Ah, how I remember my roommates and I laughing at the PAW Letters to the Editor from old fart alums complaining in often the most (as we have all since learned to call it) politically incorrect manner about everything then new at Princeton.
So I guess it’s my turn to do much of the same when it comes to describing the pictures I’ve seen of the outside and grand hall of the new Adjaye designed Princeton Art Museum as not only out of place but worse — butt ugly — as opposed to the recent Wall St. Journal critique that hardly gave the faintest of praise in suggesting that its style should not be described, as some do, as Brutalist but rather as Establishment Modern?
Note that I’ve been around enough to remember the controversy that surrounded I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre (which for me evokes Zen-like contemplation) and Maya Lin’s sunken Vietnam Memorial (which for me, when I ignore the kitschy statue, evokes tears), and I acknowledge that both were responses to different locational and elbow room opportunities and perhaps even advantaged by different functional challenges, but the best you can say about our new art museum is that it’s utilitarian?
Also I fully recognize that Princeton’s beloved collegiate Gothic buildings are an artifice of what turn of the prior century college architecture was supposed to look like … but really, who doesn’t love gargoyles?
Yet as I get closer to the grave and realize that almost all architecture will outlive me, not (yet?) having the money to pay for it to be torn down and rebuilt, say, with a competed for design that might blend functionality with either beauty or boldness, and with my recent 40th reunion trip back having me feel that the campus is claustrophobically overbuilt, as an old fart alum can I at least say that our museum is such a big miss that those who approved it should please seek other purviews?
Ah, how I remember my roommates and I laughing at the PAW Letters to the Editor from old fart alums complaining in often the most (as we have all since learned to call it) politically incorrect manner about everything then new at Princeton.
So I guess it’s my turn to do much of the same when it comes to describing the pictures I’ve seen of the outside and grand hall of the new Adjaye designed Princeton Art Museum as not only out of place but worse — butt ugly — as opposed to the recent Wall St. Journal critique that hardly gave the faintest of praise in suggesting that its style should not be described, as some do, as Brutalist but rather as Establishment Modern?
Note that I’ve been around enough to remember the controversy that surrounded I.M. Pei’s pyramid at the Louvre (which for me evokes Zen-like contemplation) and Maya Lin’s sunken Vietnam Memorial (which for me, when I ignore the kitschy statue, evokes tears), and I acknowledge that both were responses to different locational and elbow room opportunities and perhaps even advantaged by different functional challenges, but the best you can say about our new art museum is that it’s utilitarian?
Also I fully recognize that Princeton’s beloved collegiate Gothic buildings are an artifice of what turn of the prior century college architecture was supposed to look like … but really, who doesn’t love gargoyles?
Yet as I get closer to the grave and realize that almost all architecture will outlive me, not (yet?) having the money to pay for it to be torn down and rebuilt, say, with a competed for design that might blend functionality with either beauty or boldness, and with my recent 40th reunion trip back having me feel that the campus is claustrophobically overbuilt, as an old fart alum can I at least say that our museum is such a big miss that those who approved it should please seek other purviews?