Tiens! Dis donc. Just a few weeks ago, posting on the absurdity of
planting the Eiffel Tower, we'd taken aim at the Met as well for the shabby way it has (mis-)treated its monumental beaux-arts façade, using it as a glorified laundry-line since the days of Thomas Hoving.
Clearly others have been thinking the same thing as well, most important among them the person writing a check for the $60-odd million it will cost to renovate the 4-block-long strip of the Museum's Fifth Avenue street frontage: the 0.01% of the 1%, multigazillionaire David Koch.
Pandering to barely conceivable wealth,
the NY Times article leads you to believe that Koch was the one who had the
Eureka! moment, after he'd seen the renovated fountain at Lincoln Center, and that the project sprang from his imagination like Venus from Saturn's brow.
Apparently not quite. The
Times also reported (below the fold, of course) that Emily Rafferty, the Met's president, had been looking for a donor for years. And years. (Echoes of Saint Simon, who wrote how the Sun King's architect, Jules Hardouin-Mansart, always planted an obvious error in his plans so that Louis XIV could point it out, and then he would profess astonishment that he himself had not seen it and praise the king for his penetrating eye, thereby leading him wherever he wanted.
Plus ça change...)
So, thank you Mr. Koch for the check, thank you Ms. Rafferty for your persistence and evident fund-raising skills. And what exactly does one get for $60 not-nearly-as-big-as-they-used-to-be ones these days?
Pretty much what the Louvre got a decade ago (less the glass pyramid, the upscale underground shopping mall, and Dan Brown and Tom Hanks). The planning was done by the Philadelphia-based landscape design firm OLIN, who have also renovated other important Manhattan public spaces, Bryant Park and Columbus Circle.
To paraphrase another of Saint Simon's anecdotes, this one when Louis XIV asked Le Notre what he thought of Hardouin-Mansart's work in the gardens of Marly, "Hire a landscaper and you get a landscape." Gone are those
triste 70s lozenge-shaped fountains stranded amid acres of pink granite, like the pompous afterthoughts they were. We now will have, as of 2014, two large, square I.M. Pei/Louvresque
fontaines flanking the steps before the William Morris Hunt main façade, and beyond them pairs of square
bosquets of untrimmed London plane trees with seating beneath, just as you'd find in the Tuileries gardens.
Fronting the outer McKim, Mead & White end pavilions, which project farthest toward Fifth Avenue, we get long
allées of iconic clipped lindens redolent of the Champs-Elysées and the gardens of Le Notre. And we get café seating with rollout awnings just like you get all over Paris (though you'll probably be tasered if you try to smoke while sipping your Chardonney there).
We don't want to quibble here—after all, who doesn't like a tree?—and we rather like the bustle that will result from the shoe-horned fountains and
bosquests-cum-food courts, and are amused by the provocation of Descartean plotted, poodle-clipped and tortured trees appearing in Manhattan, but must note that the
allées are far too close to the buildings (well, truth be told
everything is far too crammed and far too close to the buildings, but hey, it's New York). Clearly though, this idea of disengaging important public monuments from their surroundings is about as dead as classical architecture itself, and we doubt that even Mr. Koch is wealthy and influential enough to buy and raze the four blocks facing the Met to Madison Avenue (Park would be ideal) and get the job done right. He shouldn't feel too badly though; even the Sun King was forced to content himself with a rump front yard for the Louvre, unable to dislodge some very stubborn clerical holdouts in the church of St-Germain l'Auxerrois.
Hopefully the Met will also take another cue from the Tuileries and not max out on the Au Bon Pain kiosks but also find a few appropriate spots for public sculpture as well.
Curiously, and against all current French practice, the Met wishes to encourage use of secondary entrances accessible at the plaza level. This flies in the face of French logic, which holds that the larger and more important the public building and the greater the attendance, the fewer entrances should be open because only two security guards can be afforded in the operating budget, though massive amounts can be spent on the design of monumental doors that will never be used.
(
Below, the Opéra Bastille's grandiose entrance 20 minutes before the opening curtain, and the Louvre's solution of how to enliven its vast inner court.)
If the architect has for some reason included more than two doors, as is often the case, they are best condemned with these plastic chains (approved by the fire inspectors, apparently as they will quickly melt in case of a serious conflagration), and visitors are to be herded with bicycle-stand barriers, neither of which any public building in Paris worth its
sel de mer can ever have enough of.
If the Met really wants to go the whole nine metres here, we'd highly recommend they close off the main stairs with a few dozen yards of plastic chain and route all visitors via a makeshift labyrinth through any random entrance they see fit, chosen in a weekly lottery held by their maintenance staff.
At night, the Met's façade will now be lit by low-energy LED lights, instead of spots from across the street, just as in the Louvre's stunning
Cour Carrée. All in all, a consummately pleasant, coherent and inviting plan that will turn the Met's Fifth Avenue frontage into the world's longest sidewalk café.
Unfortunately, Mayor Bloomberg has refused the Met's proposal to flood Fifth Avenue in the 80s and replace the
M4 bus with MTA-run
bâteaux-mouches.
No mention is made of
gendarmes on roller blades or motionless street mimes or roving bands of fiercely cool fashionistas or bad accordian interpretations of Piaf or even if Woody Allen will be lurking about, but surely these necessary if minor clichés will not be forgotten to ensure the Met's complete francophilic transformation.
We'd only point out one inexcusable
faux pas that gives the whole game away: those ridiculously suburban foundation plantings, pasted against a classical limestone façade that runs nearly ¼ mile long.
Tellement américain.
