IAC

I first saw the IAC building on my way down to Stuyvesant in March. It was still wrapped in construction equipment, and I had no idea what it was, but it jumped out at me as a real comer. It’s on the corner of 18th (I think) and the West Side Highway, literally the last building on the west side before the docks (in this case, the Chelsea Piers). I tracked it down and found out that it was designed by Frank Gehry. You might know him from The Simpsons.

I was in Manhattan Friday, over at the Javits Center for the annual Book Expo, where all the publishers lay out their upcoming wares so that all the bookstore people can get free samples of stuff they would otherwise never hear of, or get their kids’ pictures taken with Michelin’s Bib, or as I did, pick up a Superman button to give to O’C. I had never been to Javits before, so that was something of a revelation too. It’s a wide open space, as a convention center must be, dreadfully airless and hot, and fancifully designed along the inspirational lines of the 1851 Crystal Palace, which was the phenomenon of its day, a modular construction of glass and metal with the structural elements clearly visible. Javits makes no secret of its roots, and even boasts some sort of Crystal Palace cafeteria, no doubt just like the one Victoria and Albert used to get their bagels at. The CP is the Grandaddy of World’s Fair exposition buildings, a ginormous space where everything was squeezed in willy nilly to provide a deliberate sensory overload. You were here to see the wonders of the world, after all. You shouldn’t be yawning through the whole thing.

Subsequent fairs kept the concept of the uberbuilding, but slowly branched out. By 1893, the Chicago Columbian Exposition was a whole series of these enormous buildings devoted to specific themes, collected in a grand White City. Walt Disney’s father was one of the construction workers on that fair; L. Frank Baum used the design as the germ of his Emerald City. By 1939 and the quintessential New York fair, buildings had gotten smaller and more specific: modernism had replaced classicism. I don’t know if form follows function when the National Cash Register company’s pavilion is shaped like a giant cash register, but I guess postmodernism’s seeds are inherent in modernism. At the same time, the Trylon and Perisphere are perfect examples of the Modernistic, architecture that claims to be the most up-to-date by predicting what architecture will look like in the future. Or this can be considered Futuristic, like the design of Space Mountain or much of EPCOT. (A lot of academic architecture is arguing orthodoxies and orthographies, which is why I’m not much of a fan of a lot of academic approaches to subjects.) By the time you get to Hanover in 2000, the architecture of the fair is literally and intrinsically about architecture (but you saw that coming, didn’t you). Hanover was pure post-contemporary.

Anyhow, I enjoyed rambling around the Javits, wishing that it were some mythical BIE (that’s the international World’s Fair folks) Expo 2007 rather than the BEA, but what are you going to do? After exhausting myself with the futility of making money off the written word in the 21st Century, I headed off to the IAC, it being in that general neck of the woods. If you’re so inclined you can read what the Times had to say about it (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/arts/design/22dill.html?ex=1181102400&en=59dd564376989178&ei=5070) and see some pictures (the href isn't working for some reason; sorry). It’s not a particularly large or grandiose building, which is one of the nice things about it. It’s exactly the right height for a building in that neighborhood. It fits in, yet it stands out. One expects Gehry designs to be, at least at some level, visual overload, with all those freeform roofs and crooked angles, but this is modest in its nonlinear angularity. It reminds me of a small iceberg, and when you’re close, it’s even more like an iceberg, with cool gray-white glass that you can just barely see through. The interior (at least the part I was able to get into) was clean and inviting, and I gather there’s an open arborium away from the public area, which I have to admit is one of the things I don’t like about modern buildings (the Hearst on 58th has this same problem): making the most dramatic interior spaces private seems to be counterintuitive to the public nature of these buildings. Granted they are privately owned, but not so private as not to be urban landmarks. Once you’re a landmark, you sort of forfeit your privacy. (That’s even true of people, at least in a legal sense.)

Overall, I’m reminded by the IAC of Gehry’s Fred and Ginger in Prague, which is also a surprisingly small but fun structure. Everything doesn’t have to be his Disney music hall or Bilbao. The one I haven’t seen yet that I should is MIT, because I haven’t been to Cambridge since it’s been built. I’m tempted to go just for that. For that matter, I’m tempted to go to Bilbao just to see the Guggenheim.

I’m very easy to please.