By Stuart Mitchner
When I was a 13-year-old obsessed with skyscrapers, hotels, and movie theatres, my parents treated me to a stay at the Terrace Plaza Hotel in Cincinnati, said to be the first International Style modern hotel in America, with murals by Joan Miró and Saul Steinberg, and a mobile in the lobby by Alexander Calder. But what thrilled me about staying there had less to do with the artwork than with the idea of spending a night or two in an architectural work of art, as my father and I did again a year later in Columbus at the Deshler-Wallick Hotel, which was attached to the glorious 47-story Lincoln-LeVeque Tower, my favorite building, along with New York’s Chrysler-RCA-Empire State triumvirate.
You can see the Terrace Plaza on the cover of Shawn Patrick Tubb’s Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza Hotel: An Icon of American Modernism (Cincinnati Books paperback 2013), which notes that it was designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) between 1945 and 1946 and opened in 1948 to “national acclaim,” being the first Modernist hotel built in the United States. Natalie de Blois, a SOM architect, “was lead designer of the 20-story high-rise, which included a J.C. Penney and a Bond’s department store on the first seven floors.”
The all too predictable fate of a hotel-as-artwork in a regional metropolis is described in the Terrace Plaza’s Wikipedia entry. When the building was sold to Hilton Hotels in 1956, the art was moved to the Cincinnati Art Museum. In 2022, after several more sales and attempted redevelopments, the Terrace Plaza was named one of America’s most endangered historic places by the National Trust for Historic Preservation — and no wonder. Later that year, after being denied landmark status by the Cincinnati City Council, the structure was sold to an Indiana developer for $10 million. Two years later the new owner planned to convert the “icon of American Modernism” to a mix of residential and retail use known as The Terraces.
Looking for Chandigarh
Fifteen years later, I’d gone from Cincinnati’s Terrace Plaza to Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh. The cover of Chandigarh Revealed: Le Corbusier’s City Today (Princeton Architectural Press and Mapin 2017), with photographs and text by Shayn Fynn, evokes my surreal first impression of the place on a mid-March evening in 1966. I see myself and my fellow hitchhiker as the two tiny human figures at the bottom of the view. We knew to expect something different from a “planned city,” but night was falling fast and there was no “there there,” no sign of the country we’d been traversing since the previous November — no bright colors, no sacred cows, no blaring Bombay movie soundtracks, no human multitudes. We were on the edge of what seemed to be a vast cement no-man’s-land — we never saw the commercial center, or the Tower of Shadows or even the sign of the Open Hand Monument, which is described as “a cross between a Buddhist gesture for dispelling cynics and a hovering Picasso Peace Dove” in William J.R.
Curtis’s Le Corbusier: Ideas and Forms (Rizzoli 1986), with its bleak, vaguely menacing cover image of a corner of the Capitol complex.
Corbu’s Sketchbooks
Wondering if there was a way to avoid continually referring to Le Corbusier by his full name, I found a June 2023 article in The Guardian that claims he was “granted the nickname ‘Corb’ or ‘Corbu’ by architects.” As it happened, I felt closer to the man himself when I read the sketchbook entries quoted in Kenneth Frampton’s Le Corbusier (Thames and Hudson 2001). For a start, it helped to have the cover photograph from 1931, which shows the architect poring over his model of the Palace of the Soviets. Having visited the Soviet Union in 1928, he had the authority of firsthand exposure to “a society incapable and unprepared to appreciate modern architecture,” which was his terse rationale for the rejection of his plan in 1932.
Le Corbusier’s unique vision of India is reflected in his sketchbook notes: “At Chandigarh people will walk without automobiles and New York’s Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street will be grotesque. Calm, dignity, contempt for envy: Perhaps India is capable of maintaining herself at this point and establishing herself at the head of civilization.” As Frampton points out, however, in trying to “evoke the space of the traditional bazaar,” Le Corbusier “failed to reproduce its well-shaded fabric in modern terms.” And despite “his fascination with the elegant posture of Indian women” and his “countless sketches of Indian cattle,” his “architectonic sympathies remained more with the Mughal empire than with the Indian village vernacular.”
Maybe our timing was off (and our time too short; my companion and I were on our way to Kashmir), but, as I said, there were no sari-clad women or sacred cows in our “no-there-there” Chandigarh.
Gaudi: A Mystery
Four years later, I’d gone from Corbusier’s Chandigarh to Gaudi’s Barcelona, where my wife and I spent two nights in Casa Mila or La Pedrera (the Quarry), Antonio Gaudi’s “greatest secular work” according to Lluís Permanyer in Barcelona Art Nouveau (Rizzoli 1999). Permanyer calls Casa Milà “more than just an architectural masterpiece; it is a sculpture.” It is also a mystery how we managed to spend two nights there in the summer of 1970. Neither of us can remember anything more than meeting and chatting with a distinguished old woman in a wheelchair who said she was the granddaughter of Gaudi’s first patron, Conde Eusebi Güell. Not to worry, nothing could spoil the colors and forms of Gaudi’s ebullient shaping as we filled our eyes with the wonders of his city, where we saw a bullfight, ate estofada del toro on the Ramblas, and visited his magnificent Sagrada Família, the largest unfinished Catholic church in the world, not to mention taking photos of ourselves on the tiled-mosaic fantasy of the Serpentine Bench at Güell Park.
Haunted by the New
This article is haunted by the Halloween opening — no pun intended but inevitable — of the newly rebuilt and much expanded Princeton University Art Museum designed by Adjaye Associates, with Exceutive Architect Cooper Robertson. Readers of Anne Levin’s story may already know about Sir David Adjaye’s 2022 book Constructed Narratives, edited by Peter Allison and published by Lars Müller, “an informal manifesto of the architect’s design principles and architectural approach, reflecting on almost 25 years of work.” Given my teenage fascination with skyscrapers and skylines, I want to mention this comment by Adjaye, from a 2008 interview: “I didn’t really know much about architecture until my late teens. I found out about it through my art teacher in high school.” In the same interview he says, “For me architecture depicts how we write the story of our civilization.” In another interview, he makes special mention of Le Corbusier’s Palace of Assembly in Chandigarh.
Remembering the Old
I’d like to pay tribute to the building I got to know as a kind of “second home of art” while covering some 20 Princeton University Art Museum exhibits between 2004 and 2020. Every time I walked into the galleries, I was looking for the life in the room as well as in the art. “Bringing into Being,” the first three words of the first exhibit I covered in September 2004, about American Prints between 1950-2000, describes the moment when art is animated by what D.H. Lawrence called “the poetry of the present.” All my visits to the museum were conceived in that spirit, that sense of a mission, every visit a poem, or a story, or an adventure; thus, the title I gave one of my favorite exhibits, “A Gallery of Russian Stories Waiting for a Chekhov.”
Spending Time with Zinaida
When I saw the photograph of Le Corbusier peering into his proposed model of the Palace of the Soviets, I thought of the great enduring Russia now at the mercy of the dictator who invaded Ukraine three years ago. The exhibit that led to my acquaintance with the painter Zinaida Serebryakova (1887-1967) was titled “Mir Iskusstva” (“World of Art”). I resisted the subtitle, “Russia’s Age of Elegance,” given that Mir Iskusstva was a periodical published in St. Petersburg between 1898 and 1904, and the fact that elegance was only one aspect of the world on display. As an example, I mentioned Konstantin Somov’s portrait of composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. An elegant man no doubt, but he was wearing a cardigan, his tie was loose, and he was sitting for a portrait he knew would be used to advertise Steinway pianos.
The painting I spent the most time with was Zinaida Serebryakova’s self-portrait, Study of a Girl, painted in 1911 when the artist was 27. I kept coming back to it because she seemed to be humanly present, looking at you rather than the other way around. The curator’s note says that she was experimenting with “candlelight effects,” which helps explains the in-the-moment effect. And I wasn’t the only person in the room who felt seen. “Look how her eyes follow you around,” I heard a father tell his little son. In fact, she followed me home, thanks to the card I bought in the museum shop, which kept me company for the better part of a decade, right here on my desk. A book of her selected works was published in 1988 in both Russian and English editions.
PUAM 2004-2020
My first Town Topics review of a Princeton University Art Museum exhibit began by noting the pleasures of living in a town that has a free, easily accessible art museum with a world-class collection. Written in September 2004, the article closes with reference to a “beautiful day” reminiscent of a blue-sky perfect September morning “three years ago.” On my way back to Nassau Street, I stopped by the little garden created in memory of the 13 Princeton alumni who died on September 11.
My last PUAM review, on March 18, 2020, began with reference to an invitation promising “a touch-free museum experience,” along with an advisory about keeping “social distance” along with the assurance that “new disinfection protocols are in place.” As it turned out, the Cézanne exhibit closed a week after it opened. The pandemic having created a now-or-never situation, I made a special effort to get in under the wire for an opportunity to spend quality time with Cézanne’s Rock and Quarry Paintings, two galleries by the “wonder, wonder painter,” as Ernest Hemingway once called him. Given the threat of the virus, there were no crowds between me and the work of the artist who once told a friend, “One minute in the life of the world is going by! Paint it as it is!”
Now’s the time to look forward to Princeton’s “wonder, wonder” museum.
