(Host) Lawyer and commentator Donald Kreis is a Vermont Law School
professor by day, but in his spare time he likes to roam Vermont in
search of great architecture. Recently, he ventured into a well-known
border region.
(Kreis) Folks
who live on the western bank of the Connecticut River can sometimes be
heard quipping that if you really want to contemplate New Hampshire, the
best place to see it from is Vermont. This brand of Green Mountain
chauvinism may or may not be justified as a general proposition. But if
you love distinguished contemporary architecture, as I do, to see the
best example of good design to hit these parts in many a day you have to
cross the river and visit Dartmouth College in Hanover.
Dartmouth’s
new Black Family Visual Arts Center is a functional example of how
contemporary architecture doesn’t have to be goofy and self-indulgent
like Frank Gehry, whose buildings resemble crumpled pieces of paper, or
monolithic and prison-like, in the manner of Bicentennial Hall at my
alma mater, Middlebury College.
You might think it ridiculous,
perhaps typical of a wealthy Ivy League institution, to go all the way
to Norway for small rectangular panels of autumn-colored slate – but as a
material around which to organize a façade that is complex without
being too complex, it is both visually pleasing and a welcome respite
from the relentless brick of the rest of the campus.
This golden
brown slate is a favorite material of Machado and Silvetti, the
Boston-based firm that designed the building. So, too, is the notion of
making a staircase the building’s distinguishing interior feature. If
you’re ever in Los Angeles, drive to Malibu and check out the masterful
way that Machado and Silvetti updated the Getty Villa, an exact replica
of an ancient Roman mansion. Among other things, Machado and Silvetti
added an outdoor entry pavilion in the form of a richly textured
concrete parallelogram through which a series of staircases allows
visitors to ascend a hillside to the villa itself. It may be the
coolest outdoor stairway in North America.
At Dartmouth the
action shifts indoors to a three-story atrium, where the zig zaggy
stairway is both the most prominent visual feature and and an opportunity to see and be seen from various vantage points. I think all
this ultra-visible ascending and descending is an architectural metaphor
for a dominant theme of our era – that of upward and downward mobility.
From
the plaza adjacent to the Black Family Center you see the sweep of more
than a half century of architectural history. To the west is The
Hopkins Center, a midcentury modern masterpiece designed by Wallace K.
Harrison as a precursor to his Metroplitan Opera House in New York. At
center stage is the Hood Museum, a rare example of un-schlocky
postmodernism by that era’s great avatar, Charles Moore. And now we have
Machado and Silvetti’s richly complex Visual Arts Center.
This
plaza at Dartmouth College demonstrates that modern architecture
deserves the same love we lavish on our 18th and 19th century buildings.
It’s too bad you have to go to New Hampshire to see something this
good.