L ifestyle /C ulture
Architect Opens ‘Daring’ Virtual Museum
ARTS JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
THE DARING DIAGONAL
Virtual Museum, an online
collection of photos and
writings concerned with
historically significant expres-
sions of diagonality in art and
design, launched on Dec. 3.

For Joel Levinson, the
founder and curator of the
DDVM, it’s the culmination of
the curiosity he’s harbored since
he was a student of architecture
at the University of Pennsylvania
nearly 60 years ago.

Though the museum is
primarily intended to provide
historians with what Levinson
believes is a crucial intervention
in the study of architecture and
design, the DDVM might just
have something for everyone.

“I hope that readers of all
stripes will see the world in a
different way,” said Levinson,
founder of the architecture
and interior design firm Joel
Levinson Associates.

Though Levinson has long
dreamed of creating some
sort of archive of his collected
material on diagonality, it was
only about two years ago that
the current iteration started
to come together. A well-re-
ceived lecture on the subject
to a group in Germantown
connected him with the
physicist Kenneth Ford, who
enthusiastically offered to edit
any material that Levinson had
into a book.

While the material for the
book was being selected and
arranged, Levinson created a
website to host it all for public
consumption. That website
was eventually converted into
the DDVM. Coincidentally,
Levinson’s drawings, corre-
spondence and models are in
the midst of being collected for
publication as separate book by
the Architectural Archives at
the University of Pennsylvania.

The structure of the website
that “houses” the museum
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM is based on Levinson’s own
design, mimicking the layout
of a stately home built by
Levinson many years ago. Each
of the “rooms” are home to
webpages covering individual
aspects of diagonality, complete
with plenty of photographed
examples, often by Levinson
himself. One can jump from
1.12 (Works by Children) to 3.5
(Fashion) with a few clicks of
the mouse, and there’s enough
material for one to spend hours
wandering the digital halls.

Levinson is 82 and a native
of Philadelphia. Born and
raised in Strawberry Mansion,
Levinson’s family moved to
Mt. Airy when he was still a
boy, where the spitball-firing
Levinson spent more time
in the principal’s office at
Germantown Jewish Centre
than he did in the classroom.

His highest aspiration in those
days was to be a farmer or
a writer.

Informed by his father that
farming and writing were out
of the question, and presented
with a list of acceptable profes-
sions, Levinson landed on
architecture at 13. Though the
other personae pop up from
time to time — he cultivated
a small vegetable garden in his
youth, and later wrote a novel
about the Bosnian War — it’s
been a lifetime of thinking
about buildings.

Entering Penn in 1957,
Levinson had already devel-
oped a bit of an iconoclastic
sense of self, he said. Coming
from a line of rabbis on one
side and Bertrand Russell-
reading skeptics on the other, it
was only logical that Levinson’s
architectural interests might
become uncategorizable.

Levinson first became
interested in what he calls the
“Phenomenon of Diagonality”
around 1960. Diagonal lines,
in Levinson’s estimation, were
much more than met the eye.

Everywhere he looked, he
saw them, and not just in the
buildings he studied. They
Joel Levinson, creator of the
DDVM Photo by Julie Levinson
were in paintings and sculp-
tures, chairs and graphics,
products galore. It gnawed at
him: How could something
so fundamental be discussed
so little?
“It became apparent to me
that there is a big story here,”
Levinson said.

Ever since, Levinson has
tried to make up for the gaps
in the scholarship. His theory
of diagonality encompasses
design elements from antiquity
to today, and art forms both
high and low.

Eventually, Levinson said,
material he’s been gathering
for decades will lead to a
book, “The Daring Diagonal,”
for which there is already a
preface, introduction and “a
critically important chapter
dealing with the right angle
in architecture.”
If this all sounds like it
borders on the marginal or
quixotic, it wouldn’t take long
for Levinson to make you think
twice the next time you see a
triangle. Even the distaste he
holds for symmetry in design
could get your brain moving.

For Levinson, architecture
is a way to look for truth —
both a mode of inquiry and
the answer to questions, some
urgent, some idle.

“There is a difference
between what we observe, and
what underlies that in reality,”
Levinson said. “These rather
JEWISH EXPONENT
The interior of the Danish Jewish Museum in Copenhagen
Photo by Joel Levinson
abstract ideas become expressed
in my architecture — not in an
academic way, I’m not trying to
teach anybody anything — but
they’re just part of my thought
process, and they are embedded
in my architecture.” l
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
Name: WWDB AM 860
Width: 3.625 in
Depth: 3.62 in
Color: Black
FEBRUARY 11, 2021
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