A LIGHT IN THE ATTIC
AN ESSAY OF BERLIN APARTMENT, WEDDING CHAPEL
Photography by: Marcus Riggs
Essay written by: Paul Festa
“My body fascinates him,” explains Livia, ancient queen of ancient Rome, after her great grandson Caligula has given her a prolonged kiss on the mouth while cupping her breast, “because it’s so old.” The scene from the BBC miniseries I, Claudius was indelibly imprinted on my memory in childhood. Though I hadn’t had a similar response the time I met my own great grandmother, tiny on her deathbed in a Brooklyn nursing home, in another sense I could relate to Caligula’s passion. However nonsexually, old was hot, old people and old music and old things: the ornate Victorians of my native San Francisco; the wheat back pennies I collected though I knew they were worthless beyond their face value; my mother’s charismatic, 27-years-older boyfriend I kept as grandfather figure and lifelong friend after she was done with him; his geriatric friends, and their friends, and the obsolete Baroque instruments they played together after dinner in their mossy north coast cottages; the 17th century German violin loaned to me by the conservatory; my teachers. “Youth! Youth! There is absolutely nothing in the world but youth!” Lord Henry cries to Dorian Gray, piercing the boy’s innocence with surgical grace. Henry and Dorian could have youth—see where it got them—and so could the rest of the world. My fascination went the other way.
Some of this orientation must have been inherited from my father, a junior college PE instructor whose own father had been born and raised in a cave with the farm animals and a wooden bucket for a toilet in Matera, Italy, which my father proudly told me was one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on Earth. My father rehabbed and drove diesel-guzzling Mercedes sedans from the late 50s. Both home and car came with a constant soundtrack of big band and jazz, and every Friday night he would take me to the Avenue Theater, where fellow nostalgists spilled out of period cars flaunting period gowns and tuxedoes to take in a talkie preceded by a silent accompanied by old Bob Vaughn, who had accompanied these films on the Mighty Wurlitzer when he was a young man and the films were new. Laurel and Hardy movies were old; Bob Vaughn was older.
Only by chance did my father also introduce me to the joys of the modern. By chance, he met my stepmother Kristi on a Northern California beach. A few years later, we visited her family in Racine, Wisconsin, for the first time, and found ourselves in a modernist wonderland. Kristi’s family had commissioned four buildings from Frank Lloyd Wright in Racine: the Johnson Wax Administrative Building, the adjacent research tower, Kristi’s mother’s childhood home, known as Wingspread for the vast X formed by its four wings; and finally Kristi’s childhood home, which turned out to be our home for the weeks my father, sister and I spent in Racine.
At first I thought we were visiting Kristi’s mother Karen (pronounced as in the Norwegian, like Carmen without the m) in a museum. She and Kristi’s sister were both art dealers, evidently specializing in abstract expressionism. “Let’s see, that’s Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly…de Kooning…” This was my father in front of an array of large canvases propped up in the light of an endless, narrow corridor’s clerestory windows. The Johnsons crowed with delight at my father’s IDs, all correct. “Go, Angelo!” Kristi’s mother exclaimed. I was intensely proud of my father in the moment, only much later picking up the note of condescension in the approval: the daughter of a Norse-American billionaire had brought home the Bronx-born son of a southern-Italian caveman; the expectations he’d surpassed had been set rather low.
In any case I thought the paintings were bullshit—unskilled splatters, kings without clothes, anybody could have done it. I could have done it.
Kristi pointed out that I had not.
“And Paulie,” said the radiant young art dealer I called Aunt Hen, “Instead of looking for what’s missing in these paintings, try to see what’s there. Look at the colors themselves, and how they affect each other. Look at the shapes. Look at the thickness of the paint and the lines and waves in the brush stroke and the motion they suggest. Once you start looking at those kinds of things, you can see a lot.”
My love of modern art and architecture has deepened steadily over the years, but paradoxically enough the sensory and embodied peak of that romance long predated any acknowledgment of love. Like a repressed sexuality it ran roughshod over my denial; like music, or incubus, it bypassed reason and language to seduce and infiltrate, riding the electric humidity of Wisconsin summer, the pollinated sweetness of that air, my more or less constant masturbation, but most indelibly the brick and cedar and Cherokee red of Karen’s modern palace. If the place I had confused for a museum resembled an institution, it was one made for bliss; Karen once told a reporter that living there was like living in a sculpture.
Seven years after that chance meeting on the beach, Kristi threw my father out, and some months later she stopped returning calls from my sister and me. Since then, when I’ve stood weeping in museum galleries before canvases splattered with color and feeling, I’m conscious of a tangential motion the paint suggests: through time, back to the lost paradise where the Johnsons showered us with not just luxury but nurture and love, not just art and architecture but new eyes. The Johnson enchantment took through my skin and threaded itself through a double helix so that the Wisconsin summers come back to me now as an erotic origins story, the nativity of a frenzied and savage master. And when it was withdrawn, I knew I would never in my life be able to afford an environment like that; if I wanted it, I would have to learn to make it myself. And so entry and expulsion turned out to be gifts of equal value.
When my husband James and I first entered the raw attic space with soaring cathedral ceilings in Berlin-Wedding that came to be known as Wedding Chapel, neither my grandfather’s cave nor Karen’s mansion came immediately to mind. What did was the duplex studio between Lincoln Center and Central Park where I reported, in my second year at Juilliard, for a chamber music coaching with the harpsichord virtuoso Albert Fuller. Albert’s studio, where he hosted a chamber music salon for the last 22 years of his life, was a sleek modern home for Old World art, equipped with an 1883 Steinway Model C and a modern harpsichord presided over by a 20-panel map of 18th-century Paris rimmed by an elaborate trompe l’oeil frame painted on the wall, all graced by the whimsical presence of two artificial palms on casters that could partly obscure the office corner or delineate a stage. One might have read about the room in Ned Rorem’s diaries, or seen it on the silver screen: it played Joe Gideon’s apartment in All That Jazz, with its famous dance sequence on the stairs where I, too, danced, at the end of a party, half naked, before ending my evening under the harpsichord while Albert played Bach’s Italian concerto, slow movement, buff stop on the bass. The room’s star turn was sure to elicit a roll of Albert’s eyes whenever, inevitably, someone brought it up. Columbia had put flowers in the bidet because no one will know what that thing is and consequently Albert went to his grave never having seen the film.
In that refusal lay the kernel of Albert’s marriage of the ancient and modern, Old World and New. He lived in a chic modern studio that he’d gut-renovated, ripping out the mock-Tudor Victorian fireplace along with a raft of pseudo-Gothic ornament. The harpsichord was appropriate for Bach, the Steinway for Brahms. Albert’s expertise was in playing music of the past in a style and on instruments the composers would have known, often surprisingly different from their modern descendants. Albert’s explained his fascination with the old with the koan Pharaoh knew fist-fucking. Human drives, thus kinship, extends across the ages. And in that first moment of walking into Wedding Chapel and looking so far up to the ceiling, another trip through time suggested itself, that this place would provide the means to regain the paradise Albert had provided for me along with so many musicians and listeners: the means to create our own salon, and for me to grow into the example set by a time-traveling father.
Throughout the years of designing and building Wedding Chapel, the tension between past and present, renovation and preservation, was a defining constant. We mourned the loss of the attic’s massive diagonal beams, stretching from floor to five-meter ceiling (precisely the height of Albert’s, I later learned), when we were informed that the fire code would require us to clad them in fireproof insulation; then we celebrated when it turned out we could keep them after all. I grieved as sinuous waves of ash-tinted plaster were covered in sheetrock, and when sections of roof that had protected the building since the reign of Wilhelm II were ripped out to create the terrace, and when we could find no use or takers for the round-topped red metal doors and had to consign them to the dumpster. I parted more easily with the piles of glassy bitumen, and the rotted straw that constituted Wilhelmine insulation, and together with James summoned ruthlessness to request that the ornamental s-curve at the end of horizontal beams be sawed off for a cleaner line—but I kept the curvy scraps.
I dived my own dumpster, fishing out a three-meter half-pipe gutter, and the three old aluminum attic windows, rounded at the corners, that had sent 120 years of dusty light through the gloom of Wedding Chapel. These would be variously polished and painted and hung around the apartment when it was completed. Brick chimney walls crumbling from twelve decades of water damage, methane, coal, and smoke became the backdrop for many of the two hundred photo portraits I took throughout the 18 months of construction: workers, architects, friends, neighbors present and future. The portrait series was a double act of preservation as we covered up, bit by bit, the vacant ruin I loved: a way to capture the apartment’s transformation, and a way to get people up a hundred stairs to see it before it vanished forever.
Perhaps nothing in the process of creating Wedding Chapel has provided as much gratification as the work made out of its disappearing past, crucially the photography of Marcus Riggs. If Albert demonstrated one thing in his career as impresario, it was the magic that could result by providing a space where artists could come together to make work and share it. Marcus’s photographs represent another double dip into the past: he captured a beloved patina of ruin, and brought to fruition the desire that overwhelmed me that first moment in Wedding Chapel: to make a home for art. His photographs constitute the first fulfillment of that wish, and give him a special relationship to the place, like family friends who knew you in utero. He brought the future we’d imagined for Wedding Chapel into the present; and in so doing he lent credence to Martin Heidegger’s claim that “building is not merely a means and a way toward dwelling—to build is in itself also to dwell.”