All of this comes to mind when thinking of one beginning, one set of beginnings, a Rashomon set of stories of beginnings of a project that started more than 35 years ago. The stories, not the authorship of the project, may cohere.

The project involves an idea, the birth of an idea back in the early sixties, in New York. It involves one of countless ideas that went into the making of Lincoln Center, more specifically, the making of the Opera House in Lincoln Center. And more specifically than that, the idea behind the origin of the points of light that drop from its ceiling. I am referring to the design of the Chandeliers in the Metropolitan Opera House.

Metropolitan Opera House Chandeliers

You may have seen them. They make a spectacle at the start of every performance, an explosion of light refracting from crystals that ascend, literally ascend, to the ceiling to announce the beginning of an opera.

Genesis, the ultimate beginning, makes one think of the first book of the Bible for its believers, the origin of the universe as The Big Bang for non believers. Interestingly, physical evidence for The Big Bang was developed at about the same time as the Metropolitan Opera House design was being developed. With optical telescopes, the space between stars and planets is black; but with a radio telescope, a glow is visible; this glow is cosmic radiation. In 1964, scientists explained that this radiation is leftover from the origin of the universe, the first physical evidence of The Big Bang.  There was excitement in the media about this discovery. The world was looking up and out into space. The U.S. and Soviet space program was in full swing. This context is the basis of a story of origin of the design of the chandeliers.

About the same time, a year earlier to be precise, The Austrian Government announced that it would make a donation to the new Metropolitan Opera House: a set of crystal chandeliers for its foyer and auditorium.  In July of 1963, Hans Harald Rath of J. & L. Lobmeyr, a celebrated Viennese crystal and chandelier manufacturing company, came to New York to discuss the design of the chandeliers with Wallace Harrison of Harrison and Abramovitz,  the architect of the Opera House itself.

Three years ago, I met Leonid Rath, the grandson of Dr. Rath at the ICFF.  Both Leonid and his brother Johannes are the current head of J. & L. Lobmeyr. Mr. Rath was in New York to begin discussions of the dismantling and cleaning of the Met’s chandeliers. He told me that when his grandfather and WKH met to discuss the chandeliers, Harrison gave Hans Harald Rath a book on galaxies. This book served as inspiration for the chandeliers’ design. The crystals are held by metal rods that radiate out from the center of the chandeliers, making them appear like starburst constellations. They were installed in May 1966 and became known as sputniks, after the Soviet space satellites, from the night the Met opened.

On Sept. 13 1966, 3800 people were in the audience for opening night of the Opera House. It was an exciting evening, the world premiere of Samuel Barber’s Antony and Cleopatra. The first ovation exploded as the curtain was lifted and 21 chandeliers rose toward the ceiling.  Wallace K. Harrison, Hans Rath and my father were there. This brings me to a second story of the chandeliers’ genesis.

The genesis of genesis has an Old English origin of gignesthai meaning birth. The etymological dictionary entry states, “be born…see KIN.” While birth is the beginning of one that is distinct; kin carry shared family lines and history.

My father, Tad Leski, far left, with draftsman, and Wallace K. Harrison far right.

My father, Tadeusz Leski is an architect; and a painter. He was a designer for Harrison and Abramovitz.  Harrison was a painter and an architect like my father. He was also a statesman, a businessman, and spent time in high profile social circles being [1] linked by marriage, socially and professionally to the Rockefeller family. This consumed his time.  My father, who entered H&A in 1953, straight off the boat, so to speak, was a recent immigrant to this country. He had survived the war; fighting as a Pole in the French army getting captured and escaping work camps. He ended up in London where he finished architecture school and had just left England with his wife and young daughter and a portfolio of drawings under his arm. Harrison recognized the artist and architect in my father. They were close because of it. So close, that my father designed and built a house for our family on a piece of property adjacent to Harrison’s own house. It seemed to me that Harrison was drawn to my father and the kind of conversations they could have. They could converse by standing over sketches, marker or pencil in hand. I imagine that my father’s English wasn’t so good back then; but, he could draw beautifully. These exchanges were recluse for Harrison. He got to speak his favorite language of gesture, mark, space and form. It was a respite from the countless board meetings that I am sure Harrison had to attend.

My father was the designer for the Metropolitan Opera House—as he was for many H&A projects. And he prepared the initial design sketches as he always did, countless fast perspective sketches done in marker or ink and white paint washes on trace, vellum or even cardboard. He would meet with WKH and separate them out based upon strengths and weaknesses. The sketches would become orthographic projections—or plan, section and elevation, and models. Eventually the design would be rendered with a ruling pen and gouache.

My father, Tad Leski on the job site of the Metropolitan Opera House. He is standing to the left of Wallace K. Harrison

Along the way, in preparation for one of the meetings, my father was hurriedly finishing a perspective sketch of the Met’s interior. One fault of my father’s was that he never knew when to stop a painting or a drawing until it was too late. He would obsess over the work, changing one thing and adding another until, as he used to say, “he made a mess of it.” His disgust with the work because of the one too many changes, would make him abandon it; and only then it was done. So he was characteristically “finishing” this sketch of the Met’s interior, when a splash of black India ink dropped from his brush right smack in the center of the piece. The splatter extended across the image, resembling an explosion of fireworks. He quickly added lines to attach the splattered droplets and added white paint so that it could be interpreted to be the abstracted points of refracted light projecting from a chandelier.

One of hundreds of interior sketches for the Opera House by Tad Leski

Harrison thought the sketches were great. And he particularly liked the idea of the exploded geometry of the splatter as the form of the chandeliers.  An accident was the genesis of the Chandeliers of the Metropolitan Opera House. A drop of ink followed the laws of gravity, surface tension and impact instead of the intentions of the artist. This moment of genesis is suspended like a drop of ink over a page just beyond where my father had intended and before an idea of exploded geometry came to light.

Origins are critical in establishing authorship. But like any beginning, the origin of a work of art or invention is not crystal clear. Constellations, the dots of light in the sky that we connect and name, are imaginary. They inspire myths of princesses, heroes, winged horses and sea monsters. We mentally connect the dots of light as mnemonic devices. Narrative connections serve our imagination and memory. The actual physical locations of these points of light are stars light years away from us, spread out in three and four dimensions. From another point of view, away from the Earth, the constellations would not be recognizable and could not be connected the same way. Different points of view inspire different stories which inform memory and shape what we know.

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Paleus Melisanda: Blue Vevet by Alfred DeCredico

I am Alfred DeCredico’s friend and colleague. This chapter of our friendship and colleagueship started with the words, “he’s gone,” on the phone.

Honor him; “yes,” but I am not done with Alfred DeCredico. There are some artists or architects whose work you absorb pouring over pages for years and then you’re full. I did that with Louis Kahn’s work and I’m done. There are friends that part company, move-on—done. I’m not done with Alfred DeCredico. The world is not done with Alfred DeCredico. And I want to think about continuing.

So I made a list.  This is  A L F R E D  V.  D E C R E D I C O :

Ask, “What do you think about _________?”

Lobster bisque, a bushel of oysters and seaweed, Osso bucco, peach tart.

Fight the censors.

Recognize the intelligence of others.

Eat the bone marrow.

Drawing is everything.

Vice Versa

Deconstruct chaos.

Elixir of life.

Cohere Entropy.

Really laugh.

Everything isn’t wrong with double negatives.

Don’t hide in the politically correct.

In-tolerate intellectual laziness.

Couragio.

Open mind vices.

_______________________

Alfred  DeCredico died on Saturday December 26, 2009.  He was an Artist & a Professor of Foundation Studies Drawing at the Rhode Island School of Design.  A memorial service was held for him on Saturday, April 10th.

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It blew my mind.

Kyna Leski at Pop!tech 2009,
photo by Kris Krüg

I also got the opportunity to make a presentation, that I call, “Cohering Entropy: Navigating the Creative Process.” You can read my entire lecture notes here. Some notes from parts of my talk:

A strange thing happened about 20 years ago, very early on in my career as a teacher. I gave a group of students this painting by Paul Klee, called Polyphonically Enclosed White, and I asked them to build the third dimension using only white glue and white museum board.

One of the students, John Schroeder, decided that he would assign different heights to each colored rectangle. He couldn’t tell me why he was doing this…but there was something about his sense of purpose that made me step aside and watch. He worked through the night and built this object and when he was done he held it up to the indirect sunlight coming from the north side of the building.
This is what he saw. He had somehow osmotically channeled the work of Paul Klee.

I am showing you this, not to mystify things… in fact….there is a good explanation of why the light is refracted in this way given the differing sizes and heights of this cluster of tubes. But there isn’t an easy explanation of how John arrived at this idea. This is what interests me: how we get there…or how we navigate the creative process.

I have been surprised and awed by the imagination many times since then. It has made me think I am an atheist and believe I am not. This dilemma draws me into the creative process in my teaching and my work.

How an artist gets to a discovery or invention is mystified in our culture…it’s outside the umbrella of words like “talent” or “genius.” These words keep us from seeing what is at work and keeps it in the periphery and not to be depended upon. I like to call talent or creative abilities, intelligences. One of the most important intelligences for an artist is sensibility. “Sensibility”—keen intellectual perception—not the optics of the eye or capacity of the sensory organs—but how we take this information and form a concept of the world and our place it. Sensibility is on the cusp between percept and concept…which is at the heart of intelligence.

. . .

Search engines gather for us. The founders of Google, stated that “if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, you’d be better off.” And that he and his partner’s ambition for “perfect search engine” would be one that could understand exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.”

My ambition is the opposite: Creativity….is not in knowledge but in the way towards knowing. Discovery is about arriving somewhere other than where you wanted or expected. And invention is moving outside of what is known.

. . .

Dwelling in uncertainty is key to growth and moving beyond the known through the imagination.

Creative, process are two words neither of which are creative and both are more processed than process.I think of it as cohering entropy. A creative work makes its own necessity by cohering what wasn’t before and now we don’t want undone. Cohering by recognizing connections from the astronomical to the metabolic, by putting together what precedes, follows and is next to: coherence gathered, and meaning made.

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The diagram gained insight as a kind of accident. In one of our presentations to the church, we realized with embarrassment that we had forgotten the spire on our model of the existing church. Then, after adding a spire to the model, we found that it kept being knocked off. So I thought, “what is a spire anyway?” and looked the word “spire” up in the dictionary. What I found addressed the purpose, history, aspirations of openness, expansion and the specific diagram of the chapel.

I found that the word, “spire,” comes from the Latin root, “spirare,” or “spirit.” “Spirare” is also the root of “inspire, ” “respire,” and “spiral,” a geometry that is always expanding and contracting like breath.

At the same time, we were starting to work on the chapel’s design, with the narrowing trapezoidal plan and its supporting perimeter walls. We found that if the ceiling’s geometry is square to each supporting wall, instead of being a compromised geometry in between the two walls, the lines of the geometry continue to spiral around like a string wrapping the space. This became a convincing order for the design of the chapel: the geometry of the ceiling/roof and floor spirals north setting the structure, windows, and ceiling/wall acoustic fins.

Now looking back at the facades of the historic churches…the ones that formed Shepherd of the Valley, you can see something that is very interesting.

The Phenix Church is on shown on top. It has its structure out of sight, within its skin of siding. The Hope Church, shown second, has its structure poking out from the skin of siding and its roof is sucked in. It is as though the two churches where inhaling and exhaling: the body carving a cavity, the skin taut, revealing structure on the inhale and the body and skin relaxing on the exhale.