Tag Archives: #vanlife

Aquariums

Catfish

Arapiama, the largest fish in the Amazon

Frogfish

So far on this trip, we have been to two aquariums; The Shedd in Chicago, and the National Aquarium in Baltimore. Though they were both cool, I don’t think that even added together they equal the Monterey Bay Aquarium. But that is so amazingly awesome that even less than half of it is still amazing.

Piranhas

Both aquariums had green sea turtles. Nickel, named because a nickel was found in his stomach when he was rescued, was smaller, but he had all his flippers. The Baltimore turtle had only three, but I was so busy marvelling at her size that I didn’t notice until someone pointed it out to me. She was longer than the diver who was feeding her, and her shell was the size of a tire.

Baltimore Turtle

Another similarity was that they both had dolphin shows and stingray petting. At the National aquarium however, there was nothing telling you when the shows were, or even telling you that they had dolphins, so we missed that. I missed the show at the Shedd too, while I was looking for the stingray petting. I never found it. At the other aquarium however, they had a tank with skates, horseshoe crabs, and stingrays. The tail barbs on the stingrays were clipped, which is good, because a sting from one is so painful, fishermen in the Amazon call them “wish you were dead fish.” There was also a tank with moonjellies they let you poke, because unlike other jellyfish, their stings are so small you can’t even feel them.

The National Aquarium had more sharks. Shark alley, a three level exhibit where the sharks and sawfish were literally swimming all around you was awesome. I’d never seen a sawfish before, and they are the weirdest things. There were also a few giant pufferfish, who wore the silliest expressions. Zoe the leopard shark only swam in tight circles for the entire time we watched her.

Zoe

The Shedd had more marine mammals, including sea otters, seals, and the beluga whale tank I once threw my ragdoll in when I was a baby. True story.

Happy Beluga

They also had a special exhibit about amphibians. It had a large variety of poison dart frogs, as well as a giant Japanese salamander.

Giant Salamander

But my favorite exhibit was the jellyfish in Baltimore. They had upside-down jellies, who, instead of floating around, affix their bells (the top part) to hard objects like rocks, and wave their tentacles around waiting for food to come to them. Brown blubber jellyfish look like the Oxiclean scrubbing bubbles things. I couldn’t stop laughing when I was watching them. Jellyfish are the living lava lamps of the animal world. There was another tank of moonjellies too. One cool thing about moon jellies is that they’re translucent, so you can see right into their stomachs, which look like flowers on the top of their bells. Usually full of orange or blue zooplankton, they range from having four to six “petals” or stomach compartments, and no one is sure what causes the variation. The aquarium obviously didn’t have any on display, but box jellies are the evil cousin of moon jellies. Clear and small, they live in Australian waters, and are the most poisonous animals in the world. A single sting from one can kill a human in less than twenty minutes. The more visible and less deadly Australian white-spotted jellyfish was on display, and looked nearly as ridiculous as the blubber bots.

Blubber Jellies

moon jellies

Australian spotted jellyfish

Though both aquariums are expensive, over forty dollars a ticket, I think they were worth it. Be sure to manage your time wisely, and go see the dolphin shows we missed.

Family (northern edition)

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Philadelphia

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One day in downtown Philadelphia, where once again the parental need to force Greta to view the major monuments of colonial America asserted itself. Different cities have taken different approaches to this heritage. Boston does it really well – with the exception of the Paul Revere Mall, the historic sites are still imbedded in the city. New York more or less obliterated all the historic sites and their surrounding context. Philadelphia kept all the historic buildings, but obliterated the city fabric around them, so you can view these icons as isolated objects, surrounded by pointless, overscaled open space and dreadful overscaled buildings.

I remember Independence Hall as a wonderful building. It is not only important, but it is beautiful and says something about the city of the time. The problem is this: you can’t get anywhere near it anymore, without signing up for a tour over in the dreadful visitors’ center and waiting around to be shepherded through with throngs of tourists snapping iPhone photos. You can’t even walk on the grounds near it, having to detour around the block.

It gets even worse when you step back. The Independence Hall Mall was proposed in the 1930s, and was implemented in the 1950s, when we thought knocking down old cities was a great idea. Hundreds of buildings were destroyed, so that a giant open space would allow you to view Independence Hall from far away, looking puny and unimportant.

Then big, bombastic buildings were built around that, symbolizing the might of large corporations in our national system. It gets even worse behind Independence Hall, where this sterling example of historic preservation can be seen.

It declined further recently. In 1976 the Liberty Bell was moved into its own viewing pavilion, part of a veneration of the minor icons of our history rather than the history itself (the recent Star Spangled Banner re-installation at the Smithsonian is another example of this). But then this simple pavilion was destroyed (probably because it was modernist and minimal), and replaced by a more grandiose pavilion, just south of the visitors’ center.

The experience is awful, reminding me of what has happened to Mt. Rushmore. Where does this impulse come from, to remake everything in a phony, pretentious manner? (By the way, some very good architects and planners were involved in many stages of this madness – Edmund Bcon, Dan Kiley, Venturi and Scott Brown, Cywnski, Laurie Olin!) Philadelphia was not Versailles, but it had one of the most compelling plans of an early American city. Why can’t we leave it alone, and let visitors have an experience that in some way might evoke the 18th or 19th century, helping them to understand life in that era, rather than pedantically shaping their perceptions? Boston looks better and better in this regard.

Luckily, the architects did preserve one of the best features of the earlier Liberty Bell pavilion – a window through which it could be seen, without going through the rigamarole. We took the picture and got the hell out of there.

Once you get away from this, Society Hill and other older neighborhoods of Philadelphia are spectacular. There are crazy renderings of the founding fathers,

fantastic Greek Revival buildings by Robert Mills and others,and streets which really maintain the experience of the 18th century city.

The Ciry Hall is magnificent, a good example of how a city plan can evolve positively. There was no building at the center point of the city in Penn’s plan, but having this icon visible on the axes works beautifully (with sculpture by Alexander Calder Sr.)

The Paul Cret Federal Reserve is fine (Cret being an employer of Kahn).

They seem to be having more fun at the Pennsylvania Academy these days, I think Furness might have approved?A truly dreadful “remuddling”and some fine urban buildings and juxtapositions

As we were into checking things off our list, we grabbed a random cheesesteak, but not being in the right neighborhood, it was nothing to blog about.

Mercer Museum

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When I began teaching at the University of Oregon, I found that one of my colleagues, Bill Kleinsasser, was fairly obsessed with Henry Mercer. Mercer was an archaeologist, collector and amateur architect, who built three buildings and started the Moravian Tileworks in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. I dragged two of my sisters to see Mercer’s house about 20 years ago, and Laurie’s response was great. First room: That’s pretty cool! Second room: Cool. A lot like the first. Third room: I get the idea.

But Bill Kleinsasser was right – it’s just that the Mercer Museum is the building to see. Mercer collected a comprehensive assortment of technological artifacts from pre-industrial America. Then he built a museum to house and display them. Concerned with fire destroying the artifacts, the museum was built of reinforced concrete, which is apparent on the outside, a strangely flat medievalist fantasia.It’s adorable, but a bit twee, with vernacular forms in a strange material. The roofscape looks like a giant birdhouse, but somehow I love it.

You enter through a new lobby wing, go up some winding stairs, and step out into this:a four-story atrium crammed with more stuff than seems possible. It’s feverishly hallucinogenic. Every surface is covered with stuff, even the ceiling

and then the really big stuff is hung out in space.

It is so far from our current model of what a museum should be like that it’s hard to process. Where are the blank white walls? Where are the wide open spaces across which we can contemplate an isolated, perfect object? The Mercer Museum shows that a museum can work extremely well while not meeting our aesthetic preferences for abstract minimalism. The central atrium is surrounded by vaulted side aisles, on the the outside of which there are niches, almost chapels, each of which explains and shows many artifacts pertaining to a specific technology, such as lighting:

or a cabinetmaker’s shop, with its molding planes:

The sidewalls are heavily glazed, and the light filters through the niches and side aisles into the atrium.

and there are other random artifacts scattered around.

as in a separate two-story space where there are perhaps thousands of panels from cast-iron wood stoves, along with firebacks, each which is highly wrought and decorative. But the space itself grabs your attention, with its Orientalist detailing and complex spatial moves.

The exhibits are extremely clear – I now know a good amount about the practices of 18th century technologies – such as tinsmithing – which were just vague ideas to me before. The layout of the building also supports this pedagogical approach – you may be looking at the small tools and labels in a niche exhibit, and the the label says, turn around and look behind you for a big artifact – like a whaleboat or a stagecoach – which is the product of this technology.

It’s a museum which can be approached from many directions and found to be satisfying. Kids love it, both the artifacts and exploring the space, with surprises around every corner. Grown-ups just stare, not ever having been in a place like this before. And some architects wonder why everything we do now has to be within such narrow parameters. Or whether there can’t be a closer fit between the architecture and the contents. Mercer’s buildings on their own are quirky and interesting, but not all that good. But when you fill one up with amazing stuff, there is synergy, and the experience is fantastic.

Radburn, New Jersey

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There are iconic buildings and places that everyone knows, but remarkably few people have actually visited. In my lectures I try to stick to places where I have been, as the understanding one has of a place is greatly inferior if your whole knowledge of it comes only from books or media. However, there are some places that are so important that you need to present them even if you’ve never seen them. Radburn is such a place, one that I show to my students constantly, so actually seeing it was on the top of my list for this trip (even though I knew it would drive Greta crazy). And I’m happy to say that it was an even better place than I expected it to be.

Planned communities, and planned suburbs, grew in importance and influence in the 19th and early 20th century. A radical change came with the spread of the automobile to the middle class – how could the built environment cope with the spatial and organizational demands of cars? Corbu’s various schemes pointed in one direction, but a more realistic and thoughtful approach was taken by progressive designers in the 20s. Clarence Stein and Henry Wright collaborated on many important developments (such as Sunnyside in Queens), but Radburn laid out a new model for organizing suburban developments to emphasize community, safety and privacy.

The basic premise was that pedestrian and car circulation should be separated, with the dwelling units situated between the two. Children should be able to walk or bike safely around the neighborhood, and all the way to school, without having to cross a street. It sounds difficult and expensive, but the solution turned out to be affordable and at a remarkably high density. And like all great solutions, it was also elegant and beautiful.

The through streets in Radburn that connect to the larger street system are for cars only. Notice that they have no sidewalks – they don’t need them. Some houses enfront these streets, and they have modestly-scaled yet formal front yards.

They look like village roads, although in the site plan below, they look quite large in comparison to everything else.

Branching off these streets are the dead end streets for accessing the houses – courts, cul-de-sacs, whatever. They are even smaller, and allow for car access to driveways and a small amount of on-street parking.

Units have their front doors on these streets, with a small yard setback for privacy, and driveways long enough for one car.

Some of the house are detached, and some are semi-detached (duplexes or two-family houses, depending on which coast you live on).

There are carports and garages between the units. At the end of the cul-de-sac, a sort of court is created, with detached houses tucked into the corners.

it is a remarkably efficient solution to the parking demands, and one that still seems to function well, almost 100 years later.

The next innovation is that on the other side of the houses, across pleasant backyards, there is a narrow pedestrian path that provides access from all houses to the common outdoor space. These pedestrian paths are really quite agreeable – you can look into your neighbors’ backyards, but it’s not a large enough space where one would linger (although small children would probably find them to be a great environment for exploration). This pedestrian path idea was later used by Duany and Plater-Zyberk in their design for Seaside, Florida.

These paths connect out to a beautiful large field, where gatherings can be held, and games can be played.

The paths connect to the field between houses.

There is actually another path system which doesn’t show up on the site plans – it runs parallel to the large common, one house in from it, and so connects the parking court and the pedestrian path systems. I don’t know whether it was a later design revision, or whether it evolved organically, but it provides another layer of complexity and connection on the property.

The pathways on the common connect all the houses, and converge on tunnels beneath the through roads,

so that children may safely get to school.

The architectural style issue is intriguing. The houses reflect the preferences of the 20s – there are many “early American” houses, some Craftsman-y, some Tudor-y, etc. The houses vary from pretty small to pretty generous, illustrating that the concept of the site plan is independent of the architecture. Like many good diagrams, it can assume a variety of scales and absolute dimensions, and accommodate a wide variety of needs and site conditions.

Greta did the normal zoning-out when confronted with yet another piece of architecture that her dad was running around excitedly photographing, but I tried to get her to imagine life in this neighborhood. Suppose that when you were a little kid, you didn’t have immediate access to just the one other kid who lived next door to you, having to rely on your parents to facilitate any other engagements? Suppose your backyard connected to a world of kids, not just a private, fenced-off dead end? Suppose you could safely wander out from your house at any time, and find your cohort, with your allowable range naturally increasing as you aged? What if all the places where you could go were visible from your neightbors’ houses, and access to this shared world was pretty tightly overseen from those same houses? She began to see that Radburn was designed to accommodate cars, intending to limit their damage, but at the same time fundamentally improving the quality of life in suburbia for all.

You’ve probably noticed that this fantastic model was not followed very often in the intervening century. What happened? A Depression followed by a World War, and we really didn’t build much housing for 20 years. Then during the postwar boom, all this knowledge was forgotten. Market forces drove all development, and the emphasis was on quick, efficient construction and the amenities of the house. These ideas were resurrected in the New Urbanism movement which started in the 80s, and there are a very few places where they are being implemented. But if we ever get serious in the future about creating extremely attractive, higher-density residential neighborhoods, the Radburn model will always be there for us to copy.

History: Mill towns

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Travelers are often obsessed with history. Many major tourist attractions are historical sites, and we’ve noticed that people we’ve met on this trip often focus on historical minutiae. But in planning out a truck-schooling curriculum for Greta this year, we ran into a problem: history was Greta’s least-favorite subject. I was taken aback – wasn’t it my responsibility, as a parent, to drag her on a tour of historical sites and monuments (everyone should see Gettysburg, dammit, even if I hadn’t)? I asked her if there were any part of history she’d enjoyed, and she mentioned the history of the railroads. Further discussion clarified that she was interested in seeing historical stuff, artifacts from the past that showed how things were made or economies and regions organized. She wasn’t at all interested in staring reverently at a field where a battle had taken place 150 years ago, and I realized, neither was I. Being in a place where something happened long ago is kind of cool, but going out of your way to visit such a place didn’t make sense to either of us. Our historical agenda derived from this insight; we would visit historical places where there were substantial, tangible remnants of history (and preferably cool, Steampunk-looking ones with lots of gears and parts), and avoid places with people in period dress.

a carding machine in Lowell

Mill towns jumped to the top of this list. Our friend Dan prepared an exhaustive map of every mill town in New England he could find, and we set out to find a few. North Adams was interesting, especially as a large mill had been converted to the Mass MOCA museum. But clearly the main goal was to be Lowell National Historical Park, which preserves the mill district where the industrial revolution really took hold in America. It was an early planned, industrial city – a group of Boston investors scoped out possible sites for development, and settled on Lowell because of the drop in elevation of the Merrimack River, and the opportunity to build canals and waterways off it.

Lowell also continued our trip theme of Cities Which Were Really Important 100 Years Ago, but Aren’t Anymore. Except in this case it was 150 years. At its peak Lowell had 55 major mills, and dozens of smaller ones. Lowell took the cotton from the South and turned it into cloth. The original work force was New England farm girls, and a highly controlled, paternalistic system was put in place to ensure their respectability while living in the city. Within a few decades the work force shifted to immigrants, and Lowell was the site of early labor organizing in this country.

The National Park Service has preserved much of this infrastructure. The historical area is an interesting mix of remnants of the waterways, a few preserved mill buildings, such as the Boott Mill complex, where you can walk through rooms with operating looms:

and other parts of the district, where privately owned sites sit vacant, or are available for redevelopment.

In this way, Lowell is similar to our experience at Ebey’s landing National Historical Reserve on Whidbey Island, where 90% of the land is in private ownership, and the Park Service provides an overall organization and focus.

Once you get away from the renovated buildings, Lowell is pretty depressed and depressing. Some mill buildings have been turned to other uses – such as a large medical clinic or loft housing for artists and yuppies – but let’s face it, the supply of old mill sites is much greater than any foreseeable demand for redevelopment. It’s a story we’ve seen repeatedly on this trip, cities which peaked economically 100 years ago, and there hasn’t been much new investment. I remember an Atlantic article a few years ago, where Bernard-Henri Levy visited Buffalo and said that this was inconceivable to a European, that one of the most important cities from 100 years ago could be allowed to decline so precipitously. But the economy moves on, technologies and transportation systems change, and when a city has lost its primary economic raison d’être, what really can be done? Architects tend to focus on the potential of the amazing building stock left behind, but this supply-side view ignores the lack of demand to fill those buildings up.

The next important mill town we visited was Paterson, New Jersey, located on the Falls of the Passaic River. Although Paterson is a short trip from New York City, I had never been there before; the average New Yorker just can’t conceive of voluntarily visiting New Jersey. Paterson also didn’t have the best reputation – when I recently mentioned this visit to a friend, he was astonished that we drove through the center of Paterson without having our trailer stripped while waiting at a red light. (This may be a slightly outdated view – we drove through the center of Paterson and it seemed like a depressed, but not necessarily dangerous place to me.)

The Paterson mill district is even older than Lowell. The initial group of developers included Alexander Hamilton and it was the first substantial manufacturing area in the country. The mills centered around the Great Falls of the Passaic River, a 77-foot drop into a narrow canyon. A very cool spot, and one that you might have seen in the Sopranos, as people sometimes get thrown off the bridge pictured here:

A really knowledgable historian who grew up in Paterson and now works for the NPS gave us the rundown on Paterson, which was surprisingly important – most of the early steam locomotives in the country were manufactured here, it was the center of the silk industry, an it was the site of the first Colt factory. There are a few remaining mill buildings in the district near the Falls, as well as a museum (which we didn’t have time to visit, as we got stuck in horrific traffic jams in Paterson, and then missed a turn to the parking lot and had to circle around narrow streets with a trailer, and then ended up in front of an elementary school just as it let out). Despite its gritty reputation, Paterson didn’t see as depressing as Lowell. Perhaps we just saw a lot more street life, with a clearly vibrant immigrant population. Perhaps it was because dreams of urban redevelopment don’t seem so unlikely when you’re within an hour of Manhattan and you have some great building stock. We wished we had more time to investigate the city further, as the downtown has many remaining civic and cultural buildings from its era of prosperity.

Fun with Frank

New York

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In New York, we decided to focus on cool new stuff we hadn’t seen. And pastrami. Our pastrami quest was thwarted as we trekked up to Carnegie Deli, only to discover that it was closed for repairs. (And while we considered our next move, a dozen other people came along to be equally disappointed. Someone should set up a pastrami cart there.) We did see Alwyn Court (even if we couldn’t afford to eat at Petrossian).

We only had two days to spend in New York, less than we did in Cincinnati. The focus on this trip has been on places where I haven’t been in a long time, places where we’re not likely to go to again soon, and places that you need a car to reach. We had just been in New York last winter, and it’s likely we’ll be back soon, since we have a lot of family and friends there. Then Greta and I came down with colds while staying with my brother in Mamaroneck, so our time in City got cut in half. We decided to not spread ourselves too thin, and missed a lot of places and people we wanted to see (including an abortive attempt to schedule a Facebook-based meet-up with a lot of friends). It was disappointing, but we’ll be back soon.

We wandered through the Park, and felt the full impact of the new residential tower at 57th and Park. It’s kind of unbelievable, the tallest residential building in the western hemisphere, and a portent of things to come.

The Century used to be considered a tall building.

On to some favorite blocks on the West Side.And over the the 79th St.Boat Basin, where the rotunda is looking a lot spiffier than it did when I kept a boat there in the 80s.

The redevelopment and park extension at Riverside South was interesting. The new apartments were a tiny bit less banal than most of their era.

But the real pleasure was in the park. Back in the 80s, I was one of very few people who ever roamed into this territory – some homeless people managed to find gaps in the fence, and I would come from the river side in a row boat. I was especially drawn to the remnants of the wharves that were there, as seen in these photos from the late 80s:I expected that some day this would all get swept away in a real estate development, so I was pleasantly surprised to see that the park design, by Balsley Studio, incorporated these pieces into a sophisticated design that covers the range from hard to soft and industrial to natural.

And at the end of the park, there’s something else new to see:Bjarke Ingels’s new condo building is his usual showstopper. Once again, he lets the building form be driven by the site conditions, and doesn’t worry about conventional ways of making buildings. I think this has worked really well in some of his projects, such as the 8-house, and less well in some others, such as the Mountain, where the concept may be strong but the execution is flawed. It may be too early to tell with “Via 57West”, but I do wish they had hired a Danish branding consultant too and come up with a better name. (Maybe they’re trying to attract Italian residents, and want to distinguish it from the buildings full of Russian oligarchs down the street.) I haven’t seen the plans, but we spoke to a construction worker who said there were lots of weird, unusable spaces, which has certainly happened in some of his other projects, and seems like a natural result when you let the building volume drive the scheme. I’ll withhold judgment.

But I think this may be a real New York building at heart, with the form driven by real estate economics. One way to look at the massing is that it provides a graceful transition from the 57th St. canyon to the open space of the River:

Another interpretation arises when you find out that the whole block is being developed by the Durst organization. The more conventional building further back on 57th St., seen to the right in this photo,now has a view of the River because the Ingels building slopes back. So instead of one building with a view of the River and one with a view of 11th Avenue, you now have two buildings with river views. The first one may be inefficient, not maximizing its potential floor plates and with funny unit designs,, but you can sell the units to hipsters who want to be in the cool building with great views, regardless of functionality. Then you can have conventional units with normal floor plans in the second building, which will be bought by more pragmatic people. The origin of this building is similar to that of Central Park – it may be a good design, but it would never have happened without the financial rationale. I just wish it had a less cheesy name.

Whitney Museum

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I thought the main capital-A Architecture focus of this trip was going to be out-of-the-way buildings by Lou Kahn, but then Renzo Piano hijacked our agenda. We’ve only seen one recent museum that wasn’t by Piano, and I think the MFA addition is really Norman Foster in Piano drag.

The new Whitney is superb. Anchoring the High Line at Gansevoort St., it consolidates Chelsea’s status as the new zone for hip galleries, since Soho became a shopping mall and the East Village seems to have gone back to being the East Village. Tectonically, the building picks up on the High Line and other buildings in the area – it stands out as an institution, but it complements the older technologies beautifully.

The superstructure at the top of the picture is the key to how the building fits into the context. Every other museum in New York is a solid box which you enter to view the treasures within. (The Met has some views of the city from the large atrium areas in the new wings by Roche Dinkeloo, but that is all.) In a museum of American art – which necessarily means lots of art in and about New York – the Whitney pulls in the City as an essential part of the experience. Being in Chelsea, surrounded by low buildings, the views of midtown and downtown are unobstructed, and going back and forth from the galleries to the city is exhilarating.

I am a big fan of museums which allow easy access to large open areas where you can shift the focus of your eyes to a distance, get some spatial relief from the necessary introversion of galleries, and let your mind wander a bit; the Whitney does this better than any museum I’ve ever seen. The large space isn’t just a relief from the galleries, it is a complement which intensifies the experience while providing a change.

The parti is classic Piano – simple, legible and appropriate. Each level has a big east-west bar of galleries, with a fairly solid wall to the south, and filtered openings to the east and west. The staff spaces are mainly on the north side, accessible from the gallery levels, but tucked away behind the circulation core.

These filtered ends are tunable – allowing for a directly daylit space at the end for sculpture, while using a series of screening elements to block direct light from reaching the galleries within. This layering strategy is being employed in many museums now, but this makes more sense to me than Foster’s MFA – it is both more flexible and less extravagant.

Movement through this building is directed, but not constrained. The staff suggests that you take the elevator to the top, and then walk down. Interestingly, this is the same processional as was suggested at the old Breuer Whitney. That building had gigantic elevators, which were also used as freight elevators after hours, and one notable interior stair, which was a sculptural and spatial experience, despite having only one window; Piano seems to pay homage to that. The elevators are the coolest glass elevators this side of Lloyds of London, and there is a central stair that is perfectly located and visible, a pleasure to use, again despite being completely internal.

Every floor has an entry space at the top of the elevators and stair, orienting you and facilitating the introduction to the exhibit.

You can us this stair, but why wouldn’t you head outside? The steel structure relates to the High Line below, and contrasts with the slick envelope of the gallery volumes.

The view to the north

and to the south

Museums can be disorienting rabbit warrens (Pelli’s remodel of MOMA was one of the worst, thankfully now somewhat mitigated.) This museum not only allows you to be oriented within the museum, but within the whole city. For a city with great views, it is remarkable how few of them are immediately accessible to the public. I took views for granted when I worked in the Empire State Building for seven years, but now returning as a tourist, I am annoyed at how I’m always in a canyon, only able to get the big view by standing in line for an hour and paying a lot of money. The Whitney offers a view of the City that is actually better (though less spectacular) than from the tower decks, and reflective of real life in the City, not the prospect of a master of the universe.

The various spaces are all commodious and comfortable. The ground floor lobby is transparent and open to the street. The scale is wonderful, as opposed to the lobby at MOMA, which has the proportions of a parking garage.

As in all Piano buildings, you can grasp the layout without looking at a plan, the main elements being visible from each other.

The top floor galleries have Piano’s usual attention to daylighting, in this case a nice balancing of high-tech systems and traditional gallery room design.

I left with the same feeling I get from many Piano museums – a wonderful museum experience, where the architecture didn’t scream for attention, but supported the art without being at all neutral.