We had the pleasure, if it was a pleasure, of visiting the Empire State Plaza in Albany, one of the great monoliths of 1950s town planning, a combination of gigantism and Thunderbirds. It was designed on the model of Versailles and Chandigarh by an architect called Wallace Harrison. Robert Hughes called it ‘The International Power Style of the Fifties’:
Michael Conforti very generously took us on a tour of the new Tadao Ando extension to the Clark in Williamstown. He began to think about how to connect the two existing buildings – a 1950s piece of polite neo-classicism and a 1972 work of brutalism – when he first took over as Director in 1994. He devoted the 1990s to thinking and consciousness raising and preventing the extension to the conservation building which would have scuppered any future plans. He first met with possible architects more than ten years ago, including Renzo Piano and David Chipperfield. He chose Tadao Ando in 2001 because of his skill at designing buildings underground which have access to natural daylight. Much of the building is buried, including the loading dock and services in order not to change the scale of the existing small-scale buildings and surrounding university campus. Conforti then spent the next decade raising the necessary funds and doing the detailed designs, travelling to Japan once a month. The first building Ando did (although the last to be designed) was a small exhibition pavilion called the Lunder Center at Stone Hill:
We called in at the birthplace of Gilbert Stuart, the local artist who made good in London. Born in North Saunderstown, he moved to Newport aged seven. His father operated a small rural snuff mill. Aged 14, he was taught to paint by Cosmo Alexander, a travelling Scot, who took him away to Philadelphia, Virginia and ultimately to Edinburgh, where Alexander died. Stuart then worked his way back to Newport as a crewman on a collier. In Newport, he made a living painting rather wooden portraits of local grandees, but he left for London in 1775, when trouble was brewing in the colonies. He worked to begin with as a church organist until he appealed to Benjamin West to take him on as a pupil. In 1782, he made his reputation by exhibiting a portrait of a Scotsman, William Grant, skating (now known as The Skater and in the NGA Washington) in the RA’s annual exhibition. He claimed to have been ‘lifted into fame by a single picture’. Two years later, he greatly annoyed Reynolds by painting an unidealised portrait of him looking old, a bit bleary eyed and taking snuff. Continue reading
We headed out west along the Mohawk Trail through the hills and valleys of western Massachusetts to the Berkshires, stopping only for a hermit and ice cream at a junk store in Erving en route. We wanted to see MASS MoCA, which was established in a set of disused industrial buildings in North Adams in 1999. The buildings are fine, particularly the Boiler Room installed by the Sprague Electric Company in 1947:
I’ve wanted to go to the Redwood Library for a long time. It’s a surviving eighteenth-century subscription library, founded in 1746 by a gift from Abraham Redwood, a Quaker slave owner (he inherited a plantation called ‘Cassada Garden’ in Antigua). He gave £500 ‘for purchasing a Library of all arts and sciences, whereunto the curious and impatient inquirer, after resolution of doubts, and the bewildered ignorant might freely repair for discovery and demonstration to the one, and true knowledge and satisfaction to the other’. The language of the gift admirably exemplifies early eighteenth-century free thinking, the quest for knowledge which led the citizens of Newport to greet the arrival of George Berkeley en route to establish a university in Bermuda and themselves to form a Literary and Philosophical Society in 1730. This was half a century before the foundation of literary and philosophical societies in provincial cities like Manchester (1781), Newcastle (1793), and Hull (1822).
I had forgotten the relentless opulence of Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island, the so-called ‘cottages’ towering over the street. We drove through the drizzle admiring their oppressive grandeur, many of them still private residences. The question was, which to visit ? The Breakers or the Marble House ? We chose the Isaac Bell Jr House by McKim, Mead and White, built in the early 1880s, just after they had designed the Casino nearer the centre of town. It’s in a wonderful, over-elaborate Arts-and-Crafts style with rich shingled exterior, a bulbous roof based on a French windmill and an interior stripped of most of its furniture, but with elaborate decorative details drawn from historic French interiors, mantelpieces based on designs by E.W. Godwin, a big inglenook, and silk and rattan in the ceilings.
Before leaving Martha’s Vineyard, we called in at Mariana Cook’s forthcoming exhibition at Tanya Augoustinos’s A Gallery in Oak Bluffs (opens tomorrow). It was only half hung. I’ve previously known Mariana’s work mainly as a portrait photographer (she took the official portrait of me on the website and Chris Smith for the NPG), but her work has now diversified into semi-abstraction, including details of a black silk dress, steps, window frames in France, an interior in Santorini, light on the pavement, trees in Central Park and a door in Oak Bluffs. Some of these have been published in her book, Close at Hand.
One the the pleasures of the last few days has been staying in East House, recently constructed to a design by Peter Rose, an architect who teaches at Harvard. A nicely judged, asymmetric, neo-Louis Kahn essay in concrete, wood and abstract spaces, with floors of Swiss stone from Vals, walls of douglas fir and Alaskan cedar and walls which open up to the sound of the sea.
This is the ground plan, which demonstrates how the rooms have been disaggregated from the central axis, allowing views through the centre and cross axis of the house:
We completed our short stay on Martha’s Vineyard wholly appropriately by attending an open-air feast in honour of Bob Daniels, a ninety-year old supplier of vegetables at the local market. The feast was organised by Chris Fischer of the Beach Plum Inn, with wine supplied by Andrew Mariani of Sonoma County in California (his parents are the main suppliers of US walnuts). This is the view of the sea from where we were eating:
This is the menu:
Much of the discussion over the last few days has concerned the imminent arrival of the President. Will it require the closure of North Road ? How much will it inconvenience the neighbours ? Did he leave a monogrammed Presidential basketball behind by mistake ?
But some of the discussion relates to the deeper issue as to how far the President has fulfilled the hopes of his greatest supporters (Martha’s Vineyard is full of loyal democrats) ? Most people feel that he could and should have done more, but they remain sympathetic to him as a person. They know that the expectations of a President are nowadays unreasonable. They blame Congress. Some blame his closest advisors. And they recall that he has been, and still is, a great orator.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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