Architecture as Sculpture

Architecture often has a sculptural quality. Frank Gehry’s Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and Le Corbusier’s Notre Dame du Haut Chapel at Ronchamp in eastern France spring to mind as Modernist examples. But in the American Southwest stands an equally impressive, though spatially more modest structure, older than these but still archetypically Modernist in its form and line: the San Francisco de Asis Mission Church in Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico.

Built between 1772 and 1816, this adobe church was constructed by Franciscan Fathers, whose patron was St. Francis of Assisi. It is located southwest of Taos, an artists’ colony in the high desert of northern New Mexico, near the Taos Pueblo, the 1,000-year-old settlement of the Taos, or Northern Tiwa, Native American Pueblo people. Nearby the Sangre de Cristo mountains provide a backdrop.

What distinguishes this church sculpturally is not its entrance, which is fairly conventional, but its rear structure. The asymmetry of the exterior of the apse (in conventional terms) and the use of stunted, lump-like buttresses give the building a decidedly Modern sculptural appearance, much as some ancient Chinese ceramics, say, from the Shang Dynasty (1600-1100 BCE), look as though they might have been thrown yesterday.

Declared a National Historic Landmark in 1970, the mission church was recognized much earlier as something special. It has been captured as art by the likes of Ansel Adams and Paul Strand (photography), Georgia O’Keeffe (painting), and Gustav Baumann (color woodcut). O’Keeffe, in fact, called the church “one of the most beautiful buildings left in the United States by the early Spaniards.”

One would be hard-pressed not to be captivated by this early example of adobe architecture. I know I was. So on a recent visit to New Mexico, I also found myself digitally capturing the image of this church, as shown above. The combination of adobe, blue desert sky, and the influences of sculpture, architecture, and religion made the opportunity to record an impression irresistible.

Finding My Father

I find my father in museum exhibits. Dad and I were not especially close. He was, at least for me, easy to admire but hard to love. Maybe that’s why, since his death in 1997, I keep looking for him.

In 1955, while visiting Denver, President Eisenhower suffered a heart attack during his first term in office. He recuperated in Fitzsimons Army Hospital in the suburb of Aurora, and my father was one of his caregivers. Once Ike was well enough, there was a photo shoot on the hospital roof. My father can be seen in many of the photos, standing in the background: hair almost black, hawk-like profile. He was thirty years old, a master sergeant, and already a veteran of two wars as a combat medic.

The photo shoot is how I find my father in museums. In the Smithsonian’s American History Museum I’ve even found a film clip from that day.

Recently I took a long-postponed road trip to Abilene, Kansas, to the Eisenhower Center. There in the museum, sure enough, was a tiny display of the 1955 photo shoot. And there was my father, forever young, the image of him I always carry in my mind from childhood. It’s rare to find my father credited—or any of the other bystanders, for that matter. But I know who they are. (In the photo above, Dad is on the far right, sharing a moment with First Lieutenant Lorraine Knox, one of Ike’s nurses.)

Apart from his military career, I guess I’m less sure who my father really was. There were swaths of time when he was away on duty throughout my childhood and adolescence, and somehow the time never got made up. I sometimes feel as though he was a stranger who just happened to live with us now and again. He wasn’t, of course. But between him and me, there was a disconnect. He even missed the wedding of my wife and me because he was overseas, serving a tour of duty in Vietnam during that war.

A couple of days after Abilene, my road trip took me to Denver. It seemed reasonable to look at where our family lived in the mid-Fifties. The Army post at Fitzsimons has been closed since 1999, and much of the old military facility has been bulldozed. But the soaring old hospital remains, now repurposed as a centerpiece of the sprawling and ever-expanding University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.

Originally Army Hospital 21, as it was first called, the building where that long-ago rooftop photo shoot took place was formally dedicated in the autumn of 1918. In July 1920 the facility was renamed the Fitzsimons Army Hospital after Lt. William T. Fitzsimons, the first U.S. casualty in World War I.

Little else of the Army post remains, except for the original gates and the post chapel. Long gone are the housing areas where Army brats like me lived, played, and went to school a half-century ago. Indeed, my sister was born at Fitzsimmons Army Hospital. According to what I’ve read, the Eisenhower Suite, where Ike recovered in 1955, has been restored to that period. I didn’t try to visit it. I wonder if they have any images of the photo shoot. If so, I bet I’d find my father in them.

On the Road Again

As I was contemplating a road trip that would take me through Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas out to Colorado, then down along the Rockies to New Mexio, and back through Texas and Oklahoma, I was struck by a desire to recall some of my favorite road movies. A Google search will yield other folks’ top 15 or 30 road pictures, so why not drive down my own memory lane. I’ll limit myself to five:

The Wizard of Oz (1939). Four unlikely friends come together with the speed of Facebook, joined by a common need to seek the help of a wizard to cure their woes. Who says you can’t dance down the road instead of drive—and in ruby slippers? Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr are the friends: a Kansas girl, a scarecrow, a tin woodman, and a cowardly lion. And a yellow-brick road.

Road to Morocco (1942). This is my all-time favorite among the Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road pictures. Dorothy Lamour co-stars, of course, and Anthony Quinn puts in an appearance. It was topical in 1942 because of the Operation Torch landing of American troops in Morocco. I wasn’t born when this film hit theaters, but I did see Dorothy Lamour in the late 1960s, when she was on the road in the title role of a touring production of Hello Dolly. And who says you have to drive a car when a camel will do?

Paper Moon (1973). Ryan and Tatum O’Neal, father and daughter actors, portray a con man and his, perhaps, daughter, trying to make their way in Great Depression-era Kansas. Moze Pray (Ryan) is Bible seller just one step ahead of the law. Addie (eight-year-old Tatum) is the orphan of a prostitute and so might be Moze’s daughter. Along the road they pick up a stripper (played by Madeline Kahn). Peter Bogdanovich directed, and the film features the song, It’s Only a Paper Moon, by Billy Rose, Yip Harburg, and Harold Arlen. Among the Oscars was one to Tatum O’Neal for Best Supporting Actress, the youngest person to win an Academy Award.

The Adventures of Pricilla, Queen of the Desert (1994). Disco isn’t dead in this celebration of drag in the Australian desert, as an aging transsexual (played by Terrance Stamp) and two drag queen friends drive a broken-down bus across the outback for a gig at a casino and, ultimately, to reunite “Tick” Belrose (Hugo Weaving), a gay father, with his eight-year-old son. The movie was translated into a Broadway musical—a costume and music extravaganza—that I saw in New York City in July this year. Great fun! The film has more substance. And it won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design. Go figure.

Little Miss Sunshine (2006). A dysfunctional family hits the road to a children’s beauty pageant with an odd-ball cast that includes Greg Kinnear, Steve Carrell, Tony Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin (as the beauty girl), and Alan Arkin (as the grandfather who dies along the way). Disaster and hilarity ensure. The film earned a Best Picture nomination and three others, and won two Oscars. One went to Alan Arkin for Best Supporting Actor. An unheralded star is the Volkswagen minibus in which the family travels. A friend owned one in Germany in the 1980s; that yellow van also figured in a few memorable road trips.

Road movies are invariably tales of quests, some serious, some silly. What are your favorites?