Sunday, July 10, 2011
House Party
Yesterday my sister and I went to the Robie House, the Frank Lloyd Wright building down in Hyde Park. On Saturdays they have events where you can just roam the house freely and "use the house as a house," although I did not take that to mean that I was allowed to take a shower or curl up for a nap on the living roam sofa. It turned out that as a space it was really not overrated, with lots of beautiful, bright open spaces and a great sense of overall unity to the design. It is sort of too bad how the house was neglected and misused over the years before preservation became a cool thing to do, but they're trying to buy back the furniture now and get replicas of the original fixtures (really, it's as though the place was used as a frat house), which is good. I'll be interested to go back in a few years and see how they've progressed.
But the really interesting part of the afternoon was the Q&A that followed the presentation on a local museum and its preservation issues. As everyone knows, allowing an audience to ask questions is really just an invitation for them to make declarative statements that show how smart they are. And so we had innumerable questions that followed the format "I once saw a museum exhibit about X and it was great. Are you going to do any exhibits like that?" Then there were more general ramblings about the importance of museums generally, with a few references to articles in the New Yorker or Vanity Fair thrown in. But my favorite was the gentleman who asked if they were restoring the museum facilities to look like any specific year and, when the speaker replied that she didn't know, tried to explain what he meant by the term "year." Or maybe it was the lady who just asked if she could get her parking validated, I don't know.
Yesterday my sister and I went to the Robie House, the Frank Lloyd Wright building down in Hyde Park. On Saturdays they have events where you can just roam the house freely and "use the house as a house," although I did not take that to mean that I was allowed to take a shower or curl up for a nap on the living roam sofa. It turned out that as a space it was really not overrated, with lots of beautiful, bright open spaces and a great sense of overall unity to the design. It is sort of too bad how the house was neglected and misused over the years before preservation became a cool thing to do, but they're trying to buy back the furniture now and get replicas of the original fixtures (really, it's as though the place was used as a frat house), which is good. I'll be interested to go back in a few years and see how they've progressed.
But the really interesting part of the afternoon was the Q&A that followed the presentation on a local museum and its preservation issues. As everyone knows, allowing an audience to ask questions is really just an invitation for them to make declarative statements that show how smart they are. And so we had innumerable questions that followed the format "I once saw a museum exhibit about X and it was great. Are you going to do any exhibits like that?" Then there were more general ramblings about the importance of museums generally, with a few references to articles in the New Yorker or Vanity Fair thrown in. But my favorite was the gentleman who asked if they were restoring the museum facilities to look like any specific year and, when the speaker replied that she didn't know, tried to explain what he meant by the term "year." Or maybe it was the lady who just asked if she could get her parking validated, I don't know.
