http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/23/fashion/23POSS.html
POSSESSED
An Architect's Eye
By DAVID COLMAN
Published: May 23, 2004
If you think, as summer approaches, that your shape has problems — well,
at least you are finite.
Time, on the other hand — what is it? Every six months, it seems,
scientists have another theory, some mind-bending definition that does
little if anything to advance the common man's idea of what time
actually is. A doughnut? A river? A regret?
Whatever it turns out to be, the most practical idea of time is whatever
you think it is. Such is the experience of the architect Charles
Gwathmey, who points out that architecture, unlike those fine arts that
are experienced as if time were paused, needs to be appreciated in 4-D,
over time. Movie theaters have yet to hand out special 4-D glasses, but
Mr. Gwathmey knows just what they would look like: a special kind of
kaleidoscope called a teleidoscope.
A simple chrome tube with a glass-ball lens on one end and two inclined
mirrors inside, a teleidoscope fractures and multiplies your view of the
real world. (By contrast, the classic kaleidoscope relies on the
refracting imagery of beads or colored stones encased in a revolving
disk at the base.) Looking through a teleidoscope is disorienting to
some, but it is a tranquil moment for Mr. Gwathmey. This is the man,
after all, who made his name in the 1970's with a series of dizzyingly
geometric houses in the Hamptons. "I love the light, the refractivity,
the abstract graphics, the multiplicity of images," he said, like a
schoolboy with a new toy and a degree from M.I.T. "I used to get a new
one every time I would go down to Chinatown with my family when I was
little," he recalled. "I had quite a collection."
The teleidoscope neatly manages to turn any structure into a work of
fantastic architecture, albeit a rather circular and impractical one. It
is the closest thing there is, he said, to walking around or through a
piece of modern architecture. Even when focused on one point, the toy
scope reveals subtly shifting forms and barely perceptible interplays of
light — as a building does when scrutinized. "It's all about seeing it
from different angles," he explained. "No matter how you walk around the
site, there's always different layers and fragments that unfold."
He recalled that at a recent presentation of a Gwathmey Siegal proposal
for Astor Place, critics complained that the building was not in keeping
with the late-19th-century architecture of the square. He countered that
the faceted design would have a teleidoscopic effect on the other
buildings without being itself a sentimental throwback. "This design is
about the facets reflecting what is there," he said.
Whether the crowd fell for it is beside the point: the building is going
up. People will like it, or they won't. The pattern of life rolls on,
never the same. Anyone who has looked through a kaleidoscope knows how
futile it is to try to turn the wheel back to see the pattern he saw a
second ago.
Likewise, the architect, who recently moved into the much photographed
Amagansett house he built for his parents in 1965, is amazed at how much
the same and yet how different it looks to him now. Whatever time is,
age is certainly a lens, one that changes how you look at everything.