I wanted to talk about this apartment building that towers over the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, along with a radio tower. My first response to it, was to try and avoid it in as many shots as I could. It’s rigid grid modernism seemed a mediocre example of International Style architecture and it seemed to clash with the neo classical and neo Nippon gardens there. It seemed, in short, an eye sore, but it got me thinking about modernism and the Japanese and the Germans and the end of World War Two. I was thinking about the tremendous need to rebuild on the cheap after blowing Europe and Asia all to hell… and how the International Style is a kind of rational response to this obvious need, but I liked that Americans some how talked themselves into building in this style too (after all no one had blown us up)… it seems like we really believed in what we were doing and I found that charming (I suppose it had something to do with fashion, but fashion is a belief system too)… and of course it brings to mind the Swiss and my old man and Geneva and The U.N. and how nice it must have been to believe in progress and Darwin and science and peace, etc. I don’t want to get all romantic about it, but I started to see the squares of the buildings as a kind of antithesis to the biomorphic natural shapes of the trees and flowers and waters… that sort of split down the center of the picture, like the spine of a book, or woman… that thing born of fish swimming into a sphere (or carp into a rose)… I thought of this and more importantly, the building when seen from the Japanese garden had the affect of making me feel like I was really in Japan (since so much of Japan is post War architecture). The building was the flaw that made the lie work… and I was transported to Japan from Brooklyn in a way that all the Neo Classical stuff surrounding will never make me feel I’m in Greece, or some idealized European past… no that ugly little apartment block (with the nice grid balconies) made me feel like I was in Japan Today… that minute… and so altered time and space…it stood tall against the chaos of flowers and nations. So yesterday it was the ugly little building that could…..also: When seen in the context of a pine tree, the shape seems to harmonize with the Fibonacci sequence of tiered branches… or is that just me?
