The Problem With Aesthetics

I was just in New York where I visited as I always do the Museum of Modern Art, a temple, or so it has always seemed from my earliest youth, of cold and haughty beauty, certainly alien to everything that I knew from the simple middle class culture of my Middle Western upbringing.  It was my second wife, an architecture student when I met her, besotted with the Bauhaus style of her school's director, Walter Gropius, who showed me the way to modernism, although I must admit that I only purchased a membership to MoMA years later so that we as a family with young children would have easy access to clean bathrooms in Midtown Manhattan.  In our home my wife insisted upon a stripped down version of things, clean, simple lines, spare detail, intoning over again "form follows function," to which I, heir to Victorian bric a brac, and Edwardian ornamentation, thrilled as to illegal drugs.  On this visit to MoMA, however, I was once again confronted with how these things do not always work out.  In a gallery on the second floor there was a temporary exhibit for which the show's curators had assembled a collection of drawings displayed in a vitrine that was a long continuous glass topped box cantilevered out from the wall. It was easily the most elegant thing in the room, its spare ninety degree angle moment of contact with the wall was such a minimal statement of gravity's demands and wight's pressures.  I was startled to see that next to this a guard had constantly to stand at attention admonishing viewers not to surrender to their natural instinct to put the slightest pressure on the vitrine with their hands and arms to study the art.  It could not support the slightest weight.  On the ground floor I was once again struck by the fact that there is a rise of maybe five stairs leading from the initial reception area to the entrance to the garden, as well as the landing that takes one upstairs to the second floor.  These five stairs stretch maybe thirty feet across and only at the very ends are there narrow elegant tubes scarcely standing away from the wall that constitute railings to assist those who finds stairs a trial.  At eighty four I am one of them, and I take great exception to this cavalier dismissal of a commonplace need in the interests of the elegance and cool of the visual drama of the vase expanse of bare stone steps.  It was a great shock a couple of years ago to discover that the re-ordering of the plaza at Lincoln Center included a grand stair of maybe twenty very shallow risers (sort of a ramp, one might say, with a step up every few feet) which must measure seventy or more feet across without a single railing in all that space.  An enthusiast dismissed my complaint pointing out that there were two ramps at either end for "people with problems," as she put it.  I resent, however, having to be shuttled off that way when it would give me great pleasure to engage with this giant space of the grand stair, and I don't think--now we're moving into the old timer's indignation almost a whine-- any architect with talent would not be able to find an aesthetically pleasing solution for a few railings every so often.  I also nastily find it amusing that even the young in winter's snow, slush, and ice find those barren windswept Lincoln Center stairs a trial and search vainly for railings.