The Life and Death of Buildings at the Princeton Art Museum

As the nation prepares to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the World Trade Center bombings on September 11, a new exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum explores the question of how the arts can contribute to an understanding of the experience of calamity.

The Life and Death of Buildings which opened on July 23 and will run through November 6, 2011, is described by Joel Smith, the museum’s Peter C. Bunnell Curator of Photography, as an “oblique meditation” on the 10^th anniversary of 9/11.

One of the most haunting and memorable pieces in the collection is Peter Hujar’s black and white photograph of the Twin Towers, titled World Trade Center, Twilight, taken in 1976.  

Connie Lyons lives near Philadelphia and came to Princeton specifically to see this exhibition. Her son is a New York City fireman, though he was not working in the city on the day the terrorist bombs exploded. She remembers taking her son and his sister to the top of the World Trade Center when they were children.

“I wanted to see this photo, to see how the towers were expressed so long ago,” said Lyons. “When I look at this picture now, all I can feel is sorrow for our country.”

The exhibition features many photographs, including a seventy-two-image series called the Destruction of Lower Manhattan by photographer Danny Lyon. The pictures were given to the museum recently, a gift from M. Robin Krasny, Class of 1973. Ironically, many of the buildings immortalized in the photographs were torn down to make way for new, modern buildings, including the World Trade Center.

Professor Dirk Hartog and his wife, Nancy, were struck in particular by a photograph of downtown New York taken by Berenice Abbott. Hartog is a professor of American history at Princeton University and since they live nearby, he and his wife are always checking out the museum’s new exhibits.

“Every time we go to New York and see buildings, it seems they change but look better,” said Nancy Hartog. “They change more slowly than we do,” agreed her husband. 

The idea of change over time is one of the central themes of the exhibition, which also explores how photography can preserve the past, and then link the past to the present through the eyes of the viewer.  

One of those viewers is Mauricio Coutinho, a visitor from Brazil who is in Princeton visiting friends and came to the museum because he enjoys photography.

 “I like watching a building evolve from new to old and how a photograph can capture a moment of a building in time,” said Coutinho. “It is an interesting idea. It is about a changing environment.”

One of the more eye-catching and unusual displays is a work called Splitting: Four Corners, created by Gordon Matta-Clark in 1974. Taking up the whole center of a room, it consists of the four roof corners taken from a house from a condemned neighborhood in Englewood, New Jersey.

The exhibition also takes the visitor to far-flung places around the world, from a Peruvian mountaintop to the Siberian tundra. A photomosaic of prints takes visitors into one of the dark ages of American history, with its depiction of the Tule Lake Relocation Camp for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War Two.  

The Life and Death of Buildings is housed in the special exhibits section of the Princeton University Art Museum. Admission to the Museum is free.