Day 348 - Plan for a city hall


June 15, 2022

Gallery 916 displays models and plans,  mostly two-dimensional drawings, for both public buildings and private homes.  Most of the designs are modernistic and seem - to me, anyway - more like exercises for the imagination than like structures that could actually be built. And most never were built.

One of these is an entry for the design of a city hall executed in 1914 by Harry Sternfeld, an American architect whose dates are 1889-1976 and who was largely based in Philadelphia. The very large drawing (perhaps eight feet across and five feet high) depicts a long white (presumably marble) building that is distinctly traditional in style.  Neoclassical elements  - a long, porticoed entrance topped by a pediment - mark its highly symmetrical facade, and identical statues on pedestals flank the stairs that lead up to the doors. The design reminds me that Neoclassicism  was very much the accepted style for public buildings of the period - think the New York Public Library or the Met itself.  In back of this building is a much taller, equally symmetrical building with towers at either end that reminds me of the Municipal Building here in New York City. It looks like it could easily house offices for thousands of city employees. 

I like to imagine that Sternfeld, who was only 25 when he made this drawing, was the son of immigrants (I know he went to the University of Pennsylvania on scholarship), and that he intended the design to be a testimonial to democracy, city government, and civic mindedness. But to me the building appears grandiose rather than grand, oppressive - quasi-Stalinist - rather than (or as well as) impressive.  It seems out of scale with the buildings behind it,  removed from the bustle -  and humanity - of urban life.

A raised platform displays my two favorite objects in the gallery: a curvilinear folding screen of mahogany plywood designed in 1946 by Charles and Ray Eames, and a laminated birch lounge chair designed in 1931-32 by Alvar Aalto as part of an overall design for a Finnish TB sanatorium.  The light, warm colors of these home furnishings seem to bring the outdoors inside.
 

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