Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, Chase Manhattan Bank Building, New York, New York, 1961

1:02AM 5.5.2013

In the drizzle; at night, after an argument of some sort we had over the phone before I caught the train across the bridge {‘There’s the train I should be on rumbling past now,’ I believe I said, or something like it, looking out the western set of windows relative to the ones you were looking out of that morning when you declared without further explanation, “I’m miserable.” It was the travel and my sad whining, not me, not you, not us, the dwelling and the distance were a new challenge, from which we both have learned.}, when I was really just sad and missing you, not realizing how quickly the semester would pass; I stomped uphill, along the backside of the building, the black marble plenum devouring me, before I turned the corner, down the island, emergency gates slamming closed further towards the tip, chains on small shop windows still closed since the last hurricane, sirens, and somewhere, they were floating in the sky above me. I had gone to midtown first, the wrong office. I shot off a message to one of the studio heads about not being able to make it at 8PM, having woken at 4AM. I let myself get overwhelmed by the city and your absence — reminded that this great metropolis will certainly be underwater, fearing the shorter-term loss of your love. Please forgive me. What we had together meant the world to me. I love you.

1:37PM 5.2.2013

Welcome to the desert of the real.

Bertrand Bronson, 1962, “All this for a song?”:

Looking intently at the familiar IBM card with a hopeful eye, it dawns upon us that those serried ranks of figures on dress parade can just as well stand for the degrees of a musical octave as for less Pythagorean entities.

It seems time to cast about for some means of controlling the oppressive mass of detail. In this extremity, it naturally occurs to us to inquire of those electronic robots, clothed in power and magic, which speak with sibylline utterance in our day and which can answer the hardest questions in the twinkling of an eye. Might they not be entreated on our behalf to idle away a vacant moment in aesthetic relaxation?

8:28PM 4.30.2013

The library at my grade school had a ton of punch cards rendered obsolete in the days when they explained how the computer was “shaking hands” with other computers before our very eyes. My youngest sister, a decade my junior, was told that she used up the last of them, as scrap paper.

Incidentally, if we had gotten back together sooner, I would have written the most beautiful script, a garden weaving through my project. I’m not casting blame, just expressing how much your love meant to me, even if I did not always show it. Once I felt as if I were invincible, with you on my side. Now it is a matter of just making it through. I suppose I will have to take my sister’s erstwhile advice (before I met you) and hire a professional matchmaker, if I’m to hunt for another as close to you (but, whatever the case, never tell the new other you ever thought such thoughts out in the open like this) as possible. Everyone else will just be a poor imitation or some beautiful young Adonis who will flee within three months time. Eventually, as I already find myself (no longer feeling that crippling sadness at sunset I once often felt, not now that I have words to show for the love and the pain), I will get over it all and plan great parties. I will have great adventures, with or without you. I will, finally, this my final chance, write that book. You have the choice of remaining a spectator or splashing in the fountain before The Plaza with me at 3AM, but not really, because it’s the 21st-century now, and they have cameras everywhere, security forces, and movies in 3D. (There is more to that last sentence, like an ad on the side of an MTA bus as I approached and passed Moscot today, admiring my own frames, and, thinking of the death in the book, my mind flashes to the sharp-edged tile-work of the Bobst Library, the way Rachelle, who was working behind the checkout counter described seeing the blood roll out over the cold white and black and greenish-blue (if memory serves) tiles, beneath the brown vinyl and polyester room dividers they had brought up from the basement to shield the body from being viewed at ground level. They’ve since installed a parametric screen, one no longer getting that wobbly feeling, though I’ve only seen photographs and the live camera feed of the family of hawks that live in one of the nooks of the Brutalist masterpiece.)

The color pallette of my current project has been compared to that used by  Hokusai in his painting “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” (1829-1832)

Glow-in-the-dark plants.

“No-Stop City” - Archizoom (1969) 

Incidentally, that day at the Whitney with the leaning video wall which analyzed my face, writing, “unduly concerned,” above it, was during the summer, with Zoe (exiting a cab into that warm yellow midday light of mid-summer), and they had recreated upstairs installation art from the summer of 1969, with one entire floor devoted to floor-to-ceiling aluminum covered foam, visitors asked to tear away at the walls, reminding me now, as I edit and extend this sentence, of the day at the MoMA (what a horrible new building) with Samuel, each of us selecting a piece of candy from a sea of such pieces, each wrapped in shining silver mylar; I saved my wrapper.

Another memory flitters to mind, of visiting the museum with mom when I was much younger, us purchasing miniature artworks by new artists from a special vending machine near the glass wall looking out onto the sunken plaza; that photo of Marcel Breuer before the window upstairs; that drawing of Graves’ proposed addition, which would have been awesome, that M. enjoyed as much I. 

An opera based on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, performed on the terraces of Fallingwater on June 8, 2013. Please join me. <3

Hector Berlioz - “Symphonie Fantastique”

I wonder what Victor Hugo was thinking while at the performance of this upon Berlioz’ return to Paris in 1832. My heart skips a beat, this is amazing. His wife spoke not a word of French, he not a word of English. I think there’s something to be said for that in the realm of romance.

6:21PM 4.27.2013

While in Rome, he stayed at the French Academy in the Villa Medici. He found the city distasteful, writing, “Rome is the most stupid and prosaic city I know; it is no place for anyone with head or heart.”^[7] He therefore made an effort to leave the city as often as possible, making frequent trips to the surrounding country. During one of these trips, while Berlioz enjoyed an afternoon of sailing, he encountered a group of Carbonari. These were members of a secret society of Italian patriots based in France with the aim of creating a unified Italy.^{[30] (Wikipedia)}

Acoustics

With Koolhaas’ reputation for the provocative, it was obvious that he would try to subvert the traditional rectangular ‘shoe-box’ shaped music hall convention. After researching, however, the acoustic quality of existing concert halls Koolhaas was forced to conclude that the best halls in the world have a shoe box shape. So that’s what the Casa da Musica got.

However, that’s not to say Koolhaas didn’t let his invention run riot. The main auditorium is suffused with daylight from the two walls made entirely of glass, an oddity in the music world as glass scatters sound in random directions.

However, Koolhaas’ ingenuity overcame the problem by making the glass ripple in tightly curved folds, and setting two glass sheets a metre apart to insulate the hall from exterior noise. (Source)

“Music and Architecture: Confronting the Boundaries between Space and Sound” - Prof. Jonathan Cole