Three distinguished lectures were held concurrently on campus the morning of Oct. 16 to commemorate the inauguration of President Jeffrey Lehman. Here are reports on each of them.
By David Brand
Cornell's Life Science Technology Building, planned to tower over the west end of the university's Alumni Fields within four years, is now in its schematic design phase on "a wonderful site," said its designer, the acclaimed architect Richard Meier, speaking to an overflow audience at Statler Auditorium, Oct. 16.
Presenting one of three concurrent distinguished lectures as part of the day's inaugural festivities, Meier, a Cornell alumnus, had just given a highly emotional account of being chosen by the Vatican, over five other leading architects, to design the Jubilee Church in Rome. The small parish church, surrounded by apartment buildings 20 minutes from the city center, has a striking design featuring three enormous curvilinear shells.
Will the Life Science Technology Building also have soaring curves, asked a member of the audience. "No," answered Meier, "I don't think it's that kind of building."
Meier, whose flawless, light-filled buildings won him the 1984 Pritzker Prize, architecture's equivalent of the Nobel Prize, is a 1957 graduate of Cornell's College of Architecture and has been a visiting Frank H.T. Rhodes Class of '56 Professor. He heads the New York City-based architectural firm of Richard Meier & Partners.
He is, perhaps, best known for his striking Getty Center, a complex of buildings in the Santa Monica hills of California just north of Los Angeles, that includes the John Paul Getty Museum. Unlike most of Meier's buildings, the center's exterior cladding is not brilliant white but rough-hewn stone in earth tones of pale gold.
Meier talked at length about the Getty project, as well as his collaborative -- and unsuccessful -- designs for Memorial Square, linked predominantly glass buildings, a park and pedestrian walkways on the World Trade Center site. But it was the Jubilee Church, erected to celebrate Pope John Paul II's 25th anniversary, that inspired him to eloquence. The Jubilee Church, which will be dedicated Oct. 25, is notable for its precast concrete panels, each weighing eight tons, post-tensioned and tied together, "almost like an arm cantilevered out of the ground." The brilliant white cement used in the panels is that same as used by Pier Luigi Nervi for the Rome Olympic stadium in 1964.
"For me, daylight is the key," said Meier. "Daylight is the protagonist of this church and daylight will emanate from the skylights above and will also bounce off and spill around the walls in the shells of the church."
Designing a church is always a matter of very specific conventions and spirituality, and the architect must consider the original material of architecture, which is space and light, said Meier. The architect has to achieve both artistic and sacred qualities, "which go way beyond the merely functional," he said. "The church space must allow for a variety of conditions in which both the liturgy and everyday life make themselves manifest."
Ideas about sacred spaces, he said, include a desire for truth and authenticity, a hope to move from the peripheral to the essential, a search for brightness and openness, a search for transparency, a yearning for tranquility and peace, "and somehow to evoke an otherworldliness that is both eloquent and uplifting."
His association with the Jubilee Church, he concluded, has been "a joyous testament to an act of faith and love."
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| N.R. Narayana Murthy, chair and chief mentor of Infosys Technologies Ltd., speaks in the Biotechnology Building, Oct. 16. J.Reis/www.jonreis.com |
By Susan Lang
"The world, in general, and Cornell, in particular, have made tremendous advances in science and technology," said N.R. Narayana Murthy in his distinguished lecture, Oct. 16. "We have sent men to the moon, scaled Mount Everest and explored Antarctica. We have conquered time and distance using digital and satellite technology, enhanced longevity, conquered diseases and improved health. We have grown the world GDP six-fold in the last 50 years," he continued.
Murthy, chair and chief mentor of Infosys Technologies Ltd., a global information technology (IT) consulting and software-services provider based in India, spoke to an overflow audience in the Biotechnology Building in one of three concurrent Inauguration Day lectures on campus Thursday morning.
In his lecture, Murthy emphasized that, despite such advances in science and technology: "The gap between rich and poor countries has doubled in the past 40 years. ... There are 1.2 billion people in this world who live in extreme poverty, on income of less than $1 per day. About one billion people lack access to safe drinking water." Furthermore, he said, it would take a worker in a developing country who makes Disney paraphernalia 166 years to make what Disney CEO Michael Eisner earns in a day.
The recipient of numerous awards, such as "Asia Businessman of the Year" (Fortune magazine), "Star of Asia" (Business Week) and one of the world's 25 most influential global executives (Time/CNN), Murthy also is known for his humility, "simple living, high thinking," and his beliefs in corporate fairness, transparency, accountability and social responsibility.
Murthy, a new member of the Cornell Board of Trustees, called on Cornellians to counter the "infectious greed" that is so rampant among CEOs. "Can we be catalysts in wiping the tears off the eyes of the poorest of the poor? Can the Cornell chime bring solace not just to the chosen few on this campus but to a forlorn child in the remote lands of Africa? ... How can we address the myriad problems that cripple the development of mankind as a whole?" he asked. "By creating a set of Cornellians who have the courage to dream big, and the courage to stand for their convictions ... to create trust and instill hope."
Murthy concluded his talk by saying that he had no doubt that Cornell President Jeffrey Lehman will lead Cornell in making the world, as Michael Jackson once sang, "a better place for you and for me and the entire human race."
By Linda Myers
"Subversive Pleasures: A Poetry Reading," featuring prize-winning Cornell poets Alice Fulton and Kenneth McClane, was presented Oct. 16 in the university's Sage Chapel. One of three concurrent Inauguration Day lectures, it featured remarks by Fulton and McClane, both professors of English, on the marvelously subversive nature of poetry ("sub-versive" suggests there is meaning underneath the verse, said Fulton) as well as the reading of their own selected poems.
The poetry symposium drew a small -- about 70 -- but passionate group of listeners, among them Cornell President Emeritus Dale Corson and Phyllis Ammons, the widow of renowned poet A.R. Ammons, the late professor of poetry.
The darkened chapel, with its shafts of light refracted through stained-glass windows, seemed a fitting setting. "The language of newspapers is like glass -- transparent," Fulton told the audience. "The language of poetry is like stained glass," which has a surface and tones that "create an interesting resistance that I prefer to the barrenness of clarity."
Poetry, Fulton said, can raise its voice to warn or soften it to offer comfort. It "treats the tongue like a muscle that says to human viciousness, 'I wouldn't if I were you,'" and offers this promise "to the shipwrecked, castaways, defectors: 'If you lived here, you'd be home by now.'"
Both Fulton and McClane said they were honored to read as part of the inauguration of President Jeffrey Lehman. Fulton spoke of Lehman's earlier role as a legal champion of the poor and disenfranchised. In praising him, she quoted Ammons: "He holds radical light as music in his skull."
Fulton read five of her poems: "A Little Heart-to-Heart with the Horizon" and "Southbound in a Northbound Lane (both from Sensual Math), "What I Like" (from Dance Script with Electric Ballerina), "Close" (from Felt) and "Cascade Experiment" (from Powers of Congress). In that last poem, she wrote about how "truths we don't suspect have a hard time making themselves felt, as when thirteen species of whiptail lizards composed entirely of females stay undiscovered due to bias against such things existing."
G. Peter Lepage, professor of physics and interim dean of Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences, who introduced Fulton and McClane, said he particularly liked a line in that poem in which Fulton compared "the soul's decoupling" with "electrons vanishing on one side of a wall and appearing on the other without leaving any holes." Lepage said, "That's quantum mechanics!"
McClane gave an animated reading of seven poems in his collection Take Five: "Square-Toed Intensities," "Spring," "Mother," "Song: A Motion of History," "Elm Taking," "The Glowworm" and the powerful, redemptive "1619-1979 Is a Large Time."
Noting that "1619" refers to the year that the first slave ship docked in Jamestown, McClane spoke of the African-American experience and how both its harsh social realities and wealth of personal expression, including jazz and the blues, have shaped his poems. In addition to music, McClane said, "I couldn't have lived without language. It was the bridge between growing up in Harlem and coming here."
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