Connections/The Column

My name's Nancy Wu, I'm an educator at The Cloisters. I'm gonna talk about the column.

I spent many years working on Reims Cathedral. It is one of those huge Gothic cathedrals, full of tourists. It's not a building that you can study close up; you cannot hold it in your hand.

But you still have to study it carefully, in detail. My approach, which is not a common approach, is to measure the whole place. My base unit of my measurements is the column.

In a way, columns serve for me like the DNA of a person. I get into the habit of looking at the column by looking at the individual components

the capital, the shaft, the base. They are clues for me. If I see a fragment of a column

I can pretty much figure out the original height of that column. And I don't think it's unlike a pediatrician who has seen hundreds of babies.

So if you were to bring the pediatrician a baby, completely covered up revealing only the toe, I bet you the pediatrician

can tell just from the size of the toe the baby is probably three months old, six months old, nine months old. Really, that's the way I see columns.

The wonderful thing about this column is that most of the shaft is missing. The three components are compressed into a scale that is more visible for us, more of an eye-level.

And you get to see details that you cannot see if this column were in its original size. And the volutes, seen from one side, look like spirals, or even snails. My metaphors with architecture are very often food-related.

Spiral columns, the grooves, the patterns start to twist and to turn. It reminds me of a piece of dough, just freshly kneaded, and that the pastry chef is twisting it into some delicious dessert.

I know the shapes of columns, the proportions, have invoked associations with gender. Think of those beautiful women

depicted on vase paintings wearing these long robes with folds that are tubular. Don't they just look like the fluting of the columns?

So, chicken and egg question: what comes first, were artists inspired by the garment worn by the women around them, or the other way around?

What I'm envisioning is the owner of this dress, as if she was a column in motion, herself, as she parades through dinner parties. So I think a column is supposed to be supportive, solid, part of the architecture—all of these qualifications are broken.

My association is more architectural. I see them primarily as supporting devices. They can support

architecture, tables, little boxes. I'm always amazed by how this function can be kept

while the shape and form and the design of the column can vary so wildly.

I am Chinese. I'm embarrassed to admit I have never measured a Chinese building. I don't have the kind of DNA to have the visceral connection with this Chinese column.

The shafts tend to be a timber, cut from a tree, very simple, very unadorned, and I sort of instinctively like that.

The way I look at columns is pretty nerdy. The memories I have of measuring at Reims are the number of measuring tapes that I broke

the New Age music that was played from the souvenir stand, the candles.

So, when I look at columns outside of Reims, I smell the candles, I hear the music.

There are certain things that actually make me feel very warm

very personal. I feel as if I

I'm in possession of some of those columns

because I have spent so much time with them.