Exile in Florida

THE SPECTATOR WORLD EDITION, March 17. 2022

Exile in Florida

Palm Beach is more than Mar-a-Lago and hedgerow snobbery

For the New Yorker, touching down in Palm Beach is like visiting Taiwan from the People’s Republic of the Upper West Side. I am here for a few days. So is much of the American conservative movement. We are all fleeing to the sunny island like a government in exile.

Palm Beach is more than Mar-a-Lago and hedgerow snobbery. With a room at The Breakers now running $2,000 a night, I opt for a Vrbo at the Palm Beach Hotel. The old pile designed by Mortimer Dickinson Metcalfe in the Mediterranean Revival style in 1925 reminds me of the faded glory of the Grand Budapest Hotel in its Sovietized incarnation. The exterminator is a regular presence, but the price is right, and I like the overgrown pool deck. I watch a banana blossom shed its petals in the deep end as I read copy for the next issue of the New Criterion. For dinner I join friends by the fountain at Café Boulud, some fifty feet from their room at the Brazilian Court, the Sicilian castle designed by Rosario Candela in 1926. The air is wet with tropical fruit and old money. We admire the pecky cypress boards decorating the building like lace.

Back in the big city, just before my trip, I stumbled through the Columbus Circle subway station. A Putin apologist, a LaRouchite no less, then shoved a pro-Putin petition in front of me: “Will Carnegie Hall Denounce Nazism in Ukraine?” I lined up in the freezing cold on desolate 57th Street — Billionaires’ Row — for the check of my booster status. “How about your third shot?” the interrogator asked me, as I fumbled for my identification and medical papers. I felt like those huddled masses on Ellis Island awaiting the buttonhook to the eyelid to clear them of trachoma. As I arrived at my $250 seat to hear the Vienna Philharmonic, I convinced myself that Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” is worth it.

Now I am having second thoughts. It is 78 degrees and sunny and my first morning on the island. I am off to an “Ideas Summit” organized by the Manhattan Institute at the Colony Hotel. A colony of New Yorkers is more like it. I spot MI president Reihan Salam wheeling in his suitcase. “I’m a New York bitter-ender,” the Brooklynite tells me. “What do you need to do to get a crowd down here?” quips MI chairman Paul Singer. “Raise taxes in New York City.”

MI has brought down the heavyweights for its two panel discussions. For “Understanding America’s Cultural Revolution,” Heather Mac Donald rails against an obsession over structural racism in the museums: “There has not been a single institution that has pushed back against the lie. Even still lifes are coming under attack. They are still lifes, you idiots!”

Christofer Rufo, the David to the Critical Race Theory Goliath, says that Fortune 500 companies are repeating the same mantra: “A series of euphemisms to bully you into submission.”

Douglas Murray then suggests that “America is a projection device. You have to fight over every detail,” or else, “the rest of the world suffers for it.”

“We are headed to civilizational self-cancellation,” Heather concludes.

For a panel on “The Panic Pandemic,” John Tierney suggests that, “Using public health to grow government power and tell people what to do is a terrible precedent. It’s the left’s ‘long march through the institutions.’”

Dr. Joseph A. Lapado, Florida state surgeon general, agrees that it’s been wrong to ride out a pandemic on the lives of the young. At just that moment, I get a message from my daughter’s school that its mask mandate is ending. For the past year I have been insinuating that when her generation rises up to slaughter its elders, she should know that I was against all this. “Burn it,” I text her with a picture of a mask.

That evening, my colleagues and I gather for a cocktail reception at the home of friends. It is Fat Tuesday. A pianist starts playing some Rodgers and Hammerstein. I launch into my rendition of “Oklahoma.” Another singer joins me for some Cole Porter before I realize these are both professionals brought in for the evening and that this is not a group singalong. After the party and a casual dinner, we try to tune in to the State of the Union address. The horrific specter of war hangs over our entire visit, but Ukraine has already become the new superficial virtue signal of the Establishment, which will surely only hurt the cause of Ukraine. We lose our steam just as Joe Biden’s vitamin injections run low. Roger Kimball quotes that famous line from The Leopard, the great conservative novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

The next morning, I walk out to the beach only to be blown inland by a sudden squall. It is Ash Wednesday, and Palm Beach is clearly not as anti-Catholic as it was once thought to be. At the intersection of Sunset Avenue and North County Road, I walk by St. Edward, the elegant 1926 church designed in the Spanish Renaissance style. Edward is one of the patron saints of difficult marriages. As the light changes, I spot a Mercedes with a license plate that says DON. I am reminded of the deposed ruler at the far end of the island. Will he run? Should he run? Will DeSantis run? A vote for “moving on” seems to be winning my straw poll, even if that means the former president should merely move on from the last election to focus on the next one.

Besides, we don’t want to give up DeSantis. Over lunch I see Karol Markowicz, Park Slope’s most famous dissident and a new Boca Raton transplant. She reflects the attitude of many Floridians who have reaped the benefits of their governor’s war with the pandemic status quo. “The moving vans only seem to be moving in one direction,” I observe. Over our lunch with media-in-exile, including David DesRosiers’s team at RealClearPolitics, we give thanks for the wisdom of federalism and the healthy competition of our states. It helps that Danielle Moore, the mayor of Palm Beach, is as cool as a Florida cucumber. I joined Dani for dinner and she tells me about her pet pig.

With what time remains, I take in the galleries on Worth Avenue and get a tour of the upstairs of Findlay, which had the foresight to settle here sixty years ago. I then head over to the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum. Whitehall, designed by Carrère and Hastings in 1902, is one of the most lavish extant mansions of the Gilded Age. This splendid house museum of the industrialist, railroad tycoon and hotelier speaks to the Gilded origins of Palm. Whitehall also serves as the genius loci of this golden island, where the gilding has never tarnished and the sun has never set.

New York is lucky that I like the cold.

Norman's Conquest

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2019

Norman’s Conquest

On the expansion of the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach.

You might have expected the $100 million expansion of the Norton Museum of Art, in West Palm Beach, Florida, to go wrong. Just consider the backstory: An ambitious director (Hope Alswang) and an embarrassed trustee (Gil Maurer) come together to lament the state of their outmoded institution. They wonder aloud how their tired facility (a 1941 Art Deco pile encumbered with additions, now resembling a bankrupt shopping mall) could be “expanded and transformed in a dramatic way.” The trustee says to the director: If you could ask any architect to do this expanding and transforming, who would it be? The director gives the name of a starchitect at the center of the celestial firmament (Lord Norman Foster). The trustee responds: That starchitect happens to work in my building (they are meeting on the forty-third floor of New York’s Hearst Tower; Maurer is then the coo of the Hearst Corporation; Foster designed that building in 2006; and Foster + Partners maintains a New York office there). The trustee calls up the firm. An architect (Michael Wurzel, a partner at Foster + Partners) comes down. They begin to “muse about the possibilities.”

A story of museum musings that began on a winter day in New York in 2010 reached its conclusion on a winter day in Florida in 2019, when the Norton Museum of Art reopened to the public. You might have expected it to go wrong—and yet this expansion has gone surprisingly right. How it went right is a triumph for South Florida. It should serve as a lesson for museum planners everywhere. If today’s museums must grow, grow they must. The Norton checks all the boxes of a museum’s new-car mandates (new restaurant, new lounge, new shiny surfaces), yet it stays remarkably sensitive to art and to the history of the institution that has held the art in trust.

On approaching the Norton’s new entrance from the South Dixie Highway, as most everyone in car-centric West Palm now must do, the first growth you notice is not the museum but a tree. This is not just any tree. It is the tree. Known as “the banyan,” but in fact a ficus altissima, the six-story-tall tree is the focal point of the new west-wing façade. Photographs do not do justice to its outsize presence. Foster calls the tree his “protagonist.” Indeed, it drives much of the plot of the new design. Forty-three feet up, elevated on cloud-white blocks, an aluminum canopy extends forty-five feet over a new entrance plaza. The canopy is a sharp horizontal, made of reflective panels like an airplane wing. From afar, the form seems to cut across the middle of the sixty-five foot tree, a slashing antagonist in an architectural drama. Yet the protagonist wins out. The canopy pulls back at just the right places so that the hundred-twenty-foot-wide tree can continue to grow and spread above the new roofline.

Up close, outside the new museum entrance, the sculptural qualities of this massive tree are striking. The banyan is its own work of art, a dizzying abstraction above, a gothic mystery below, with multiple trunks that have grown out of the many “prop roots” sent down over decades by its own bending limbs. And rather than compete with the tree, up close the aluminum roofline works with it to extend the shade of the natural canopy, adding welcome relief from the Florida sun.

The banyan tree along the South Dixie Highway entrance to the Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Nigel Young.

The symbolism of this thriving tree is well appreciated by Foster. His architectural deference to its living history reveals something about his own approach to imposing new designs on living institutions—as he did successfully with Hearst Tower, which rises out of a 1928 base, and most famously with his additions to the Reichstag and the Great Court of the British Museum, completed in 1999 and 2000.

“The protagonist of the project was planted just before Ralph and Elizabeth Norton planted their seed,” he said at the museum reopening. The flourishing tree represents a flourishing institution in its increasing complexities. Rather than cut it down, the new design frames its growth for us to see. It protects rather than rejects history. It allows an organism to thrive through deep roots and existing branches. The challenge now of caring for the banyan reflects the challenge of caring for the museum. Since the tree’s failure would cause Foster’s design to fail, they are both closely interconnected. This is a fact not lost on the museum’s attentive arborists.

The plaza cleverly features another large sculptural form: Typewriter Eraser, Scale X(1999), by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. This 2017 donation to the museum by one of its trustees, Ronnie Heyman, was sought out by Foster, and with good reason. With its upturned brush resembling the branches of a tree, the Oldenburg serves as a symbolic pendant to the banyan. While allowing for growth, Foster has had to do some judicious editing of the Norton’s existing structures. The Eraser happens to touch down next to a part of the building that had been one of those loquacious later additions. Edited down, while still providing upstairs gallery space, this wing now fits into Foster’s concise five-paragraph essay of architectural form.

Typewriter Eraser, Scale X(1999) by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (foreground) and the banyan tree in front of the Norton Museum of Art. Photo: Nigel Young.

A convincing seamlessness of old and new, living and man-made, has been achieved through an uncanny awareness of existing ties and a balance of existing structures. “It started with two people, Ralph and Elizabeth Norton, in 1941,” Foster said of the museum. All such projects should begin with an appreciation of an institution’s founders. Too few do. Here such respect for the couple who bequeathed their collection to the public trust, with its particular strengths in American and European modern painting and drawing, as well as Chinese art, ultimately informs the overall design.

Re-established as the center of the institution is the Norton’s original 1941 museum building, which, like the banyan, determines the shape and placement of the new entrance. Designed by Marion Sims Wyeth as an Art Deco pavilion surrounding a central courtyard, the building’s original symmetry and sight lines have been restored by cutting back the infelicitous additions from 1997 and 2003.

As Foster creates his new façade facing the banyan tree to the west, he preserves the original front façade to the east. He also restores the ground floor’s east–west axis after it was disrupted by the earlier expansions that turned the museum entrance to the south. Now someone standing outside the new building can see all the way through to the old front door and on to the shimmering Intracoastal Waterway beyond.

I only wish the acoustics of this new entry plaza were as appealing as its form. On the day I visited, the noise of the South Dixie Highway, combined with the screech of a nearby rail line, was deafening. It might be said that every contemporary building “learned from Las Vegas.” A structure must now not only shelter the individual on foot, but also flag down the passing motorist on the road—functions that are often in conflict. But what happens in Vegas should stay in Vegas. While Foster’s aluminum canopy protects the entrance from the sun, it also acts like a bandshell to concentrate street noise on the exposed plaza. While it might take away from the museum’s billboard qualities, additional screening between the highway and museum is in order.

Perhaps already understanding the need of an added buffer between outside and in, Foster brings the visitor into the new wing slightly off axis. A quick turn to the left after the ticket booth then brings you into a new Great Hall (as it is called) and back into alignment with the original museum. Every great building needs a “great hall”—a place to decompress from the outside and adjust to the expectations within. The Norton has dubbed this space its “living room.” In its tasteful modernist furniture and bleached tones, it might just double as a Knoll showroom. It is indeed a pleasant enough room to linger, if not to live in.

The Norton Museum of Art’s Great Hall. Photo: Foster + Partners.

At the same time, with its maximum square footage designed for maximum flexibility, the hall lacks intimacy. All that tasteful furniture is easily moveable so that this Great Hall can serve as a flex space for great donor cultivation. A white box with gray accents (someone said that Foster designs in “fifty shades of gray”), the Great Hall is also topped with an oculus that looks squinty. Round skylights call for round rooms, not rectilinear ones. I wish Foster had rolled the dice and gambled on an interior that was more daring than another white cube—one that might also reflect the octagonal shape of the original eastern entrance.

At least by adding this large new space, and fulfilling the museum’s new-car mandate, Foster could then restore and renew the many smaller adjoining galleries from the 1941 building. Of the museum’s 130,000 square feet, it is interesting to note that only about 10,000 of that are truly new. The preservation of older spaces allows for substantial “recycling,” as Foster says. The original 1941 hardwood floor, for example, has been brought back to life after being covered in decades of carpeting. The Art Deco entry also looks wonderfully preserved—although I wish outdoor access to the east were also restored so we could easily see the Norton’s two outdoor commissions by Paul Manship, which flank the original front door.

The preservation of historical space preserves “the memory of time,” Foster says. This is also how a museum overhauled by a world-famous architect can still come in at $100 million, while the price tag for a new wing at the Metropolitan Museum is slated to cost upwards of $600 million. The best spaces here are the ones that have been brought back to life from the original building, where gallery proportions and arrangements were designed to best complement the art on view. I was very glad to see highlights of the Nortons’ bequests of European art arrayed front and center in one of these galleries. Here Monet’s Gardens of the Villa Moreno, Bordighera (1884) and De Chirico’s Sailors’ Barracks (1914) are presented with works by Klee, Soutine, Picasso, Braque, and Brancusi—all donated by the Nortons—and supplemented with bequests by later donors. Other galleries display the Nortons’ gifts of paintings and drawings by the Ashcan painters and first-generation American modernists such as John Marin and Maurice Prendergast, along with Stuart Davis’s 1932 painting New York Mural, purchased through an acquisition fund established by Ralph Norton.

Taken together with the museum’s significant holdings in photography and Chinese art, you start to see that the Norton is not just a museum of art but a museum of significant art with an important core collection. Foster’s elegant and symbolic renovation brings that fact to the fore by allowing the museum to defer to this great art history.

There are already some signs, unfortunately, that the new museum may try to upstage its impressive historical collection with contemporary work. An ability to attract new donors and bigger crowds is the constant seduction of the contemporary Kunsthalle. The Norton could do better than its dopey wall-decal commissions by Pae White and Rob Wynne, for example, or Instagram-optimized art such as the promised gift of Sam Durant’s End White Supremacy (2008), which is better suited for woke selfies at Art Basel Miami Beach.

When everyone else wants art to shout, the Norton should seek art that sings in concert with its core collection and its harmonious building. As the Norton’s director Hope Alswang, who is retiring this month, rightly says of Foster + Partners: “They were not building a piece of sculpture. They were not building a monument. They were building a great art museum.”

It is indeed a great art museum, if you can keep it..