Form Follows Fantasy

By KURT ANDERSEN

Practical-minded modern Americans have been contemptuous of follies, those curious buildings meant only to charm and delight. But recent architectural fashion has been tending toward the fey, even the frivolous. This winter in the American heartland, form follows fantasy completely: in St. Paul and Galveston, Texas, local volunteers have just finished putting up elaborate municipal whimsies.

As the centerpiece of its centennial winter carnival, St. Paul has a neogothic ice palace twelve stories tall. And with its Mardi Gras celebrations as a happy pretext, downtown Galveston has seven exotic ceremonial arches designed by a remarkable group of architects. The ice palace and the arches were both finished last week.

Both cities are caught up in revivalist sprees. Galveston's arches have been erected in the rehabilitated old quarter of downtown. Even the local celebration of Fat Tuesday is a recent revival of tradition, and commemorative arches went up once before, in 1881.

Some of the 1986 arches allude explicitly to that extravagant era when follies proliferated; some are simply giddy. Their very existence seems fair evidence that a new gilded age is under way. For even though the seven architects (Charles Moore, Cesar Pelli, Stanley Tigerman, Michael Graves, Helmut Jahn and Texans Boone Powell and Eugene Aubry) worked for free, the arches cost $35,000 to $70,000 apiece; the budgets had been $25,000. Fortunately for Galvestonians, the project has deep-pocket private patrons.

Moore has developed a subspecialty in this sort of high-camp Gulf ephemeron: for New Orleans he designed the Piazza d'Italia and the snazziest part of the 1984 World's Fair. His Galveston arch, a pair of towers connected by wire mesh, is more of the same, a flibbertigibbet accretion of painted waves, plywood sea creatures, banners, arches, gables, windows, lights, action. Aubry's rigid canopy of pleated gold fiber glass, topped by a big wooden fish, is baffling but unequivocally vulgar--like kitsch from another planet, or a collaboration between Claes Oldenburg and Cher. Powell's arch, with its oversize keystones, is a frolicking postmodernist fancy, circa 1980. Jahn has used the tensile imagery of naval architecture (masts, rigging, an upturned hull) to produce a fine object, jaunty but tough--a structure considerably more appealing, in fact, than his skyscrapers.

Tigerman's four-sided Roman arch is the most literally classical of the lot, although its instant statuary (stucco-sprayed mannequins) does madcap violence to any deeper notion of classicism. Graves' handsome copper-roofed arch is better behaved and more civic than the rest; it wants to be a real building. As for Pelli, the neomodernist turns out to be a cryptoprimitivist. His open-faced sandwich of long two-by-fours forms a kind of aboriginal latticework gate and seems Southwestern in the best sense: simple, staunch, serene.

If the follies in Galveston are gay, the ice palace is grand, St. Paul's largest in this century. Its central tower is 127 ft. 10 in. high. Some 10,000 blocks of ice, 600 lbs. each, have been nudged into position. At night the palace is aglow: hundreds of computer-controlled lights line the hollow interiors.

For the several people from Ellerbe Associates who designed the palace and the several hundred trade-union volunteers who built it, the resemblance to a gothic cathedral is not merely stylistic. For weeks, through a mortifying, mercurial Minnesota winter, two 80-man shifts have worked six days a week to finish what is, after all, a kind of fairy-tale church. The picturesque asymmetry, however, saves the palace from seeming grave. "Ours was not a modernist solution," said Karl Ermanis, the palace's chief architect, as if there were any doubts. The designers borrowed from King Ludwig II, Piranesi, Gaudi, Maxfield Parrish and Walt Disney. There are some fetching small touches: off to one side is an ersatz ice ruin and a skull-shaped ice cave.

Architectural flights of fancy are one thing in concrete or (especially) dry wall, but who knows how to build in ice? As a structural material, ice turns out to be not unlike stone, but then the skills of classic masonry are scarce these days. Ice harvesting, an ordinary annual ritual when St. Paul built its first palace, is at least as arcane. The lost arts have been revived: massive ice chunks were chainsawed from Lake Phalen, floated to an underwater conveyor belt, broken into blocks (21 in. by 2 ft. by 3 1/2 ft.), / shaved, sluiced down a long wooden chute, trimmed, plucked by a crane and set into place with a mortar of slushy snow.

"How high are we now?" asked an ice mason at the end of his shift one recent afternoon. "Right around 56 ft.," replied his boss. The laborer chuckled and shook his head at the preposterous wonder of the thing. But even great architecture seldom endures forever, and the ice palace will last barely a fortnight: demolition is scheduled for next Thursday.