Windows Without Buildings, Final Rough Draft
My loafers are disintegrating. Sprawled alone with decaying spring dusk falling through the trees beyond the Kimbell with my back against a bench and my legs flat stretched out across the floor toward the burbling pool I finger pits in the travertine. Iridescent grackles fluttered and splashed on the far end of the pool then reared up, whistling. I can’t address giants like the Kimbell when I am right up against them. The built-in delay to ratifying my experiences is the most troubling part of my tendency to discursion. As satisfying as its blossoms are, fertile enough to perpetuate themselves, dusting forgotten pollen on the longing stigmas of each moment’s flowers, discursive thought is so mired in the tedious process of reflection that the sacrament of mass with an experience comes only through the layered epiklesis of simmering old images or concerns, like layers of immaculately marked onionskin forming a still approximate figure when pressed flat to a sunlit window. The full exposure takes more time than the situation itself occupies so does not quite lend itself to indulgence in the immediate tingling satisfaction of momentary experience. Yet the involutions of this thought stew, however far from their source in time or relevance, never fail to reward me with spaded-under memories.
WINDOWS
I stumble over those gauzy figures much later as their tortuous profiles overgrow the simple filing system for the rest of my brain’s detritus. I have been traveling in Texas for days. I am in Austin for a stretch. I haven’t slept. No matter how I stripped down, showered and scalded, dimmed the lights, turned down the covers, arrayed the heap of pillows, I still felt like I was sleeping in my clothes, still smeared into the endless meetings. It is maybe because of the resulting bleariness that business travel distills my perceptions. Rather it distills what my perceptions act upon. The settings reduce to the walls of a tunnel lined by uniform fluorescent lighting where I float through a diffused experience that does not solidify into material perceptions until later lying awake in the dark hotel bed.
A room filled with a project meeting under fluorescent light inflects into being out of the flat space of my reverie. For all the time I have spent in federal office buildings I have never managed to convene in a room with windows. This is disorienting because the archetypal federal building is conspicuous in most urban landscapes for having the most windows. The relentlessness of its glazing subdivision promotes the framed figure of the window over the transparency promised by the window opening. The deceptive fenestration of Kafka’s Castle here finds mundane peerage: the building envelope manifests both the sovereign existence of the individual as one of many and the loss of that individual identity in bureaucratic homogenization through a primary conveyance of promise in architecture – a window to the sky. Yet, all of this shrouds a building whose interior I am fortunate enough to gain access to only to find that there are no windows.
Back at the too-nice historic downtown hotel I take off my dress shoes and tie and let the sun into my room for a while through slightly warm white sheers. It deforms around me like a cloud of down. The gauzy figure of the capitol dome is barely material, flattened against the glass before the viscous sky. In the luminous air over the bed I recall some velvet mornings in Los Angeles. There was such promise in those vast mornings driving to SCI-Arc downtown for what discoveries might fertilize one facet of the thought-career I fancied I was availing myself to. That was nine years ago. I was meeting with or working with Perry Kulper (PK) every day. He was my thesis advisor and I assisted him in teaching a drawing course for first year graduate students. As knowledge of a person is limited to the arena in which they are made available, I believe through our deep connection in an educational environment I grew to project my own hesitancy to face the responsibility of making buildings onto him. Perhaps I erroneously believed that his tenure in the world of drawings and words had something in common with my fears. Rather than finding concern in this somewhat antonymic station of the architect, I found fullness in drawings, in words, and in the slow cook discursive experience itself.
BUILDINGS
An exhibition of PK’s work is staged at The University of Texas concurrent to my business travel – it has me back into my mind for a full night roaming Austin. I call my old compatriot Leach from the hotel to find out if he is out of studio yet, take off my dress shirt and put on some ragged fabric loafers. I feel conspicuous in just the t-shirt. I can’t hide in it. But on foot through the city, and then north of the Capitol, beginning to sweat a bit in the t-shirt, I feel more myself. Nobody is on the streets.
Most everything north of the Capitol, before I get to West MLK, is closed. An odd assortment of daycare centers, old law offices, and a bootmaker line the street in low-slung 1960s far-past-modernism main-street U.S.A. storefronts made of deep-raked, painted-over brick or stucco with mold constellations. Gold foil lettering on the plate glass is blistered. The stretches of glass are so black and dirty and the spaces so dark or dim that I can place myself in them between effects of reflection and transparency. These heaps are long dead, held together by coats and coats of paint. I absorb them at the pace of my footsteps. Later something will arise in my hypnagogic cataloging that perhaps was there or wasn’t. I might recall a window onto a stair oddly rotated away from the outside wall but rooted by a ceiling grid that diminishes to different vanishing points than the building, but not at the same time as the color of the brick or the abscesses of some poor jobsite decisions that have rotted out and been painted over, cobwebs and all. The discourse of memories that conspires to build a building of impressions is often cobbled together from unrelated flashes that become so full as to seem complete.
When I finally arrive at UT I wander around to try to find Leach’s studio. From the foyer I see the glow of narcotic, incandescent light washing into a long ambulatory. Only a gallery would spill that. It is silent in the after-hours. I have the sensation and trepidation of walking through a funeral parlor to a wake and seeing the pink saturnine light bathing the wallpaper from a side portal in the middle of the hallway, searching for an excuse to bypass it, to go spend time with mourners in the hallway, or to walk past without indulging in a glimpse into the room. A glimpse of the body forms a mold that casts moving, living memories with the crushed petals of a dry mauve flower, and dust. It introduces a lifeless dummy into their name’s evocation. Recalling their smile a brittle stitch-snapping leer arises. I had spent almost a solid eighteen months straight with PK and then only saw him once for eight to ten hours since. I didn’t want to cast him with mylar and graphite.
Though I had indeed seen him more recently, the way he haunts me is through the last time I saw him in Los Angeles. As I watched, somewhat separate, as though through the storefront at Fred 62 or the windows of the Kulpers’ house, his wasn’t a life passing. He asked questions. I rambled. His face gathered and froze with the strain of deep listening, as if every combination of words held a poignant but fleeting opportunity to learn, to recast a memory. The meals and conversations of that day were an effort in a life project, in ‘The Work.’ In the mind of a subscriber to the project of life, the wash of the senses was not a loss but a less filed amalgam, an impressionistic paste. ‘The Work’ was the critically detached, but retained, experience of life. The ongoing nature of the transformation of his life into his work caused the work to remain in flux by the moment. His work drew people because it was alive as he lived. I saw the paralyzing horror at finishing a piece or suite as overarching because it was the euthanasia of a string of memories. The unfiled sheet of mylar still out on the table is the fulfillment of others’ idle wishes “that this beautiful day could last forever.” Though his racket was found in drawings, coming from an academic setting where talking about one’s work was its realization, PK’s indulgence in listening and the experiential vocality of his work characterized him more as a builder, a stoic practitioner, than an academic showman. Especially in the growing tendency of global culture to allow the unfiltered document of an experience to stand as an artifact, the physical transformation of a working life into something other than the original experience was an invitation more than the closed door of pastiche or capitalistic lifestyle baiting that comprised much of the rest of the decade’s work. Perry’s work became part of my life rather than a recognition that a life was merely occurring parallel to mine.
I sneak past the glass-walled gallery on to the stairs hazarding a glimpse of drawings ranked, arranged, filed, their mineral eyes beginning to glisten. Leach is in the old flash of a colorless, light-filled studio sitting next to his laptop with a drafting table perpendicular to it. We sit for quite a while talking in the intimate slot of his workspace about the tools we have as architects, or more precisely, the misconceptions we have about those tools which hold those more sensitive investigations to a parallel realm of analogy or substitution. But the crux is that these tools communicate data of the eventualities of architecture, or often more accurately, the data of the framework that allows for those eventualities, but they do not awaken them or execute them.
We talk and move from the potage of light into the cool, lugubrious terrazzo stair that smells like wood veneer and dust and sun, the treads smoothed and sagging like those down into a hidden Venice rio. I envision on this route a sort of collage cobbled from odd vantages, lost spots, illicit spaces, and involuted passages. The manner in which people gather in a plaza during an event, autumn light through Gingko trees with a month’s loss of yellow leaves onto a brick embankment, the dusty cedar odor of a dry attic, the feeling and sound of a particular scale and shape of gravel underfoot, cats’ paws on a translucent roof, all stitch together into a blur of new memories. The aspects of architecture that rely on reference funneled back into the hidden quantitative documents of our minds need other mechanisms for education and characterization than analogical or representational aids. These things can’t be drawn. But they must be drawn… perhaps by drawing around them.
SILENCE
In the silent hush that only comes in single rooms which you cannot see the whole of from any vantage point, the lights sing like insects. That funereal overtone that had arisen when I had first scurried past in the hallway is recharged. The gallery is populated with freestanding white walls. The walls stop at eight feet gathering space low in the room into a tangibly distinct volume separate from the room.
On the first panels into the room excerpts from PK’s landscape serials are pressed behind thin glass. Perry had, at points during the school year, gingerly lay these wafting leaves across the concrete floor of the long gallery at SCIArc’s Marina Del Rey outpost. The recollection of these works on the floor, lucky as I was to possess it, helped me sense what was different here in their display and how they differed in their actualization from the other drawings flanking them. The success of these works was their investment in flatness and their capability of distancing the viewer as one would take in the developed roll of a landscape. Without glass and on the floor they had been able to do two things: first, in their liberation become visually tactile, including the withering ripples of aging or affected trace; second, by dint of the floor’s extent become expansive beyond their borders. Five and some odd feet below my eyes on the floor of SCI-Arc’s long gallery perfected their quality of extreme distance in that they themselves became perspectival where they were objects that were part of a scopic context. They weren’t vistas into space themselves but Jeffersonian plats, filled blanks.
I stall out a bit from Leach at the next few drawings in from the door. The David’s Island drawings are there. These old messes were the first image of PK I had. Seeing him again here is like catching up with an old friend at the haunt where you first met.
More than the other types of drawings these glyphic fields seem to have PK’s voice, his demeanor, pace, posture, from the measured words to the meticulous haircut. The conventional architectural drawings, although idiosyncratic in their pursuit and invention still put something undeniable out as their mouthpiece, figurehead, gatekeeper: a building. It is not the architect’s imperative for the building to speak for them, but it is imperative that the building speak with the voice it is given. A drawing of a building has the capacity to speak with the pure voice. Yet by definition they feel little more than a tool, speaking with neither the voice of the building nor the kick of the silent baby in the womb. I miss talking to PK.
The inclination with PK’s drawings is to approach them. The level of detail is microscopic and burned into the mylar with such precision that each mark, each dash in a ship’s curved hidden arabesque seems as though it might be a text inscribed on a grain of rice. These are laden objects, weighted objects. It is at that scale that some secret and skew specificity and quantitative intensity are established. Moving out, ever so slightly, where marks begin to group, two things are visible. First, geometry is marshaled as a communicative vehicle by using scales of characterizing elements like a riot of Hejduk’s silent witnesses. Yet an idea or arena does not emerge, only tones or poses. Second, a skin spreads out beneath the marks, somewhat translucent in its inconsistency such that it floats over the mylar and beneath the marks. The skin is in small part the schmutz of triangles and tools and in large part the fog of his construction marks. Even more so than the quantitative intricacy, proof enough of hunched hours, this rind, which Perry punningly alluded to in a previous exhibition, this ‘calculus’, as both the division of complex forms into discrete packets which can be understood or the lithic accretion of minerals in the body, is an index of investment, of life. The function of drawing as a surrogate for experience, or at the very least a record of passing time, is worn into it like the depressions on those stair treads, or the dirt from a cat’s oily flank built up on a door jamb, or the acute stone corner of Pei’s National Gallery polished by fascinated hands. This dirt is the patina of time and action in the real lives of real things.
The calculus insinuates a second life lived by the information next to the architecture of which it might be the progenitor. This bilocation of the drawing’s consciousness is strong. It insinuates something that is not forward, not the instructional logic that turns mind into matter, but the physicality of the mind itself pressing against the outskirts of its own body, of the first architecture, that of our flesh, to imprint on the leaf of mylar film. It is trodden in, lived onto, bled across, architecture beaten out of life. In fact, PK, in his drawing courses, often characterized the expectations of what of labor commitment might lay behind a drawing in hours. “This will be at the very least a one-hundred hour drawing, I expect, no less,” he would say.
It is upon stepping out of the drawings’ shades to a distance equal to their mounting height that both their voice and intent, their invocation, approach something transcendent. The drawings coalesce into a painterly organization of form. They are not organized in a way that would initially bespeak productivity. However, if I can consume them in a detached enough fashion, as if intent on ‘crossing over,’ the messes of calculus and gaseous form idle over a more Cartesian absolute borrowed from their format and allusions to latent spatial indices. By letting its obscure content cling to a system whose function is to transpose information outside of its boundaries the whole of the drawing is less focused on its own making and its sense of hermetic fascination. Struggling to make that transposition my efforts are frustrated by the mess itself which, once established against the connective order of the page, corrupts it with the virus of doubt, as if even the dependability of reference points that could transpose its phantasms into our world through analogy of scale or measure is at risk. However, even in its specific obscurity the vocabulary urges me to strain the content out of the drawing into my world. I miss my old friend. In my old friend I can engage the insistence of his passion. I can see the imprint of his life. A life of passion recorded imbues its documents with meaning.
I move toward and away from individual drawings as if tethered. I move slow, possibly intentionally shuffling my loafers and shrinking inside myself to create the daze I feel having just donated whole blood, my most lucid frame of mind, somewhat outside my body. The drawings are my only vista from the compressed luminance of the lower half of the room. I appear reflected in the glass over the drawing directly before me. Oblique to me the reflections of far ends of the gallery settle over the tangle of graphite. As if a breeze from the whispered thicket there, the light from beyond the gallery and distant streamers of sky deep beyond the glass filter into the furthest hangings from me. In my altered state the effects are native to the terrains and vistas beneath the glass, moving from hallucination to a space expanding through it like a window. Before me again where I was reflected clouds gather on a white sky. I can’t decipher whether I am inside or out, but clearly I am at the demise of two spaces. No other students came into the gallery. I sense nobody in the building. I have the overwhelming desire to have a conversation, to arise out of these lost bits of sky and trapped distances. Though these discursive hauntings are merely the chance of light and state of mind I note a sense of completeness to my delusion.
CONVERSATION
Leach and I leave the gallery. Dusk still hums. Spring dusks are Arctic. Instead of the sun racing as it gets closer and closer to the horizon, as it does over the ocean or the desert, it seems to slow asymptotically and sometimes almost move backwards. The air is brighter now than when I had first strolled onto campus. Light fills the air like a mold casting the detailed grain of the scabby crust about us. This kind of inescapable light draws up all of our surroundings as though captured beneath a rainless thunderstorm.
The front door of Medici is open and the place was empty. I am disappointed, after hearing from Leach that they served French press coffee, to receive my drink in a paper cup with an insulating paper jacket. Barred from the sophistication of plunging the press myself we decided to go back to the CoA to sit in the courtyard. As quickly as we were in Medici the sky had turned white. A small reception is concluding with a few stragglers standing around a folding table to the east in a breezeway, studios stacked four stories on the north and south, and the arcade hallway with the gallery and PK beyond on the west now glowing through the louring blue.
We sit talking on one side of a square banquette bench that is weathered to approach the splintering compendium of abuse visited upon a railroad tie. Two Barred Owls roost on either side of the courtyard calling out to each other, “who cooks for you?” I can hardly pay attention to Leach for watching the sky in hopes of an owl’s silent slur of flight through the courtyard. Conversation washes color over the in between, the down times, like the room we leave behind in the procession that tapers into the spaces beyond it or the vista forgotten on the first part of the hike that appears in reverse on the return leg. Conversations are more of a way of marking time. They are necessarily fleeting. I struggle to listen, to make meaning of the words in this moment. I can’t help fixating on the sound of the owl calls. I recall reading about a coyote wandering into a Quizno’s in Chicago and nosing its way to a cooler full of drinks. A young woman walks down the glazed arcade that separates us from the gallery still waxy with its moribund glow. Seeing the girl closing down the gallery from the courtyard, to risk awakening my Homeric simile, is like staying past the graveside service to watch the backhoe bury the corpse. The darkened drawings behind glass are liberated to the complicated biases of my memory.
With this immediate distance, the oddity of placing an architectural drawing, a complex tool, on the wall for casual consumption and reflection strikes me. Yet it could be considered that this context provides the drawings with a function. These drawings are to surrogate the buildings that either haven’t or will never emerge from them. They do this by means of communicative conventions. But in their borrowing from the gallery or salon tradition these drawings gather a similar power that works of art gain through their exhibition. By recontextualizing the work outside of the studio by a third party it legitimizes it as something to be publicized and canonized, at least at some scale. As with art displayed, although with different repercussions, the display ‘stops’ the work. It no longer exists as a vehicle or a function of time. It is complete; it has reached its destination. The display of technical drawings of unbuilt architectural projects cultivates the perception of putting a cork in their instrumentality. This perception of architectural drawings as ‘ends,’ or being able to end, or culminating in a test of their ability to wail some final aria from the wall is clearly rooted in the traditions and structures of the design academy. If the architect truly wanted to communicate the intention of the drawing to be used beyond the fetishization of its technique or the style of its content they would lay it flat on a table where it could be used, leaned on, or have measures taken from it. I’m not saying however that PK’s drawings end. I am clarifying the context that they find themselves in and the peerage they align themselves with. In fact, I think it is because of this inclination that the drawings are able to become dislodged from their instrumental capacity and tend toward something greater to me.
When the only remaining light in the sky seems to be thrown back over the horizon like the strangely peaceful hair of a drowned woman the light in the windows of the studios stacked in the north wall of the courtyard arises. I’ve had an affinity for the archetype of the glowing window at dusk since I worked a construction project on a farm in central Georgia in my early twenties. Their warmth and their ability to telegraph a completely identifiable spatial tone I felt was strong enough to humor the guts like a pull of brandy from a real St. Bernard as I died across the snow from a Swiss chalet and its twinkling purr. Of course that transcendent interior space of milkglass lamps, wood and upholstery settees, and beapron’d grandmothers pulling hot olive boules from the oven to nibble with some Glühwein is a statistically improbable confluence. It is the obstruction of the sheer curtain that makes this illusory phenomenon possible. It both allows the light to escape and protects the reality of the situation. The process of uniformly distributing light across the fabric surface turns the window solid, an object that distinguishes itself from the night air and from the building being consumed by shade. It is alone and it speaks. The windows of the architecture studios weren’t doing quite that. They lacked the sheer curtains and a worm’s eye view of the ceilings could be seen through them. Still they transmit a uniform glow from bouncing throughout the large white rooms that seemed to hit the glass and stop there, halted by the not-yet-complete darkness of the courtyard.
DISCURSION
Nothing strigils the mind’s filthy tongue better than a long, bleak drive, not even a night of sleep. Yet bits of images and sensations gather in my thoughts driving the bleached plain from Austin to Fort Worth. My discursive thoughts are a kitchen midden of recollections, associations, and misunderstandings hung beneath a single precipice, like an idealized mountain whose pinnacle is a singular point where a climber could find no purchase. That pinnacle was the notion that the field drawings hung on the wall behind glass in the gallery were not just what conventional wisdom allows me to corral into ‘architecture,’ but that they were ‘a building,’ or at least some constructed, real aspect of a building, or at the very least the illusion of that aspect. These escape routes into the expanded field of flat space trailed in the wake of experience. In my estimation they were windows. The window is a primary conveyance of promise and humanity in architecture. And in that it constructs a relationship between territories it is the most reduced synecdoche of architecture. These windows just happened to exist without buildings.
I drive an inordinate amount of time below the horizon in a concrete trench. Like most plains cities Fort Worth rises up slowly, almost endlessly, from the south. It rises so gently that I was dizzied by the immediacy of its presence like the chance palpation of some tumorous mass. “Where did that come from?” I drive straight to the Modern. I hardly know where I am, or where I had just been. My thoughts are filled with the coalescing rubbish of the drive. The fringes of visual relationships between tangential stirrings limp along in the pile, occasionally locking into one another, until through some physical corruption shared between that mess and my body, the whole is given sufficient power to speak aloud as one.
Admission is free. A polished weekday hush aches in the lobby. The sun is silent on the pool, silent because it has burned so ceaselessly that I don’t know the noise it makes. The building is mute, mute because its voice and words have become so intertwined that I can’t tell if it is speaking or dead and singing back in my memory. Through its gauze I slip undisturbed into the first peninsular gallery. A bronze Caesar stands facing a very large mirror on the concrete wall away from the pool of water which the gallery is oriented towards. He has reached out just above the level of his head to the mirror but isn’t touching it. His fingers curl, slightly limp. An empty expression has halted on his face. It is the face of a rising epiphany, not before and not amidst. It is the irreducible instant at which this saluting Caesar, reproduced from a bronze in patina’d plaster, cast still with all the alloys of propaganda, egotism, insularity, puissance, all the thrust of history inseparable from his eternal being, looks into the mirror in this place, in this present, in this silence, in my witness, and sees just a man, weak, fallible, and doomed. It happens through the juxtaposition of figure and mirror, but not solely. The latent epiphany also relies on me. It requires my empathy, the fertility of my humanity to draw upon. I have looked at photographs of Pistoletto’s work and find them vacuous and approaching trite. This is a case in which the piece of work only functions with the perceptual corruption of the procession. This solidification of affect can only be the pinnacle of the heap, not a stone within it. Like the form of the argument that I begin to weave around the situation, Pistoletto’s conceptual finesse is fragile. The resonance silently transmigrates into me without trace, like a miracle of faith, and leaves with me as I wander over to the Kimbell. Receding back into isolation the Caesar is left with its intrinsic values, for obviously it can’t gaze upon itself. It needs me to see its face in the mirror.
My hemp loafers are in tatters and I walk lightly and slowly to keep them from slipping off. It makes me feel like I had just emerged from syncope, slightly aloft. This flaccid conveyance with Pistoletto, the highway, meetings and federal buildings, and a host of others in tow is the silent transubstantiation on which I bring PK’s pieces forward to the lawn of the Kimbell. My wife and I have discussed a shared handicap of ours. Without fail, when we are meeting a new person we become so focused on erecting the façade of social pleasantness and attentiveness, by being in the moment, that the entire content of the exchange disappears like Cinderella’s carriage when the situation passes. We ask “Do you remember that person’s name?” This kind of binary plagues me. When one thing is on another must be off. So the intellectual commitment to experience is a deferral of actual experience. Standing before PK’s work silently in Austin, having an electric conversation in passing moments shared with a suite of dead objects, filled me with all of its qualities and left them with none of mine. It is a releasing feeling to float through the world. A building or a piece of a building is just that, no matter if it is alone. Yet PK’s drawings became windows only when I was with them, and only for me. I had the power to change them with my perception and memories.
Any of the four or five times I have raced over to the Kimbell after pencils-down at Fort Worth meetings I have only had time to take the stairs from the basement entrance up into the main vault and straight out the door to the bosk of trees. This time they are completely closed. On an earlier trip the three of us reveled at how “perfect” the building was. But what I loved rather silently were the throwaways that made it imperfect: the cracks in the travertine stuffed with gum wrappers, the little service under the south terrace stair through which the areaway is visible. I loved that the trench-drain in the staff parking lot, a pristine square, had to take the module of the double-loaded parking aisle rather than the famous building module. I felt like I needed to love these things in secret, a different kind of postponement or deferral than the silent oblivion of raw experience, but a delay nonetheless.
It comes upon me sitting by the gargling sheet of water behind the Kimbell in another protracted spring dusk. The space beneath the bosk is bright and the sky is blank. A group of girls are playing ultimate Frisbee on the lawn separating the Kimbell from the Amon Carter’s lawn. I finger the pits in travertine. The burbling water flips sunlight like clouds of frayed ponytails for a moment into the shape of a landform in my memory. No longer a discursive house of cards, having been born of flesh in the The Modern, this vision is the pictorial convergence of a truth. The notion that grows inside of me, or before my eyes, in the silence, or disappearance of the entire world ensorcelled by the burble of the water jets is at first an easy one, the laughable acknowledgment that the Kimbell is a great building. Few people would disagree. However, being so often barred from its interior by forces of schedule what I knew to be great about it was everything that it wasn’t, or possibly more explicitly, everywhere that it wasn’t. By this I mean that it was all of the things that clung to it like cowbirds or trail dust, the things that orbited around it at some distance, like me, the grackles romping in the pool, the Frisbee girls, and all of the intangible aspects that I would call the building’s own memories, like writings, anecdotes, stylistic influence and antecedents, and mythology. This absence of building that must also be enabled or activated emerges, at first unorganized, from what seem to be undesignable proclivities and potentials. These can be seen to slowly coalesce into something like a waste mold that the Kimbell itself could be cast from. Our minds and memories as a civilization, your heartbreaks, your night terrors, the films, the stories, the sketches of the traveler, the postcards written home badged with tentative photographs, and the conscious or unconscious riffs and eschewals of the Modern and the Amon Carter, are all packed here about me like an ephemeral mold. I see Perry drawing molds. I see in the windows they cast. I see Perry making buildings.