AAP NYC

Louis Kahn’s iconic sketch of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park. Credit: Louis I. Kahn Collection, University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission.

On the last day of the semester, AAP NYC students had the chance to go visit Louis Kahn’s posthumous work to be built in New York City – the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Four Freedoms Memorial on the tip of Roosevelt Island set to open in Fall 2012 and currently under construction. We came to the island early in the morning to Roosevelt Island, where waiting for us was Gina Pollara; the Executive Director of the four freedoms park corporation set up by eighty one year old former U.S Ambassador William vanden Heuvel. Gina Pollara showed us some of the renderings of the project and told us the history of how Kahn died in Pennsylvania Station in 1974 before this project could be completed. He had, however completed all the drawing up until construction documentation for the project which was taken up again by Vanden Heuvel almost twenty years later and is now being built after a long fund-raising and approvals process. Gina Pollara told us they needed almost eighteen different permission to be able to build on the island, including from the Army Corps of Engineers and that ten years were simply involved in garnering enough funds. The project is being built exactly as Kahn designed it with minor changes such an increased height on the island due to tidal waves and the need to keep up to date with the latest building codes.

Kahn’s design called for a monumental staircase leading up to a wide lawn flanked by two rows of linden trees, which converged on what Kahn called a “room” of silvery-gray granite at the tip of the island. The roofless room would have three twelve-foot walls and would be open toward the water and the view of the city. The architectural firm of Mitchell/Giurgola (a firm which had worked with Kahn when he was alive), along with the Weidlinger Associates, and Langan Engineering who were both on the original project were brought in to figure out how to get the project built. This challenge became even greater when the engineers realized that climate change had raised the water level of the East River by about four inches in the years since Kahn made his design. The project team hence set the level of the monument fifteen inches above where Kahn had placed it.

Plan of Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park

Construction has come along quite a bit in the last few months. The stairs leading up to the park with linden trees and the room at the end is complete. There is only the center portion with the grass, some lighting and the circular stone paving with dirt in the middle where the trees are placed left to be finished. We walked up the mounds of earth on the site to a small niche that led to the granite ‘room’ at the end. When you pass the niche, you enter a walled space that is open to the south, in which you feel almost as if you were floating on the river. The enormous blocks of granite, each of which weighs thirty-six tons, are set an inch apart, so that slivers of light pass between them, providing tiny slits of the view. The sides are polished, a detail that intensifies the light, and the blocks are mounted so that they appear to hover just above the ground. Like all of Kahn’s best work, the memorial is abstract, simple, and powerful.

On the day we went to visit the memorial, construction workers were etching in to the stone the Four Freedoms Speech given by Roosevelt on January 6, 1941. It is the speech that shaped this nation and which is the cornerstone of the United Nations as Gina Pollara told us, hence the room at the end also looks out to the UN building on the nearby Manhattan shoreline.

Roosevelt had looked forward to a world founded on four human freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. By building Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park, the Four Freedoms Foundation hopes to honor this man and these essential freedoms. The part of the speech the carved in to the stone on the site is given below:

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression — everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way — everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want — which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants — everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear — which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor– anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation.

Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman was recently revived at the Barrymore Theater on Broadway with a modest run of 16 weeks ending on 2 June 2012. It has recently been nominated for several Tony Awards, including Best Actor in Featured Role, Best Sound and Lighting Design and Best Revival of a Play. Although the play has received both good and bad review with the New York Times called it “the most lucid ‘Salesman’…ever seen” with others such as the New Yorker giving it higher praise with the words “luminous and blistering” as well as the Daily Mail, which said the performance were “powerful and emotionally rich”.

I am not a theater critic so I will refrain from expounding on the characters’ acting skills or general direction of the play. I will say that it was thrilling to see Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield (of the film ‘Social Network’) perform up-close, on stage in real time. And more than the male performance was the acting of Linda Emond as Willy Loman’s wife, the performance I had least expected to stand out and one that blew me away with her rendition of the classic speech defending her husbands ego when she claims with rigor “Attention must be paid”.

Apart from the acting, what I enjoyed most however, were the wonderful sets of the play and how they seamlessly fit in with the production and original text. Director Mike Nichols decided to revive the original sets for the play designed by Joe Mielziner for the 1949 production as well as the original score. This, in my opinion, was what made the play truly great. The set drew me in to Miller’s portrait of failed American dreams of the middle class man; struggling against the world and his own egoistical nature to ‘make it big’ .

The sets brought the pieces of the story together, cleverly showing Biff and Happy, Willy Loman’s sons resting in bed on the upper levels of the house, shown cut-away as though in section while we watch him come through the doors of the home weighed down by his bags of samples, heavy enough to contain a lifetime of disappointments. We can watch the reactions to Willy’s words as we see the boy on the upper level get up and move around the room. This set allows so much more to be written and said than is possible in a set that is created as a whole. Parts of the story can be told congruently and there is no need for winding narratives or going back and forth in time. It takes advantage of the viewer’s ability to absorb several moments at once and hence makes the play all the richer for it.

Joe Mielziner was an American theatrical scenic, and lighting designer born in Paris, France. He is “the most successful set designer of the Golden era of Broadway”, and worked on both stage plays and musicals. In the course of his career, Mielziner won five Tony Awards and was nominated for another seven, as well as the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design. His influence extended outside of the theater. He was acquainted with the American artist Edward Hopper, who is said to have modeled his well-known painting Early Sunday Morning after Mielziner’s set for Elmer Rice’s play Street Scene, produced in 1929.

Live Design Online has a wonderful interview recounting set designer Brian Webb’s struggle to recreate the original sets of the play, the drawings of which he found in the New York Public Library.

“I have always admired Jo Mielziner as a scenic artist,” confirms Webb, a New York-based designer who had read Mielziner’s day-by-day diary of his process for the play. “That diary fueled my fascination,” he adds. “Mielziner had given his designs to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and when I discovered the box of original drawings, I was flabbergasted at the amount of material for this one show.”

In 1998, Webb was struck by the ground plan, and how sculptural and three-dimensional it was. Faced with the library’s restriction on taking materials home, he used clear tabloid-sized paper with a ¼” grid and clear gridded acetate, laid over the originals, to transcribe copies. “I copied the plans point-by-point, connecting the dots, and putting my copies under the transparent original drawings to check my accuracy,” he explains. Webb scanned and printed his copies, then made a ½” scale presentation model he keeps in a Plexiglas case in his living room.

In 1999, when Death Of A Salesman was revived, Webb told technical supervisor Gene O’Donovan about his fascination with the original set design. More than a decade later, when the current revival was being discussed, O’Donovan told director Mike Nichols that he knew someone who had made a model of the original set. “Nichols had seen the original production,” notes Webb. “He knew the floor plan and design concept worked and that Mielziner’s concept was responsible for rewrites by Arthur Miller and the show’s seamless transitions.”

Webb proceeded with caution, especially early on. “I have a particular interest in iconic designs for important American shows, but I thought there might be a fair number of people who wouldn’t understand why we did something 60 years old, or we might get it all on stage and wonder what all the fuss was about,” he says. “I knew it backward and forward, and am pleased by people’s response in seeing this poetic set on stage.”

Webb went back to the original drawings and studied the notes indicating such details as the thickness of the wood, no knots allowed on the pine, and bull-noses on all corners of the house. “When we turned on the stage lights, we realized immediately the value of Mielziner’s careful specifications,” Webb notes. “The house is actually very small. Mielziner and [director Elia] Kazan must have spent hours discussing the use of space, and the furniture is slightly diminutive. Then we realized the small tables really forced the actors to confront each other.”

Bill Mensching’s ShowMotion built the sets, which were painted by Scenic Art Studios. “I don’t think in Mielziner’s lifetime his scenery was ever so lovingly created,” concludes Webb.

One of the great things about being in New York City is that it is a city that one is so familiar with through various forms of media that when you actually do go to sites such as the Statue of Liberty or Times Square – you try to see them with new eyes. Taking pictures of the city, I felt like any other tourist who has taken the same picture time and time again. I wanted to do something different and when I sat down with Photoshop to doctor my images a little to make them look unique I discovered something called High Dynamic Range Imaging. HDR is a method used to bring out both the lights and darks in a picture – resulting in high contrast imagery. The method used is to take an image at several apertures so that one can then combine them to allow a greater dynamic range between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than current standard digital photographic methods. This wide dynamic range allows HDR images to represent more accurately the range of intensity levels found in real scenes, ranging from direct sunlight to faint starlight, and is often captured by way of a plurality of differently exposed pictures of the same subject matter. It also results in artfully wondrous images which, in their almost comic book quality allow one to view the city as never before. HDR is also used for researching the way light reflects off of surfaces and how it is canceled out via this method.

I came upon HDR when I was trying to combine three images taken at different apertures by merging them in to one so that both the bright sunlight and the dark areas of the photograph could be shown clearly. Upon browsing the internet on how to do this I came upon HDR. Below I have put up some images I have taken using HDR technology – there are several plug-ins available for software such as Photoshop and aperture that one can use to automatically combine photographs at different apertures, and if one has Adobe CS5 there is a handy HDR tool included within the latest software.