The Studio Art Department treated the Dartmouth community to another rich, instructive lecture yesterday in Loew Auditorium. Brian Healy, head of an architectural firm based in East Cambridge, New Jersey, exposed his personal interpretation of architecture to a large, attentive crowd in 13 Carpenter.
Healy's innovative approach to the art of building has attracted the focus of prestigious institutions like the Boston and the New Jersey Societies of Architecture, and has been praised in many publications, among them "Life" and "Architecture" magazines.
His vision indeed stands out of the ordinary. He sees architecture as one of the fine arts, on par with painting or poetry. He therefore regrets the emphasis his field has placed upon the purely functional, social and political role of architecture.
Healy is an artist who "attempts to engage what's out there," and from what he has so far produced, we can easily state that his "engagement" has paid off.
Fresh out of Yale, Healy tackled the delicate interaction of architecture and its surroundings with a home he built for his brother in Florida. Clearly receptive to the warm climate and proximity of the sea, he designed a circular, yellow "island" that sits amid lush tropical vegetation. The marriage is perfect between man-made and natural elements. And it gets better every year, as the foliage progressively covers more and more of the walls.
The circle will often reappear in Healy's plans. Usually it will unravel, "shed its skin," so as to form distinct, but attached private and public spaces, two central concepts in Healy's work.
Public and private subtly interlock in one of his later projects, a large, one family summer home on the coast of New Jersey. There the private quarters bedrooms, kitchen connect to the common area which, open on a magnificent view of the bay, can receive the golden Summer light.
Light, then, acts as an intermediary between spheres, and Healy's transparent and airy structures allow it to flourish. He also uses color to bridge the world outside and within a house, or as he puts it, to create "poetic vacancies for others to inhabit."
Although Healy especially praised Van Gogh, his vivid yellows and blues undoubtedly harken back to the Californian pool series of David Hockney. Both artists favor flat, subdued tones to better reflect the bright sun and play off the cloudless sky.
Another artist who possibly influenced some of Healy's buildings is Edward Rusha. Rusha paid homage to the iconic beauty of highway billboards in "Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas," now in the Hood museum collection. Healy's "Billboard Project," an early design for a Nappa Valley resident, reflects similar interests in roadside advertising.
A third ingredient Healy likes to work with is humor. For a home on Long Beach, New Jersey, he included architectural metaphors to symbolize "beach culture." A pillar looks like a surf board, a giant sunscreen protects the main living room, and, surprisingly, a red vertical glass structure is made to resemble a telephone booth.
However, the lecture ended on a far from humorous note. When a person in the audience asked why, for a major redevelopment plan in Atlantic City, he did not build a grand-scale housing project, Healy invoked the destructive, monotonous effects of Modernist interventions.
But how could an artist who celebrates the uniqueness of a location with color, light and humor admire the grim housing projects that still today lend uniformity, banality to our urban and suburban landscapes? Healy's art stresses difference, vitality. And to drive this point home once and for all, he quoted the painter Agnes Martin's definition of art: "Art makes subtle emotions concrete."
The next and final Studio Art lecture for the Winter term will be held next Tuesday in Loew Auditorium at 4:30 P.M. The painter George Rose will speak about his work, which will soon be the subject of an exhibition at the Jaffe-Friede Gallery in the Hopkins Center.
