The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
A ‘fascinating look’ at ‘Connecticut Architecture’
Chris Wigren’s new book took 30 years to vision, assemble and create: That thoughtfulness is fully evident in its effortless complexity.
If you are looking for a book “type” – a “coffee table” tome, “or a “best off” ranking assemblage, or just a happy recap of the familiar buildings that make so many places so richly rewarding you will be taken aback by “Connecticut Architecture.”
As created by Wigren, this book has a much more interesting approach. The book is divided into a dozen “parts” that divide the 100 places into the sorts of cultural gifts they deliver. Whether set into groups involving the “landscape” or “materials” or organized by types - the homes, cities, places we work – or focusing upon their designers the book takes a statewide approach tat is both granular and sweeping.
Beyond the obvious particulars, Wigren goes beyond how most of define “architecture” and reveals the kinesthetic of moving among these places and delves into the rarified clarifying orders of “meaning” or “soul” as embodied by his chosen subjects. Wigren trusts the reader’s intelligence to see beyond the 200 pictures on heavy paper, hardbound with a snappy layout.
“Architecture” has been defined as “the mother of the arts,” and Wigren notes that it is “the art and science of making places” – both definitions compel anyone looking at any building to see more than its beauty as an object. “Where” something is can be transformed, inspired by, or be embodied in its presence. “How” something is made can coalesce a culture or a craft. The “who” of its user, designer or maker can offer up an insight into how humans manifest themselves in the places they make.
Chris Wigren fractures the complexities of how we perceive the places that have meaning, simplifies their means and methods and holds them up before us in history and in our own popular culture. But this book is neither arcane nor idiosyncratic. It is a holistic view of one small state’s rich weave of how its residents make and experience their culture.
Of course featuring Yale’s Kroon Hall designed by Centerbrook Architects is thoroughly logical: the greenist of buildings and world-class design. Sure, you would feature the Merritt Parkway – a prototype and icon of the advent of the Automobile Age amid the nobility of Connecticut’s Gold Coast. Similarly Philip Johnson’s Glass House, Connecticut’s state Capital Building, or Effie Pope’s Avon Old Farms School are signature efforts of great significance in our state’s history, and in highbrow architecture.
But, you could also focus upon the Grantmoor Motor Lodge as emblematic of highway life on the Berlin Turnpike, or the Portland brownstone quarry that made easy-tocut stone a transforming material in 19th century construction or the 1955 Wengloski Poultry House in Lebanon, Conn., where it embodied the best hopes of an agricultural presence in a state where farming failed during a long century of decline.
“Connecticut Architecture” is one person’s fascinating look at what all our culture has been, is, and might become using the evidence of our buildings, landscape, history, people and popular culture. There is no anointed judgment of a “correct” Canon or sage distinctions of fine arts elitism that picks winners and is silent towards those things deemed to be insignificant. Everyone living here, now, experiences the world around us – we have no filters and should not have blind spots: and that is the sweep of this book.
In “Connecticut Architecture,” Wigren, the deputy director of the Connecticut Preservation Trust, is actually showing us how his mind works. As an architect, I can vouch that people naturally obsess upon “starchitects”, and become mired in “style wars” from High Modernism to Neo Classicism, and often focus on the glamour of our aesthetics rather than its meanings. Wigren opts for a full bandwidth in his exposure and focus, rather than picking winners and losers.
Why do we bother with books anymore? I sit with my laptop, or iPad or phone and dial up anything, verbal or graphic. In the pre-processed cyber world of artificial intelligence, or what passes for it online, others have rated, ranked, organized all data for your eyes to follow on a glowing screen.
But Wigren’s mind has lingered long and wide on this tiny state of Connecticut. His depth of perception is fully human, open to the widest of variety we all use every day. But here, in this book, Chris Wigren goes beyond the crutch of artificial intelligence and simply offers up his own: the real thing.