No Runway Model Poem by gershon hepner

Aloof, less stunning than a runway model,
maturing less well than a vintage wine,
the aging beauty who would molly-coddle
so many men who stood for her on line,
attracting them with couture that was haute,
can’t now conceal her wrinkles with her cream,
distraught because her favorite poet wrote:
“Reality will always trump a dream.”

Dismayed by her decay, and quite detached
from those who now pursue new models, she
recalls how when her beauty was unmatched
she could control her fate, which, accompli,
is now beyond control but not reproof,
and therefore is unwilling to ignore
her former friends, who, as she stands aloof,
regret the fact that she does not withdraw.

Inspired by Christopher Hawthorne’s report from Dallas describing its arts center (“Strangers in Dallas’ arts scene, ” LA Times, October 7,2009) :

[T]he new buildings feel detached not only from the city around them but also from each other. Because of its size, siting and the umbrella-like reach of its canopy, the opera house has taken up an undeniably central position in the district. But like the theater, it has a distinct personality and exerts its own separate sphere of influence. This is true of the district's older designs as well - Pei's 1989 Meyerson Symphony Center seems entirely uninterested in any sort of urban dialogue with Barnes' 1984 Dallas Museum of Art, for example. And the 2003 Nasher Sculpture Center by Piano and landscape architect Peter Walker, tucked away behind high travertine walls, exists in its own world; it puts as much distance as architecturally possible between itself and the parking lots and freeway access roads that sidle up near it. To an extent this sort of individuality is unavoidable. What board of trustees wants its new opera house to match the museum down the block? Still, the phenomenon has grown more attenuated and more extreme now, in the waning light of the starchitecture era. Cultural buildings by Koolhaas, Foster and their leading competitors can be as stunning and as aloof as runway models, looking at their neighbors in ways both haughty and wary. That sense of detachment, touched with a bit of superiority, is what, inconveniently enough, gives the Wyly a good deal of its architectural force. It is a technically advanced building, to be sure, with its equipment and rigging arranged above the reconfigurable stage, rather than beside or behind it. That allows the theater to have an unusually tall and narrow shape, to grow vertically instead of horizontally: The footprint of the building, essentially, is the footprint of the auditorium, which is wrapped in the glass on three sides.

10/7/09