Frick Collection Entrance. Image via Frick Collection.

Callouts is a review series in praise of architecture, art, and the city.

Contrary to the common use of the modal verb “to call out” which emphasizes negative criticism, “Callouts” here draw from the architectural drawing tradition. Callouts in architecture establish a closer look towards a part of a project that requires more explanation and emphasized attention due to its complexity, uniqueness or typicality. They create a different, more detailed view of what has already been seen, expanding the reader’s understanding of the project.

Following that tradition, “Callouts” is a series of carefully selected complex, unique and banal projects, that have the potential to initiate a discussion, be didactic and affect their contemporary contextual mythology. Reviews for projects that do not satisfy these criteria can be found by typing “architecture” on your search bar.

Starting this new year,  we will talk about a house, prominently located in New York City’s 5th avenue, in the upper east side, right next to Central Park. Despite its loud location, the house’s reputation is conveniently hidden amongst the city’s institutional behemoths: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Frank Lloyd Wright’s extra-ordinary Guggenheim. The house holds a series of treasures acquired by its original owner, Pennsylvania’s Henry Clay Frick chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company and owner of the Frick Coke Company. It served as the cabinet of Frick’s artistic curiosities, a mausoleum of his legacy built in 1914 by Thomas Hastings, five years before his death in 1919. Frick’s estate was transformed into what is now known as the Frick Collection, a willed public museum after the industrialist’s death.

However, this is not the vanity fair of a wealthy art-filled mansion in New York, but rather a story about discovery, movement and interiority. A procession of space formed within the (then) newly established, relentless, delirious, New York Grid. It is a myth of a building told inside-out, of a conglomeration of sequential pochés changing in shape, character, and function, wrapped up in a Neoclassical container, within a house by the Park. 

Peekaboo

Now a story on an interiority cannot be narrated in the same was as any conventional building, where one approaches it, understands its exterior and proceeds to explore its less impressive innards. The interior here dictates both physical and narrative processions, starting and ironically ending with nature through a journey that begins in a garden and culminates in a park. Here I invite you to ignore any exterior understanding of architecture, close your eyes for a second. Welcome to Frick’s labyrinth.

The Garden

Open your eyes. A strong blur coming from the brightly illuminated space overwhelms the senses. The sound of trickling water reorients one into space and time revealing the first vista in this inward journey. The view is dominated by a central axis dividing the extended rectangular area beyond, into two mirrored but equal parts. Looking up one finds a vaulted glazed ceiling supported by a forest of coupled Ionic columns forming the arcade that frames the space. In the middle of the void, contoured by the natural light above, lies a fountain sprinkling water through the mouth of two small frogs, breaking the architectural symmetry of the space. The bas-reliefs of the surrounding frieze and architrave transform into a picturesque composition of nature further dissolving the spatial axiality. Around the sunlit courtyard, and beyond the double colonnade, the garden is both contained and extended by ornamental walls holding sculptures, petit exhibition rooms-echoing a service-oriented past life, and glazed vaulted apertures creating small teaser trailers for what lays beyond. Under the garden’s colonnaded canopy, three portals expand the visitor’s field of view, towards the north, east and west. Look north, a mahogany ambiance darkens the line of sight. Westwards extends a long corridor with a female silhouette bathing under sunlight at its end. However uninviting the Eastern portal might be, its narrow field of view is replaced by the adjacent sound of violins coming from a room beyond.

The courtyard undergoes an American transformation, leading a double life in the manner of Jekyll and Hyde. 

Frick’s Garden is composed here through a film strip of sequential still lives, adding the European courtyard typology in his cabinet of curiosities. The courtyard undergoes an American transformation, leading a double life in the manner of Jekyll and Hyde. On the one hand, it is serene, hidden and mysterious, drawing from monastic life, but on the other, it concentrates movement and communion around it, much like a palace. The resulting product is a straight forward yet puzzling kaleidoscopic spatial hinge stitching together the "cabinet's" various treasures.

The tamed Pantheon

Marching through the east portal following the orchestral music, one enters a short crescent space that splits the visitor’s promenade between two rooms. Tracing the enfilade and stepping into the room to the right, reveals the source of the music in the face of a practicing band of cellos and violins echoing within the round space developing around the visitor. The wooden threshold reveals the unseen planar circle, a hidden room that carves itself out of the New York grid. 

The house momentarily turns into a rotunda, with a glazed oculus in the middle, posing as a warm spotlight for the practicing quartet. The suppressed dome above, condenses the space, domesticating the otherwise religious void. The walls shimmer in velvet reflections of green and silver, providing depth in the otherwise flat poché. Here we don’t have a temple that any god can call their home, as we do in Rome. The Pantheon is tamed. It serves as Frick’s contained music stage, another urbanity tapped eternally within his collection. Here it lays lost in his maze, out of line, out of sight. Turning back to the crescent corridor, it disappears, as if it never existed, pushing you quickly to the next adventure.

The Corridor: Noble Savage in vivid RGB

The enfilade quickly leads one to what is considered as the main exhibition space for Frick’s acquired art. It is formed through a sequence of three rooms placed on an elongated east-west axis running across the whole length of the American neoclassical palace. 

The first room holds an austere generic rectangular plan, followed by an axially corresponding oval to the Garden, culminating in a more extended space that duplicates the one initially encountered. So far the tropes of neoclassical architecture are kept. Symmetry, proportions, harmony, and repetition dominate the tripartite space. However, something unusual happens.

A strange combination that distorts the corridor’s architectural integrity. Entering the banal rectangle at the eastern end of the axis, one is struck by the radiant red emanated by its walls, amplified by the highly articulated steel laced skylight. The color changes as the shape of the long corridor transforms, turning from red to blue, and green along the path illuminated naturally. The red room contains portraits and scenes of human activity, whereas the green room focuses on landscape.

They remain separated yet connected through the  blue, oval room exhibiting architecture, models and drawings depicting speculative combinations of tectonic elements. Architecture here is the medium between nature and human activity, an unpopulated ruin that is dissected from painterly scenes so that it becomes understood autonomously. In that myth, the architecture of the elongated space recedes in the background. Neoclassical architecture’s protagonists now become secondary, enabling elements, setting the scene for the connection of man and nature. In fact, columns, pilasters, and bas-reliefs go back to their prototypical state as they are portrayed in Laugier’s myth. They un-petrify, turning from stone back to wood, as distant relatives of the elements the Noble savage used to built the Primitive Hut. The corridor evolves into the stage set that enables the play of Frick’s curiosity to be performed. 

Beautiful yet Boring**

Turning left at the green end of the elongated spectacle, one finds themselves, inside a constellation of rooms, each describing a part of the everyday life of a bourgeois, through Frick's living quarters. Placed around the living hall, lay the library, the painting, and dining room forming the north-south axis of the house all connected through a corridor cornering The Garden. Dressed in mahogany,  colorful velvet wallpapers, and gold trims, the living quarters, allude to a distant memory of 17th-century French aristocracy, the likes of which American high-class living tropes demanded of a wealthy businessman during the early 20th century.

However, this Versaillian imitation leaves a lot to be desired. Here Thomas Hastings remains in a limbic state, where the rooms are not humble and quiet but do not go all out to impress either. This might be reflected however by Frick's own conflicting lifestyle, not wanting to promote his riches in a society that demanded of him just that. Thus, the room, yet beautifully crafted, filled with countless artifacts, from Chinese porcelain, Florentine sculptures, royal French clocks and paintings from Titian, Turner, Holbein and El Greco, they become an uninspiring and cluttered static composition. If you have visited any French or Italian palaces, or even any of the Shaker's mansions, the Frick collection's living quarters will not leave a memorable mark.

However, there is one significant treasure hidden in that constellation or rooms. Next to the south hall, lingers the house's main stairwell, connecting to the family's private chambers. The stair receives monumental treatment, with giant steps and fastidious decor, wrapping around itself once in a switchback manner. The material composition of marble, gold, and blackened steel detaches it from the living quarters' trite banality, elevating it to the status of sculpture, of an artifact both being in and creating space. Inside the vault formed by the underbelly of the stairs second run, lives an Aeolian Pipe Organ, with its pipes standing proudly at the staircase's first landing, creating an ornamental backdrop for the sculpted steps. Once again, one is guided through Frick's labyrinth through music, this time remaining in the realm of visual pleasure.

The Park

Directly south of the staircase, lives the labyrinth's exit - or entrance, depending on your point of view- however, if one leaves now, they will have missed the chance to finish the myth, to confront the “Minotaur”. Moving north, next to Garden, at its intersection with the Frick's Corridor and the living quarters, is where the end of the story was witnessed in the beginning. Looking westward, across the library, the female figure that captured our vision in the Garden still awaits. Every step towards the inevitable encounter shrinks the eye's pupils, as the light intensifies. One step past beyond the living quarters and the environment changes. The walls on the left are replaced by a row of columns extending all the way to the female figure at the end of the tunnel. One is now at the Frick Collection's portico, where the petrified body of Diana allures the visitor towards her.

The portico frames the house's front lawn overlooking 5th avenue almost connected to the Central Park, at first seemingly assuming the role of a threshold, between man and nature. However, the portico does not remain within the primary volume of the house but instead extends outwards towards the park, somehow engaging, inviting nature in as the house did previously in its Garden. The architecture here expands, capturing the front lawn, and with it the park beyond. The Park becomes part of the enfilade, another room in Frick's cabinet of curiosities, part of the collection, to be preserved, maintained and observed by visitors through a painterly frame. The poche expands throughout the city turning the outside, in, fulfilling Rem's retroactive prophecy about New York's delirious grid. The Park has been acquired. It is part of the house as much as the house is part of the park. Frick celebrates his acquisition, and as a true collector displays it through a trophy, and Diana the sun bathed Roman goddess of nature is there to testify.