Bob Cassilly - Architect?

City Museum is not what you would expect it to be. It's a massive art installation installed and threaded through the guts of an old shoe factory, inside and out, created from sculpted concrete, wood, rebar, old airplanes, and massive pieces of architecture and industrial machinery. Designed and run totally for the enjoyment of people to come and play in it, mostly children. It's a place that has no equal that I've ever seen or heard about.

It's founder, Bob Cassilly, died a few days ago, and I went to the public memorial service. It was a low key affair. The mayor spoke and suggested that city hall had been behind him all the way and all the time. In fact, Bob spent most of his time constructing City Museum fighting the bureaucracy and the code officials. 

Actually, for me, this is where he was incredibly inspirational. He was an artist with some talent, but what made him really exceptional was his drive to overcome. It sounds like he never took 'no' for an answer, built first and applied for permits second, and generally built enough momentum to literally move mountains. I've been to City Museum twice and I can't believe something like that ever got built. It is way too interesting and complex and dangerous. Maybe its because it's something that doesn't have to justified along utilitarian or economic lines.

His brother spoke about danger, and the value of danger. Anyone who has been to City Museum knows what he means. There is some danger to playing in city museum. Danger, he said, has a way of waking us up all the way, to really force us to live in the moment. And it fits well with the City Museum- its a very exciting place, the spaces range in size from ten story atriums to tiny nooks and crannies only accessible by very small children. There is danger, but the danger is manifest in the appearance and exhilaration of the space, in the same way poison dart frogs are brilliantly colored as a means of marking the danger. Most architecture I've been to that has been dangerous has been so in the most dangerous way, in a bland fashion which attempts to disguise, rather than celebrate, the danger of the moment, so people stay in the bland haze of obliviousness of their surroundings.

Lastly, Bob was called many things, but 'architect' was not one of them. 'Design' was said once in the entire memorial. 'Architecture' was not even mentioned. Bob was described as a member of the "benevolent arts," which made me think about architecture. I don't think that one can call architecture a "benevolent art" by any stretch of the imagination. Bernard Tschumi, in an impassioned manifesto, declared that only unbuilt architecture, paper architecture, had any real revolutionary, or one could read, artistic, value, because once it is built, it has been corrupted by the act of building by constructors, and as real estate becomes commodified, and by its presence affirms a hegemony of political and economic will. 

I think City Museum should be a required field trip for educating architects. There is something utterly fantastic and uninhibited about it- it is a primer on the ability of spaces to delight the senses and on how the body fundamentally relates to space. City Museum taps into primal urges of curiosity, to climb, to explore with the body, the joy of the cipher and labyrinth, lessons I would like to see return to architecture.