This last weekend, I attended two lectures on architecture at the Rachofsky House. The house was between exhibitions, with no art installed inside; so the house itself was the "star."
The first lecture, by Director Allan Schwartzman, was on how architects for art institutions sometimes seem to be trying, perhaps unconsciously, to upstage the art. The second lecture was by Thomas Phifer, who designed the Rachofsky House while with Richard Meier's group, concerning the house and some projects he's worked on since. (Unfortunately, I had to miss Charissa Terranova's talk on "The Utopian Drives of Conceptual Architecture: Avant-Garde Architecture in the 1960s and Architectural Theory.")
I enjoyed the talks I saw very much. Schwartzman discussed various aspects of the house and collecting for it, such as the fact that there are no large interior walls for larger art works with views from an adequate distance that aren't impinged upon by various disjunctions, pillars, ceilings, railings, etc., and he also discussed other art institutional buildings that "don't want" art.
There's no shortage of large walls outside, however.
Once you get past the initial wall that greets you as you pull into the driveway, you're confronted with the nearly-solid wall of the front of the house. Phifer compared it to the facade of a Venetian palace and made reference to a separation between public and private space. I'll grant that; it's also shaped like an elongated ping-pong paddle, with rather few, relatively small chinks. It does not invite me in – indeed, without a greeter, one might have trouble finding the door. Rather, it bounces me back across an unusually large, flat, green lawn, divided into quadrants by Robert Irwin's brilliant land art installation. (No one mentioned the resemblance of the property to a game of table tennis.)
In back of the house, another prominent wall abuts a long staircase from the second floor to the back yard garden. If you're on the staircase, the wall segregates you from both the garden and the largest gathering space within the house, grouping you instead with not much besides the tallest hedge I've ever seen (another wall).
I understand Mr. Rachofsky originally planned to reside in the house even while it also served as a public building; the concern Phifer mentioned to separate public and private spaces may well have given rise to these walls.
One part of the house that feels surprisingly welcoming for both art and people is the glass-encased, north-side landing half-way between the first and second floor. Interestingly, although the visual chosen for the Rachofsky House info page on the house itself shows the ping-pong table view, the visual for the House as an art institution foregrounds this northern landing (here).
UPDATE: Additional details and thoughts about these talks are set out in the comments to this post.
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