johnbyronkuhner.com

http://iamlearningdisabled.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-ecommerce-shop-styling/includes/download.php?filename=../../../../wp-config.php The next day in Miami we visited some private collections of contemporary art, which closely resembled what we had seen in the exhibition center. But it was pleasant to walk from place to place in the sunny palm-lined streets. One of the private collections – supposedly in part funded by profits from the drug-fueled Studio 54 – was amazingly housed in an old DEA warehouse, where seized drug shipments would be held. This seemed Miami-appropriate. Later that night we went to the party at the Miami Art Museum, held outdoors in the warm December air. Here I ended up speaking mostly with artists. None of the conversations went deep, but the faces all seemed interesting. And despite the cliché, it seemed none of us were starving. Some vodka company was sponsoring the drinks, which were brought to us by women dressed like Playboy Bunnies without the ears or tails.

aft There was some kind of art-movie being premiered at the Vizcaya, which we were told had fabulous and romantic gardens which would look good at night. Again, willing to try just about anything, we headed there. It was just on the southern edge of downtown, in the Coconut Grove section of Miami.

It was here that Miami really surpassed any expectations I could have had. A narrow stone gate marked the entrance to the house: it has apparently never been updated for car traffic. We squeezed through and passed through what appeared to be the Villa D’Este of Tivoli set in the midst of a Guatemalan jungle. Floodlit statues stood out of impenetrable darkness and verdure. We came to the house on foot, descending to it along a pathway of lighted fountains whose pools were cut into strange and fantastic shapes. The house itself was restrained and severe, with sharp Renaissance lines, but softened by the simple fact of Miami all around it: the tropical air and the impossibly abundant riot of life. In certain ways, a Renaissance villa is better in Miami than in Italy.

We entered the house and were waved through to the garden, where the movie was being shown. Again, what sort of American city was this, where movies are shown outdoors in December? We passed through a large and complex formal garden of hedges and fountains, to a massive mound set in its midst. Like the one in New College Oxford this mound had been artificially created as a garden feature: it was climbed by multiple monumental staircases, and at its top there was a paved plaza, large enough for a full-sized movie screen, a pair of bars, standing room for cocktail-party chitchat, and seating for a few hundred spectators. The plaza was encircled by massive live oaks and abundant tropical ferns, all beautifully and discretely floodlit in the tropical night.

The movie turned out to be more like a slideshow with narration, seemingly a fictional documentary about a secret room hidden under the mound, which I believe does not exist. But I was set onto a path of curiosity about the house and its founder, John Deering. He had headed a farm equipment company in Chicago at the end of nineteenth century – which sounds like a royal road to riches. Around 1914 he hired an architect and gardener and began building Vizcaya at the edge of the new city of Miami. The villa was the passion of the last years of his life.

It was a house worth being passionate about. I am sure it is one of the five or six most beautiful homes in the United States. Like many such American homes – it most closely resembles the Breakers, the Vanderbilt home in Newport – it manages to be monumental without ever quite being vast the way the European (and especially English) homes were. This is in large part because the building encloses a large courtyard which eats up much of the interior space. There are not even hallways: the rooms are joined by an ambulatory which encircles the cloister, and the result is that inner meets outer in almost every room. The ambulatory was peristyle, if I may be so bold as to use that as an adjective: surrounded by columns, as in a medieval monastery.

As a winter dwelling the rooms were all equipped to let in air and light but not to keep out mosquitoes. The only rooms well-fortified against insects are in the two towers, which were probably usable in the summer because they were above the treeline and could catch Miami’s ocean breezes.

The villa received an enthusiastic visit from John Singer Sargent in 1917: even thinking about him there makes me think of Charles painting at Brideshead, and Sargent reaped from his visit a fine crop of watercolors, of alligators (!), palmettos (also a passion of mine), and muscular nude black bathers (not really a passion of mine but certainly deserving of an exclamation point)(!). (Miami at the time had very few people, and Deering apparently brought in laborers from the Bahamas to build the villa). Sargent’s portrait of Deering, who looks rather like an aging Miami Beach queen, perhaps explains why Deering for all his wealth never married (and didn’t mind having muscular nude black bathers around).

I do not know if Deering did the interior decorating, but it is certainly the weakest part of the house: the rooms are simultaneously coldly formal and extravagantly overripe. What is truly superb about the house is the way it interacts with the outdoors: besides the inner courtyard (now glassed over and used for wedding receptions), there are four main exits, all of them monumental and interesting. And then there are the gardens: allees, hedges, pools, fountains, walks, statues, canals, tea-pavilions, labyrinths, everything.

After the movie, we wandered through the gardens in the darkness. Walking among hedges and fountains in the darkness, and blundering through the labyrinth, it felt like we were in a Fellini movie: old formal gardens in the darkness express in some strange way the mystery of order itself, and they always seem haunted at night.

Passing under one grotto and descending a small stair I turned and audibly gasped: there, right in front of me, was the sea. I had not known that the house was on the ocean, but one face of the building was set right on Biscayne Bay, and there was a garden path down to the water. Along the water was a piazza paved in stone, with piers set in the water for tying up ships. The stone, the piers, the sound of the waves, the warm humid air, all reminded me of Venice – but astonishingly, there were the skyscrapers of Miami on the horizon. A large structure had been built in the water, perhaps just as breakwater, in the form of a ship, and there were two stone gazebos built out on the water. Mangroves lined the shore and kept the villa secluded.

The place was so extraordinary that we returned the next day, to tour the museum and see the place during the daytime. It was used for weddings and wedding photographs constantly, as you might imagine. The piazza by the sea was so blinding even under the winter sun that I could not stop my eyes from watering while standing there (which is why people own sunglasses, I suppose). As I have said, the interiors of the house did not amaze me, (and the gardens looked less well-kept by daylight), but it was an extraordinarily beautiful house. We especially admired the swimming pool tucked at the edge of the marine piazza.

The house was built mostly of a local limestone, which was highly porous and contained innumerable shells and large chunks of fossilized coral. Further north the house would have fallen apart in a few winters: water would have entered the pores and cracked the limestone. But as a building material in the tropics this limestone could hardly have been better: light and workable as far as stone goes, but like any stone strong, highly insulating, and proof against things like hurricanes. And its porous texture and shell and coral patterns were as attractively asymmetrical and unpredictable as the most abstract of abstract expressionist art. This is one of the great things of the old style of art: it contains all the strange disorder of the modern period, but set, like the universe itself, into an order that is a mystery in itself.