Comment on this article
Object Lesson
An architectural historian looks at the Center for British Art
March/April 2005
David G. De Long, coauthor of Louis I. Kahn: In the Realm of Architecture, is Professor Emeritus of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania.
Last December, the American Institute of Architects named the Yale Center for British Art winner of its distinguished Twenty-Five Year Award for 2005. This award is given annually to a building of special significance as judged twenty-five to thirty-five years after its completion, and in this instance the award is especially well deserved. Its architect, Louis I. Kahn (1901–74), has been widely acclaimed as one of the greatest of the twentieth century, and this honor is one of many that have recognized his talents as well as those of his associates. The award also honors Yale, for surely no American university in recent decades has been more dedicated to commissioning works by leading architects, and the results have proven the rightness of this course.
Strong ties between Kahn and Yale go back many years. From 1947 to 1955, he taught architectural design there while shaping his own practice. Vincent Scully, Yale’s legendary architectural historian, one of the first to recognize his genius, once said that Kahn, like Frank Lloyd Wright before him, had begun a new architecture. Clear evidence of this beginning—of an architecture that questioned accepted dogmas of orthodox modernism and reintroduced fundamental qualities of mass and differentiated space—also owes much to Yale, for it was there that Kahn’s Yale Art Gallery extension (1951–53) initiated such change. In the British Art Center, one of his last designs to be realized (1969–77), the power of that accomplishment can be more fully appreciated.
Like a Greek temple with its organic unity of calibrated parts, the British Art Center projects a sense of timelessness and intellectual order that exist apart from fashion. Its rational structure, made visible, reinforces the modular clarity of its spaces, achieving that exact correspondence between structure and space that characterizes noble architecture. An integrated system of skylights and windows reinforces this correspondence; natural light animates the underlying forms as it brings the art itself to life. Precisely detailed connections between the concrete structure and the building’s wood, linen, and steel panels provide a sense of ornamental richness that is never arbitrarily applied, but instead develops out of the making of the building itself.
Within the building, spaces open in sequential order. Flexible galleries shaped by their visible structure enfold two grandly scaled courts at the center of the building; one feels agreeably situated within the smaller galleries themselves, but never isolated from the larger order of the whole. Art benefits from this logically charted feel of position. These are the qualities that distinguish great architecture from that which is merely good.
Back to the drawing room
Brian Seibert '97 is a freelance writer for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, and the New York Times.
For the first five minutes of White Chocolate, a new play by William Hamilton '62 that recently had a four-month run in New York City, the stage is dark. The main characters make their first impression aurally. Brandon Beale’s voice is patrician, unmistakably the issue of a clenched jaw. His wife, Deborah, talks fast and peppers her speech with Yiddishisms. Through their morning chat, we learn that Brandon may soon be appointed director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Deborah’s father has financed a new wing. To know these people, it seems, it’s enough to hear them converse.
But when the lights come up, everyone’s in for a surprise: the Beales are black. Or rather, they have just become black, suddenly and unaccountably. Such is the premise that drives Hamilton’s farce.
It’s also his answer to a professional dilemma. “It occurred to me,” says Hamilton, “that the least salable commodity in the theater these days was an over-privileged WASP who went to Yale. The theater had left behind the drawing-room comedy of privileged people.” That’s a problem for Hamilton, since privileged people are his subject. His satirical plays, novels, and essays, as well as—most famously—the cartoons that have been running in the New Yorker since 1967, all target the well-to-do. In White Chocolate, Yale is not spared: both Brandon and his rival for the directorship of the Met are Elis (as is the play’s director, David Schweizer '72, and the actor who played Brandon, Reg E. Cathey '81MFA).
Hamilton found his theme early, at Andover and then at Yale, where he drew cartoons for the Yale Record. “And then as I got into it, it died out”—first the Record (temporarily) and then the humor illustration market in general. “TV wiped cartoons out,” he says. The New Yorker was, and still is, practically the only venue left. “And they treat cartoonists badly. Pay them like poets. It was at one time a real profession.”
So was writing drawing-room comedies. Hamilton got into the practice in the late seventies, when a fan of his cartoons—the two of them met at a racquet club, of course—said he would produce a play if Hamilton wrote one. White Chocolate is his fifth. In it, Hamilton plays a bit with the idea that the Beales' new color might be liberating. Mostly, though, the play is an old-fashioned concoction of mistaken identity, false assumptions, and slips of the tongue. The complications mount, and the characters pile on crisp zingers—the sort of lines, reviewers like to point out, that would make good captions for a Hamilton cartoon. Such comparisons strike the playwright as lazy criticism; to him, his writing and his drawing are entirely separate modes.
He has a point. Most of the humor in Hamilton’s cartoons lies in the captions, but it’s different from that of his plays: at once softer-edged and crueler. The captions have the quality of overheard dialogue—so much so that it’s sometimes hard to find the joke. Hamilton’s plays, in contrast, push caricature to absurd extremes. There’s no question what the jokes are, and you either laugh or you groan.
Yet the plays and drawings share more than a milieu. Flip through the mammoth new Complete Cartoons of The New Yorker, and you can watch Hamilton chasing his subject population as it recedes from the center of popular culture to the peripheries. The characters are either at a party or a restaurant or are preparing to go to one; in any case, they are never without a drink. Over the years, they grow more anxious, more out of touch, and not just in the eyes of their children. But the sense of fading glory is there from the beginning. “It’s hard to believe,” reads one 1972 caption, “that someday we’ll be so much nostalgia.”
For whom the shot clock tolls
When Nothing Else Matters: Michael Jordan’s Last Comeback
Michael Leahy '75
Simon and Schuster, $26
Reviewed by Carlo Rotella '94PhD
Carlo Rotella’s latest book is Cut Time: An Education at the Fights. His work has been featured in The Best American Essays.
Entertaining as he could be with a ball in his hands, an improvisational genius at his best with the clock ticking down to zero, Michael Jordan may well be the most tedious man ever to enjoy the status of culture hero. His only significant character trait is fierce competitiveness in all games, from basketball to blackjack. My four-year-old daughter has to win all the time, too, but at least she can also sing and draw a little, and hold up her end of a conversation about where bunnies go when they die. Michael Leahy '75—who is the sort of reporter who would swim the River Styx with his notebook in a baggie to determine exactly where bunnies go when they die—spent the better part of two seasons following Jordan around everywhere, on assignment for the Washington Post. He accomplishes an improbable feat in his first book, a comprehensive account of Jordan’s final comeback, by managing to make Jordan a compellingly human character off the court and on.
At 435 closely observed pages, When Nothing Else Matters has the heft of a naturalist novel, and its themes resemble those of Zola or Dreiser. Driven by a tangle of desires—for attention and thrills; to recapture a sense of being the man, because “‘Nothin’ compares to bein’ it’”—the 38-year-old Jordan returns to the game, only to find himself subject to larger forces from which he had naïvely thought himself exempt. He pushes his aging body too hard, waving off the warnings of his trainer, his handpicked coach, and other flunkies. Your own knees will come to ache in sympathy with his, which serve as the central figure of weaknesses of body and character that combine to undermine him. There are larger social forces at play on him, too, like the dynamics of money and fame, adding up to a kind of deterministic fate that dwarfs even Jordan’s outsized talent and reputation. “‘I’m afraid for Michael,’” says a basketball executive early on in the book, when Jordan declares himself retired from the game and takes a management job with the Washington Wizards, a lousy franchise he expects to infuse with his winning spirit. “‘He’s going to get his teeth kicked in.’”
Before he can fall, Jordan must rise. He sheds his front-office job and business suit, Superman-style, to take the court in uniform for a last hurrah. Crowds go wild and he has good nights, even great ones, but he also has awful nights and merely average ones. His imperial insistence on calling the shots and on taking too many shots prevents the Wizards from jelling around him. Having stunted the development of promising young teammates or had them benched or traded when they wouldn’t subsume their games to the deliberate style that best suits him, Jordan is left to drag himself up and down the court in a kind of solitude, burnt out in the third and fourth quarters after impressive first halves, limping on his bad knees, laboring to put a sullen team on his back and carry it into the playoffs, which he never manages to do.
Then, as must happen in a naturalist novel when grasping humans run afoul of nature and economics, the teeth get kicked in. When Jordan hangs up his Nikes for good after two frustrating seasons, Abe Pollin, the Wizards' owner, does not invite him to return to his management position. Pollin, a turkey-necked old bottom-liner who understands the exercise of power in a way that Jordan never will, runs the used-up hero out of Washington as soon as there’s no profit in keeping him around. One measure of the book’s novelistic effectiveness is that, despite Jordan’s insulating megamillions and deluded selfishness, you begin to feel sorry for the guy. He can’t get any lift on his jumper, his co-workers don’t like him, then he gets fired. The greatest basketball player of all time ends up as just another lonely jerk yelling “How can you put up that fuckin' shot?” at the TV screen. Bonjour M. Zola.
Some readers have described When Nothing Else Matters as an “angry” book, which it isn’t, as far as I can tell. But it is relentless, and most relentless in its treatment not of Jordan but of the sports reporters who write about him. Leahy hits a high point of convention-busting insight in detailing the bad-faith pas de deux danced by scribes and jocks locked in a symbiotic business embrace. If Jordan doesn’t want to talk about his knee or his team’s bad chemistry or a paternity suit filed against him, reporters stop asking, because they don’t want him to stop talking to them. “Such deference typified most of the media’s approach around Jordan,” Leahy concludes, “where a studied servility was the rule, and a phrase like 'sucking up' did not do justice to the level of subservience at work.”
This book is anything but servile. If it feels too long and underedited, I suspect that’s because Leahy felt obliged to substantiate his iconoclastic portrait of Jordan with an irrefutable avalanche of evidence. When Nothing Else Matters may be fearlessly honest, and it may do much to dispel the hushed awe with which writers approach sports stars, but it betrays a certain hushed awe at its own temerity. If it were a hundred pages shorter and delivered its impious payload with slightly flatter affect, it would be a masterpiece.
More Books by Yale Authors
Rikki Abzug 1994PhD and Jeffrey Siminoff 1980PhD
Nonprofit Trusteeship in Different Contexts
Ashgate Publishing, $89.95
Robert Belknap 2001PhD
The List: The Uses and Pleasures of Cataloguing
Yale University Press, $27.50
Alexander Blackburn 1951
Meeting the Professor: Growing Up in the William Blackburn Family
John Blair, $18.95
Sheldon S. Cohen 1953
British Supporters of the American Revolution, 1775–1783: The Role of “Middling-Level” Activists
Boydell and Brewer, $70
Peter Cox 1959
Journalism Matters
Tilbury House, $20
Richard W. Cutler 1938
Counterspy: Memoirs of a Counterintelligence Officer in World War II and the Cold War
Brassey's, $25.95
Robert Day 1972
Working the American Way: How to Communicate Successfully with Americans at Work
How To Books,
£12.99
Lee Edelman 1981PhD
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive
Duke University Press, $21.95
John Mack Faragher 1977PhD, Arthur Unobskey Professor of American History
A Great and Noble Scheme: The Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from Their American Homeland
W. W. Norton, $28.95
Keith Ferrazzi 1988 and Tahl Raz
Never Eat Alone—and Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time
Currency/Doubleday, $24.95
Eric Freeman 1992, Elisabeth Freeman 1994MPhil, Kathy Sierra, and Bert Bates
Head First Design Patterns
O'Reilly, $44.95
Susanne Freidberg 1988
French Beans and Food Scares: Culture and Commerce in an Anxious Age
Oxford University Press, $29.95
Ruben A. Gallo 1991, Editor
The Mexico City Reader
University of Wisconsin Press, $19.95
Ruben A. Gallo 1991
New Tendencies in Mexican Art: The 1990s
Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, $75
Elizabeth Harlan 1970MPhil
George Sand
Yale University Press, $35
Alan E. Kazdin, Director, Child Study Center
Parent Management Training: Treatment for Oppositional, Aggressive, and Antisocial Behavior in Children and Adolescents
Oxford University Press, $54.50
Patrick Radden Keefe 2005JD
Chatter: Dispatches from the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping
Random House, $24.95
Martin Kihn 1986
House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time
Warner Business Books, $24.95
Robert H. King 1960BD, 1965PhD, and Elizabeth M. King
Autumn Years: Taking the Contemplative Path
Continuum $17.95
Ellen Ernst Kossek 1987PhD and Susan J. Lambert, Editors
Work and Life Integration: Organizational, Cultural, and Individual Perspectives
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, $99.95
Natalie Krinsky 2004
Chloe Does Yale: A Novel
Hyperion Books, $19.95
J. E. Lendon 1986, 1991PhD
Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity
Yale University Press, $35
David Lieberman 2003
Young and Hungry: Making the Most of Fresh and Affordable Food
Hyperion, $24.95
Benjamin I. Lipton 1989, Editor
Gay Men Living with Chronic Illnesses and Disabilities: From Crisis to Crossroads
Haworth Press, $29.95
Eric Liu 1990
Guiding Lights: The People Who Lead Us Toward Our Purpose in Life
Random House, $19.95
M. G. Lord 1977
Astro Turf: The Private Life of Rocket Science
Walker and Company, $24
Dale Martin 1988PhD, Professor of Religious Studies
Inventing Superstition: From the Hippocratics to the Christians
Harvard University Press, $29.95
Michael Medved 1969
Right Turns: Unconventional Lessons from a Controversial Life Crown
Forum, $26.95
James C. Mohr 1965
Plague and Fire: Battling Black Death and the 1900 Burning of Honolulu’s Chinatown
Oxford University Press, $30
Margaret Morton 1977MFA, Photographer and Writer
Glass House
Penn State University Press, $34.95
Jonathan E. Nuechterlein 1986, 1990JD, and Philip J. Weiser
Digital Crossroads: American Telecommunications Policy in the Internet Age
MIT Press, $40
Jaroslav Pelikan, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History
Whose Bible Is It? A History of Scriptures Through the Ages
Viking/Penguin, $24.95
Dan L. Perlman 1980 and Jeffrey C. Milder
Practical Ecology for Planners, Developers, and Citizens
Island Press, $65
Imani Perry 1994
Prophets of the Hood: Politics and Poetics in Hip Hop
Duke University Press, $19.95
Emily Raboteau 1998
The Professor’s Daughter: A Novel
Henry Holt, $24
Peter Rock 1991
The Bewildered: A Novel
MacAdam/Cage, $23
Joanna Russ 1960MFA
We Who Are About To.
Wesleyan University Press, $14.95
Joanna Russ 1960MFA
The Two of Them
Wesleyan University Press, $14.95
Elizabeth D. Samet 1998PhD
Willing Obedience: Citizens, Soldiers, and the Progress of Consent in America, 1776–1898
Stanford University Press, $55
Daniel J. Solove 1997JD
The Digital Person: Technology and Privacy in the Information Age
New York University Press, $29.95
W. Royal Stokes 1965PhD
Growing Up With Jazz: Twenty-Four Musicians Talk about Their Lives and Careers
Oxford University Press, $30
Frederick J. Streets, Editor 1975MDiv
University Chaplain Preaching in the New Millennium: Celebrating the Tercentennial of Yale University
Yale University Press, $38
Mark V. Tushnet 1971MA, 1971JD
The NAACP’s Legal Strategy against Segregated Education, 1925–1950
University of North Carolina Press, $17.95
Carol Weston 1978
Melanie in Manhattan
Random House/Knopf, $15.95
Lauren Willig 1999
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation: A Novel
Dutton/Penguin, $19.95
Susan Zimmermann 1976JD
Keeping Katherine: A Mother’s Journey to Acceptance
Three Rivers Press, $13
|
