wrote about the work, as it was classified.

Office of Strategic Services Situation Room, 1942 (Yale University archives; photo by Mina Marefat)

Lesser known still is the struggle contemporary architectural historians have undertaken to preserve his original drawings and tell his story from a human level.

It’s this latter story and its artifacts that make the exhibition “Eero Saarinen: A Reputation for Innovation,” as compelling as it is. Mina Marefat, RA, PhD, an architect and design historian in Washington, DC, curated the exhibition, which originated at the Finnish Embassy in Washington, traveled to the Nordic Heritage Museum in Seattle and currently resides at the Architecture + Design (A+D) Museum in Los Angeles, where it will run until Jan. 3, 2013.

Now It’s Personal

It’s clear the project is a highly personal one for Marefat, who was born in Iran, emigrated to the U.S. and studied architecture at MIT and Harvard. The exhibition takes care to show the human face of a man who defined the look of corporate America.

“When TWA lost my luggage I was not as upset as I should have been,” she says. “I was in awe, because the first building I saw in the USA was Saarinen’s terminal.”

Among other vignettes, the exhibition details the romance that developed between New York Times art critic Aline Louchheim and the subject of her article, “Now Saarinen the Son,” which ran in the Times Magazine in April 1953. Louchheim had gone to Michigan to interview the architect about his recently completed GM Technical Center, a disciplined set of steel and glass boxes enlivened by a domed demonstration building, floating staircases over interior pools, and colored glazed brick and exterior pipes. The story of his time there includes functional innovation (using the neoprene gaskets he saw in use on car windows to create seamless window walls on buildings) and charming gaffes (he drove a Chrysler onto the campus and was asked to please select a vehicle from GM’s inventory).

The Styling Dome, GM Technical Center, 1948-1956 (Ezra Stoller)

Even before the swooping forms that defined his later work were created, Louchheim wrote of Saarinen, “He brings a personal expressiveness to functional integrity.”

There is personal expressiveness in the Case Study House #9, for John Entenza in Pacific Palisades. Here, a fireplace recalls the centrality of the hearth to Finnish life, and a curving couch surrounding it, amidst the rectilinear gridlines and sliding panels of “outside-in” California modernism.

Case Study House #9, Pacific Palisades, CA, 1949 (James Vaughan)

There is personal expressiveness in the chairs he designed for Knoll, some of which are still produced today. The chairs fused new, industrially processed, lightweight materials with intuitively organic shapes, and were given names such as “Womb” and “Tulip.”

Womb Chair for Knoll, 1946

Saarinen’s personal expressiveness impressed Louchheim, who was taken with the slow and deliberate speaking style of a man who seemed “almost touchingly surprised at his own levity.” Saarinen divorced sculptor Lillian Swan and married Louchheim the same year. A telegram from Louchheim declined an offer to write another piece on Saarinen for the Des Moines Register, saying, “Since I am marrying Eero Saarinen on Monday I think it tasteless for me to make further public appraisals of his architecture. Thanks any way.”

But Louchheim continued to advocate for Saarinen in other critical ways, according to Marefat. The Vassar alum got Saarinen a commission to design a dorm there, and played a role in his contract to design the CBS “Black Rock” headquarters in Manhattan (even though she was an NBC correspondent). She also published the first collection of his work after his death in 1961.

Noyes House, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, 1958

To The Rescue

Ardent advocacy returned to the aid of Saarinen’s memory just in time. Given the iconic nature of his work, it’s surprising how difficult it is to obtain Saarinen’s original drawings. The week before Thanksgiving, 1989, Marefat was a researcher at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and had become fascinated with the unbuilt Smithsonian Gallery of Art, commissioned in 1939 by the New Deal administration. That’s right: Congress mandated the creation of an art museum, an act almost impossible to imagine in a climate where even Big Bird can’t get a break.

Smithsonian Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 1939 (unbuilt) (Smithsonian Institution)

Saarinen designed the Gallery with his father, Eliel, also a well-regarded architect in Finland and the U.S., and his brother-in-law, J. Robert F. Swanson. The gallery would have played a counterpoint to the National Gallery by displaying contemporary works of living artists, but was scuttled at the onset of World War II. A close cousin to the only other contemporary art museum at the time, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the sleek rectilinear form would have stood where the current National Air and Space Museum stands, which is somewhat fitting given Saarinen’s deep relationship with American aviation.

The powers that be at the National Museum were not as captivated with the drawings as Marefat. After months of inquiries, when a call came that the 4-foot high stack of 36-by-48-inch drawings were at a General Services Administration (GSA) storage facility but had exceeded their 50-year destruction threshold, no one was interested in authorizing Marefat to use a museum-owned vehicle to retrieve them.

“I prevailed by threatening them with a Washington Post story about how they let these drawings be destroyed,” Marefat says. In a snowstorm, Marefat raced to the facility in Suitland, MD. Once the drawings were safely in hand, Marefat called the Post anyway, resulting in a feature piece in January 1991, sealing the Smithsonian’s interest in the collection.

The 1949 Case Study house was extensively restored in the early 1990s, but here again, Marefat had to chase down reluctant parties. The renderings sent by a Santa Barbara architect that had performed the modifications were copies and unusable as source material, Marefat says. The Eames Foundation refused to part with their drawings. Marefat finally found the originals in the Library of Congress.

The Principles of the Things

Unlike Le Corbusier or Frank Lloyd Wright, in Saarinen there is little of the egomania or logorrhea characteristic of prominent 20th century architects.

After giving a lilting, deliberate soliloquoy during a presentation, Saarinen was asked if he could speak any faster. He said, “No, but I can say less.”

Though fully committed to the idea of total design integration, Saarinen didn’t scold people for moving chairs in buildings he’d designed. He also found room for others to collaborate, including fellow Cranbrook Academy student Charles Eames on furniture, first wife Lillian Swann on sculpture and Alexander Girard on murals inside the Gateway Arch. Industrial designer Raymond Loewy designed the Union News coffee shop at TWA Flight Center.

Dulles International Airport Terminal, Chantilly, VA, 1962

Of Dulles, he said, “Maybe it will explain what I believe about architecture.”

But Saarinen had already succinctly done so, with six “pillars” that informed each of his projects:

Respect for Function: “It is deeply embedded in me. Sometimes, the problem is ripe for an entirely new, functional approach.”

Integration with the Environment: “The conviction that a building cannot be placed on a site, but that a building grows from its site, is another principle in which I believe. I see architecture not as the building alone, but the building in relation to its surroundings, whether natural or manmade.”

Structural integrity: “It is a potent and lasting principle and I would never get away from it. To express structure, however, is not an end in itself. It is only when the structure can contribute to the total and other principles that it is important.”

Unity of design: “Architecture must make a strong emotional impact on man. Once one embarks on a concept for a building, this concept has to be exaggerated and overstated and repeated in every part, so that wherever you are, inside or outside, the building sings the same message.”

Expression of meaning: “Conveying significant meaning is part of the inspirational purpose of architecture and therefore, for me, it is a fundamental principle of our art.”

Awareness of our time: “The thinking and technology of our time is for me an ever-present challenge. I want always to search out the possibilities in new materials of our time and give them a proper place in architectural design.”

Awareness of Our Time

Though the basic principles are timeless, nevertheless some of Saarinen’s work is so redolent of the optimism of Atomic America, and so hard done by contemporary demands, that it’s not always easy to appreciate how revolutionary the “retro” design was for its time.

GM Pavilion, containing Futurama exhibit, New York World’s Fair, 1939 (Corbis)

The General Motors pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair, designed with Norman Bel Geddes, was one of the most popular in the park. The swooping ramps and forms suggested motion and freedom, and its huge diorama of 500,000 structures, over which visitors sailed in motorized chairs, laid forth a new, auto-centric world of prosperity and synthetic materials for the home. It’s better known by the name of the ride inside: Futurama. At the time, Business Week rhapsodized, “It unfolds a prophecy of cities, towns, and countrysides served by a comprehensive road system.” In other words, the Interstate Highway System and suburbia, almost 20 years before both hit full swing. That particular prophecy was Bel Geddes’, but Saarinen’s architecture is inextricably associated with “retro” futurism, satirized in the Matt Groening cartoon of the same name.

TWA Flight Center Interior (Michelle Young, Untapped Cities)

The TWA Flight Center, now surrounded by the contemporary JetBlue terminal, but no longer a functioning part of it, hosted a wide range of firsts. It was the first terminal with enclosed passenger jetways, closed circuit TV, a central public address system, baggage carousels, and an electronic schedule board. Of course, Saarinen cannot be blamed for his failure to anticipate the huge changes in the nature of air travel that would come in just a few decades, from the advent of the hub system, to the demise of flag carriers like TWA and PanAm, to the demeaning security procedures we now endure.

TWA Flight Center Interior, with first electronic departure board (Michelle Young, Untapped Cities)

The Flight Center, protected as a landmark and recently renovated by Beyer Blinder Belle, still sits empty. It may see rebirth yet as a boutique hotel, but given the radical change in program and everything that now surrounds the structure, it will be an enormous challenge to make the hotel design sympathetic to Saarinen’s vision: “We wanted passengers passing through the building to experience a fully-designed environment in which each part arises from another and everything belongs to the same formal world.”

Mobile Lounge, Dulles International Airport (James Vaughan)

The “mobile lounges” of Dulles, giant wheeled machines that rise up to a plane’s door, were intended to save people long walks in the elements across the tarmac – “take the people to the plane, rather than take the plane to the people” – a problem that jetways obviated a few years later. Furnished to accommodate the Jet Set, it was actually intended that people would sip martinis as the mobile lounges made their plodding way to the planes, according to Marefat. As aircraft became larger, the “loungier” furnishings were stripped away, rendering the vehicles mere buses that stressed out travelers who couldn’t get out of one metal tube and into another fast enough. Soon, an underground train will take over most of the mobile lounges’ duties.

Design of the tram for the Gateway Arch (National Park Service)

To ascend the Gateway Arch, one boards an ingenious tram, designed by Richard B. Bowser, a part-train, part-elevator contraption that moves over a system of racks and cogs, swinging gently on an independently rotating axles as it moves up, then over, then up. To me, even as a child, the jaunty white, globular carriages, which placed five passengers face to face as in a European train compartment, resembled nothing so much as Mork’s egg ship from Mork and Mindy. But even as these warhorses begin to break down more frequently under the strain of more than 4 million visitors per year, nothing gets in the way of the symbolic power and simplicity of the monument itself.

Gateway Arch Tram Interior (Gordon Wolford)

It’s hard to believe Saarinen would not have had a sense of humor about his place in the canon. One of his first chair designs for Knoll was labeled, “Chair, or the Like.” He also acknowledged the effect his late hours might have on others when he painted a picture depicting his office as “Eero’s All-Nite Diner.” The pipe-smoking Finn epitomized the ambition, yet softened the edges of an age in thrall to the shock of the new.

“Eero Saarinen: A Reputation for Innovation” runs through Jan. 3, 2013, at the Architecture + Design (A+D) Museum in Los Angeles.

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"Brutalism is Beautiful" - Kim Barker - Preservation in Pink

This fall has brought me two auspicious pieces of mail. On Sept. 21, a solicitation to join AARP arrived. This turns out to be the same day that Radiohead’s “Creep,” the caterwaul of self-loathing that defined my high school experience, was released 20 years ago, in 1992. It really made me feel my age. It felt as if the world was trying to tell me something, and I had it double confirmed in the next week, when a copy of Northwestern University’s alumni magazine materialized at my parents’ house, where all of my donation-soliciting mail continues to go.

Normally I ignore this publication, because I do not enjoy reading about my peers who are so massively successful that they have found it obligatory to “give back” to the university that extracted – and in my case, will continue to extract until, and possibly beyond my death – nearly six figures during their collegiate years. But never mind all that.

On the cover of the Fall alumni magazine was a carved wooden owl, which I recognized from the school’s Deering Library, accompanied by the clever tag line, “A Who’s Who of Northwestern Buildings.” Northwestern, like many campuses, is a hodgepodge of late-19th-century eclecticism, Collegiate Gothic, and a substantial dose of late-modern “Brutalist” architecture. It’s ironic that Northwestern should now be going through an inventory of its buildings for the pleasure of its alumni and contributors, because it has also been sending mail to those same “friends” asking them for their support in its quest to tear down one of its more architecturally noteworthy structures.

A Teardown?

My alma mater is at the center of a controversy regarding the place of Brutalist architecture in the contemporary landscape. Northwestern Memorial Hospital has vacated and plans to demolish the Prentice Women’s Hospital, a cloverleaf-shaped concrete edifice with “pods” that cantilever off a cylindrical core, to build a research facility in its place, and connect it via sky bridge to an adjacent building. Completed in 1975 on Northwestern’s professional school campus in downtown Chicago, it was designed by Bertrand Goldberg, who also designed the corncob-shaped Marina City and the serpentine River City projects along the Chicago River.

The original Prentice Women's Hospital, Bertrand Goldberg, Chicago, 1975

Considered an innovation in hospital design when it opened, Prentice’s floor plans were column-free, allowing maximum configurability, and placed nurses’ stations close to the patient rooms that surrounded them, allowing nurses to keep an eye on patients without traversing long corridors. It was also revolutionary for allowing more family-oriented childbirths, putting to rest the old nervous-father-smoking-in-the-lobby tradition.

The revolutionary floor plan of Prentice, as seen in Metropolis magazine via the Bertrand Goldberg Archive at the Art Institute of Chicago

Prentice is also recognized as one of the most sophisticated engineering feats of its day, using early CAD software and concrete-reinforcement techniques previously reserved only for dams and waterworks. This fact is unsurprising, as the oval-windowed building looks like something you’d use to plug a drain, and that’s not helping its cause.

But Landmarks Illinois, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the World Heritage Fund, and 90 architects, including 10 winners of the Pritzker Prize (founded by Jay and Cindy Pritzker of the Hyatt hotel chain, headquartered in Chicago) are interested in the cause, and have signed a letter to Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel (a Northwestern graduate) imploring him to save Prentice. Not that it’s really his decision – he appoints members to the City’s Landmarks commission, but is not a decision-maker. The decision has been pushed back repeatedly, and did not make the commission’s latest agenda on October 4. The next scheduled meeting is Nov. 1.

Emmanuel has also reportedly received letters from architecture firms such as Holabird & Root, HOK and DeStefano Partners, all of which have done work on the Northwestern Campus recently and doubtless hope to do so in the future, encouraging him to let NU tear down the building. Editorials in the Chicago Tribune have repeatedly advocated NU’s plan. The Tribune’s managing editor and co-owner from 1854 to 1864, Joseph Medill, is a former Chicago mayor and Northwestern’s school of journalism is named after him.

Oh sure, tear down that other ugly building, because monolithic '70s buildings can't be reused.

The Chicago Sun-Times, whose offices were razed to make way for the Trump Tower, got a new headquarters in the Apparel Center, a stunningly banal concrete pile. After first arguing that the Commission on Chicago Landmarks place consideration of Prentice at the top of the agenda, the Sun-Times has now also picked up the pitchfork. The wielder is none other than Neil Steinberg, who has in the past reserved quite a bit of bitterness toward the alma mater we share.

Truthiness Be Told

For its own part, Northwestern is promulgating what alum Stephen Colbert famously calls “truthiness.” Unquestionably, Prentice is no longer in the medical vanguard, its low ceilings prohibiting the advanced ventilation and data systems in contemporary facilities, among other shortcomings. NU has argued that Prentice can’t be used for any other purpose, and that there’s nowhere else suitable to build its 500,000 SF replacement, which is expected to pull in $300 million in research grants annually. But that’s just patently untrue – many people never gave Prentice a second glance before the Lakeside Veterans Administration Hospital directly across the street was demolished in 2008, giving NU several acres of vacant land to build anything it wants. Though there is validity to the idea that allowing researchers to mix in close proximity helps accelerate medical research, it’s not as if extending the skybridge a few more feet across a street is going to destroy that potential.

"Nope, can't think of anywhere else we could put that new building." (Nancy Stone, Chicago Tribune)

But that’s not how NU is playing it: its director of the medical school, Eric G. Neilson, titled an editorial in the Sun-Times “Save Prentice or Save Lives,” in which he bluntly stated, “Chicago has a choice. It can save a building. Or it can save lives, provide thousands of jobs and bring in millions of research dollars.” According to Neilson, the vacant lot is owned by Northwestern Memorial Hospital, which “is a separate entity committed to using that land for future patient care. The university strongly supports those plans,” he said, without specifying what those plans are. Not to put too fine a point on it, NU also ran a full-page ad in the Tribune with an adorable baby’s face, asking, “Where will her cure be found?”

Northwestern has announced that it will sponsor a design competition to create a world-class building for its new research facility that would replace the old Prentice, but considering the lack of adventurousness in previous downtown buildings, including the new Prentice, that seems a dubious bargain to accept. And when Renzo Piano, Frank Gehry, Jeanne Gang, and dozens of other prominent architects are standing in opposition to the demolition plan, who exactly will be entering this competition? Fortunately, the Chicago Architecture Club is also sponsoring a competition for re-use proposals for old Prentice.

Addressing SCI-ARC last month, Vanity Fair architecture critic Paul Goldberger said of Prentice, “The university has argued that preservationists are somehow ‘against medical research.’ That’s utterly disingenuous and a false dichotomy – put it across the street!”

This is not Chicago’s most beautiful building. It is not even Goldberg’s best building. It’s certainly not everyone’s idea of “aesthetically pleasing.” But architectural history was made here, in the same way that the Water Tower was significant not because of its looks, but because it happened not to be made of wood, which prevented it from being burned down in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Enter building codes, fireproofing and a lot more steel and concrete – the North American cities as we know them, and burn to the ground much less frequently today. The practices and spatial innovations developed at Prentice have been repeated in hospitals elsewhere, but that doesn’t make it less significant. The failure to understand a building’s place in history, regardless of whether it is to one’s taste or not, is a poor excuse for pretending that demolishing it is the best option, without at least exploring whether someone else might want it.

Brutalism Is the Prog-Rock of Architecture

I might be taking this battle a little personally because a reviewer once said of a design I’d proposed with circular windows – “I just don’t buy circles in buildings.” Right, me neither. What was I thinking? The Pantheon – what a dump.

I might be taking it personally because the old Prentice is almost the same age as me, and there’s something wrong with a society that is so ready to trash significant buildings that are only 37 years old, especially when we now know that buildings contribute one third of all the landfill waste on the planet.

I’m taking it personally because my own school is being a bad citizen by not listening to people who know their stuff, and painting the whole affair as a black-and-white decision, in a city where it pays no property taxes.

Maybe I take it personally because Brutalism is of the same vintage, and bears a resemblance to progressive rock, in which I bathed during my youth. Living or working in a “concept” building, whose architect is challenging us with meaning, texture and symbols when we just want to find the bathroom, is a little like trying to make out to a concept album that keeps switching time signatures, or features someone shrieking about dystopian Orwellian societies or the wives of Henry VIII, when we’re just trying to find someone else’s tonsils. There’s a bit of a show-off quality to progressive rock and to Brutalism, like someone playing virtuoso just to prove that they can.

Some people find a building like Paul Rudolph’s Orange County Government Center in Goshen, NY, currently also under threat of demolition, to be like a 15-minute guitar solo – garish, gangly, out of place and tone-deaf to the people enveloped within it. Importantly, with its 86 independent roof planes, it does leak quite a lot. Wherever there is a connection between a plane and a wall, there is potential for leaks. But it’s been determined it’s mostly because of poor maintenance. It’s not as if the leadership of Orange County in the 1960s didn’t know this – they just thought their inheritors would take care of the special place they commissioned. It’s part of government’s responsibility to maintain buildings it commissions, or see that they pass into the hands of someone else who has the means to do so, if the building no longer serves its initial purpose.

Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center, Goshen, NY - also under threat of demolition.

When you see what county executive Ed Diana wants to replace Rudolph’s Government Center with – a mock-colonial building that looks like a Friendly’s – you begin to understand why this proposal has architects pretty upset.

Proposed replacement - faux-lonial.

It’s like someone saying that, because you didn’t take very good care of your copy of “Aqualung,” and it got scratched, now you have to listen only to Christopher Cross. Who wants to be challenged, anyway? The difference is, whereas your “difficult” prog-rock history can just be put in deep physical or digital storage, destroying a “difficult” building is a permanent erasure of a singular entity.

“These are buildings that demand more from us and deliver more for us,” Goldberger says. “Rudolph’s work was an investigation into the nature of service and those it serves. But innovation and fresh thinking are not characteristic of government architecture in the Tea Party era.”

NU-Wave

I would not go to the mat for every Brutalist building, nor every building by a respected architect. Even before I studied architecture, I took issue with my school’s seeming tendency to pick up the dropped batter of the architectural vanguard of the time. While Walter Netsch designed the soaring, almost operatic Cadet Chapel at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, now a national landmark, local universities got a lot of his designs that seemed to be a catcher’s mitt for surplus concrete, including the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago, which slabbed over an entire neighborhood, including the Maxwell Street Market.

University Library, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, Walter Netsch, 1970

In my time as an undergraduate at Northwestern, I would have been the first person to propose dynamiting University Library, the pile of interlocking cogs on concrete stilts which spurred a campus legend: supposedly it is sinking into the landfill on which it is built because engineers failed to calculate the weight of the books inside. The 1970 Netsch concoction, which I called “Battlestar Biblioteca,” confounded attempts to find anything quickly among shelves arranged radially from the center core of each of three towers. On the other hand, much can be said for the quiet moments (or shenanigans) one could devise for oneself (or a companion) in the coveted study rooms that cantilevered out over the campus, sometimes providing contemplative views of Lake Michigan, or chilling views of Netsch’s Norris University Center in front of it.

Norris University Center, Walter Netsch, 1971

That bunker-like facility also earned my ire for its windowless corridors, its rough aggregate concrete surfaces that would scrape unsuspecting passers-by and its wood-grain basement with orange tiles and earth-tone modular furniture. A student movement is currently underway to replace it, and the University seems to be taking it seriously.

The Rebecca Crown Center was the subject of another campus legend – designed (again, by Netsch) during the throes of student rebellion in 1968, and in the wake of the University of Texas shooting, its moat-like level separations and confusing layout seemed to go beyond Brutalist and straight to medieval, as if it were specifically designed to discourage marauders. The legend was that administrators could shelter there behind narrow windows, protected by limestone-slab “shading devices,” avoiding the larger objects students could throw and affording a good prospect from which to take a shot or two.

Rebecca Crown Center, Walter Netsch, 1968

But now I’ve spent a lot more time studying architecture, and my own rigid and antagonistic feelings toward Brutalism have softened.

Dedicated Followers of Fashion

Brutalism is poorly understood by the public – for one thing, it refers to the use of raw concrete, béton brut, left with traces of formwork still on it, not to “brutality,” though the style is characterized by roughness and block-like forms. It is generally lumped in as another example of ‘70s bad taste, along with polyester and shag carpet. Truly, some of these buildings do not function to support the exact purpose for which they were designed. But that doesn’t mean we should just start bulldozing them. That’s the same sort of logic that eliminated functioning, tight-knit low-income neighborhoods for ur-Brutalist complexes like Boston’s Government Center, derided by everyone from Jane Jacobs to Jonathan Richman. (Rudolph has an unfinished project, the Government Service Center, in the complex). It’s that kind of blunt-instrument urban planning – calling any neighborhood with problems “blighted” so that it can be replaced with civic slabs – that put the “brutality” in “Brutalism.” Now is it Brutalism’s turn at the guillotine?

Government Service Center, Boston, Paul Rudolph, 1971

At the peak of Corporate Internationalism, people thought the Beaux-Arts opulence of New York’s Pennsylvania Station was dated, and it didn’t fit the then-present need for leasable office space above a struggling railroad, so down it came. This is not to equate Prentice with Penn, but it is to say that once something unique comes down, it never goes up again.

…And When You Smile for the Camera…

If anything, the best antidote for forestalling the premature destruction of significant but “dated” buildings is to understand how people use them. That was the object of classic studies like William Whyte’s “The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces,” and it is the object of a photo essay of Goldberg’s Marina City by architect Iker Gil and photographer Andreas Larsson, whose “Inside Marina City,” exhibition just opened at the Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery in Los Angeles, after a stint at the Art Institute of Chicago and the pinkcomma gallery in Boston.

Marina City, Bertrand Goldberg, 1965

Marina City also represents the vanguard of innovation at the time of its completion in 1965, with its spiraling parking ramp and “city within a city” comprehensiveness, including a bowling alley and 400-boat marina. Iker and Larsson shot residents in 40 of the 900 apartments in the twin towers, with the object of showing that this is a place that is loved both by architects and residents.

Circular floor plan maximizes efficiency and views for residents.

Marina City is full of architectural innovations, including column-free floor plans and a circular core whose opening interpolates on either side of the elevator shafts on odd and even floors, so as not to compromise the structure. The circular shape afforded the greatest possible enclosure in the least possible floor area, and gave every apartment a balcony, as well as the shortest possible distance for utilities to travel from the core. The Fiberglas forms into which concrete was poured were re-used 67 times before being discarded, allowing the towers to rise 1 floor every two days. The concrete core and circular shape made for 30 percent less wind resistance that a comparable conventionally square tower of the same height.

Some Marina City residents go for the Shrine to Modern look... (Iker + Larsson)

...and some don't.

But just as importantly, the towers support a thriving community. Unlike many ambitious Modernist projects, Marina City remains a success story on a social level. It was financed by an elevator operator and janitor’s union in 1958 with the intention of stemming the tide of the white middle class to the suburbs, and is credited with beginning the residential renaissance of American inner cities. Converted to condominiums in 1977, Marina City now typically sees residents spending decades in the tower, trading up to bigger units with better views over time.

Green sky fort at Marina City (Iker + Larsson)

Some residents obsessively preserve the 1960s all-electric pastel appliances and steel shelving, turning their dwellings into shrines of white reverence for the Jet Age. But others take advantage of the column-free design by knocking out kitchen walls for pass-throughs or expanding bathrooms, filling their spaces with ersatz fireplaces and leather ducks. Now-unfashionably low 8-foot ceilings notwithstanding, Gil says he was fascinated by the way that the soft angles and floor-to-ceiling windows of Marina City’s spaces drew people outwards to their balconies, which they personalized, carving out little forts amidst the towers of the much bigger room of the commercial city.

All-electric, all-yellow, all the time. (Iker + Larsson)

“Marina City is such an icon, but it is also a diverse community,” Gil says. “There are old ladies on couches in the lobby talking about their medical problems, and hip people having parties on the roof. We wanted to find a way to tell the story through residents, and show that interest in it is not just for architects. It’s not a one-liner building.”

Sure, why not?

Neither should complex situations merit one-line responses. The post-modernists Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown were deriding the self-seriousness of “proggy” architecture like Rudolph’s and Goldberg’s when they wrote Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Learning from Las Vegas. (But both have signed the letter in support of preserving Prentice). But the more complexity and contradiction a building can accommodate, and the more it has to say about society’s complexity, the more useful it is over time, even if it takes two more minutes to find the bathroom the first time, or it takes a little more due care than your average tilt-up office park. It might be too late for Old Prentice, but here’s hoping Iker and Larsson or similarly inspired acolytes take to the halls of gangly government centers before more irreversible decisions are made.

“Inside Marina City” runs at the Woodbury University Hollywood Gallery (WUHO), 6518 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles, through Oct. 28.

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In ancient and old buildings of stone—be they classical, Romanesque, medieval, Renaissance, baroque, even rococo and certainly neo-classical—it’s often easiest to see how a structure “speaks” when it’s denuded of furnishings and decoration, when tone and tenor become clear. Is the voice elegant? Eloquent? Does it pose a question, or posit a solution, or both? Does it, in short, talk pretty?

The idea of a human-made environment as boon and buttress for thought—a safe haven for contemplation sensorial, spiritual or philosophical—is as ancient as the Greco-Roman atrium, which found translation over the centuries in the Islamic pleasure garden and Medieval Catholic cloister.

During a visit to the just re-opened Abbey of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers in the Champagne region of France, a few hours drive from Paris, I was especially mindful how stones, and the spaces and volumes they make, inspire, their balance and harmony encouraging breakthroughs in other arenas—in this case those that start with a pop and then get bubbly. Because buzz notwithstanding, this abbey was home for over forty-five years to Dom Pierre Pérignon (c. 1638-1715), the monk who is the father of Champagne.

While it’s clear he did not invent champers, Pérignon, the abbey’s cellar master from 1670 until his death, was indisputably Champagne’s greatest and earliest pioneer. He improved quality and set standards for production that would be refined progressively in the 19th century—the celebratory result summed up in an apocryphal Pérignon quote from a late 19th-century print advertisement: “Come quickly, I’m drinking the stars!”

In the ensuing three centuries, most Pérignon particulars have been lost. Still, it’s known that when he came to the province weak red wine was its norm. It’s also known he created clear white wines from black grapes (Pinot Noir) by clever, innovative manipulation of their pressing, and that he was the first wine maker to understand the idea of terroir (that grapes grown in different sections of a district, or even a sub-section of a district, yield different attributes and tastes). It’s known he evolved into a wine whisperer who learned how to bottle Champagne at just the correct moment to preserve its bubbles, and that he employed thicker glass to discourage explosions caused by the wine’s second fizzy fermentation, single explosions often then starting disastrous chain reactions.

What remains a mystery is what inspired the gentle, humble Benedictine to launch an oenophilic revolution? Or what, in other words, enabled Pérignon to conceive of an improved sparkling wine, when sparkling wine was very much a novelty?

And having done so, what then emboldened him to embark upon a journey that would occupy him for well over four decades, its resolution predicated on the reconciling of Champagne’s many disparate elements, both technical and taste?

No documentary evidence exists, unfortunately. But just as there came to be balance in Champagne, so was there first architectural harmony in the Abbey of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers.

Situated next to vineyards on a postcard-pretty hillside outside of Epernay, the abbey and its grounds just received a makeover costing several million euros and taking several years, the work initiated, planned and paid for by the property’s owner, Moët & Chandon. (Dom Pérignon is the house of Moët & Chandon’s tête de cuvee, or top of the line.)

Like the monk’s favored drink, the Abbey of Saint-Pierre d’Hautvillers is a mix. Fully rebuilt in 1692, it incorporates earlier architectural elements, such as Romanesque columns (with grape-vine motifs, no less), with some later decorative detail, namely window frames with small 19th-century mouth-blown panes.

The park, gardens, cloister and renowned Sainte-Hélène portal were fully restored, and the monastery’s former library was renovated; it’s now a tranquil tasting and event space. Connected to the abbey is Hautvillers’ church, where Dom Pérignon’s tomb occupies a place of honor.

It’s a mosaic of and in balance. Like the vintage beverage that bears his name.

(All photos credited to Stephane Cardinale.)

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The high stakes, big money, haute design world of international fine and decorative art fairs is no different. Turf is staked out, jealously guarded and defended, and reputations and buzz of the fair and its dealers are key in attracting coveted high-flying collectors and building bridges for new byers and markets. As dealers across the categorical gamut—contemporary art to ancient sculpture—have seen increasingly over the last ten years, more and more of their revenue and new clientele is generated at fairs. That makes these jet-set Happenings important like never before.

Which is why this year’s Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris was such a Napoleonic big deal. The fair, which ended last Sunday after a ten-day run in the glass-domed Grand Palais just off the Champs Elysées, marked its 26th edition.

Founded in 1956 and launched in its present form in 1962—with 78 dealers, steered to the Grand Palais by none other than André Malraux, the celebrated intellectual, novelist and theorist who was also France’s first Minister for Cultural Affairs—the Biennale set the pace for international fairs for well over the following three decades. On display were not only boldfaced pieces, the majority of which were French 18th century, but boldfaced people. There were luminaries of screen, stage and screen; leading artists; kings of countries and bourses. Tout le monde, café society, and the curators from the West’s most important museums, all drawn to the Biennale, which grew to become an encyclopedic fair offering vetted antiques and fine art from the ancient to the contemporary. At the fair’s heart were of course its unique objects, but it was as much the platform of Paris that arguably made it peerless.

A shock, then, that over the last decade the crown for Best Fine and Decorative Arts Fair in the World has been worn—with increasingly confidence and security—by another fair, the European Fine Art Fair, or TEFAF, an annual encyclopedic fair held in the dreary month of March in Maastricht. How a Dutch fair dating to the mid 1970s, which began as a small venue specializing in Old Master paintings and continues to be held in a small town in southeastern Holland, managed to become the world’s preeminent art and antiques fair, is a fascinating story of long-range planning and determination. How the Biennale stumbled is an equally interesting story, and continues to be the subject of conjecture (much of it conjuring 18th-century Versailles in its complexity and penchant for intrigue).

Regardless, this was the Biennale bounced back, and it did so by doubling down. The number of exhibitors surged from a relatively anemic 87 dealers in 2010 to a robust 122 this year. The Syndicat National des Antiquaires (SNA), the antique dealers union that organizers the fair, also undertook a 13-city promotional tour leading up to the fair, with whistle stops in standards such as New York, Milan and Berlin, but also in Hong Kong, Kiev, Moscow, Beijing, Taiwan, Shanghai and Istanbul.

Broadening the numbers, in terms of exhibitors as well as well-heeled collectors, was vital. But Christian Deydier, the noted Asian-art dealer who is also president of the 400-member SNA, cleverly chose to emphasize not what makes the fair international, but what makes it most uniquely and distinctly French. Because while other fairs might have more exhibitors and greater range, the Biennale remains unsurpassed in sheer uncontestable glamour. httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAMwvBjSS80&feature=youtu.be Toward that end, Deydier secured Karl Lagerfeld as the fair’s scenographer, and Lagerfeld, acting in coordination with museum exhibition designer Rene Bouchara, delivered a turn-of-the-20th-century fantasy that conjured the Belle Epoque, the era in which French taste and influence over the arts was unchallenged, and which was, not coincidentally, a reminder of when and why the Grand Palais was built (for the Universal Exhibition of 1900).

Nor were holds barred to achieve the stunning effect: booths had uniform facades, white-framed light gray storefronts with enormous mullioned windows punctuated by faux street lanterns, stand-to-stand carpet with an abstract pattern evoking cobblestones, and, in the center under the great glass dome, an enormous striped balloon that the brothers Montgolfier would have envied. Deydier, an accomplished chef, also engineered a roster of Michel-starred top toques to cook at the fair’s gastronomic restaurant, with three-star chef Michel Guerard overseeing the fair’s opening night charity dinner gala benefiting the Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris- Hôpitaux de France, whose longstanding patroness is Bernadette Chirac, former first lady of France.

And in poured le beau monde, French, European and international. Included were the likes of Bernard Arnault, Henry Kravis, Francois-Henri Pinault and Salma Hayak, Pierre Bergé, Eugenie Niarchos, Charlotte Casiraghi, Yue Sai Kan, Sheikh Hassan bin Mohamed bin Ali Al Thani, Philippine de Rothschild, Prince and Princess Michael of Bourbon Parma, not to mention Mr. Mick Jagger and Ms. Danielle Steel. (To catch a bit of the fair’s buzz, watch the slide show, Impressions from the Opening, first video above.)

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iv1VwXVOGnA&feature=youtu.be The sound, fury and river of champers were not for nothing. The artworks on view were dazzling, often literally if one sauntered into the stands of the great jewelry houses, numerous as never before and including first-time exhibitor Hong Kong-based Wallace Chan. All the Paris-based big guns were firing in force—from new players such as Dior and Chanel, to Cartier, Chaumet, Boucheron and Van Cleef & Arpels (which complemented a comprehensive exhibition currently on at Paris’ Museum of Decorative Arts).

Many of the houses featured pieces made exclusively for the Biennale, pieces that, so complex in intricacy and construction, took almost two years to complete. The unofficial spokesmodel for several of the houses, the late Elizabeth Taylor, made a ghostly through line at the fair, her photograph and examples of her famous collection (much auctioned at Christie’s earlier this year for enormous sums) on view at Bulgari, not far from the stand of New York and L.A.-based contemporary art dealer L&M Arts, which showed Andy Warhol’s yellow “Liz #1 (Early Colored Liz)”, perhaps the fair’s single most expensive piece with a rumored asking price of $40 million.

Central to the Biennale has always been a premier selection of FFF (fine French furniture). While there were slightly fewer specialists than in years past, the great Parisian antiquarians more than made up for this in quality. The big daddies were in attendance: Didier Aaron, Aveline, Francois Léage and Steinitz. But in terms of consistency paired with connoisseurship paired with complete unity, the prize went to Maison Kraemer. In 2010, this venerable, multi-generational company of antique dealers amused and awed visitors with a recreation of the Oval Office employing 18th-century French furniture exclusively (the illusion was down to to-scale photographs of the grounds mounted in the windows).

This year, Kraemer staged the first-ever monographic exhibition devoted to cabinet maker Jean-Henri Riesener, Marie-Antoinette’s preferred furniture source. Indeed, among the approximately 20 pieces was a coiffeuse, a lady’s dressing table with a complete kit (small, delicate, hand-painted porcelain containers for powders, rouge, etc.) that is identical to two at Versailles that belonged to the doomed queen. (There was also a small writing desk that was once part of the royal collection at Versailles, its delivery documented on December 31, 1779 by Riesener himself.)

The second slide show above shows off three of the pieces, starting with a commode owned by Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette’s sister-in-law, the Comtesse d’Artois, followed by an 18th-century backgammon table, and finally the small writing desk from various views. As Laurent Kraemer says with typical understatement, “Uniquely, furniture in 18th-century France was a major art.”

The same could be argued for 20th-century French furniture, especially that made between the world wars, much of which was made in the great 18th-century ébeniste tradition combining exemplary materials and craftsmanship to yield uniquely artful pieces. Examples of work by Jean-Michel Frank, Armand-Albert Rateau, Jacques-Emile Ruhlmann and Eileen Gray have for the last decade been darlings of collections, auction houses and galleries, and terrific examples were on stand at Galerie Vallois, along with a pair of matching cabinets in shagreen, ivory and mother-of-pearl by Clement Rousseau, who should be better known than he is.

Right Bank-dealer Alain Marcelpoil, a specialist in Art Deco furniture who wrote the book on Lyon-based furniture-maker André Sornay, showed a stand-full of Sornay’s work, among them a partner’s desk from 1929 that emerged from a console (when the leaves came out and clicked into place, concealed desk lights illuminated, as pictured above). First time exhibitor Galerie Mathivet showed pieces by André Groult as well as Rateau—evoking the dressing room of his great patron, couturier Jeanne Lanvin (one of her original dresses was even on display, all part of the ambiance.

In terms of post-war and contemporary, Yves Gastou showed a plexiglass backgammon/game table from 1970 by Jean-Claude Farhi. It made me think of Kraemer’s 18th-century Riesener, which in turn prepared my mind for Gastou’s surrealist table, “Expansion Valise,” from 1970 by César. And while it’s actually a desk, the fantastic bronze donkey by Francois-Xavier Lalanne at JGM Galerie (priced at $1 million) could in a pinch serve as a bar.

Why quibble when you might tipple?

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The current 6th St Viaduct, built in 1932 and slated for demolition.

The 6th Street Viaduct in Los Angeles is not the city’s best-known icon. But it’s been featured in as many movies and TV shows as City Hall, the Hollywood Sign, and Capitol Records. Spanning the Los Angeles River, two sets of railroad tracks, a warren of warehouses and light industry, and the 101 and 5 freeways, the 3,500-foot-long viaduct east of downtown has presided over dozens of key scenes, if only as a backdrop and not a focal point. Scrambling over the concrete walls of the mostly-dry riverbed, car chases in Grease, and Repo Man passed under it. Music videos for INXS, Kanye West and Limp Bizkit have included it. (A surprising and glaring omission: the viaduct is not featured in the video for “Under the Bridge,” the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ paean to the City of Angels and heroin addiction).

If the 6th St Viaduct has historically been a recurring bit player in the city’s cinematic history, three teams of architects now vie to turn the structure into a much more significant participant in the life of the city, and something much more than a bridge. Like a rarely seen but influential film from generations ago, the 6th St. Viaduct is set to be replaced and rebooted with a spectacular remake.

Cracked Actor

The bridge is one of 14 built between 1909 and 1934 on the stretch of the Los Angeles River closest to downtown. Though their styles vary from Beaux-Arts to Italianate to Art-Deco, all are built of reinforced concrete. The 1932 6th Street bridge is unique in that it is has a double steel arch span over the river itself, and more importantly, is the only one of the group to have sourced rock for its mixing plant from a different quarry. This turned out to be a fatal choice: the bridge has alkali-silica reaction (ASR) syndrome, or “concrete cancer,” a chemical reaction that creates cracks in the concrete and increases the risk of collapse in a major earthquake to unacceptable levels. Despite its eligibility to be included on the National Register of Historic Places, and numerous attempts at fixing the problem, the Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering determined that the bridge would ultimately have to be replaced for safety’s sake.

An Ambitious Plan

In an unusual and refreshing development, the authorities have elected to capitalize on the opportunity of replacing the bridge to create an asset that will form the basis of urban revitalization, serve multiple modes, and become a centerpiece of civic life. The City has assembled a Design Aesthetic Advisory Committee (DAAC) comprised of academics, architects, community and business leaders, including Eric Owen Moss, director of the Southern California Institute of Architects (SCI-ARC) and Lewis MacAdamas, the president of Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR)downtown. The DAAC will submit its recommendation to the Bureau of Engineering, which has final say.

At MacAdams’ behest, an international design competition was held, and three finalists emerged, each led by a global architecture-engineering firm: AECOM, HNTB and Parsons Brinckerhoff (P-B). The city will select a designer in October and the design is to be completed by summer 2014, with construction concluding by the end of 2018. The finalists presented their designs at a series of community meetings in mid-September.

The City is clearly concerned with the potential of the bridge to become a catalyst for development and a multi-modal piece of connective tissue between the on-the-make Arts District and the historic, densely populated Latino neighborhood of Boyle Heights. Specific design responses to this challenge varied widely among the three teams.

“Here is Your New Landmark”

The AECOM team, which reminded us that its lead firm is the “only Fortune 500 corporation headquartered in downtown Los Angeles,” packs perhaps the strongest resume of prior bridge experience, having designed more than 40 sizable spans throughout the world, from Sutong, China to Lisbon, Portugal. Closer to home, AECOM led the joint-venture construction team for the Metro Gold Line East Side Extension, and is materially involved with at least nine projects in a five-mile radius of the bridge. These include the Metro Regional Connector subway project, the development of a Clean-Tech Corridor for environmentally progressive businesses (which the viaduct itself will pass over), and Park 101, a proposal to bridge the 101 Freeway with a new park connecting the historic Pueblo de Los Angeles area and Chinatown with downtown.

The design process that led to AECOM's "Angel" concept.

Despite all these credentials, the AECOM proposal seemed the least graceful and appropriate. The central concept of the main river span is a flared pylon representing an abstraction of an angel’s wings, from which cable stays would extend to support the the bridge. The proposal does include some tidy gestures, such as a stairless, universal design approach to a suspended pedestrian ramp beneath the bridge, and the elimination of light standards along the deck in favor of isolating lighting within the tower itself and within the pedestrian handrails. The pedestrian walks are separated from roadways by a planted verge. But the overall effect of the iconic central span is ungainly, largely due to the thickness of the decking, which seems overbuilt for the relatively short spans and low clearances required. The technique of creating a strong truss effect through shallow cable stays is called “extradosing,” and here it seems particularly apropos.

The abstracted "angel" form of AECOM's center bridge tower.

Despite being inspired by the “City of Angels,” there is something about the imposing design of the tower that is reminiscent of the brobdingnagian ambitions of authoritarian despots in Asia or the Middle East, for whom AECOM has designed some fairly spectacular bridges in the past. The gold plating of the towers in the renderings seems more characteristic of a nouveau riche sultanate than a connector between working-class and artistically avant-garde neighborhoods in a major U.S. city. It’s as if someone in Seoul was asked to design a bridge based on his experience of Los Angeles as a themed casino replica in Macau.

The rendered "Angel" and twilight riverside activity.

AECOM’s presentation was also an odd mix of self-assurance and insecurity. The massive corporation with hometown roots advertised that 75 percent of the design work would take place in Los Angeles, and rolled out its community outreach team, which promised to engage with the citizenry using every means available, including going “door to door with old-fashioned shoe leather,” according to outreach leader Kermin Mattucks.

From a low angle, the massing of the "Angel" scheme is evident.

The delivery was alternately grandiose – “Here is your new landmark!” – and withholding – “what you see is what you get.” For its initial design, the AECOM team declined to build ramps down to the edges of the river, which is slated for a substantial de-channelization project and revitalization master plan that will bring occupiable park space to the water’s edge, because currently, “there is nothing to go down to.”

The presenters stressed that everything shown in the renderings was included within the bridge’s $190 million construction budget, implying that other proposals might be doing some wishful thinking. The total project budget, including demolition of the current bridge, is $401 million.

The “High Line” Effect

Recent urban history has shown that wishful thinking does have a way of turning into willful creation, when all the right ingredients – chief among them monetary and leadership commitments – are in place. As the viaduct is situated in a gritty but tentatively resurgent area of Los Angeles, it’s clear that the city fathers, business leaders and designers alike are hoping that 6th Street Viaduct Version 2.0 will have the transformative effect of New York’s High Line, where a derelict elevated rail line has been turned into a linear park, festooned with native plantings, street furniture, food vendors, and most importantly, new real-estate development. Nowhere was the hoped-for “High Line effect” in as much evidence as the HNTB team proposal, which showed people walking along some rusted rail tracks and highly familiar-looking paving blocks, between cafes and open shop windows revealing artisans spot-welding their creations.

Anticipating the "High Line effect."

Kansas City-based HNTB augmented its considerable bridge experience, including the “Big Dig” cable-stayed Leonard Zakim Bunker Hill Memorial Bridge in Boston, the second Tacoma Narrows span and the Delaware Memorial Bridge, with an exemplary array of international and local firepower. Dissing + Weitling, a Danish firm responsible for many of Scandinavia’s overseas crossings, brings structural economy and simplicity to the design. A.C. Martin is the architect of City Hall, the Department of Water and Power building, the May Department Store (now LACMA’s administration building) and more recently, the Hollenbeck Police Station. Michael Maltzan has impeccable instincts for urban regeneration and arts projects, including the Inner City Arts campus, the New Carver Apartments affordable housing project, a serrated circular building in the crook of the I-10 / 110 interchange, and a large-scale urban plan for the re-use of the Union Pacific Mission Yards, just across the river from downtown. The team also includes San Francisco-based urban planners and landscape architects Hargreaves Associates, whose credits include the Sydney 2000 Olympics and the 2012 London Olympic Park. Not surprisingly, the ground plane across the entire length of the bridge is highly programmed and developed.

The HNTB team proposal features a bow-shaped pedestrian river crossing.

The HNTB team had what appeared to be the most fully developed and visually exciting proposal. Its graphical style and narratives revealed Maltzan’s hand.

“Infrastructure is part of our iconography,” Maltzan says. “But it stopped being as productive as it once was. Too often, it divides the city. We’d rather capture what it means to the city.”

Combining a nod to the current bridge’s arch structure and the City’s desire for a cable-stayed span, HNTB’s scheme consists of a series of ultra-thin decks suspended by cable from pre-stressed concrete arches. The arches bow out laterally from the roadway and take broad leaps over the rail lines, then duck under the high-tension wires on both sides of the river. Like the other schemes, HNTB suspends a walkway below the vehicular deck, but instead of dangling via steel rods, the walkway is a smooth inverted reflection of the main concrete arch above. The tops of some arches would be climbable via stairs.

Climb an arch, why don't you?

Also different is the scheme’s elimination of a center pier in the water, and its devotion of the longest and highest arches to passages over active rail and road lines. The balanced arches on either side of the river unite the utilitarian rail lines, future riparian eastern banks, and pedestrian activity on both sides, and are intended “to show this is not just a bridge over the river,” Maltzan says.

Bridge underside as "urban room."

This move partly has to do with complex seismic calculations and the desire for a thin, diaphanous deck. But the team also intends to create what Maltzan calls “urban rooms” and “grand halls” beneath the bridge, which renderings show as venues for gatherings and painted and projected murals.

The eastern end of the bridge would feature gardens and gathering spaces.

The scheme reveals a total commitment to the parabolic arch shape – the ADA-accessible ramp is a double loop in plan, concrete paving patterns echo the arches above, and holes in the deck and the arch itself are stretched ovals.

The gentle curve of the bridge – a design requirement of the project brief – in this scheme shifts the arches slightly out of plane, affording unique tessellations of light and shadow on members that are largely (and cost-effectively) identical.

A larger arch over the 101 Freeway signifies that the bridge is a gateway for travelers passing under the bridge as well as over it.

Of Allées, Ramblas and Nests

In many ways the Parsons-Brinckerhoff (P-B) scheme splits the difference between the other two proposals. Its center span is a steel double arch with a mid-river pier, like its predecessor, but it uses a wing- or harp-like symmetry of cables and arches for its “angelic” gesture.

The P-B "egret" design and a re-imagined Los Angeles River.

While the overland spans are not visually stunning as HNTB’s, they are relatively unobtrusive and neatly accommodate pedestrians in the center, rather than at the edges, creating more opportunities for interaction between people moving in both directions. The pedestrian right-of-way is dotted with ramps and inclines that parry with the road deck, splitting to dip below for the “nest” observatory and rising slightly above the road in the main span. Numerous shelters and segmented colored decking break up the monotony.

The "nest" observation platform of the P-B bridge.

As did the HNTB team, P-B pulls together a well established transportation engineering giant with several design architects. P-B is the main consultant for the nearly $100 billion California High-Speed Rail project, the new Hoover Dam bridge, Florida’s Sunshine Skyway, and is the offspring of the firm responsible for the first New York City subway, where it continues to work on the Second Avenue Subway. The lead design architect is Ricardo Rabines, one half of the Safdie-Rabines partnership out of San Diego, which designed the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook south of Culver City and several expressive pedestrian bridges in California. Wilkinson Eyre joins from the UK, where it designed the reconfigured Channel Tunnel Rail Link’s 100-plus bridges, as well as numerous other spans in the UK and Europe.

The P-B design features a wide center path for pedestrians.

P-B’s approach is to create an “iconic destination, place for celebration and a new spark for economic development,” says project manager Juan Murillo. The bridge should also be seen as a “vertical and horizontal connection,” says Rabines, who says the main span’s shape is based on the spread wings of an egret. Fundamentally, Rabines views the project as a “place for people,” not just a thoroughfare for cars to bypass obstructions.

Approach to P-B bridge features shelters for pedestrians.

The plan emphasizes living streets with bioswales, proposes semi-permanent shipping-container modules for a “Clean-Tech Allée” beneath the viaduct, and a network of active streets and parks radiating from the project. Characterizing the paseo as a series of “ramblas,” as the avenues of Barcelona that turn into pedestrian parade grounds are called, Rabines asserts that the viaduct will become a place for celebrations, and noted that his team’s budget includes changes of color for the lighting to commemorate holidays. Wisely, the P-B presentation included a slide that implied the vision would not be fully realized until 2040.

From Skid Row to Sky Park?

Given the area’s grit and the potentially long stretches of isolated walkway, security was a top concern at a SCI-ARC Q & A earlier this month. The AECOM team responded that its unique lighting scheme could be augmented by security cameras and call boxes if needed. P-B referred to its wide walkway design and ample sightlines, with Rabines adding, “Security is all of our responsibility.” On behalf of HNTB, Maltzan responded, “It’s not so much about mechanical safety. Having worked in Skid Row, I can say that if the bridge is successful, if it is used intensely and there are people around, it will be much safer than if it is void of activity.”

A "living street" underneath the P-B bridge.

Los Angeles has shown too-little-seen forethought by capitalizing on the need to replace a piece of failing infrastructure by advocating for a true civic asset that will figure into larger plans for the region, including turning the Los Angeles River into a true waterfront, not just a concrete ditch. For areas of the city that have been sliced and scarred by “critical infrastructure” for the better part of 100 years, a green vein running along and intersecting with neighborhood revitalization efforts will hopefully have some catalytic effect. Architects often believe that their designs will have impacts on the human condition that extend far beyond the borders of the project. But just because something gets built doesn’t mean people will come. In this case, even a truly iconic and beloved bridge might end up being just that, if other economic and civic forces well out of the architects’ realm are not brought to bear with the same level of intent and support as the design and construction work. Still, it’s tempting to think about what new roles the rebooted Sixth Street Viaduct might play in the coming decades. It may just be the case that the remake outshines the original.

The post In Viaduct Design Competition, A Remake Is Poised To Trump The Original appeared first on The Faster Times.

Mobile (Neutra) by Xavier Veilhan, hangs in the VDL Research House.

When a family moves into a house, they begin to add personal touches that make it their own. If they’re successful interpreters, the history of the house is drawn into their story.

French artist Xavier Veilhan and has family of five are no different, though the house they’ve moved into isn’t a typical fixer-upper. It’s the Richard Neutra-designed VDL Research House on Silver Lake in Los Angeles, an icon of California Modernism.

Throughout the VDL House, Veilhan has installed “Architectones,” a series of statues, sculptures, models and flat silhouettes that he calls “monochrome interventions.” The objects, ranging from a giant Richard Neutra head on the sidewalk to a sleek rocket car in the penthouse, both abstractly and figuratively trace the history of Neutra’s family in the house while more broadly alluding to the tenets of Modernism itself. The name “Architectones” is inspired by the “architectons” of Russian Suprematist Kasimir Malevich, who created numerous figural three-dimensional black and white shapes in addition to his famous “white on white” paintings.

The VDL House epitomizes the lightweight, airy feel of mid-century Modern, and this transparency is enhanced by the strategic placement of mirrors. Neutra was very much concerned with maximum space efficiency penetrating light into the narrowest of spaces and making even the most restricted confines seem commodious.

In some ways, the installation subverts these themes, particularly with its use of the timeworn color of the architect’s uniform and of heavy industry – black. The black aluminum silhouettes in organic shapes (Neutra’s head, Neutra as a boy in a cowboy hat), the apparent heft of the black polyurethane and fiberglass Ford roadster, and the lava-like sheen of the mounted Neutra statue sharply contrast with the clean lines, soft colors and smooth transitions of the house.

"Old Man (Richard Neutra)" dominates the sidewalk in front of VDL House

At times it also seems Veilhan is claiming conquest – a silhouette of his own family dominates the second floor balcony, and a black metal flag is frozen in a flap over the circular drum of the penthouse. When the exhibition opened, a plane triumphantly flew a black rectangular banner over the house.

Veilhan Family silhouette and Black Flag

Yet there is also subtle reinforcement of Neutra’s philosophy, interests and humanity. Neutra’s own family is depicted not as a light-absorbing silhouette but as a mirror, prominently positioned at the top of the stairs between the first and second floors, echoing the architect’s use of mirrors to make rooms feel more expansive.

Neutra Family Silhouette

A white-gold mobile bounces light around in a way so complementary to the room it’s easy to imagine it was an original design feature. And Veilhan’s choice of thin black aluminum solids makes more sense when it’s revealed that the black metal disc tucked underneath the stairs is original to the house, and not part of the installation.

Disc under stair provides a reference point for Veilhan's shapes

The silhouette of the cello represents wife Dione Neutra’s love for music (a piano occupies a good portion of the ground floor music room).

The “tonal” part of the installation comes from a soundtrack by Nicolas Godin of the French band Air. While not necessarily redolent of Neutra or the music of his contemporaries, the lilting piano and quietly thumping rhythm of Godin’s music is part of a continuum of smooth music typified by fellow Frenchman Serge Gainsbourg, Mexico’s Esquivel, and others, that goes hand-in-hand with the high Modern axiom of sophisticated living through technology.

The Ford H-Boy car model is a reference to Neutra’s admiration for Henry Ford and the mass-production techniques that first produced cars, and soon after a wealth of ready-made parts for buildings that thrilled the Austrian when he arrived in America in 1923.

Ford H-boy sculpture refers to Neutra's fascination with mass production techniques

The speedboat and “Blue Flame” rocket-car models celebrate the use of advanced technology, which Neutra eagerly deployed throughout the original house, completed in 1933, and its post-fire replacement, finished in 1963. The compact house is shot through with maritime and aviation engineering, with tucked-in swing beds that swivel for cleaning, new-at-the-time synthetic cladding and insulation materials, push-button controls, ultra-thin metal casements and a dumbwaiter.

Blue Flame rocket car

This isn’t the first or last architectural intervention of Veilhan’s. In 2009, Veilhan placed 11 large-scaled statues of architects on the lawn of Versailles.

And, for one night this summer, Veilhan’s next project surely would have been top-of-ticket for in-the-know Angeleno archi-ficionados (and I missed it, so I guess I am not one of them). The artist reduced Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21 to its bare essentials. Removing all the furniture, he filled the minimalist masterpiece with white dry-ice smoke, filled the reflecting ponds with black dye, and placed a series of black panels around the entrance, spacing the verticals in a succession based on – what else? – the Fibonacci sequence.

More Modern icons will get the Architectones treatment this year and next, including Le Corbusier’s Cite Radieuse in Marseille, France; Parent and Virilio’s St. Bernadette du Banlay Church in Nevers, France and the Melnikov House in Moscow.

Fussing about with Modernist masters is a risky proposition, but Veilhan is something of an essentialist. By reducing Modern projects to their basic principles, he reveals that dealing in black and white carries more meaning than the simple juxtaposition of polar opposites. A piano has only two colors, but can produce an infinite array of tone, feeling and color if the right person is seated at the bench. A black-and-white tuxedo could just be a suit, or it could contain the complexity of a Don Draper. With a deft artist at the controls, interpolating the primary components of architecture – figure and ground, pen and paper, solid and void – draws out a new array of interpretations of the classics.

“Architectones” runs through Sept. 15 at the VDL Research House.

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