ArchiTakes

Linked Hybrid, a Beijing complex designed by Steven Holl, was completed last year.  As with his Simmons Hall dormitory at MIT, Holl sets windows deeply into a uniform and pervasive grid, camouflaging them as dimples in an enveloping waffle texture that’s applied like shrink-wrap.  He so accentuates the window grid that it takes on the geometric purity of abstract sculpture.  Like many other architects today, Holl hides his windows in plain sight.  Unlike so many others, he does this by embracing the grid rather than fleeing it.

Georgia O’Keefe’s 1927 painting, Radiator Building – Night, New York, shows Raymond Hood’s tower at an hour when its dark window openings can’t disappear into its black brick façade.  The randomness of a city’s lit windows at night violates the tyranny of the grid with chance, mystery and individual volition.  In recent years, architects have brought this defiance of regimentation into daylight.

Forty years ahead of its time, an otherwise anonymous 1963 hotel on West 57th Street willfully offsets windows from their expected vertical alignment.  The effect is so successful at destroying the usual window grid that the building at first appears to defy structural logic.  Only on close inspection does it become apparent that there are still continuous vertical paths for the exterior wall’s columns, and that windows are merely jiggled left and right within conventional column bays.  While the building’s countless identical windows are no less visible and repetitive, they are less suggestive of coercion than windows in a grid, and seem to belong to the liberated realm of surface decoration.  Gridding is so much a part of the Gestalt of urban windows that to take them out of alignment camouflages them, effectively hiding them in plain sight.

SHoP Architects’ critically acclaimed Porter House condominium at West 15th Street and Ninth Avenue, completed in 2003, adapted and added onto a 1905 warehouse.  The addition roughly matches the bulk of the original building, a key to its success in the role of mirror-opposite.  By contrasting itself in every possible way, even offsetting itself from the old building’s footprint, the addition leaves the integrity of the original perfectly readable.  Among its points of departure, the addition sets its windows free of the grid and varies their width.  They are closely enough spaced not to disfavor any of the identical stacked floor plans within on any given floor. 

SHop takes no chances in pusuit of the romantically staggered lit windows of Georgia O’keefe’s Radiator Building portrayal.  Fixtures built into the addition’s face insure a balanced distribution of haphazard light sources, regardless of occupants’ contributions.

Polshek Partnership’s Standard Hotel, completed last year, straddles the High Line near Washington and West 13th Streets.  The building’s floor-to-ceiling glass makes the rooms’ curtains a facade-determining feature.  By day, they contribute the shifting randomness and vitality that variations in artificial lighting typically provide at night. 

The Standard Hotel’s jiggled window pattern, echoing that of the 1963 hotel pictured above, further defuses the deadening effect of the grid and suggests the decorative freedom of textile design.

One Ten 3rd, a condominium at 110 Third Avenue, was designed by Greenberg Farrow and completed in 2007.  Listing the building’s pros and cons, CityRealty cites its “unusual fenestration pattern” as a “con,”  while New York magazine’s Justin Davidson called the building an “impressively awful tower, full of fussy fenestration and clutter.”  These assessments overlook how efficiently the design avoids gridlock by simply varying the color of the panels covering columns.  This variation, within a limited color range, also blends with the predictable chaos of individual owners’ window treatments to produce a painterly effect.

SOM’s addition to John Jay College is approaching completion at Eleventh Avenue between 58th and 59th Streets.  Glass units with fritted glass dots in varying densities create patterns that override the framing grid.

Based on paint manufacturers’ color sample chips, Peter Wegner’s 2001 painting, 49 Greys, might have inspired SOM’s façade at John Jay College.  The painting resonates with current architecture’s use of the grid as a point of departure for vibrant destinations.

The Zollverein School of Design in Essen, Germany, by SANAA, was completed in 2006.  (photo: Michael Hoefner, CC/SA)  It practices a different kind of windowflage from the same firm’s mesh-encased New Museum of Contemporary Art on the Bowery.  Here, windows are set free of the familiar grid in all directions and even deny its possibility by their varied sizes.  While emphatically expressed, the windows contribute to, rather than detract from, the overall building as sculpture.

In his “Vision Machine” condominium, nearing completion at West 19th Street and the West Side Highway, Jean Nouvel takes the liberated window into new frontiers.  His design not only rejects the grid, but tilts individual glass panels out of planar alignment.  Even on the tower’s faces that aren’t cubist curtainwall, Nouvel’s punched windows avoid alignment and consistency of size and shape, as at SANAA’s Zollverein School.  The building avoids grid-based window radar by multiple means.  Beyond, the fritted glass of Frank Gehry’s IAC Building catches light like a lampshade.

The 1960s National Maritime Union annexes at West 17th Street and Ninth Avenue were designed by New Orleans architect Albert Ledner.  Beyond their obvious nautical inspiration, the portholes resist interpretation as building windows and contribute to an abstract sculptural quality.  Now the Maritime Hotel, the upright annex on the right faces Ninth Avenue and has openings on a standard vertical-horizontal grid.  The structure on the left is more relaxed, sloping back from 17th Street and setting its portholes in a diamond array that even further camouflages them into the appearance of decorative surface pattern.

As rendered by Spine 3D, the West 17th Street Maritime Annex’s façade is currently being reworked into an even freer assembly of multi-sized round windows in its conversion to the Dream Downtown Hotel.  The redesign, by Frank Fusaro of Handel Architects, argues that even diagonally arrayed round windows aren’t up to today’s standard of windowflage.

“The Loneliest Job”, an unposed 1961 photo of JFK in the Oval Office by George Tames (The New York Times) shows how a window can express individual presence and uniqueness of outlook.  At a traditional domestic scale, even an empty window invokes human presence as surely as a Van Gogh painting of an empty chair or pair of shoes.  If the eyes are the window of the soul, windows are the eyes of the building.

A. Paul Weber’s 1953 drawing, “The Rumor,” captures the psychic unease that results when windows are multiplied beyond the capacity for individual identification.  Rather than expressing identity, windows in such huge and regimented numbers convey an oppressive anonymity and conformity.

A detail of Weber’s drawing suggests a short leap from the grid-bound anonymity of urban architecture to a complete loss of identity.  The many eyes of rumor’s personification link it to the building and its countless windows.  Residents have been prepared for disappearance into the consensus of rumor by their lock-step environment.

Ralph Walker’s sketch for the Barclay-Vesey Building downplays his tower’s windows while showing those of neighboring buildings.  Walker’s brisk drawing style suggests impulsive conception as well as the dynamic massing and upward thrust that are the design’s principal aims.  The sculptural success of a building often depends on how well a simple sketch or model survives translation into a full-scale realization that must satisfy countless practical needs.  The windows Walker tellingly omitted from his sketch simply weren’t part of his formative vision.  The strategy of camouflaging windows helps keep a large building close to the generative vitality and easily grasped image of its mind’s-eye origin, while avoiding the depersonalizing effect of huge fields of windows.  Built in a bulkier form than Walker sketched, and completed in 1923, the Barclay-Vesey Building is considered the first executed Art Deco skyscraper.  It stands at 140 West Street and was badly damaged on 9/11, but has since been restored.

Raymond Hood’s clay study-model of the Daily News Building of 1929-30 explores the tower’s massing.  Hood’s desire to retain the abstract simplicity of this tiny sculpture can be seen in the executed building’s flat, bare façade and its concealment of windows within scaleless vertical strips.  One recent school of windowflage similarly seeks to shrink and unitize large buildings, but by superimposing large-scale grids or exterior skeletons over their smaller window-grids.

Fox & Fowle Architects’ tower, 101 Avenue of the Americas, was completed in 1992.  Employing a common strategy of the 1980s, the design places a multistory “super-grid,” here in dark brick, over the window pattern.  This reduces the perceived scale of the building and camouflages what would otherwise be a numbing grid of smaller punched openings.  The super-grid anticipates today’s exterior skeletons which similarly subdivide façades into larger segments than the window grid, although with a structural rationale and diagonal lines.

The brown apartment tower on the left demonstrates the crushing multiplicity of windows caricatured by A. Paul Weber in his drawing “The Rumor.”  To its right, the Hearst Tower, designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2006, at Eighth Avenue and 57th Street, avoids this effect by adopting a different scale altogether.  Despite its greater size, the Hearst Tower is more easily grasped by the eye and mind.  Its external skeleton expresses an efficient triangular structural frame that reportedly saved 20% in steel.  At least as importantly, it disguises individual floors and windows under a frame of multistory segments that visually simplifies the building and takes it closer to the geometric abstraction of sculpture.

Approaching completion on 23rd Street and cantilevered over the High Line, HL23, a condominium designed by Neil Denari, also expresses diagonal structure in a way that reduces scale.  Windows and floors are clearly expressed, but subsumed within an external structural expression that shrinks the building into a discrete machine-age object.  Bloomberg architecture critic James Russell has written:  “With its elegantly tooled diagonal braces and shiny, embossed metal-panel surface, HL23 is as fluidly feline as a sports car.  Denari eases the planar facets of the structure into one another with gentle curves.  In wrapping the metal panels around expanses of glass, you see the finesse of a great auto-body designer like Pininfarina.”

The 1970 Ferrari 512 Modulo, designed by Pininfarina.  The designer’s sensibility has been compared to Neil Denari’s in HL23, underscoring the building’s sculptural aspiration to appear as a cutting-edge industrial design product.  Even the building’s name seems calculated to suggest a model number.

A recent construction photo shows the ordinary Rust-Oleum painted steel pipe - straight out of a tract house basement - behind HL23’s “structural” curves, which are in fact merely silkscreened onto the glass façade.  Awaiting interior covers that will make them appear as continuations of a single factory-made uniframe, the pipe sections still on view belie standard field assembly from stock parts.  The design is driven by the intended image of a factory-made object rather than technology.   

Designed by Jean Nouvel, the Tower Verre is proposed for a site on West 53rd Street next to the Museum of Modern Art.  Its exterior steel frame introduces a scale between that of the overall building, which would be among New York’s tallest, and its countless human-scaled windows.  The frame’s deviation from an expected rational pattern like the Hearst Tower’s ostensibly responds to the eccentric loads of the building’s expressionistic asymmetry.  Its spidery irregularity enhances the frame’s power to distract the eye from the window grid, and gives the tower a unique and alien identity.  In arguing his design’s appropriateness to New York’s skyline before the City Planning Commission, Nouvel presented it alongside iconic 1920s renderings of windowless, crystalline fantasy buildings by Hugh Ferris (or “U. Ferri,” as Nouvel calls him).  

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The architect Edward Durrell Stone built this Manhattan townhouse for himself at 13 East 64th Street in 1956.  Stone’s American Embassy in New Delhi was under construction at the time of its design.  He had given the embassy a similar screen to protect it from the sun, and here recycled the idea for privacy.  Stone would go on using screens to the point of being ridiculed.  Nonetheless, his house introduced a new and subtle effect to New York, and it holds a key position in the history of windowflage.  It looks back to Alexander Jackson Davis’s 1835 American Institute project, with its upper floor windows camouflaged into a unified element, and forward to our own time’s layering of building-scaled veils over windows.

Alternatives to the played out tinted-glass-box approach to windowflage have neen explored with increasing frequency and variety since the 1990s.  One design stream has superimposed façade-like screens over windows that are visible or expressed from below.  The screens range from the uniform and static, like Edward Durrell Stone’s mid-century forerunners, to screens with window-like voids or openable sections of their own.  

 A rail yard signal box by Herzog & de Meuron was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1995 exhibition, “Light Construction.”  It is wrapped in copper bands that protect internal equipment from electrical interference.  The bands are twisted in places, allowing natural light into the building’s few windows and creating a layered facade that is at once a building with punched window openings and a sheer-sided object.  The resulting depth and ambiguity make art of a utilitarian building.  Located in Basel and completed in 1995, the building was exhibited alongside others with high-concept envelopes, including Jean Nouvel’s 1994 Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art and Fumihiko Maki’s 1992 competition entry for a Congress Center in Salzburg which layered louvers and perforated metal over glass.  The exhibition recognized an emerging exploration of the nature and potential of architectural surfaces.  Herzog & de Meuron, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2001, have made this their territory as no one else, layering windows with everything from silkscreened leaves to boulder-filled gabions.

Media mogul Barry Diller was so taken with Frank Gehry’s white model of his IAC headquarters that he asked for a white building.  Gehry accommodated with a glass curtain wall that gradually varies from white to clear, at the level of each floor’s sight-lines.  Diller’s initial impulse highlights the appeal of a building as a unitary, sculptural object, while Gehry’s compromise points up the inherent conflict between this desire and the need for windows.  Architectural models have a special appeal that works on several levels.  Robbed of useful size, the building in model form is almost purely sculptural.  Reduced to an innocuous scale that the mind, or even the hand, easily grasps, it appeals to the part of the brain that takes pleasure in toys.  One role of recent windowflage techniques is to visually shrink buildings which might otherwise intimidate with their size or complexity.  

The IAC headquarters achieves its gradual transition from white to clear by way of a silkscreened pattern of ceramic paint on its glazing, or ”fritted glass.”  Available in unlimited patterns and colors, fritted glass has become a ubiquitous plaything of architects who often justify it in practical terms as a way to reduce heat gain through partial shading.  As with all screen-based windowflage techniques, however, it imposes a barrier at extra cost to the daylight and views which a glass building envelope provides at already higher construction and maintenance costs.  Given advancements in glass technology that otherwise reduce heat gain, fritted glass is only justified on esthetic or privacy-related merits.

A rendering of Renzo Piano Building Workshop’s New York Times Tower of 2000-07 emphasizes the consolidating effect of its screen.  Piano has described his design as “simple and primary.”  Typical of windowflage from Alexander Jackson Davis’s American Institute through the Edward Durrell Stone House, the multi-story unifying effect starts not at the ground, but rises from the top of the first floor.  The special street-relationship of the first floor is thus enhanced, and a conflict between doors and a sheer screen avoided.

Countless exquisite brackets suspend the Times Tower’s screen, as shown in this construction photo.  Piano has been working outside the box with such elegant castings since his career-making Pompidou Center of 1971-77. 

The Times Tower’s ceramic tube screen casts acres of film noir cliché shadows inside, as shown in this construction photo.  “The screen wall both deflects solar gain and heightens atmospheric effect,” according to its description in the 2004 Museum of Modern Art “Tall Buildings” exhibition.  It also affects views in ways that may not always be appreciated by occupants.

The Times Tower’s screen is a skyscraper-height array of tens of thousands of cylindrical white tubes.  They begin at the top of the first floor and extend up well beyond the roof, obscuring rooftop equipment and allowing the tower to dissolve into the sky.  Piano began exploring the use of such external “venetian blinds” in his 1986-96 mixed-use Cité Internationale in Lyons, France and used them extensively on the Debis (Daimler Financial) Headquarters in his huge 1992-99 Potsdamer Platz project in Berlin.  Instead of white rods, Piano’s earlier projects used aluminum slats, rectangular in section and painted reddish brown to match adjacent terra cotta façade panels.

Edward Durrell Stone’s residential screen is updated by way of the Times Tower in an extensive row house renovation now nearing completion at 252 West 75th Street.  Designed by workshop/apd, the project’s debt to Piano’s Tower is clear in details like the wider spacing of the screen’s bars at window bottoms and the exposure of the glazed corner, visible at the top of the preceding Times Tower photo.  The color and square cross-section of the slats echo those of Piano’s earlier projects.  In this house, the screen’s openings correspond to operable windows within the underlying glass curtain wall.  As with Stone’s town house, a device from a much larger project is adapted to a residential scale.  

Designed by the Japanese firm SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa), the New Museum of Contemporary Art at 235 Bowery was completed in 2007.  Above its street-permeable first floor, the building adopts the sculptural motif of a stack of offset white boxes, creating a distinct logo while allowing for skylights, terraces and galleries of varying proportions.  Intrusion of windows on the overall sculptural effect is reduced by way of a continuous mesh that extends over both opaque and glass surfaces.  A double-reading results; windows have a ghostly legibility while the mesh supports the illusion of a uniform surface.  SANAA’s projects often use windowflage, with techniques ranging from superimposed screens to fritted glass to deliberate dislocation of windows from conventional grid patterns.

The New Museum’s screen is an enlarged version of the expanded metal mesh that is conventionally used as lath for plaster. 

The mesh lends the museum’s blank surfaces a texture, depth and responsiveness to light, even as it camouflages the building’s few upper-story windows.

41 Cooper Square, Cooper Union’s new academic building, was designed by Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis.  Like the screen of rods at Renzo Piano’s Times Tower, its perforated stainless steel veil opens up to selectively reveal underlying glass while unifying the upper floors.  Mayne has used perforated steel and telegraphed windows through it in earlier projects, including his 2001-04 Caltrans Headquarters in Los Angeles.  Unlike the Times Tower or Caltrans, 41 Cooper Square uses its screen to break free of rather than reinforce the rectilinear, and indulge in something closer to pure sculpture.  Here Mayne explores new territory with the plastic potential of the screen.

A close-up of 41 Cooper Square’s perforated steel screen shows how its accents are created by leaving some holes filled in.  The image shows how such screens gray-down colors, despite claims that they are transparent.  The less open the screen and the dimmer the exterior light, the more the world seen through the screen appears in silhouette.  The retina’s shape-perceiving rod cells are more sensitive than its color-perceiving cone cells; when stimulation is evenly reduced, form perception suffers less than color perception.

Its free-form screen gives 41 Cooper Square the rich visual variety of sculpture as one moves around it.

For the cover of last November’s Architectural Record Magazine (photo:  Roland Halbe), 41 Cooper Square poses with its screen’s “windows” open.  The layering of a screen with window-like openings over actual windows, pioneered by Renzo Piano, is here taken a step further;  screen panels can be opened and closed just like a traditional casement window to allow clearer views out and additional natural light in, while adding life and variation to the façade.  Since the building’s completion, however, the screen’s windows have rarely been opened.

Nearing completion at 524 West 19th Street, Metal Shutter Houses, a condominium designed by Shigeru Ban, will have inner glass faces that  fold up against the apartments’ double-height ceilings, and outer faces of perforated rolling shutters that provide shade and privacy.  Like Mayne’s screens, Ban’s will be operable.  Unlike those at 41 Cooper Square, Ban’s are likely to be opened.

The perforated rolling shutters of Ban’s project are off-the-shelf security technology familiar from the corner bodega, and characteristic of the architect’s ad hoc use of humble materials like cardboard tubes and shipping containers.  Their densely packed perforations will provide privacy, allow cross ventilation, and keep bugs out, at least in theory.

In addition to their practical purposes, Ban’s perforated shutters will also provide the veiled transparency required of today’s sophisticated windowflage.

Smith-Miller+Hawkinson Architects presented this design for the Great Jones Hotel at 25 Great Jones Street to a public hearing of the Landmarks Preservation Commission last week.  According to the website Curbed, “The Landmark Committee is urging Smith-Miller to re-work the perforated stainless steel skin (complete with sexy leaves pattern) into a tripartite look, hoping to minimize the building’s verticality and create a structure that’s a more contextual companion to its neo-classical neighbors,” which would entirely miss the point - and historic local pedigree – of this school of windowflage.

A model of the Great Jones Hotel shows two types of windowflage:  the front facade has a perforated stainless steel screen with a truly camouflage-like pattern etched into it, while the side wall has punched windows that are freed from the usual grid to disguise themselves as a free-form pattern from a Suprematist painting.

A pre-war brick office building at 1775 Broadway is currently being wrapped in a glass curtain wall, part of its repackaging as “3 Columbus Circle.”  The new look is the work of Gensler, the world’s largest architecture firm.  A rendering posted at the job-site, below, suggests that the original punched window openings will be visible through the new glass skin.  This would follow the trend for layered windowflage, adding a sculptural unity without entirely suppressing underlying diversity.  It would also distinguish the project from deeply regrettable precedents like Donald Trump and Der Scutt’s 1980 tinfoil mummification of Warren and Wetmore’s 1919 Commodore Hotel into the Grand Hyatt, just east of Grand Central Terminal.  The emerging reality of 3 Columbus Circle, however, shows the rendering’s visual depth to be as fictional as its prairie setting.  Other recent projects pursuing a layered effect by this means, like 15 Union Square West, have fared no better.

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The Coney Island Elephantine Colossus is an object lesson in the need for windowflage, the camouflaging of windows in the service of a building’s overall sculptural effect.  The work of Philadelphia architect William Free, it was built in 1883-85 as a hotel and later became a brothel.  In 1896, it departed this world in true Coney Island style by burning down.  Resolution of the conflict it illustrates, between form and fenestration, is one of the driving forces behind much recent architectural innovation on view in New York.

In his 1930 book, Precisions, Le Corbusier presented a series of sketches illustrating ”the history of architecture by the history of windows throughout the ages,” culminating with his own horizontal ribbon window.  Much of the history of architecture since can be traced in the history of window camouflage.

The 19th century New York architect Alexander Jackson Davis pioneered disguising of the individual window.  According to Jane B. Davies in the 1992 Metropolitan Museum of Art monograph on the architect, “A remarkable original creation by Davis was the window he called Davisean Multistoried, recessed in one plane with a panel at floor level and usually with mullions running its height, it gave unity and verticality to a façade.  It anticipated the modern vertical strip window.  . . . Occasionally imitated by other architects, it was too far ahead of its time to be adopted generally.” 

In New York’s great pre-war age of skyscrapers, the influential renderer Hugh Ferris and progressive architects like Raymond Hood carried Davis’s vertical strip windows into the clouds.   

The post-war development of the glass curtain wall created the opportunity for a uniform surface that made transparent and opaque panes appear the same from outside.  Rebelling against the facile over-use of this technique, from suburban office parks to glitzy Trump towers, today’s leading designers are finding new ways to resolve and even exploit the window-vs-object issue.  Such solutions began and first developed in New York, and the city’s newest notable buildings show how their continued pursuit has become a primary concern of today’s architecture.

Alexander Jackson Davis’s 1835 rendering shows an unbuilt New York project for an American Institute.  The windows of its upper floors are arranged into continuous vertical strips, concealing their association with stacked floors, as is honestly expressed in the flanking buildings.  Davis’s windows suggest a single full-height space within and support the building’s simulation of a cavernous Egyptian temple.  His division of the facade into a street-level entry story and upper floors that read as a single volume is a continuing hallmark of buildings that camouflage windows.

Either/Or:  to the left of the Woolworth Building, a brick tower does nothing to reconcile its human-scaled windows to a city-scaled building;  at far left, the Millenium Hotel tower dispenses with expressed windows altogether by way of a tinted glass curtain wall that makes the building pure sculpture.  Both/And:  The Woolworth Building achieves real architecture through a design that’s both windowed building and sculpture.  

Architects of early skyscrapers had a new form and scale to deal with.  Working from a toolbox of historical styles that were meant for lower buildings, they were at a loss until Cass Gilbert adopted the verticality of the Gothic to the Woolworth Building.  Upon its completion in 1913, it was not just the world’s tallest skyscraper, but the most successfully composed.  Although its windows are internally related by common horizontal floors, Gilbert externally combined them in vertical strips that relate to the overall scale and vertical orientation of the building, to symphonic effect.  A step had been taken toward the disappearance of the individual window.

A rendering by Hugh Ferris shows the Chanin Building, built 1927-29.  By this time, the vertical organization of windows pioneered by the Woolworth building had become the norm.  Ferriss’s rendering dispenses with individual windows altogether, showing only the vertical recesses into which they would be organized.

A rendering from Hugh Ferriss’s 1929 book, The Metropolis of Tomorrow, shows an imaginary, windowless building:  ”Buildings like crystals.  Walls of translucent glass.  Sheer glass blocks sheathing a steel grill.”  His vision anticipated glass curtain wall technology that was still decades away.   The crystalline forms he imagined are as current as Cook + Fox Architects’ Bank of America Tower, completed in 2008, and Jean Nouvel’s proposed MoMA Tower.

Completed in 1924, Raymond Hood’s first New York skyscraper was the American Radiator Building at 40 West 40th Street, overlooking Bryant Park.  Hood suppressed the appearance of countless windows as he would in all the great skyscrapers he went on to design.  In this case, his choice of brick color downplayed windows to emphasize masterful building massing.  (This tactic is undercut by the current management’s use of white window treatments.)  “If the black windows punched the relatively light colored masonry exterior full of holes, the thing to do was to make the walls black so the windows wouldn’t show.” - Raymond Hood Architect, by Walter H. Kilham, 1973.

Raymond Hood’s Daily News Building, built 1929-30, took Hugh Ferris’s suppression of windows into dark vertical recesses a step closer to reality, even as it abstracted skyscraper massing and detail into new territory.  Ferris rendered several of Hood’s projects and his simplifying style was in turn so influential on architects that Rem Koolhaas wrote in Delirious New York, “the city would establish him, Ferriss the renderer, as its chief architect . . .”

Hood switched to continuous horizontal bands of windows in the McGraw-Hill Building, built 1930-1931.  These allowed greater flexibility of interior layout and reflected Le Corbusier’s ideas about modern “landscape” oriented windows.  In this Hood-commissioned photo by Samuel H. Gottscho, the building’s flush-set windows become lost amid the reflective glazed terra cotta building skin, and the simple force of the building’s massing predominates.  Gottscho contrasts Hood’s taut, polished, machine-age surface to the punched windows of the older building in the foreground.  Like Hugh Ferriss’s renderings of crystalline buildings, this image anticipates the post-war glass curtain wall technology that would subdue and even obliterate expression of the window.   

Carried to its logical conclusion, windowflage finds a dead end in the black glass curtain wall of Trump World Tower, designed by Donald Trump’s house architect, Kostas Condylis.  The world’s tallest residential building upon its completion in 2001, the best anyone could find to say about it was that it wasn’t gold.  Other architects have sought more satisfying solutions to the conflict between form and fenestration, and their pursuit has made for much of New York’s best recent architecture. 

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No place in New York elicits such wonder at the retina’s capacity as the Iron Triangle.  Self-contained, densely packed and eye-boggling, it is an alternate reality recalling Hong Kong’s Kowloon Walled City, demolished in 1993-4, below.

Comparing the vibrancy of the Iron Triangle to the city’s canned and bland development plan for it brings to mind William Gibson’s 1993 Wired article on Singapore, “Disneyland with the Death Penalty.”  Gibson finds Singapore a sanitized theme park where the physical past “has almost entirely vanished” and “the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely short supply.”  “It’s boring here,” he writes, calling Singapore a habitable “version of convention-zone Atlanta,” at risk of becoming a “smug, neo-Swiss enclave of order and prosperity.”  Gibson ends the piece with his departure of Singapore by way of Hong Kong’s airport, where he finds a counterpoint: 

“In Hong Kong I’d seen huge matte black butterflies flapping around the customs hall, nobody paying them the least attention.  I’d caught a glimpse of the Walled City of Kowloon, too.  Maybe I could catch another, before the future comes to tear it down. 

Traditionally the home of pork-butchers, unlicensed denturists, and dealers in heroin, The Walled City still stands at the foot of a runway, awaiting demolition.  Some kind of profound embarrassment to modern China, its clearance has long been made a condition of the looming change of hands. 

Hive of dream.  Those mismatched, uncalculated windows.  How they seem to absorb all the frantic activity of Kai Tak airport, sucking in energy like a black hole. 

I was ready for something like that. . . . 

I loosened my tie, clearing Singapore airspace.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Once a swamp and then an ash dump, the ground of the Iron Triangle in Willets Point, Queens, now feels like both.  Its businesses have an unacknowledged ancestor within one of the greatest works of American literature.   

The Great Gatsby was going to be called Among Ash Heaps and Millionaires until the great Scribners editor Max Perkins persuaded F. Scott Fitzgerald otherwise.  Bad as it was, Fitzgerald’s working title serves to tell how much importance he placed on the novel’s “valley of ashes,”  the setting for George Wilson’s garage in the novel.  The valley of ashes was based on the sprawling Corona dump which would be regraded and buried - under the 1939 World’s Fair site, now Corona Flushing Meadows Park, and Shea stadium - except for the corner of it at the tip of Willets Point that was left to its own devices and just maniacally proliferated car repair shops until it came to be known as the Iron Triangle.  Architakes’ search for Wilson’s Garage finds that it was almost certainly located within the Iron Triangle, a unique district whose days are numbered in the path of a city initiated development plan.   Read the rest of this entry »

Thom Mayne’s new academic building for Cooper Union, 41 Cooper Square, is the Pritzker Prize winning architect’s first building in New York.  Sensual, jarring and willfully strange, it’s unlike anything else in the city.  New Yorkers won’t find a meaningful introduction to Mayne or his building anywhere in the popular press.

Fifteen years ago, a Progressive Architecture editorial by Thomas Fisher titled “A House Divided” lamented the state of writing about architecture.  Fisher saw a choice between “unquestioning description” by architectural journalists and “obscure, jargon-filled analysis” by academic critics.  “What is rare, on either side,” Fisher wrote, “are critics who can address the underlying ideas and larger meanings of architecture and who can convey them clearly and concisely to the public and the profession.”  What’s been written so far about Thom Mayne’s new academic building for Cooper Union shows how true this remains.  Read the rest of this entry »

Brompton World Championship racers in obligatory jacket and tie depart from Blenheim Palace.  The dress code suggests both the folding bike’s roots in English quirkiness and its usefulness for urban commuting.

There’s no better way to take possession of a city than on a compact folding bike.  Neighborhoods that would be discouragingly distant on foot become only minutes away.  Distant communities that might otherwise go unexplored become riding destinations with the option of making part of the trip on a bus or train next to one’s unobtrusively folded mount.  A folder can be carried into shops and restaurants, avoiding the inconvenience and unreliability of chaining up outdoors.  Owning a truly compact folder is like having a bike in your back pocket.  It can shrink an entire city.  Not only does such a bike take you to fresh places in town, it does so without compromising the spatial immediacy of walking.  Philippe Starck has said, “frankly, it isn’t Manhattan that interests me.  The center of Manhattan is very civilized, a nice international city.  I am more interested in the passion of New York, and that’s why I go with my motorcycle or bicycle to the Bronx, Queens and Harlem.  There, you are like a spectator in front of the most beautiful drama in the world. Every corner of the street seems like an opera stage, a stage for drama.  The vibrations there are very strong.”  Read the rest of this entry »

Glimpses of the Manhattan skyline flavor Harding Park’s ramshackle romance.

At the end of a peninsula in the Bronx there’s a place where the sidewalks end, the street grid releases its grip, and the world seems to have been improvised by residents happily left to their own devices.  Harding Park sits on the west side of Clason (pronounced Clawson) Point, a tooth in the Bronx’s jagged waterfront where the East River broadens out into Long Island Sound.     Read the rest of this entry »

When it was completed in 1951, the Farnsworth House was a window into the future.  Still inspiring new interpretations, it has the open-endedness of great art. 

The economy with which the Farnsworth House elicits its richness of response is one proof of “less is more.”  With minimalism and technology the tines of its tuning fork, the house’s reverberations are as strong today as ever.  While it has inspired countless glass houses, a handful may provide a rough outline of its still widening influence.   Read the rest of this entry »