Jan 2006
The five broad bands of patterned brick on the library's main facade - including the wave motif common to many acient clutures - were inspired by artifacts at Dumbarton Oaks.
The library's most dramatic interior is a three-story-high space hung with ancient Roman mosaics
The rear of the library is stepped back to make it seem less bulky from the dell below
CONCERTO IN BRICK MAJOR
IN WASHINGTON, D.C., A LIBRARY BY VENTURI AND SCOTT BROWN ADDS A GRACE NOTE TO HISTORIC DUMBARTON OAKS
by martin filler
UNLIKE LONDON or Paris, Washington, D.C., has never been a cultural as well as a governmental capital; official support of the arts there can often seem more dutiful than passionate. One major exception in the private sector is Dumbarton Oaks, the bucolic northwest Washington estate that has been home to several memorable episodes in modem arts patronage.
In 1920 diplomat Robert Woods Bliss and his wife, Mildred, bought Dumbarton Oaks and soon hired landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand to turn their 53-acre property into one of America's finest gardens. The couple also remodeled the nineteenth-century brick mansion, adding a spacious McKim, Mead & White music room furnished by French Art Deco designer Armand-Albert Rateau. That stylish salon witnessed the world premiere of Igor Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, which Mildred Bliss commissioned to mark the couple's 30th wedding anniversary in 1938.
The Blisses assembled three outstanding but unusual collections- Byzantine antiquities, pre-Columbian artifacts, and horticultural books and manuscripts. As World War I1 approached, they were determined to preserve this oasis of civilized values and gave it to Harvard as a museum and research center. In 1944, the estate was the site of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, which laid the groundwork for what was to become the United Nations. As Mildred Bliss wrote to a university official, "If ever the humanities were necessary… it is in this epoch of disintegration and dislocation."
Those again prophetic words are carved on a limestone wall at the delightful new Dumbarton Oaks Research Library by Venturi, Scott Brown, and Associates, the Philadelphia firm now restoring and expanding that satellite Harvard campus. Denise Scott Brown has long been denied fair credit by those who see her partner and husband, Robert Venturi, as the team's sole designer, a mis- Apprehension that led to the scandal of the Pritzker Prize being awarded to him but not her. Yet as Scott Brown points out, "This is really Bob's job, aside from my helping with the siting and getting planning approval." It's hard to imagine this architectural gem being set more skillfully into its surroundings. This couple's powerful yin-yang of talents remains unique among their senior generation's other star architects, none of whom can depend on such a strong equal as sounding board, critic, and helpmate.
Connoisseurs cherish a deepening, darkening sensibility in older artists- think of Rembrandt's late self-portraits or Beethoven's last quartets. Yet the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library seems so fresh that it's hard to believe Venturi turned 80 last summer and Scott Brown will be 75 next fall. This scheme's youthful exuberance also belies the four decades since the publication of Venturi's 'gentle manifesto," Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, which rocked the profession with the notion that high and low design can be equally valid, now so accepted as to seem commonplace.
Despite Venturi and Scott Brown's unquestionable eminence, their roster of first-rate unbuilt works is long, and Dumbarton Oaks narrowly escaped being added to it. The design was opposed by J. Carter Brown of the US. Commission of Fine Arts, whose parting legacy to the capital was his advocacy of Friedrich St. Florian's retrograde National World War I1 Memorial, so poorly sited on the Washington Mall that it wrecks America's symbolic front yard. Brown objected to the library's flat roof, its "industrial" aesthetic, and its alleged lack of historical references. But fate intervened, Brown died, and under a more sympathetic committee the design was approved.
Neighborhood residents worried that the scheme might despoil a private property they consider a public park. The structure was therefore nestled into one side of a bosky dell to minimize its height when seen from the street and courtyard above. To reduce the building's perceived bulk on the downhill side, Venturi tapered it with telescoping setbacks and terraces. These respectful gestures play off the library's animated east facade, which has vertical banks of windows and horizontal limestone bands recalling the playful spirit of Sir Edwin Lutyens.
The main facade of the Durnbarton Oaks library demonstrates Venturi and Scott Brown's willingness to defer to good existing structures. How many architectural prima donnas would place another designer's work front and center, as Venturi has done here by recycling an orangery as the library's new reading room? His recent essay 'Architecture- MaNonTroppo-as Background Rather than Distraction" invokes the Italian musical term "but not too much" to make a case for unassertive design "in an era when architecture as total fanfare has become egotecture."
The foundation of this firm's recent practice has been campus planning, science buildings, student centers, and libraries. Those projects share several characteristics, mainly the "decorated shed" format, defined by Venturi and Scott Brown as a simple generic structure with flat surfaces enlivened by two-dimensional decoration. Appropriately for American campuses, the team's main material of choice is brick, deployed in contrasting colors and vivid patterns, from diagonal "diapering" based on Tudor and Victorian prototypes to sideways stripes of stylized waves and weavings adapted from pre-Columbian and Byzantine motifs at Dumbarton Oaks.
The curving driveway sloping downward from the street toward the library's main door is flanked by two refurbished McKim, Mead &White outbuildings: the gardener's cottage, for offices, and the refectory for communal dining. The refectory's ground floor reception room opens onto a rectangular court also bounded by a lovely old greenhouse-a gateway to Farrand's majestic garden and Venturi's new structure, with an enormous beech tree anchoring the quadrangle's center.
The reception room's pale green walls bloom with a smaller version of the superscale pink, yellow, and white pop flowers that Venturi and Scott Brown devised for their Best Products Catalog Showroom of 1977 near Philadelphia. Good-taste-niks will demand that this Dorothy Draper-meets-Andy Warhol pattern be painted over, and I pray they will be rebuffed.
Because the library, which cost a relatively modest $18 million, is a study facility rather than a public showcase, its interiors are straightforwardly flatfooted-" almost all right," as Venturi famously described the classic American Main Street. Gray steel shelving, natural cork flooring, and sturdy oak details impart a pleasingly old-fashioned air. The few hints of drama come from views of the lush grounds framed by towering square-paned windows and daylight raking down from the clerestory.
Dumbarton Oaks' previous claim to architectural fame was the art gallery that Philip Johnson added to the mansion in 1963, which he rightly judged "my most elegant building." Defined by a series of shallow domes ringed with columns, that reliquary like space (now under renovation) is ideal for the collection's small-scale objects. For once Johnson's preciousness seems appropriate, reminding me of the rococo Hall of Mirrors at the Amalienburg pavilion near Munich and a later musical analogue, the lilting waltzes from Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier.
Great artists are rare, and those who change the way we see the world rarest of all. Just as Stravinsky revolutionized music early in the twentieth century, so Venturi and Scott Brown recast modern architecture with their iconoclastic designs and writings of the 1960s and 1970s. All broke free of the past but continued to learn from the masters. In his Dumbarton Oaks Concerto, Stravinsky channeled the syncopated structure of Bach's Brandenburg Concertos to create something akin but vibrantly new. Venturi and Scott Brown have done the same at Dumbarton Oaks with their sophisticated riffs on Elizabethan, Georgian, and modernist architecture in an unmistakably contemporary idiom.
Dumbarton Oaks' brave director, Edward L. Keenan, would have had a far easier time had he commissioned a routine in-a scheme from some historical revivalist. But in going with a maverick couple whose quirky work still arouses controversy, Keenan has given Dumbarton Oaks the latest installment in its open-ended dialogue with genius.
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