Shane Neufeld and the Grand Canal

Though the world is rich with urban landscapes that have inspired great art, there is only one grand canal – the Gowanus Canal, which separates the Park Slope and Carroll Gardens neighborhoods of Brooklyn. Sure it’s filthy and gloomy – but when’s the last time you saw anyone splashing around at the Basilica di Santa Maria della Salute, that great canalside monument to health and salvation in Venice?

Like its Venetian counterpart, Brooklyn’s grand canal is visually interesting not so much in its own right but because of the great structures that line and cross it. In Venice there is the Rialto, the the Ponte degli Scalzi and the Ponte dell'Accademia. The Gowanus Canal has the magnificent Culver Viaduct, on which the F and G trains of the IND (Independent) Subway come sweeping out of the ground just beyond the Carroll Street station, stop directly above the canal at the Smith-9th Street station and quickly swoop back underground again just east of the Fourth Street station. The Smith-9th Street platforms are a dizzying 90 feet above the canal – the highest point on the entire IND subway – the viaduct comprising the only elevated portion of the Independent lines.

At the risk of belaboring the analogy, let us agree that the idea of building a subway station right where the viaduct crosses the canal with a muscular cantilevered span is every bit as cool as lining the Rialto Bridge with retail establishments so that commerce need not stop at canal’s edge.

One person who has definitely figured that out is 25-year-old artist Shane Neufeld, the Titian of the Gowanus Canal. Perhaps that’s a bit hyperbolic, but how else to describe an oil painter whose idea of a great summer is to spend it in a parking lot beneath the Culver Viaduct making pictures of trucks?

Neufeld – who turns 26 this year on the auspicious date of September 11 – grew up in Brooklyn Heights, studied art (and English) at Amherst College and, while in western New England, developed a zest for drawing and painting landscapes. He ultimately resolved to go to graduate school in architecture, but not before he rented a studio near the Gowanus Canal for five months and found such great inspiration from its gloriously gloomy infrastructure.

“I paint in order to look more closely at my surroundings,” Neufeld reports at the beginning of the artist’s statement on his web site. What his paintings convincingly demonstrate is that we can, and should, apply the same standards of beauty and discernment to whatever happens to be around us. We should no more resign ourselves to ugliness while catching the F Train at Smith/9th Street than we would from the summit of Mount Ascutney in Vermont or Cardigan Mountain in New Hampshire.

You can check out Shane Neufeld’s work – and even acquire some – at McGowan Fine Art in Concord, New Hampshire.

Black Lace Rust is Great for Hanover

Would it be too much to ask – in a community that is home to one of America’s most prestigious liberal arts institutions, I mean – for people to take a little less pleasure in their ignorance of, and hostility to, architecture? It’s not as if the buildings we inhabit, and wander among all day, are important, after all!

The latest case in point is the public reaction to the recent unveiling by Dartmouth College of the design for its $52 million Visual Arts Center by the Boston architectural firm of Machado and Silvetti Associates. The Valley News, to its credit, made the arrival of this design front-page news. The paper even ran a positive headline, to the effect that the building will be a “modern marvel.”

But the taste-maker they chose as the ostensible avatar of local reaction – apparently because she belongs to some committee charged with creating “liaison” between town and gown – proclaimed the project “hideous.” This same opinion leader offered up this assessment to the campus newspaper: “It’s creating an urban landscape in what used to be a traditional New England town. It’s gaudy and southwestern, and we’re not. It’s going to look funny with snow on it.”

Where to begin? Full details of the building plans have not been made public, but from the drawings it appears that Machado and Silvetti plan to clad the building in the same material that covers much of their celebrated Allston Branch of the Boston Public Library. Rich in texture, varied in color, but revealing mostly hues in the brown-tan-gold spectrum, this intriguing substance and its decidedly un-brick appearance are presumably what led to the “southwestern” complaint . In fact, the material is a type of slate known as “black lace rust.” And, ahem!, far having any association with the desert, this admittedly exotic materials comes from . . . Norway! So, say what you will of a building covered in black lace rust, but don’t proclaim it unsuitable for a location where it snows.

What does it say about our community when a new building of any importance is greeted with unthinking hostility unless it looks like it was designed at least 100 years ago? And what sentient, sighted person could seriously contend that this particular site, on Lebanon Street in Hanover, is an unsuitable context for a contemporary building? The Visual Arts Center will take its place next to the two most distinguished, non-historicist, 20th Century buildings on campus: The Hopkins Center, designed by Wallace K. Harrison (whose later work, the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, is but an imitation of what he created at Dartmouth) and the Hood Museum by Charles Moore, revered as pretty much the only practitioner of late-century postmodernism who designed anything of lasting value. This ain’t Canterbury Shaker Village.
It’s not even Main Street in Hanover, which clings to a pseudo-19th Century look.

Rather than reflexively proclaim the Machado and Silvetti design for Dartmouth as an eyesore, people should take the time to learn that few firms working in a contemporary idiom have a greater claim to success in designing contextually, in relation to nearby historic buildings, without lapsing into imitation. The firm’s retrofit of the Getty Villa in Malibu – the mansion created as an almost kitschy reproduction of an ancient Roman palazzo – is a tour de force. The villa’s traditional interiors look better than ever and the nearby additions are at once respectful and bold. Closer to home, these architects managed to create a successful addition for the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, originally designed by Charles Follen McKim of McKim, Mead and White, those quintessential creators of classical revival masterpieces a century ago. (McKim designed the sorely missed Pennsylvania Station in New York, among other things.)

There is simply no reason to assume that what Machado and Silvetti have planned for Dartmouth will be any less successful. The drawings and plans that the College has so far released suggest a dignified assemblage of rectangular masses that will create both variety and uniformity; nothing blob-like (hello Frank Gehry) or interplanetary (howdy, Zaha Hadid) here.

The list of architectural clients in northern New England that can afford to commission non-residential buildings that exceed $500 per square foot in cost is short indeed. We’re talking about Dartmouth and maybe a few other academic institutions like Philips Exeter and Middlebury. Although Dartmouth is not immune from over-cautiousness, its choices of late have been laudable – More Ruble Yudell for a dormitory complex and an academic building, Kieran Timberlake for a new dining hall still in the design phase. Nothing deserves to be examined uncritically but, at least until it’s actually constructed, Dartmouth deserves more than just the benefit of the doubt for inviting Machado and Silvetti to add an important and prominent building to its campus.