Open House Chicago 2014

Posted on November 3, 2014 by admin

On October 18, the day after I got back from New York, I should have done the reasonable thing and puttered around the house. The weather that morning, cool and drizzly, encouraged that. But it was Open House Chicago weekend. No time to stay home. Yuriko and I drove to Oak Park, parked the car, and took the El downtown.

I quote myself from last year, since the event was essentially the same this year: “The CAF describes it this way: ‘A free, citywide festival that offers behind-the-scenes access to more than 150 buildings across this great city. Explore historic mansions, hidden rooms, sacred spaces, private clubs, offices, hotels, iconic performance venues and more much – all for free.’ Note the emphasis on free.

“Sounds like my kind of event. At each place there were volunteers at folding tables taking attendance in the form of asking you your zip code. At a few places, you had to join a short guided tour, but most of the time you just offered your zip code, walked in, and looked around. Not all of the spaces were open 9-5 on both Saturday and Sunday, so it was worthwhile to check the CAF guide to the event, which had such details, as well as useful maps.”

Last year, I went by myself, and hit sites downtown and points north. This year, we also saw downtown sites, but then went south and west. In order, we visited the Lyric Opera, the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 190 S. LaSalle, the Inland Steel Building, and the Kemper Building (all downtown); the Forum, the First Church of Deliverance, the Centennial Missionary Baptist Church, the Welcome Inn Manor, and the Mount Pisgah Missionary Baptist Church (all Bronzeville); and Sts. Volodymyr & Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church and St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral, both in Ukrainian Village (and both places that were closed when we visited this summer).

I used to work in the Lyric Opera Building – 35 N. Wacker, but that’s the office component of the structure. The Lyric Opera of Chicago, while in the same structure, is actually a separate entity, with the theater space owned by the opera company. It’s a lavish place. Looking toward the stage, where work was under way on the set for the next production:

Away from the stage:

Opulent as it is, the Lyric wasn’t my favorite downtown space this time. Rather, we were surprised to find a former law library on the 40th floor of 190 S. LaSalle

The story is that the developer built out the space for a major law firm tenant when the building was first developed in the 1980s. Thirty years later, law libraries of this kind are obsolete, and the original tenant’s gone anyway (I noticed that a major commercial real estate company occupies the offices on the same floor as the library space). The former two-level law library’s now a posh meeting space.

It has some great views, all four directions.

That’s looking south, with the Chicago Board of Trade and its Ceres statue prominent in the view to the left and the South Branch of the Chicago River to the right.

First Baptist Congregational Church

Posted on September 25, 2014 by admin

By the time we got to the last church on the tour, we were feeling the overload. At least I was. It’s the kind of feeling that drives you back to your room for an evening of television – a bad movie in another language is just the thing — after spending the day looking at grand churches or magnificent museums or arresting ruins or even just intense, one-thing-after-another cities, or some combo of all these.

Well, one more. We can handle that. The last one for bus #4 was the curiously named First Baptist Congregational Church at 60 N. Ashland Ave. Its Gothic Revival outside hinted that it was going to be another big, spectacular church inside. That’s a good thing, of course. But the effect wears off a little after four others.

It was spectacular inside. But not in the way I expected. It perked me right up and made me want to look around. It wasn’t like any of the other churches. For one thing, First Baptist Congregational is an auditorium church, trimmed in dark woods, a very inviting design.

The view toward the front, facing the powerful organ, among other things.

Toward the back.

It’s also the oldest of the churches we saw that day, built as the Union Park Congregational in 1869, long enough ago that the congregation who built it had been abolitionist before the war, and active in resisting the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. After the war, the congregation counted Mary Todd Lincoln as a member for a time.

They hired one Gurdon P. Randall to design their church. He was active in Chicago both before and after the war, but apparently a number of his structures were lost in the Chicago Fire. Union Park Congregational survived, since the fire didn’t reach this far west. Through a number of shifts in congregation whose details I’ll skip, the modern congregation is affiliated with both the United Church of Christ and the National Baptist Convention.

It isn’t lavish in an in-your-face way, but the detail is remarkable.

Got pretty stained glass, too.

About three years ago, a snowstorm sent one of the smaller spires crashing through the roof and the false roof over the nave (if that’s the right term for an auditorium church). That was bad enough, but apparently the wind then carried soot that had accumulated between the two roofs over the years inside the church, covering everything. The restoration was only recently completed.

St. Paul’s Catholic Church

Posted on September 24, 2014 by admin

At St. Paul’s Catholic Church at 2234 S. Hoyne in Chicago, Paul is there to greet you.

Or at least a mosaic St. Paul does, looking absolutely certain of his mission to the Gentiles. He’s above the front entrance, and while the church has many brilliant mosaics – and who doesn’t like a brilliant mosaic? – note the bricks around the Paul mosaic. The entire church is an enormous, artful mass of those bricks. As this view from the rear makes clear.

“St. Paul’s Church was established by a small German community in 1876, with its cornerstone laid in 1897,” the CAF says. “Designed by Henry J. Schlacks, the church was built entirely by its own parishioners — many of whom were professional bricklayers. Singled out in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not as ‘the church built without nails,’ the structure underwent a long-term restoration project completed in 2013. The gothic-style building is visible from all sides of Pilsen due to its exceptionally tall spires and dark brick.”

Schlacks, of course, is the fellow who did St. Adalbert (see yesterday). But St. Paul was an astonishingly early work in his career, since he was only 28 at the time. “Schlacks himself took on the role of general contractor and hired men of the parish…” the CAF says. “He wrote, ‘We could find no builder in Chicago acquainted with the proposed method of construction, or who could give even an approximate estimate of the cost from my plans….’ ”

True to the tradition of its building, parishioners did most of the recent renovation, as this article in Crain’s Chicago Business (of all places) notes. And a fine job of it they did.

It’s all brick, even the white areas on the ceiling, which were plastered over at some point. The mosaics, we were told, were completed in the early 1930s – ordered in pieces from Germany, I believe. Especially striking are Jesus and the Apostles, though they look a little like they’re at a board meeting of some kind (the nonprofit Salvation Co).

By the time we got to St. Paul’s, we were eating our sack lunches in the bus. The tour took us downstairs for more refreshments. The lower level, now an event and meeting space, was a major part of the recent renovation, and striking in its own way.

When I saw it, I thought, Rathskeller. Perfect place to hoist a brew and sing drinking songs in bad German. In the case of the tour, however, the only drinks on offer were water, soda and coffee.

St. Adalbert Catholic Church

Posted on September 23, 2014 by admin

The third church on the CAF bus tour last Saturday was St. Adalbert Catholic Church, named for another saint I knew little about. That only goes to show I’m not up on my hagiography, since he seems to be a fairly big-wheel saint of the 10th century. He’s the patron of Bohemia, Poland, Hungary and Prussia, and a martyr. The story is that pagans up around the Baltic Sea – whom he was trying to Christianize — offed him for cutting down their sacred oak.

According to Wiki, at least, he’s well remembered, even in our time: “April 1997 was the thousandth anniversary of Saint Adalbert’s martyrdom. It was commemorated in the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, Russia and other countries. Representatives of Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and Evangelical churches pilgrimaged to Gniezno, to the saint’s tomb. John Paul II visited Gniezno and held a ceremonial divine service in which heads of seven European states and about a million believers took part.”

In Chicago, St. Adalbert is at 1650 W. 17th St., and currently has some structural issues.

That’s some of the largest scaffolding I’ve ever seen. Apparently the church’s twin towers are losing their will to resist gravity, and need renovation. Naturally, there isn’t enough money for that, and a cheaper option is to shorten them. That seems like a damn shame. I looked around for a box to drop a dollar in for the cause of saving the towers, but I didn’t see one.

St. Adalbert is the newest of the churches we saw, completed in 1914. Chicago Poles hired Henry Schlacks, who was renowned for his church work in Chicago, to design the structure. It’s done in Italian Renaissance style, and it reminded me of some of the churches I saw in Italy, though I couldn’t say quite which (it’s been more than 30 years, after all).

In its early days, the church was Polish through-and-through. Above the altar is a mural depicting events in the saga of Poland, such as the wedding of Queen Jadwiga of Poland and Prince Jagiello of Lithuania, and (I think) the frustration by Charles X of Sweden’s designs on Poland, for which Our Lady of Czestochowa seems to get some credit. Also, the Polish in the arch over the altar is the opening words of “Hymn of the Motherland.” In more recent times, shrines to Our Lady of Guadalupe and Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos have been added, a reflection of more recent demographics.

The church features an excellent collection of stained glass, some of which tell the story of Adalbert and his efforts to convert the heathen up near the Baltic Sea. Others are episodes from the New Testament.

There’s even a large Tiffany dome far above the altar.

It’s almost hidden away from casual inspection, peeking out like a moon in the clouds.

St. Procopius Catholic Church

Posted on September 22, 2014 by admin

During the Churches by Bus tour on Saturday, I became acquainted with a few new saints. That’s one of the things about saints, there are always more. The second church for bus #4 was St. Procopius Catholic Church at 1641 S. Allport St. in the Pilsen neighborhood.

Procopius? The Secret History Procopius? He was a saint?

No. Different fellow, separated by 500 years or so and some geography. From the web site of St. Patrick’s Church in Washington, DC: “Born in Bohemia; died March 25, 1053; canonized by Pope Innocent III in 1204; feast day formerly July 4. Procopius studied in Prague, where he was also ordained. He became a canon, was a hermit for a time, and then was founding abbot of the Basilian abbey of Sazaba in Prague.

“Procopius is one of the patrons of Czechoslovakia (Benedictines, Delaney). In art, Saint Procopius lets the devil plough for him. He may be portrayed (1) as an abbot with a book and discipline, devil at his feet; (2) with a stag (or hind) near him; (3) with SS Adelbert, Ludmilla, and Vitus (patrons of Prague); or (4) as a hermit with a skull and a girdle of leaves (Roeder).”

Pilsen, as the name strongly suggests, used to be a Bohemian neighborhood, in the ethnic sense of that term, not the hipster sense. In 1875, St. Procopius was established as the third parish for the Bohemians of Chicago, and the parish built this handsome church in the early 1880s. According to some sources, Paul Huber was the architect. Other sources say it Julius Huber. The father and son sometimes worked together, so maybe they both did, to create the Romanesque Revival structure.

Back then, the Benedictines administered the church. There was even a monastery on site that later moved to suburban Lilse and became the Abbey of St. Procopius. Now the Jesuits operate the church.

In our time, Pilsen is a large Mexican-American neighborhood, with some bohemians in that other sense – those who can’t afford Bucktown or Wicker Park any more – filtering into the neighborhood. Or so I’ve read. My visits to the neighborhood have been scant few in recent years.

Here’s Procopius, center stage. No stag or skull or leaves or even a devil, but artistic interpretations vary.

Not far away are Mary and the infant Jesus, flanked by Joachim and Anne, with Mary as a girl. I don’t ever remember seeing this particular array before, but I don’t spend a lot of time studying religious art.

In a back corner of the church stands a statue of Miguel Agustin Pro, S.J.

The Jesuits are honoring one of their own, martyred by the anti-clerical government of Mexican President Plutarco Elias Calles in 1927. Before being executed by firing squad, Pro put his arms up and cried out, “Viva Cristo Rey!” Newspapers published a picture of him in that position, and so he stands in a church far to the north.

The church is also a shrine of the Virgin of San Juan de los Lagos. A sign in Spanish and English on the outside of the building, near the entrance, says so. (The nearby cornerstone says: “AD SANCTUM PROCOPIUM C Missio Haec Fundata Est A.D. 1875 Hic Lapis Angularis Positus Est 23 Julii 1882.”) If you can’t make it to the shrine of that name in central Mexico, coming here counts, and apparently people do in droves.

First Immanuel Lutheran Church

Posted on September 21, 2014 by admin

On Saturday just after 10 a.m., Yuriko and I found ourselves at First Immanuel Lutheran Church, 1124 S. Ashland Ave. in Chicago. The predicted rain hadn’t happened yet, and the morning was warming up, unlike most of the fall-like days last week.

Note the top sliver of bus in front of the church. We’d come by bus, as participants in the Chicago Architecture Foundation Churches by Bus tour. Five busloads of people spent part of Saturday morning and afternoon, in an tour organized by the foundation, at five different churches on the West Side and in the Pilsen neighborhood. Each bus had a different route, so that only one at a time was at any given church. Our bus, #4, went to First Immanuel first. All of the churches were worth a look, and most had some extraordinary features.

These days First Immanuel is near the sprawling Illinois Medical District, anchored by enormous hospitals — Rush, UIC, Cook County Stroger, and Jesse Brown VA — and including a lot of other healthcare facilities. All that was in future when construction started on the church in 1888. The congregation dates back to 1854, as a daughter church of a Lutheran church in the city. The area was suburban in the 1850s, and a lot of Germans were settling there. An architect with a suitably German-sounding name of Frederick Ahlschlager did the Gothic Revival design.

In the church’s early days, it wasn’t far from West Side Park, where the pre-Wrigley Cubs played. The church’s web site asserts that parishioners were able to watch the Cubs from the tower on their way to winning the World Series in 1909, but maybe they simply got the date wrong, since the last time the Cubs won the championship was 1908. By the 1930s, the docent pointed out, the church was ahead of its time in making a conscious effort to include all races, and officially integrated in the 1950s. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the church.

The interior’s not overly ornate, but it’s decidedly churchly.

The church’s organist happened to be present, and he treated us with a few minutes’ playing. The organ is new, only installed a few years ago. It’s got 4,000 pipes and a powerful sound. We got a close look at it after the organist finished, which isn’t something you often get to do. Seemed like a forest of pipes in there.

The Houses Near Palmer Square

Posted on September 17, 2014 by admin

The point of a house walk is to go inside and look around while a docent tells you some interesting things about the things you see. They also sketch a short history of the property, and in the case of Chicago houses from the earliest years of the 20th century, the story tends to be: X house was built incorporating Y and Z influences. By the mid-century, later owners updated, modernized, painted over, or otherwise Eisenhowered the earlier charms of property, then the neighborhood went to hell and maybe so did the house. In the last 20 years or so, individuals have been spending a lot of time and money restoring – with some concessions to modernity – X house to close to its original design, because Y and Z influences are damn cool.

One particularly egregious example of Eisenhowering an interior on the Logan Square House & Garden Walk involved rooms trimmed with dark, beautiful woods installed by expert craftsmen in 1912 that have only recently seen the light of day again. Forty or so years after they were installed, they were painted white. All of them. Then re-coated a number of times afterward. Pictures on display showed just how lifeless that made the room.

The walk was well attended. Sometimes we had to wait outside a house while another group filed through.

Docents inside and out the houses pointed out various architectural details: Prairie School this and that, Victorian flourishes, Chicago-style windows, a couple of oculus ovule windows (oval eye, see above), an assortment of columns, a diversity of balustrades, cornices a-plenty, brick, limestone, beautiful woodwork, ornate electric lamps that used to be gas, wooden floors from species no longer harvested or at least tremendously expensive, walls restored or partly restored, and more.

And a surprising amount of stained glass in some of the houses, including the following remarkable example. Then again, Chicago used to be a mecca of stained glass manufacture.

Some of houses featured collections of stuff that were as interesting (to me) as the architectural details. One homeowner collected train paraphernalia, including a working early 20th-century fare box from a CTA car, plus neon sculpture, old radios, and more.

Another homeowner devoted the walls of a small room to his personal collection of presidential campaign buttons. Each candidate’s buttons were grouped together and under glass in one of those framings that’s a little deeper than a picture frame. All of the presidents since McKinley at least were represented, and so were a number of losing candidates (I saw Willkie, Goldwater, Humphrey and Dole), even a few that didn’t make it past the primaries, such as Nelson Rockefeller.

In another house, one wall sported a panoramic photograph of an enormous group of people in a park-like setting. From the looks of the fashions, about 100 years ago. The docent speculated that it was a company outing or picnic or the like in Humboldt Park, since it looks to be summer. But she said that no one was certain. Nothing was written on the print. I could have stared at the thing a good deal longer, taking in face after face – and there was quite a variety, young and old, male and female. Men in hats, women in long skirts. Who were they? What was important enough about the occasion to take a panoramic picture, but not important enough to record anything about it on the print?

In yet another house, the man who had owned the place from the 1930s to the 1980s had apparently walled up a number of things in the basement, including gold coins, gold certificates, postcards, and publicity shots of movie stars from (by the looks of them) the ’20s – no one I recognized, since fame is fleeting.

Maybe he thought G-men were going to come looking for his gold, though by the mid-1970s, gold ownership was lawful again. According to the docent, the current owners of the house sold the gold coins and the proceeds went to further the renovation. Some of the postcards and publicity images were on a table for us to look at, and the docent showed us a $10 gold certificate from the trove. It was a small note, clearly Series of 1928, making it one of the more common gold certificates. It was a fairly well circulated note, so not particularly valuable, though worth a good deal more than $10.

Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church

Posted on September 16, 2014 by admin

The Logan Square Preservation House & Garden Walk on Saturday didn’t start at a house or a garden, but at Old Holy Resurrection Serbian Orthodox Church on Palmer Square. I’d never been in a Serbian Orthodox church before. Russian, yes, Greek, certainly (in Chicago), even a Japanese Orthodox church, Nikolai-do in Tokyo.

Looking at the outside, it’s a little hard to discern anything Serbian, except for the flag, or even anything in a traditional Orthodox style.

It’s a handsome Gothic building with Arts and Crafts overtones, I’ve read, though my eye isn’t keen enough to pick out the overtones. Like much of the neighborhood, the property dates from the 1910s – 1910, in fact – and it was designed by Lowe and Bollenbacher, a firm active in Chicago and Bloomington, Ind., a century ago. Apparently they did a lot of work in both places.

It wasn’t built for a Serbian congregation, but an Anglican one. So it remained until a fire destroyed almost all of the interior in 1968. By then, the number of Episcopalians in Chicago was falling, but the number of Orthodox Serbs was on the rise, so the old congregation sold the ruin to the Serbs. They’ve been remodeling the interior in Orthodox style ever since, complete with an ornate iconostasis, bright frescoes on a still partly-white wall, a brilliant chandelier (not sure if it counts as a polyeleos), and a lot of standing room. This isn’t a particularly sharp image, but it gives some idea of the interior. One Filip Subotic did a lot of the frescoes.

I have no Serbian Cyrillic, and my understanding of saint symbolism isn’t all it could be, so I didn’t recognize a lot of the saints floating up on the white wall, in their blues and reds and gold-leaf nimbi. But I did know St. George. Who else is going to slay that dragon from atop his steed?

Ukrainian Village Exteriors

Posted on September 9, 2014 by admin

Cool in the evenings, warm during the day. Cicadas by day, crickets by night. We’re on the September slide. But the weather won’t be bad for two months or so, unless the Yellowstone Caldera blows or something like that.

As I mentioned yesterday, St. Stanislaus Kostka on West Side of Chicago is open all the time. Unfortunately the same can’t be said for a lot of other churches in the city. I understand the reason, of course: thieves and vandals and other miscreants. So sometimes all that’s visible to the casual visitor is an exterior, and that by itself can be a fine thing. Still, you want to go inside.

Earlier this summer we went to Ukrainian Village, a neighborhood in Chicago still populated by many Ukrainians, but arrived too late in the day to take a look inside St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Now 100 years old, I’ve read that it was modeled after St. Sophia in Kiev, with magnificent icons, mosaics and stained glass windows inside.

It has 13 domes surmounted by crosses – one for Jesus, 12 more for the Apostles, most not visible at this angle. Only a short walk from St. Nicholas is SS Volodymyr & Olha Church, a Byzantine-looking sort of place, which only dates from the early 1970s, but which harkens back a good many centuries.

It too was closed that afternoon.

But the sun was shining bright on the mosaic above the entrance, which depicts the Christianization of Ukraine. I hope it was in the summertime when that happened.

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Posted on August 5, 2014 by admin

I forget which rest stop it was now, but somewhere in Iowa we stopped for the usual reasons, and Ann asked for a cold drink from one of the machines. I fed it my dollar and then some coins, which it returned. But not the dollar. And no drink. There were blank slips to fill out in case of machine failures and a slot to drop them in. My experience with such things is hit or miss – Lighthouse Place Premium Outlets, or at least its vending concession, still owes me a dollar from the mid-00s – but I duly filled it out.

DESCRIBE PROBLEM: Took dollar. Won’t take coins. No refund of dollar.

While looking through my pile of mail when I got home, I noticed a little envelope from Pop Top Vending of Grinnell, Iowa. My slip was inside. So was one Yankee dollar. Good for you, Pop Top. Good customer service isn’t the baseline in this country (as Yuriko often points out), so it needs to be recognized.

The shortest route from metro Dallas to metro Chicago is north on US 75 into Oklahoma, which turns into US 69 – both are divided most of the way – and eventually that runs into I-44. Take that road east to St. Louis, where you catch I-55 northbound for the run up to Chicago. I’ve done it many times over the last 25 years. I used to overnight at Zeno’s Motel in Rolla, Mo., but in more recent years I’ve spent the night at the Munger Moss Motel in Lebanon, Mo. I knew Zeno’s had closed, and the lot seems to be vacant now.

Munger Moss is a solid independent motel. A tourist court. The kind of place where Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert might show up for the night. I was going to take a picture of the neon motel sign, but the co-proprietor – Ramona Lehman, who greeted me at the desk when we arrived at about 9 – turned it off for the night before I got around to it. So I settled for an interior pic of Room 70.

Lilly saw the picture and said, “That’s retro.” The pictures on the wall depicted bygone US 66 sites, so yes. Retro. But not completely. Note the TV and the AC. We didn’t turn on TV. Didn’t seem like the thing to do. We did use the air conditioner and access the property’s wifi, though. I had a column to file, and Ann wanted her entertainment. Nostalgia’s fine, but we have to live in our own time.

We arrived latish in Lebanon because I detoured slightly off the most direct route. In northeastern Oklahoma, I turned on US 412 and took it east to I-49 in Arkansas, and then north to Bentonville (I-49 was still called I-540 on my maps, but apparently the name changed recently). Bentonville is known as the hometown of Always Low Prices. Always. It’s the site of the Ur-Walmart and still the location of the behemoth’s HQ.

That isn’t why I came. I wanted to see the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. One of the things to do if you happen to be a billionaire is found a museum and stock it with the fine art you’ve been collecting for years. Alice Walton, daughter of Sam Walton, did exactly that. Not another institution on either coast or any of the major cities of the interior, but in the northwest corner of Arkansas. It’s been open only since late 2011.

You’d think most of the museum’s paintings — and it is heavy on paintings, though there’s a sculpture garden we didn’t have time to see — would already have been locked away in major museum collections, so high is the quality. Shows you what I know about the fine art trade.

From a NYT article published shortly after the museum opened: “It was only in May 2005 that Ms. Walton announced the selection of the Israeli-born Boston architect Moshe Safdie to design the museum and ruffled feathers along the Eastern Seaboard by buying a landmark of Hudson River School landscape painting, ‘Kindred Spirits,’ by Asher B. Durand, from the New York Public Library for around $35 million. The purchase came early in an extended shopping spree that rattled nerves, aroused skepticism and stimulated the art market.”

Ruffled feathers and rattled nerves, eh? But I bet when it comes to bidding for art, “riche” always trumps “nouveau.” The museum’s rooms are mostly chronological, from Colonial America to very recent items. A handful of works are astonishingly familiar, such as one of the Gilbert Stuart portraits of President Washington. Many more fall under the category of, You know, I’ve seen that somewhere — it’s here? Such as “Cupid and Psyche” by Benjamin West, or “Winter Scene in Brooklyn” by Francis Guy, or the delightful “War News from Mexico” by Richard Caton Woodville and the completely charming “The Lantern Bearers” by Maxfield Parrish. (All of those paintings are reproduced under “Selected Works.”)

A few of my pics came out decent, such as “Boy Eating Berries” by Joseph Decker, no date (but the artist lived from 1853 to 1924).

Did a few detail shots, too. This is RLS from “Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife” by John Singer Sargent (1885).

From “The Lantern Bearers,” which was a Collier’s cover in 1910.

A few of my sculpture pics turned out passable as well. Here’s an antebellum example, “Atala and Chactas,” by Randolph Rogers (1854). You don’t hear much about that story any more.

Next, a video-killed-the-radio-star example, “John Cage Robot II,” by Nam June Paik (1995). Eleven wood TV cabinets, 10 Panasonic color TVs, one Samsung, two DVD players and mixed media elements that include piano keys and piano hammers, books, chessmen, and wood mushrooms. You can’t tell from this still, but all the of TVs were playing video loops.

The museum also happened to be showing an exhibit about architect Moshe Safdie, including a lot of models of his building designs in such places as Ottawa (how did I miss that?), Jerusalem, Salt Lake City and others. I don’t think I’ve seen anything of his besides Crystal Bridges, which is an interesting work.

“Nestled between two hills in the Ozark… [the museum] traverses a stream within the wild landscape,” notes designboom.com, which annoyingly doesn’t believe in capital letters, so I’ve added them. “Covering 120 acres, the grounds are crossed with an extensive trail network which leads through mature forests of dogwoods, oaks and white pines and eventually leading into the nearby downtown area. The environment fuses art with nature, allowing visitors to descend from the site’s entrance and immerse themselves into the center’s recessed setting, encountering a cluster of pavilions wrapped around a focal pond.”

We arrived at about 4:30, ahead of closing at 6, so we didn’t have the time to walk around some of the wooded areas. Or to visit downtown Bentonville or the not-far-away Walmart Museum which, no doubt without a hint of irony, celebrates the five-and-dime that Sam Walton founded in Bentonville more than 60 years ago. Also no time for Pea Ridge National Military Park, which is in this part of Arkansas. I’m told I visited when I was small, but I don’t remember it. Ah, well. I might pass this way again sometime.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Architecture