Optical illusion as architectural metaphor

“Architecture, of all the arts, is the one which acts the most slowly, but the most surely, on the soul.”
~ Ernest Dimnet

Can the crane lift the Chrysler building? No, it cannot. Can the crane remove the Chrysler building from view? Yes, it can.

Last December I wrote about waking up one foggy morning to discover the beginning of the end of the New York skyline view I've lived with and loved for 30 years. This is what I saw through my kitchen window that day.

Construction has moved along at a rapid clip in the last five months, revealing a building far worse than my wildest imaginings. The developers have dismissively turned the building's back to the community. They have replaced the beautiful skyline with a featureless, sand-colored monstrosity. If the building is to have a good side, it will face the river. And it gets better: This building is the first of five.

What puzzles me is, what will prospective tenants think about coming home to the visual equivalent of the servant's entrance every night? What will they tell their visitors? I can hear them now: "Just head toward the waterfront and look for the ugliest building you've ever seen. That's us!" Or perhaps the developers expect everyone to arrive by boat.

New York is not just the city that never sleeps. It is the city that never stops reinventing itself. But surely we can do better than this.

"The materials of city planning are sky, space, trees, steel and cement in that order and in that hierarchy."
~ Le Corbusier

Raise high the roofbeams

"We've removed the ceiling above our dreams. There are no more impossible dreams."
~ Jesse Jackson

Santa Maria Assunta Cathedral, Pisa, Italy

In his April 30th column for WSJ.online, science writer Jonah Lehrer writes that "architecture and design can influence our moods, thoughts and health." As he explains, scientists are discovering that our outlook and our performance on different tasks change in response to aspects of our surroundings "from the quality of a view to the height of a ceiling."

The article put me on a memory path I've traveled down scores of times over the years. It begins when, as a child of three or four, my parents took me to a Roman Catholic mass in a Gothic-style church where the choir sang Gregorian chant.



As light streamed through the stained glass windows and the chanting voices arced and dipped I suddenly had the feeling that my mind was floating through the top of my head to a place way up high in the vaulted ceiling. I wasn't frightened by it. I felt both calm and energized.

Although I gave up religion in my early teens, over the years, when I've needed to think through a difficult problem or even just recharge, I have often found my way to a high-ceilinged church. Even without the chanting choir, the light and those high, beautiful ceilings work a certain magic. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, "Mankind was never so happily inspired as when it made a cathedral." I find that inspiration contagious.

Norwich Cathedral, Norfolk, U.K.

The next time you find yourself near a Gothic-style church, stop in and see how it feels.

In Your Easter Bonnet

On days like this I start thinking it's a pity that so few people still wear hats.

The photo above, from the archives of the Museum of the City of New York, shows top-hatted men and bonnet-clad women strolling past the Croton Reservoir on Easter Sunday in 1897. (The New York Public Library's main branch on Fifth Avenue occupies the reservoir's former site.)

This was the era known as the "Mauve Decade," so it's safe to assume that many of the ladies were sporting that fashion color.

Below, more fancy bonnets from Easters past when people proudly donned their finery and stepped out to promenade with their peers.

A windy, overcast day didn't stop these strollers from showing off their Easter wardrobes.

Was this even for Easter? Who knows, but what a fine hat.

I don't know if this hat was designed to look like a Shih Tzu, but if so — mission accomplished!

And we mustn't forget the tune. Have a lovely day.