Word: station
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...intent at Porter Square is to provide station design that sensitively integrates art with architecture; not a series of isolated visual incidents or a gallery of selected "art works" within the station, but rather to consider the entire spatial experience as the sum of all the physical elements, thereby to create a humane environment. Cambridge Seven Associates, Architects...
...Line extension project ever gets out as far as Porter Square, the intersection of Massachusetts and Somerville Avenues will never be the same. After reviewing the work of some 300 artists, Cambridge Seven architects heading the project commissioned seven to draw up plans for decorating the proposed station. Although the artists say they discussed their ideas with each other in order to achieve an integrated, co-operative effect, each was given his own portion of the station with which to experiment; and it shows. Cambridge Arts Council spokeswoman Jennifer Dowling promises that every artist will ultimately be represented when...
...problem with the show (and ultimately with the station, if all goes according to plan) is simple. Take seven different artists, more than seven different materials, and no matter how hard you try, you get a series of isolated visual incidents." Even the co-sponsors of the project can't agree in philosophy. Architect Cambridge Seven hope to express "the nature of a subway station as one of transition and movement, a place where people are 'passing through' en route to a destination...
...individual works on display are very good, although perhaps less significant to sweeping movements in modern art than their creators believe. Mags Harries' whimsical idea of using gloves--in piles, gripping rails, pushing imaginary buttons--as a constant image that the passenger follows from one point of the station to another is amusing, even if the philosophy behind is somewhat extravagant. The gloves, she writes in an explanation of her works, "are anthropomorphic objects with many character possibilities and by their multiplication, take on a life form that might be analgous to the people movement in the subway." Sure...
...works designed for the station's exterior should blend smoothly with the lines of the building. They don't. For the outer court, David Phillips has designed a series of cut stones for the plaza. "I have never thought of myself as a stone carver," he writes. "I didn't want to remove material or change the essential nature." Yet he has not only cut and placed stones to clutter the plaza. He, like Harries, has decided his objects would look better bronzed. The effect, if one takes the model as an indicator of things to come, is terribly pretentious...