 Barry Bergdoll: “Both 9/11 and Katrina were demonstrations of the power of architectural and urban symbols.” |
Interviewed by Fred A. Bernstein
Barry Bergdoll—chair of the Department of Art History and Archaeology—isn’t about to forsake Columbia for the Museum of Modern Art. In January, he will join the museum as Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design. But Bergdoll will continue teaching at Columbia while forging new links between the two institutions. As Bergdoll puts it, his decision to move to MoMA—while keeping a foot in the door of Columbia’s Schermerhorn Hall—is very much in keeping with President Bollinger’s notion that the arts at Columbia should be integrated into the life of the city.
Many of Bergdoll’s predecessors in the MoMA post, notably Philip Johnson, have been practicing architects. In the museum world, the appointment of Bergdoll, an academic, was seen as heralding an era of curatorial rigor. Bergdoll has written not only on such modernists as Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, but on 19th-century architecture and, closer to home, on Charles McKim’s 1897 master plan for Columbia’s Morningside Heights campus.
As departmental chair, he worked with New York’s Marble Fairbanks Architects on a new art history slide library and meeting room (901 Schermerhorn). The architects designed the walls, doors and cabinetry on the computer. Computers also controlled the saws and routers that made the pieces. That technique is revolutionizing the relationship between architecture and construction—and is likely to be the subject of one of Bergdoll’s debut shows at MoMA.
Q.What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you arrive at the museum?
A.As a historian, I want to learn more about how MoMA got to where it is today. Much of its institutional history is centered around a couple of seminal shows, which are little discussed today, as well as influential smaller shows that were presented without catalogues. I’ll be teaching a seminar to Columbia students on the history of architectural exhibitions in the spring. Their research will help fill in some of the gaps in our historical knowledge.
Q.What other collaborations with Columbia do you expect?
A.Because I had worked closely with MoMA putting together the landmark Mies in Berlin show in 2001, and because MoMA is opening an education wing in its new building, it has responded enthusiastically to my idea of offering seminars, taught by curators, for Columbia students. This is an expansion of the art history department’s successful program in curatorial studies with the Whitney Museum. For MoMA, it’s an acknowledgement that the museum is not just a public but also a research institution.
Q.One of the biggest events during your years at Columbia was 9/11. How has the architectural community responded to the challenge of Ground Zero?
A.In 2002, I published an op-ed piece in which I wrote that to get great architecture you need to have a great client. And at Ground Zero, there isn’t a great client. What we’ve seen is half a decade of jockeying for power. It’s a depressing spectacle. Since I published the op-ed, it has become far worse.
Q.Does that mean we should give up hope?
A.Architecturally, something worthwhile could still come out of it. Look at Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin. That came out of a very messy—and protracted—process, but it’s been an enormous success, a really wonderful and moving monument. In Berlin, however, the monument was planned independently of the commercial development of the surrounding city.
Q.And is there hope for architectural achievement in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?
A.There is certainly precedent for disasters becoming opportunities for rebuilding better cities. From the Lisbon earthquake [of 1755], a whole new kind of Enlightenment city emerged. From the fires in London in the 17th century, you got Wren’s great churches—not just St. Paul’s but dozens of others—which still shape London to this day. New Orleans has had no shortage of ideas from architects and designers. But it’s hard to be optimistic about what will actually be built. Just as the Bush administration had no imagination in responding to the crisis in the first few hours, there’s no political imagination about responding to it now.
Q.Maybe the powers that be should rebuild the World Trade Center and New Orleans exactly as they were.
A. I’ve never been a fan of reproducing something that was lost. But I can understand that, in the immediate aftermath of calamity, it’s a way of achieving normalcy. After World Wars I and II, many buildings were literally recreated. If, the day after Katrina or the day after 9/11, they had set about rebuilding what was lost, that would have made a certain kind of sense.
Q.And now that so much time has passed?
A.If the World Trade Center is not going to be rebuilt, one would hope for something more than the trite symbolism of Daniel Libeskind’s 1776-foot-high tower, in which he sought to do the impossible: disguise commercial real estate as a public memorial, atop a fortified base. Perhaps future generations will study it as a monument to homeland security. As for New Orleans, one can only hope that individuals and institutions will step into the vacuum with a new urban vision that celebrates the freedom from convention for which New Orleans is famous.
Q.Will architectural historians someday see 9/11 and Katrina as significant?
A.Without a doubt and for a variety of reasons, beginning with the fact that both events were demonstrations of the power of architectural and urban symbols in the culture as a whole. The World Trade Center was clearly chosen by the terrorists because of the place it had gained in the public imaginary, just as the flood in New Orleans struck a very particular cord with the imagination of the world. Even if much of New Orleans was terribly ordinary, its appeal was for its very distinctive culture, architectural and otherwise—a quality that’s growing ever more rare in a world of increasingly homogenized spaces, forms and experiences. It remains to be seen in both cases whether something genuine, with the potential for creating new vitality and new resonance—rather than a controlled themed environment—can be achieved. |
