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Lincoln, Nebraska
Hey mister, if you're gonna walk on water you know you're only gonna walk all over me
I was unusually excited about heading to Omaha a few weeks a go for a business meeting (specifically to meet with some MEP engineers). Omaha is the home of Saddle Creek Records, Warren Buffett and Omaha Steaks (or just "Steaks" as they're called there). Despite an unusually short weekday visit, we still had barely just enough time to manage to drive I-80 West an hour (or so) to go see Lincoln, home to one of the great American buildings. Designed by Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (the guy who designed St Bart's on Park Avenue) in the 1920s, topped with a tower and integrated with all kinds of public art, the Nebraska State Capitol Building is easily one of the very best public government buildings in the country and worth a visit. Really.
At the top of the tower an exterior public observation deck gives all a chance to see clear across the prairie and all the way to, well, not all that much. Omaha is in the center of the country, a blue outpost in an otherwise red state, a place where seemingly everything lies just beyond the horizon.
With true sadness in her voice, the employee in the quickly rising elevator spoke of how the CN Tower in Toronto was still technically the world's tallest freestanding structure, despite the fact that SOM's otherwise unremarkable Burj Dubai tower was already surpassing it and topping out some 800 feet higher than the CN Tower stands. Still there's something to be said about a view that stretches all the way across Lake Ontario on a clear day from the observation deck of one of the world's tallest freestanding structures, where a mere 1,465 feet above the sidewalk below will just have to do for now.
The mecca of North American Hockey (take that Montreal, Detroit and Edmonton) is Toronto where big time professional hockey is played by the recently horrible Toronto Maple Leafs. Still it was most certainly a nice diversion to watch the pride of Toronto lose to the division leading Boston Bruins, to be back in the ACC (Air Canada Centre), to see once again what it is like to be a Leafs fan in a building and city and province where everyone else at every turn is a Leafs fan too.
This all over the map slideshow finds itself at the opening weekend of the reimagined Art Gallery of Ontario on Dundas Street in Toronto. Designed by local boy Frank Gehry, the renovated building represents a new direction from his firm and an encouraging one at that. The building is surprisingly understated for a Gehry building, the organization surprisingly clear, the scale surprisingly human and there's no curvy titanium panels anywhere. All good news if you ask me.
The original museum was nothing special, a series of galleries with an annoying up and down circulation system and a particularly unmemorable facade. Gehry's big solution was to leave most of the museum reasonably intact but to add three big gestures. The first was a large curved glass and wood gallery/canopy on Dundas Street that would act as a new front facade. Here the crowds (including me) braved the iffy weather and the long lines (just over an hour if I remember right) to be one of the first ones to check the building out for its big free admission opening weekend.
The second big gesture was to create two surprisingly fun circular staircases that connect the surviving parts of the original museum to the third big gesture- a tremendously out of scale blue metal clad addition that hovers over the back side of the building. This new addition houses the contemporary art collection and is surprisingly boxy, especially for a Gehry building. The twisting staircases play well off such restraint- one rising up from the enclosed courtyard before piercing the skylights and entering the addition, while a second one is tacked on to the back side with killer views over the Grange (the park and neighborhood behind the museum where Gehry grew up).
In the old museum I distinctly remember taking pictures of the art, but in the renovated museum they have decided that such pictures were no longer allowed, a real shame since some areas (like the third big gesture, the impressive Galleria d' Italia on the second floor) long to be photographed. The Galleria stretches for the entire length of the museum (on the Dundas Street side) and holds a few pieces of art that just can't compete with all those laminated wood beams and all that glass. The one space in the building that (almost) takes your breath away.
