Current Thinking

Baby, Are You for Real?

Los Angeles auctioneer Peter Loughrey offers a tale of aesthetic detective work

Occasionally I am asked by a potential purchaser, “How do you know this is real?” Although I’m tempted to answer with a quip about ontology, I know the question is not about philosophy. It’s really about proof—documented proof—of authenticity. What it comes down to is this:

"I prove it and you’ll buy it.”

With modern furniture, such concerns can often be satisfied by simply pointing to a label or showing the purchaser a book that features the design. But fine art is much trickier. Recently, I represented a painting by Keith Haring that had apparently never been published. The seller, who was the original owner, had acquired it directly from the artist, and it had never been exhibited. While it had a bold, confident signature, I knew the painting would have to be authenticated before I could sell it. Fortunately, Haring’s works can be reviewed by the Keith Haring Foundation—the recognized authority on the artist’s work.

Ideally an organization like this has the ability to check its records and supply confirmation by way of the artist’s own notes, photographs, or receipts, and provide a smoking gun, if you will. Absent that gun, its opinion is considered conclusive.

I submitted detailed photographs of the work, but the foundation was reluctant to render an opinion and requested a better image of the signature. Getting a tight close-up of the signature meant removing the piece from the original frame. When I did so, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before: a distinct and clear fingerprint in the signature. It appeared to have been left while the paint was wet. I excitedly informed the foundation, but the people there logically reasoned it could be anyone’s fingerprint—perhaps even the framer’s—and in any case they didn’t have Haring’s fingerprints on file. However, they were intrigued. Haring, when making his early chalk drawings on subway hoardings, had been arrested several times for vandalism. The foundation contacted the New York Police Department to see if it could access his fingerprints. Amazingly, the NYPD sent digital images of the prints to the foundation the same day. Shortly thereafter, the foundation sent me an email saying it was ready to issue an opinion that the work was authentic.

The opinion itself didn’t change anything about the painting. It simply gave the buyer confidence in its
authenticity. Or, to put it another way, an answer to the question ”How do I know it’s real?” What Plato would think is another matter. M

Above: This untitled 1981 Keith Haring painting sold at LAMA's December 6, 2009 auction for $88,812, off of a pre-sale estimate of $25,000 to $35,000.

Peter Loughrey is the co-founder and proprietor of Los Angeles Modern Auctions.

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Check out more articles from our Spring 2010 issue by clicking on the "Current Issue" tab at left.

Dreaming, Drawing and Designing

Like many a budding architect, Shane Stock speaks of his designs in terms that are both lyrical and logical. Stock is now in the construction phase of his latest project, one in which the main structure and the surrounding grounds, are both meant to evoke a sense of lightness. “Buildings that make us feel lighter are more attractive,” he says. “I’m inspired by greenhouse spaces with a lot of windows and a lot of light. I have a ‘rain drop’ hotel design that I’m working on—mostly made out of glass.” His current building, however, employs different building materials. It is constructed from white cardboard and ornamented with a variety of colored markers. It stands approximately twelve inches tall, and fits nicely on his classroom’s desktop. Shane Stock is, after all, a fifth grader enrolled in a studio program, called “Architots,” in the Middle Village neighborhood of the borough of Queens, in New York City.

Architots Floor Plan

Started in 2002, Architots has a mission to introduce kids to architecture and design from an early age. “The goal,” says founder Michael Macaluso, is to “change the way children interact with their built surroundings and help them to understand their space in a unique, different, and exciting way.” Each student is encouraged to study the nuances of global design, relying on fundamental mathematics and geometry to inform their work, create designs that are exciting and unique. Shane Stock has been with the group for several years. Working in such an environment, he says, “Gives me ideas about building and space that I never had before. Adding and subtracting space from a building design lets me look at the design piece by piece. It’s an opportunity to be creative and to experiment.”


The importance of an early interest in architecture is something Macaluso understands well. As the son of an architect, a love and passion for building and design was ingrained in him as a child, and that exposure would provide the basis for the Architots program he now directs. Macaluso explains that distilling the complexities of the discipline into something interesting and fun allows architecture to become more tangible, and visits to the M. J. Macaluso & Associates firm makes a future design profession seem possible to his students.

The program is geared toward developing math, art, history, and engineering skills, and is available to kids of all ages. There are playgroups for babies and toddlers, who graduate to parent-interactive and independent design classes. Some participants meet in the Middle Village design studio, but the program travels easily, spreading architecture and design to area schools and private groups looking for more specialized design opportunities. At present, the program is implemented at five locations around New York City—including Garden School in Jackson Heights and P.S. 49 Dorothy Bonawit Kole in Middle Village—where architots engage in one or two classes per week. Each curriculum, however, is distinct from the next, allowing the program’s teachers and a school’s administration to tailor classes to the needs and desires of the kids. The Garden School offers an Architots program with a focus on math and science, while P.S. 49 focuses on architecture as an artistic expression and studies its historical influences and social relationships.

Inside the Architots studio; kitchen

This flexibility is a major strength of the program, allowing courses to grow, change, and adapt with the students' interests and talents. Macaluso notes that this multi-faceted attitude is inherent to the architectural discipline, and thus a natural component of the Architots experience. He stresses that, "First and foremost, the lessons are fun and expressive, but they give children an underlying educational message. By building on a child's innate curiosity with the world and the desire to create, the program directs these energies into creative design and a greater understanding of their built surroundings.”

The classes have resulted in a variety of creative and well-developed projects, which range from drawings to models and floor plans. Perhaps most impressively, the interest of students in architecture takes root. Kids like Shane Stock enroll in classes year after year and even take their lessons home with them—using their ever-increasing technological savvy to research information and pictures of far-flung architecture they want to incorporate into their own designs. As Stock says: “Getting ideas is the most fun. I like to imagine designs for all different types of buildings then try my best to turn my idea into a drawing. Sometimes I can’t wait to jot my ideas down. Trying my best and enjoying it at the same time is exciting.”
In this way, kids learn to see design as a field that is both thrilling and approachable, aspects that pique their interest, and hopefully hold it for a lifetime. As the Architots program seems to prove—at least when it comes to the spaces in which we will live, work, and enjoy ourselves—the children are our future.

—Katy Kiick


Interested in encouraging your child in architecture? Michael Macaluso recommends a few books by Marion Salvadori to get started:

Mario Salvadori, Why Buildings Stand Up: the Art of Architecture (New York: Norton, 1980.)

Marion Salvadori, The Art of Construction: Projects and Principles for Beginning Engineers & Architects (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1990.)

Quick facts:

Website: http://www.architots.net/
Address: 64-64 Dry Harbor Road
Middle Village, NY 11379
Phone Number: 718.894.7777

MAN OF VISION

A tribute to the art and architecture of Robert Damora

By Joanna Lehan

“It hit me like a ton of bricks.” That is a funny way to describe one’s response to an architectural exhibition, but that unintentional pun is how Robert Damora often spoke of his visceral response to Philip Johnson’s “Modern Architecture: An International Exhibition” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Right: Damora's striking 1941 image of the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, New York.

Damora was a twenty-year-old photographic assistant, and a night student at the New York University School of Architecture, when he visited that watershed 1932 exhibition, which inaugurated MoMA’s Department of Architecture. Seven years later he was back, shooting MoMA’s newly built West 53rd Street icon of modernism for The Architectural Forum, the leading journal of the day. Damora was well on his way to becoming the professional Walter Gropius hailed as “the best photographer of architecture in this country.”

Damora hit his stride in that golden post-war moment when both modern architecture and the notion of photography as a true art form were at last ensconced in the American cultural canon. This historic conjunction provided fertile ground for architectural photography—previously considered by those in and out of the field as a matter of documentation—to rise to the level of art. Names such as Ezra Stoller and Julius Shulman might become better known, but Damora was deeply admired by peers such as Balthazar Korab—architect Eero Saarinen’s lensman of choice—who called him “the dean of American architectural photography.”


Graduating from Yale’s architectural school in 1953, Damora emerged with a fervent belief in the possibilities of modern architecture. During the 1950s he headed a project for Universal Atlas Cements (part of U.S. Steel) called “Seeds for Architecture,” which commissioned such top modernists as Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Louis Kahn to design exploratory projects using affordable concrete. Damora’s own built projects reflected democratic ideals, notably his modular Cape House, Architectural Record’s “House of the Year” of 1962, a model home constructed from six pre-fabricated mass-produced components, which could be erected in two days in a variety of forms.

Left: Damora's camera peers through the undergrowth at the Marcel Breuer House in New Canaan, Connecticut, in this 1948 shot.

But Damora’s most enduring legacy will surely be the work he undertook with his 8-x-10-inch view camera. Familiarity with modern architecture’s tenets convinced Damora that a revolutionary type of structure required new approaches to photographic representation. “Modern architecture is concerned with the volume of buildings rather than the façade that captivated Renaissance architecture,” he once said. He strove to develop what he called “volumetric” photography, and achieved that goal with technical virtuosity as well as a natural talent for the composition of images.

We can see the radical departure Damora made from static façade photography in a 1948 photograph he made of Marcel Breuer’s house in New Canaan, Connecticut. Though the house is relatively small in the frame, the image possesses a sense of expansive space thanks to a composition that moves us through a foreground of dark thicket to the bright, cleared rise on which the house perches. The effect is almost anthropological—as if Damora crept up upon this exotic new breed of dwelling, with its dramatic cantilevered deck, while exploring the pastoral New England woods.

Right: His 1977 photo of the Hancock Building in Boston
gives the edifice an air of power and drama.

Damora’s 1941 photograph of Eliel and Eero Saarinen’s Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo is another example of his precise and theatrical compositional sense. Two nuns traverse the center of the frame, the twin black columns of their habits echoed in the vertical panels on the Saarinens’ curvilinear structure, as well as in the dark tree trunks in the surrounding Frederick Law Olmsted–designed park. Though the visual harmony and evocations of austerity and spirituality seem coincidental, Damora had a clear sense of purpose (not to mention perseverance) when creating this image. The reflecting pool was drained when he arrived, and he had it filled. The nuns, who happened to be nearby, were recruited to stroll the walkway many times before Damora took a shot in which their forms just clear the diagonal shadow in the right corner of the frame.

Above: Damora created a lush, complex composition of diagonals, shadows, and
flora in this 1962 image of a house of his own design, built on Cape Cod.

Robert Damora died last year at the age of 97, having recently enjoyed the launch of a Yale School of Architecture retrospective exhibition, “Robert Damora: 70 Years of Total Architecture.” They were indeed 70 years well spent, with consuming twin passions for architecture and photography, and a singular optimism in their potential to elevate the human spirit. M

For more information on Robert Damora and the Booth House, go to www.robertdamora.com.