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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the late nineteen-fifties, J. Irwin Miller, the chairman of the Cummins Engine Company, decided to liven up Columbus, Indiana, where his company was based, by commissioning work from famous architects--I. M. Pei, Kevin Roche, and Robert Venturi, among others. Pei designed a library, Roche a post office, and Venturi a firehouse. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the city hall. Charles Gwathmey built subsidized housing. Richard Meier and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer built elementary schools. This made for a place that certainly isn't like any other small town in Indiana, but almost none of the buildings rank among their architect's best work, and Columbus, for all the good intentions, is pretty much the architectural equivalent of one of those art collections that consist of a Henry Moore, a Picasso, a Calder, and a Dali--an assemblage of names rather than a coherent set of works.
Thirty years after the Columbus project was begun, the dean of the college of art and architecture at the University of Cincinnati also had an idea about using glamorous buildings to attract attention, and the school hired Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Michael Graves, and Henry Cobb. Eisenman designed the architecture school, Graves an engineering building, Gehry a molecular-research lab, and Cobb the music school. This project had a master plan, but the whole turned out to be much less than the sum of its parts, and the parts themselves were not first-rate.
In the mid-nineties, Coco Brown, a developer who lives in New York and Bridgehampton, Long Island, acquired about a hundred acres of scrub in the hamlet of Sagaponack, hard by the East Hampton Airport. This is not the part of...
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