The Royal Ballet School Bridge by Wilkinson Eyre Architects (left, Nick Wood photo) and "Iced Time Tunnel" by Tadao Ando + Tassuo Miyajima at Finland's "The Snow Show" in Lapland (Jeffrey Debany photo)
We were struck with the similarity of form and feeling -- the sense of mystery and promise -- between the two architectural structures pictured above, one an aluminum footbridge to allow students passage between their school and the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, the other an ephemeral snowblock tunnel built for an invitational exhibition meant to draw attention to Kemi and Rovaniemi, Finland.
Brian Micklethwait of Brian's Culture Blog turned his visitors on to the London bridge with his artful prose:
There is something very charming about a balletically beautiful footbridge enabling ballerinas to get from their ballet-nunnery or whatever it is, to their big cathedral, without having to cross the street, where the poor little creatures might be attacked and damaged, or where they might be persuaded by passing graphic designers or record producers to forget their ballet vows.
Similarly, we discovered the Lapland tunnel via the critical prose of Matthew Gurewitsch's Opinion Journal review:
As snow jobs go, "The Snow Show" does have its charms . . . The snow was man-made, more uniform in consistency than Mother Nature's. The blocks of ice were painstakingly processed, too, for a transparency not found elsewhere. Those blocks were gorgeous: cracked internally like rock crystal, shot through with needles of trapped air that twinkled in the light like meteor showers.
We empathize with Gurewitsch's lack of sympathy for the premise of the show, however:
[It realizes] a vision of the diminutive, bespectacled curator Lance M. Fung of New York, a fast talker who arranged pro-tem marriages of convenience between brand-name artists and brand-name architects to test their creativity against a new and challenging medium. Evidently, his powers of persuasion are formidable.
So are his academic pretensions, writ large in a curatorial statement. "A ritual is formed between paired artists and architects that will be manifested in snow and ice," Mr. Fung writes in a textbook example of artspeak mumbo-jumbo. "By replacing materials that are both familiar and permanent with ones that are freshly unusual and ephemeral, the curators [read: I, I, I] hope to neutralize initial fixity of ideas. This partnership of artists and architects in a unique setting will encourage a freeing flow of communication that allows an overlap in their individual interests and expertise."
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