Ephemera @ Architecture Boston magazine: Jonathan Levi

copyright 2006 Architecture Boston magazine, Boston Society of Architects

The demographics of Harvard graduate students have really changed. There was a time when they made the Cambridge exodus with families in tow, filling Peabody Terrace’s hallways and playgrounds with toddlers’ footsteps in ten regional dialects. The current graduate student is most likely foreign, straight out of school, unfettered, studious, and lacking any furniture. This explains why there are fewer U-Haul trucks chipping away at the bridges on Memorial Drive each fall. It also explains the need for a brave, new graduate student-housing model.

Jonathan Levi, an Adjunct Associate Professor in Architecture at the GSD, has just completed such a model, located off the Cambridge Common on Concord Avenue, in Cambridge, for Harvard University. The Graduate Housing Complex is a gut-renovation of an early 20th century hotel that transforms the site and building into an experimental typology. Levi presented his project at the eighth “Conversations on Architecture”, an informal round-table review of an architect’s work, hosted by Brian Healy.

In presenting his work, Levi concentrated on his rigorous exploration of the plan, which had produced twenty unique unit ideas from duplex, to suite, to single apartments and studios. Working closely with the university, he had distilled these into four configurations: studio, paired studio, two-bedroom, and three-bedroom faculty units. Levi believes that the more highly programmed the spaces, the more likely that they will be used. The paired studio is his most compelling invention, which in plan looks like twins conjoined at the dining nook. Throughout, built-in cabinet/bookcase/desk modules separate space, provide sound buffers, and tell you exactly where your bed will go. The dining nook is a long, narrow room with mirrored banquettes, and a table. None of this can be rearranged, but you have the freedom to rotate your futon in the privacy of your own bedroom, if you’re feeling frisky.

Levi’s boldest move was to develop the quarter-acre one-story garage roof behind the building into a green roof, and landscape the hell out of it. In a gentle nod to domesticity, he introduced a “stoop” vocabulary, so that each faculty unit has its own backdoor that opens onto this substantial, yet unexpected, courtyard. He then cut a three-story glazed passage through the short axis of the building that serves as a “luminous beacon” to draw people up and into the complex from the street.

Several architects at Levi’s Conversation observed the spaces seemed designed for a business traveler rather than a student. The units are so highly controlled that the interior has more in common with a suite hotel than a dormitory. Levi’s response was that graduate students are a “population in transition”: here to study, not to decorate; they would be happy to be relieved of that responsibility. If this is true, he has provided lovely, thoughtful spaces for his monkish protagonists.

Ephemera @ Architecture Boston magazine: Daniel Libeskind

copyright 2006 Architecture Boston magazine, Boston Society of Architects

The elusive and unassuming Robert Campbell, Boston’s homegrown architectural critic, hosted a glittering night at the Museum of Fine Arts in tweed. He sat on the stage opposite Daniel Libeskind of WTC fame and bantered with the black-clad maestro in front of the hub’s benefactors, architects, educators, and intelligentsia. Campbell is one of the sharpest critics around, a Pulitzer recipient and an architect. Libeskind had been a paper architect for 30 years before he completed the remarkable Jewish Museum in Berlin (1999). He is the architect for the permanent home for the New Center for Arts and Culture (NCAC) to be built on the Rose Kennedy Greenway.

Three cheers to the NCAC visionaries who correctly wagered that an audience could handle an evening without pictures or PowerPoint. The sold out crowd came to hear a conversation between two quick wits coming from opposite sensibilities, a sort of speed repartee about everything architecture. The two discussed spectacle and representation, Libeskind’s virtuosity at the accordion, and the creative process. Libeskind spoke with a Polish accent at super sonic rate while smiling incessantly. His answers never precisely addressed the questions; like his architecture, his mind worked allegorically.

Case in point: Campbell noted Libeskind’s trademark cowboy boots—black with pointed toes—and the famous glasses that got New Yorkers sprinting to their opticians. Libeskind’s comeback, “I never do anything that doesn’t have a point” immediately warmed the audience to his eccentricities, but kept his inquisitor off the scent. Never straying, Campbell asked which was Libeskind’s favorite Boston building. His answer: the Paul Revere House in the North End. “But how,” asked Campbell incredulously, “could you love something that’s completely fake?” No matter, grinned his interviewee, it is a powerful place that provokes a deep sense of history. Fake or not, that’s where he would take his family first to drink up the spirit of the city.

When Campbell opened to questions, hands shot up everywhere. The questions revealed a thoughtful and educated audience. So architects should listen up: there is public interest in the conversations forming our built landscape, and you can leave your laptop at home. Listening to an architect freed from his renderings is like reading the book versus seeing the movie; Libeskind constructed his philosophy with wit and charm.

Why I write

My mother gave my daughter a cuckoo clock for her third birthday. The cuckoo was my suggestion, and this was an aberration. I have trouble with routine; the idea of something predictable happening hour after hour makes me miserable. Heralded by the recorded sounds of a running brook, the bird emerges. We watch and clap. My daughter is delighted; she wants it again and again. Some would say that constancy in life is a good thing, a touch of regularity in this imperfect world.

But time is tricky: it’s either for or against you; it has trouble with neutrality. Four years of college seemed interminable, and suddenly then it was over. I washed dishes at a Maine inn that summer, waiting impatiently for the career muse to lead me to salvation, to Wall Street, Madison Avenue, or Quito. At twenty-one, I was 100% potential energy—the ball at the top of the slide. Applying basic physics, once I got moving, I figured it’d be pretty fast going. That’s what I feared: this incredible momentum, a single trajectory, and someday, standing at the bottom, looking back up, regretfully.

The innkeeper’s daughter was my age, and had just been unhitched by her fiancé. We sat on my porch at night and read stories about Maine and Manhattan, stories I’d written in the fog of June. When fall threatened, I went back to New York City with her. We found an apartment and I went to an employment agency, baited by a glamorous job description. My friend spent hours over beer with me trying to find an honest enough answer to the question, “So, why do you want to go into advertising?” I took my first typing test, went to an interview in the “lipstick building," then fled from the plasterboard walls, off-gassing carpets, and automated phone systems in my blistering pumps.

I once tried to list all the jobs I’d had before I graduated; I got to thirty, but every so often, I remember one that I’m sure I’d forgotten when making my list, so there is no complete accounting. I read Christie’s catalog of china soup tureens to a blind writer on Park Avenue; I assisted a fashion photographer and learned about Dektol and cellulite; I answered phones at an art gallery, surrounded by Stellas, and made a feed bowl of oats and seeds for the owner every noon. When I returned, I worked in a bookstore. I got fifty percent off, free magazines, and found myself surrounded by kids my age who are, no doubt, now holding tenure-track positions at prestigious colleges. I snuck around, reading the books my co-workers were consuming, and thought that I’d found heaven. Late in the fall, I discovered architecture.

An architect’s product is space; it is a wordless world that was reluctant to take me in. It seduced because it was foreign: something I couldn’t talk or write my way through. I spent years letting go of language, allowing the drawing to speak, and then to making it speak for me. I earned entry through perseverance and practice; architecture played hard-to-get, but occupied me entirely. This affair with architecture does not end, though we are opposites. It is silent and I am not; it is slow and I am impatient. I am a stickler for using the correct word, while architecture feels free to co-opt “program” and “volume” and “sublime” and contort their meanings beyond recognition.

I approached architecture from different angles. I framed a Maine house one fall, took studio classes in different cities, and worked for a former architect who went into project management. I married and got a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania. I traveled. We moved to Cambridge and I found a job in a medium sized firm. Now, after five years of practice, as I am about to get licensed, I am rediscovering my passion for words. Just as in art, I never enjoyed creating something from nothing. I needed rules, at least a site, from which I could start. When I write about buildings, what architects say and what they do, I am an activist, an observer, an editor, and a proselytizer. I have reframed my native tongue through study of a visual language.

I believe architecture is powerful. It is part of a continuum that crosses generational, geographic, and stylistic boundaries. Buildings comprise our physical memory. They make up our cities, shape the land, and create or destroy community. They are our public countenance and our private thoughts. Architecture and writing meet at a spellbinding place— solitary arts for public consumption, reinforcing each other, feeding each other. I practice them alone, best at night, when the house is quiet and dark. Time is languid. It lingers at two, drifts into three, and at four, I am warm, accomplished, asleep.

The cuckoo calls to us hourly. I pick up Samara and we count the cuckoos together while I study his miniature chalet, imagining it nestled into an Austrian mountainside. Behind his closed doors, my daughter has told me, he plays the piano. My mother worries that the cuckoo is lonely. Maybe he cleans all day. Maybe he hosts lavish parties with good food and witty repartee, excusing himself for his brief hourly stint with the phrase, “It’s a living.” This clock is more than a clock. It is a home, a baroque piece of architecture for a tiny, punctual bird. Words, visions spoken aloud, have brought these things to life and made them precious. Which explains my passion for the moment when language and design intersect.