Wrestling With the Past & Winning

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The New York Sun

It isn’t everyday that an architecture critic engages in an arm-wrestling match with the designer of the building he has been called on to review. That happened, however, last week at the New York Hall of Science, where Todd Schliemann of Polshek Partnership showed off the new pavilion that will open on Thanksgiving Day.


This entire institution positively buzzes with gizmos that are intended to incite scientific curiosity: Mobius strips, bubble machines, gyrating optical illusions, and much besides. One of these, it turns out, is a virtual arm wrestling contraption, whose protruding lever registers any pressure exerted upon it, as well as any opposing pressure from someone at a similar machine linked via the Internet. Your opponent could be on the other side of the room – as in my case – or on the other side of the world. Now Mr. Schliemann is a strapping fellow, and I am quite certain he let me win. But the whole experience disposed me kindly to this odd little institution in an all-but-abandoned section of Queens.


I had been here once before, some 40 years ago, when I was dragged as a toddler to the 1964 World’s Fair. Since then, like most New Yorkers, I’ve known the place as little more than an enigma, almost a mirage, that you pass on your way to La Guardia or Shea.


Admittedly, the hall was closed on the day I visited, but the haunted emptiness of the complex seemed richly suggestive of the passage of years. You could well believe that no one had entered this time warp in all the intervening decades, so much did the spirit of 1964 persist, most visibly in the silvery shells of the Mercury rockets out front. True, some half-hearted attempts have been made in that time to bring the place back among the living. But even the decade-old entrance rotunda by Beyer, Blinder, Belle, feels infinitely older and wearier and staler than its years.


The main architectural event of the complex is an oddly amoeboid structure known as the “Great Hall.” One of the few survivals of the World’s Fair, it towers above the rest of the complex, its concrete mass relieved only by dark shards of cobalt-colored glass irregularly set into the cells that constitute its undulous mass. Even now no one is quite sure what to make of this one-off act of tectonic brio or what use it might serve.


It is the work of Wallace K. Harrison and Max Abramowitz, who were among New York’s busiest architects in the middle third of the 20th century. Because they are best known for designing the Metropolitan Opera and Avery Fisher Hall, respectively, I had long believed that they never built anything that rose above mediocrity. I was wrong. This Great Hall is one of the most amazing things in America.


Even amid the blaze of noon, as daylight elbows its way through the dense cobalt shards, a dream-like mood pervades its undivided emptiness. All around you the walls rise up like the nave of Chartres at the onset of evening. Meanwhile, the basement, a cantilevered fan of poured concrete, recalls our military-industrial complex in better days and looks as if it would be proof against a hydrogen bomb.


This area is dense with interactive displays that spill over into the new wing, which is very different in feeling.


Mr. Schliemann’s new building, extending north from the main structure, is a low-lying and irregularly shaped lattice rectangle that looks and feels lighter than air. Certain elements of it, like the winding circulation system, recall the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History, for which Mr. Schliemann was largely responsible. From the inside, sunlight filters through the translucent white Karwall skin. Seen from the outside and at night, the whole thing glows like one of those sculptures that Noguchi confected out of rice paper and bamboo.


There is an interesting architectural point to be made regarding the interaction of the three parts of the Hall of Science. The new structure does not harmonize with Harrison and Abramowitz’s Great Hall any more than does the entrance rotunda by Beyer, Blinder, Belle, which protrudes in the opposite direction. But the odd thing is that, when all you had were the two earlier structures, the disharmony was obvious and irk some; now that this new element of discord has been introduced, a compelling logic pervades the very disharmony, until the three structures establish a respectable harmony all their own.


***


A world away on the Upper West Side, another landmark of the Mod style has just been reborn. At the Calhoun School, on 81st Street and West End, progressive education, circa 1975, finally assumed architectural form.


The building’s airy floor plan was unspoiled by anything as retrograde as dividing walls, and the very shape of its beige facade looked for all the world like an early television set. Many New Yorkers were scandalized at the time. The point of education, it was thought, was to wean young minds away from the television: Here they were being asked to inhabit it.


This, by the way, was not the first aggression against mainstream taste perpetrated by the architect, Costas Machlouzarides. In 1967, he had designed the Church of the Crucifixion, a brutalist mass on West 149th Street. In time for the opening of the present school year, however, Calhoun’s Upper School has been greatly enlarged, and is far better for it.


What is most remarkable about the new facade and the four additional floors, designed by Fox & Fowle Architects, is the way they fully embrace the formal stone-like stucco vocabulary of the older structure. Its exterior is left entirely intact, but extended with a steel superstructure posted onto the earlier building. Such is the sensitivity with which the architects have worked that, in retrospect, the new structure does not seem like an enhancement of the old. Rather, the old one seems to have been, through all those years, an incomplete version of what has now been unveiled.


The New York Sun

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