Francis Morrone March–June 2023
Hello, and Happy Spring!
My New Year’s resolution for 2023 was to reduce—not by a little but by a lot—the number of lectures and tours I do. Status of the resolution: a complete, dismal failure. Somehow, and I don’t know how, I’ve managed to increase the number of tours and lectures. Actually, I do know how: The people with whom I work at the 92nd Street Y (Melanie Macchio) and at Scarsdale Adult School (Jill Serling) are just so nice that when they ask me to do something I can’t say no.
For the 92nd Street Y, I will be doing two series this spring by Zoom, both on The Art Museum. Each series is five weekly lectures, each focusing on the history, architecture, and collections of one of the great museums of Europe and America. We all love our great museums, and if you’re the sort of person who takes part in my tours and lectures then the odds are great that you’re the sort of person who weights the number and quality of museums very heavily in your assessments of cities. But we all also take museums somewhat for granted, forgetting how recently the museum came to be—and how much their character and purposes have changed in the short time they’ve been around. So while each lecture will focus on a specific museum, or on specific museums, I hope also to give a sense of how the institution in general has evolved from its origins in the late 18th and the 19th centuries. Here are the links to register for the two series:
Part 1 covers the British Museum (March 8), the Louvre (March 15), the Uffizi (March 22), the Vatican Museums (March 29), and the National Gallery in London (April 19).
Part 2 covers the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Prado in Madrid (April 26), the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna (May 3), the Metropolitan Museum of Art (May 10), the Wallace Collection in London and the Frick Collection in New York (May 17), and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and the Mauritshuis in The Hague (May 24).
These will take place by Zoom on Wednesdays from 3:00 to 4:00. They will be recorded for those who cannot make it at that time.
For Scarsdale Adult School I did a series last year on The Architects of America, from Charles Bulfinch to Louis Kahn. Several people told me they’d like me to do a similar series on architects from outside America, and so we’ve scheduled the first twelve lectures in The Great Architects series, beginning on March 1 in the Florence of the early 1400s with Filippo Brunelleschi. I very much wish the series could be global in scope, but I just lack the expertise. My studies, alas, have been largely Eurocentric. This is changing, but because of my late start, I’m afraid I’ll never get to the point where I can give lectures on architecture outside of Europe and the United States. Put this in the “if I had it to do all over again” category. Also, if you’re wondering why I’m beginning in the 1400s, it’s because before then there weren’t really architects as we think of them, or at least we don’t know their names. It’s with the Florentine Renaissance that the architect comes into his own as a name. And the first name to reckon with is that of Filippo Brunelleschi, whose impact on our Western world seems to me to be as great as that of any scientist or statesman. (And note my use of “his.” It is a very sad fact that architecture, much more than any of the other arts, has until recently been an utterly male-dominated field. This would begin to change in the 19th century, and by now has, happily and at long last, changed utterly.)
Do note the difference between the way the 92nd Street Y does things and the way Scarsdale Adult School does things. With the former, you register for the whole series. With the latter, you register for each individual lecture.
Here are the links for the Scarsdale lectures:
Filippo Brunelleschi, March 1
Leon Battista Alberti, March 8
Donata Bramante, March 15
Michelangelo, March 22
Andrea Palladio, March 29
Gianlorenzo Bernini, April 12
Francesco Borromini, Guarino Guarini, and Filippo Juvarra, April 19
François Mansart and Jules Hardouin-Mansart, April 26
Inigo Jones, May 3
Christopher Wren, May 10
Nicholas Hawksmoor, May 17
John Vanbrugh, May 24
These are on Wednesdays from 1:00 to 2:00, and, like the 92nd Street Y series, will be recorded for those who can’t make it at that time.
In addition, I will be doing two IN-PERSON walking tours for Scarsdale Adult School:
East River Vistas: Beekman Place and Sutton Place, May 31
East River Vistas: Cherokee Place and East End Avenue, June 7
These will be on Wednesdays, 1:00 to 2:30. Alas, no recordings.
Finally, on Wednesday, March 22, at 6:00, I will do a virtual tour for the Municipal Art Society on the occasion of its 130th birthday. The tour is entitled Henry Hope Reed and the First Tour. As many of you know, it was for many years an MAS tradition that on or near April 8 I would recreate the first MAS walking tour, which took place on that date in 1956 and was led by Henry Hope Reed and E. Powis Jones. Henry led many subsequent MAS tours, as well as tours sponsored by the Museum of the City of New York, and really invented the serious walking tour that became an established part of the culture of New York City. In this virtual event, I will take you through that first tour, but, in addition, will discuss the life and work of Henry Hope Reed (1915–2013), the architectural historian whom I counted as a dear friend and mentor and who, I believe, altered New Yorkers’ perceptions and experience of their city every bit as profoundly as did Jane Jacobs. Henry had his many admirers (Jane Jacobs among them), but he was also a controversial figure. He loathed modern architecture, which set him at odds with the establishment architectural world of New York. (In fact, Henry and his friends, such as Albert Bard and Alan Burnham, who formed the nucleus of the historic preservation movement that led to the passage of the Landmarks Law in 1965, all hated modern architecture. Today, of course, much of the energy of preservationists is directed to the preservation of…modern architecture.) I don’t share Henry’s antipathy to modern architecture (well, not all of it), but that doesn’t mean my admiration for him is anything less than boundless. Here’s your chance to learn about him and about how he changed the way you see the city around you. FYI: MAS does not record its virtual tours.
As in all numbers of this newsletter, I recommend something that has given me pleasure or that I’m looking forward to. Last time, I rounded up a bunch of exhibitions coming this spring and summer that I’m looking forward to. This time, it’s a book. Witold Rybczynski (pronounced rib-chin-skee) is and has been for the last nearly 40 years (at least since his book Home: A Short History of an Idea came out in 1986) one of my favorite living writers on architecture and urbanism. I heartily recommend his new book The Story of Architecture from Yale University Press (which publishes more good books than any other publisher in the U.S.). Rybczynski’s model was the great E.H. Gombrich’s classic The Story of Art, which was first published in 1950. Just as Gombrich sought to tell the story of art by focusing one one or two key works by each of a number of important artists, rather than try to limn the full range of each artist’s career, so Rybczynski does the same for architecture, from the Neolithic Cairn of Barnenez (c. 4800 B.C.) to Allan Greenberg’s Brockman Hall (2016–20) at Rice University in Houston. You can see right there one of things that makes this book different from most (all?) other general histories of architecture: Rybczynski’s treatment of the 20th and 21st centuries (for me the best part of the book, though the whole thing is excellent) is highly pluralistic. It takes no side in the “style wars” but seeks to reveal the full range of what architects were up to. Most histories of architecture presume Modernist to be the style (or set of styles) of the 20th century and, at best, relegate all 20th-century architecture that is not Modernist to footnotes or, more commonly, don’t mention it at all. (You’d be amazed by the histories of architecture that, when they get to the 20th century, don’t even mention, say, the Chrysler Building.) In addition to his full and fair and often admiring treatment of Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier and Norman Foster and Frank Gehry, Rybczynski also gives us Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue and Paul Philippe Cret and Thomas Hall Beeby—as I would have done, and as most others have not. And he concludes with Allan Greenberg—a classical architect of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. (By the way, for those of you who attended my evening with Robert A.M. Stern last summer, the room in which the event took place, in the University Club, was designed by Greenberg.) I can’t say how refreshing I find this. Rybczynski, who is an architect with a strong knowledge of history, is also a superb writer. This, like all his books, is a pleasure to read, and it is now the book I recommend to anyone looking for an introduction to the history of architecture. And, unlike my Scarsdale series on The Great Architects, Rybczynski’s book is global in scope.
Thanks, and I hope to see you soon!
Best, Francis