Savonarola in Nylon Skeins

San Francisco Artist Bruce Conner paints and pastes together his caustic collages and assemblages from all manner of thrift-shop odds and ends. When they were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's "Art of Assemblage" in 1961, William Seitz, the show's organizer, was sufficiently impressed to rank Conner on a par with Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Yet, while the latter two have gone on to Venicelebrity and $20,000 canvases, Conner, at 34, remains mainly an underground hero, known to the world at large only for his fine experimental films.

What the current exhibit of 73 of his works at Philadelphia's Institute of Contemporary Art has demonstrated is that Conner remains as fine an artist as the pop laureates, and is far fiercer. In their own way, his fragile panels and boxes, smeared with black wax and ornamented with tarnished jewelry, Victorian wallpaper, girlie postcards and other detritus, shock and edify much as does a scabrous Matthias Grunewald crucifixion, or the death's-head kept as a memento mori by medieval princes.

"Why are people concerned about the permanency of material things," asks Conner, "when they themselves may not be here tomorrow" His entire output illustrates the question, picturing death in life, the swift passage of beauty as an integral part of growth, with a chilly poetry that haunts the viewer like the ghost of Savonarola. Crucifixion, a 7-ft.-high cross with a black, rotting cadaver, skeined by a cobweb of raveled nylon stockings, comments acridly both on the original sacrifice and its loss of contemporary meaning, while lesser works recall that Conner tried marijuana in the early 1960s.

At the moment, Conner is as bored with drugs as he is with assemblages. His belated artistic recognition concerns him very little, since his future projects are all for films and he intends his present museum show to be his last. Conner considers museums a form of death in life, a technique for embalming art so that people can avoid seeing its relevance to their lives. "Why," he asks with a smile, "should I participate in my own funeral?"

ARCHITECTURE

A Core of Light

The conventional way to build a "status" office building in Manhattan today is to erect a slender tower set back on a giant open plaza. But the Ford Foundation is the world's largest philanthropic organization, dedicated, among other things, to "fostering the realization of individual human dignity and worth." It gives away $300 million a year, much of it for studies to improve city living and architecture, and for the arts.

Accordingly, when it decided in the early 1960s to move from cramped offices on Madison Avenue, it called for a building that would symbolize its esthetic preoccupations and, as President McGeorge Bundy (who took office in early 1966) puts it, "give the best urban environment for working people." The new $16 million Ford Foundation headquarters, into which some 350 executives, technicians and secretaries have now moved, is a twelve-story work of art, as fresh and bold to look at from the outside as it is invigorating to work in.

Granite for Dignity. To do the job. Ford called on the relatively unknown team of Kevin Roche, 45, and John Dinkeloo, 49, who as the chief design and engineering associates of Eero Saarinen carried on his firm when he died in 1961. Roche and Dinkeloo beat out weighty competition for the Ford contract, primarily on the strength of their performances in completing Saarinen buildings such as Manhattan's CBS Building, St. Louis' Gateway Arch and Washington's Dulles Airport.

Designer Roche early ruled against setting the new Ford Foundation Building on its own plaza, which, he points out, "in New York really means a piece of unused sidewalk, it's a zoning definition." He decided instead to turn the building inward, around a giant interior court. After endlessly prowling about and photographing the site, on 42nd Street east of Second Avenue, before construction began, he decided that, rather than busy 42nd Street, adjacent Tudor City, a 1920s luxury-housing development, with its surrounding open spaces and parks, was the direction toward which to orient. The 165-ft. columns were therefore set at an angle to channel the view toward the neighboring play areas and gardens. Says Roche: "Then we just opened one corner so that the spaces would flow together visually, and that was the basic building."

To give the structure unostentatious dignity, the columns are sheathed in grey-brown Canadian granite, flecked with red and orange, and joined with only 1/16 in. of mortar. To keep the building all of a piece, Roche and Dinkeloo supervised every detail of the Ford Foundation's custom-made interiors, combining mahogany, polished bronze fittings and beige rugs to go with the subdued, rusty gold Cor-Ten steel.

Visual Community. What makes the building unique is the twelve-story core of greenery and light occupying the southeastern corner of its plot. Employees in the L-shaped office floors that rim the northern and western sides of the building have a choice of looking across the court through the 125-ft.-high "glass wall" into each others' offices, or down at a moist and fragrant garden, landscaped with 30-ft-high magnolia trees, a water-lily pool and 999 different kinds of shrubs.

Aside from providing a year-round whiff of nature, the courtyard is essential, according to Roche, because it gives employees a sense of community. In a conventional building, he argues, "the worker takes an elevator up to his floor, and goes to his office. You have to depend on memos to make him aware he's a member of a group." Like other Ford employees, McGeorge Bundy has been converted to Roche's views, even though employees walking along the eleventh-floor corridor leading to the dining room can see into his tenth-floor office overlooking 42nd Street. "I always run an open-door office, anyway," says Bundy gamely. "I think Roche got it right."

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