Architect celebrates science through his art
By Scott Scanlon
Syracuse Herald American
January 24, 1993

Champagne and compliments flowed freely the night Carl Baumann opened his one-man sculpture show at the Albany Institute of History and Art 25 years ago.

The mayor of Albany was there, along with many from the city's upper crust. A group of 100 Girl Scouts came along for fun. William Kennedy, who would go on to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, covered the event with a glowing review in the Albany Times-Union. Edward Cowley, art department chairman at the State University of New York at Albany, called Baumann's show "the best use these rooms have ever been put to."

"It has a quality of magic about it, which is terribly important to art," Cowley said. "And, in addition to being an artistic success, it's also kind of a technical triumph. I'm very impressed."

Baumann said he felt he was on the brink of something big. A proponent of the notion that sculpture should celebrate science, he was a pioneer in the use of plexiglass, fluorescent colors, moving parts and electric current to create forms that looked straight out of outer space. He did so before anybody dreamed of making Star Wars movies or building Epcot Center.

"The most fascinating thing in the world is a moving light in the dark. It's something I remember as a kid, watching the milk truck coming at 4 o'clock in the morning."
-- Carl Baumann, Oswego architect and artist

Baumann quit his day job as an urban planner with the state to launch hi s art career in 1965, spent the next two years working on his art and as a part-time architect, and the Albany show spurred hope that he was on the right track. But his big break--that one healthy commission that could lead to referrals and financial security--never came.

"Still, I'm glad I didn't wait till retirement time to do these, or they never would have gotten done," Baumann said last week as sipped port wine and watched 20 of his works brighten his dimly lit gallery. His voice ebbed slightly above the soundtrack of "2001: A Space Odyssey," which he likes to play while showing his work.

For the past two decades, Baumann has earned his living as an architect and picture-frame maker, working out of his home at 201 E. Fifth St., Oswego. Sculpture has remained his love.

He will turn 67 next Sunday and, in a weekend of reminiscing, plans to turn back the clock by opening the gallery he set up in his home last year. He's grown too old to lug his bulky work to other galleries, he said, so now the public will have to come to him.

Despite working in relative obscurity all these years, Baumann helped set a tone for sculptors and architects who followed, said Forrest Wilson, professor emeritus in architecture at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and former editor of Progressive Architecture magazine. The two have never met, but have corresponded over the years.

"He's tried to weld together a number of arts, and that's a thing that needs to be done today," Wilson said by telephone from his home in College Park, Md. "You can no longer understand things singularly or individually."

Shortly before his big show in 1967, Baumann merged movement, ultraviolet light and fluorescent plexiglass in a work called "Habitat - 2067." He was inspired to create it by the habitat theme of the 1967 world's fair, Expo '67 in Montreal. He wanted his work to show a habitat 100 years from then.

"I didn't know what DNA was when I made this, but my intention was to build something that was capable of reproducing itself in space," he said.

The double helix won first place in sculpture at the New York State Fair 25 years ago.

"To this day it's generally the popular favorite," Baumann said. "I suppose it has to do with the DNA shape. It speaks to something in our physiology."

"City in Space" was another critical success. Baumann forged it with wood, Masonite and glass. The former World War II Navy flier said he hearkened to his aviation days for inspiration. The hard lines and shaded blocks give way to portals filled with tiny specks of light and six planets. The 3-by-2-by-1-foot piece looks like a metropolis from directly above, and speaks to the heart of Baumann's work.

"There are no signs of human beings in there, yet you know human beings built this thing," he said.

Such celebration of technology made Baumann uneasy early on.

His grandfather chiseled bas-reliefs on Fifth Avenue fireplace mantles in New York City during the late 19th century. His father was a commercial artist in the Big Apple, painting beer and Coca-Cola ads that were later turned into lithographs.

"It used to bother me that unlike my father and grandfather, I didn't take my inspiration from nature," Baumann said. The book, "The Phenomenon of Man," written by French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, erased his doubts.

"It taught me technology is inevitable, for one thing," he said. "It's like all things. It has its pitiful and positive aspects. Whether technology comes to good or evil has a lot to do with the intention of the doer."

Science spellbinds Baumann, especially when touched by light.

"The most fascinating thing in the world is a moving light in the dark," he said. "It's something I remember as a kid, watching the milk truck coming at 4 o'clock in the morning."

That fascination took hold in 1963. Since graduating with an architectural degree from Syracuse University a decade earlier, he had steered a career path based on planning cities. He quit his state job and moved into a converted War of 1812 barracks outside Albany with his wife, Nancy. He went to work on his sculpture in a converted barn.

By the time he landed at his one-man show in December 1967, he had won five awards in eight shows.

"I was in my halcyon days," he said. "Out of the show, I sold several pieces, and got a couple of commissions. They were great days for me and trying days for Nancy (and their two young children). We were always at the devil's door in terms of running out of money."

Albany Times-Union Publisher Gene Robb might have changed that. He was so impressed with Baumann at the one-man show he asked him to design a large sculpture for the newspaper. Baumann proposed using printing-press plates, shaped like half-culverts, to create a spiral-shaped water fountain. He built a model that looks like four symmetrical water slides pouring down into a pool.

Robb loved it, Baumann said, but died of a heart attack before he could see the sculpture through. Baunann's dreams, and cash flow, died with Robb; the new publisher was not interested in the project.

Since then, he has exhibited his artwork in small shows in Syracuse and Oswego County, but has concentrated on his architectural and picture-framing career.

The most Baumann ever earned for his artwork was $2,500 for a piece called "Box Fugue," a geometrical interpretation of a four-part musical harmony. The work shoots through a spiral staircase in the former state Civil Service Employees building in Albany.

In a way, Wilson said, Baumann the sculptor became a casualty of his times. It wasn't until the explosion of art prices in the 1980s that most artists could support themselves solely on their art, he said.

In the late 1960s, Baumann took a job in Central New York designing modular buildings and bought his house in Oswego. Among the work he did at that time was helping develop the preliminary plan for the Radisson development in northern Onondaga County.

The firm he worked for, Sectional Structures, folded in 1972, and he took his family to the Middle East for a year, where he helped the Jordanian government redevelop communities destroyed during the 1967 war with Israel.

In 1975, he opened his Omega Studio for picture framing and started to design houses in Oswego. The work afforded him the independence sculpting couldn't, and some time to dabble in sculpting.

Baumann has remained active over the past decade designing most of the new commercial buildings on West Utica and West First streets in Oswego, such as the Utica Court office complex and the Sithe Energies/Paragon Cable building.

"There is a very slight distinction between sculpture and architecture. The two are interchangeable," Wilson pointed out. "I don't feel that Carl ever left sculpture. He just found other ways to express it.'

Baumann named his sculpture gallery Alpha Gallery, using the first letter of the Greek alphabet to show its importance in his life. Omega Studio, named after the last letter of the Greek alphabet, shows which type of work he prefers.

He still longs for that one big sculpting commission, but, like his art, puts the prospect in proper perspective.

"Life is a series of compromises and trade-offs," he said, "I've put two kids through college, and I've paid a mortgage, and I've got no complaints."

He looked around his gallery and cracked a smile.

"Besides," he said, "it looks like I did most of what I wanted to do in spite of everything."

Scott Scanlon is a reporter for the Syracuse Newspapers' Oswego County bureau in Fulton.