The main entrance is on the side, and it is a bit of a surprise since it is dominated by a long concrete canopy that, while structurally elegant, resembles a bus shelter. No windows and no entrances-there are two in this axially symmetrical building-are visible, just the drum and the pool. Approaching from the circle, one catches glimpses between the trees of a small drum embraced by a curved walkway and a reflecting pool. We have become used to concert halls that make big bold statements: the looming sculptural forms of the Philharmonie in Paris, the metallic sails of Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the giant glass barrel vault of the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts in Philadelphia. Nothing could be simpler.īilyana Dimitrova The chamber music hall as viewed from across the reflecting pool Olmsted and Vaux’s circle is the key to the Kleinhans partis: a drumlike curved chamber music hall echoes the circular shape the main hall, a larger curved volume, extends to the rear the lobby, serving both halls, is situated between. Richardson’s monumental Buffalo State Hospital. The hall faces a 500-foot-diameter landscaped circle that is the prominent termination of one of the parkways that Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux laid out when they re-planned the city in the 1860s the other end of the parkway is anchored by H. To begin with, unlike most urban concert halls, it is not downtown but in a leafy residential neighborhood, surrounded by large, freestanding homes on Buffalo’s West Side. Not widely known, this building, which opened in 1940, is remarkable in several ways. I came to Kleinhans for the chair, but I stayed for the architecture. The version with armrests could be placed next to the version without, an ingenious space-saving device. Witold Rybczynski Two of the surviving chairs that Saarinen and Eames designed for Kleinhans. The striking design, which uses one piece of lightly padded molded plywood for the seat and back, was obviously influenced by Alvar Aalto’s molded wood furniture of that period, yet for two novices it remains an impressive accomplishment. Nevertheless, I found several survivors in the musicians’ lounge. Not surprisingly, the chair was no longer in use-few public seats last 75 years. I was recently in Buffalo and had a chance to visit the hall. The chair was intended for a new concert hall that the firm was designing in Buffalo. The two young men-Saarinen was 28, Eames was 31-were working together in the Bloomfield Hills, Mich., office of Saarinen & Saarinen, a partnership recently formed by Eliel Saarinen and his son. I was researching Eero Saarinen’s furniture for my book Now I Sit Me Down (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), and I came across one of his earliest chairs, designed in the late 1930s in collaboration with Charles Eames. I first became aware of the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo because of a chair.
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