Schwarz
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The New York City Office of Emergency Management (OEM) is sponsoring a design competition to enhance the City's ability to provisionally house residents after a major coastal storm. Read the invitation letter from OEM's Commissioner.
But the Ennis, as noted, is in bad shape. It's now owned by a private conservancy, the Ennis House Foundation, that has at least succeeded in making it stable. But far more remains to be done. Ten million dollars is the estimate.
The Ennis is, as far as I'm concerned, the poster child for a problem nobody seems to be interested in solving: How do we protect our great works of architecture?
How is it, for example, that a buyer will spend $135 million for a painting by Gustav Klimt, but nobody will foot the bill to save a masterpiece of architecture? Wright's best houses are certainly, in my view, greater total works of art than all but the most remarkable of individual paintings.
The problem, I suppose, is that a plutocrat can't hang a building on the wall to impress his or her friends. The United States needs to find a way, as so many European countries have, to find a permanent solution for our great architecture.
From its first placard, the exhibition pulled no punches. There, within corridors that were his own creation, came blunt questions of the man's achievement and legacy:
"Genius? Fraud? Artist? Who is Frank Gehry?"
Such was the introduction to a recent retrospective on Mr. Gehry's long career in architecture and design. The exhibition was held inside the architect's first Ohio building - the sculpture-for-living that is the University of Toledo's Center for the Visual Arts.
Adjoined to the Toledo Museum of Art, the center opened 15 years ago next month as a home to the university's art department and the museum's reference library. Outside the 51,000-square-foot building is an agglomeration of boxy shapes and zig-zagging angles clad in gray lead-coated copper plates.
Mr. Gehry has described the building's skin as a jazz excursion, complete with visual riffs and syncopated rhythms that lift the eye up, then down, then back around. One critic called it "a collision of the Merrimack and the Monitor on the museum's grounds."
The University of Toledo’s Center for the Visual Arts adjoining the art museum has been called by one critic ‘a collision of the Merrimack and the Monitor on the museum’s grounds.’
It's just such design creativity that lifted Mr. Gehry to the pedestal of the world's most well-known living "starchitect." Yet that iconoclasm has often generated controversy for his projects in Toledo and elsewhere.