ArchiTakes

The 2002 World Trade Center competition entry by the team of architects Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey and Steven Holl is shown in its finished form at left, and in an earlier study by Holl, at right. The images are juxtaposed as they appear in Holl’s book, Urbanisms. The finished scheme has the regimentation of Upper Manhattan’s street grid while the study suggests Lower Manhattan’s off-kilter intersections. (One legend has it that the slang meaning of “square” comes from Greenwich Village’s bohemian heyday, when free thinkers lived on its unaligned streets and conformists on uptown’s rectangular blocks.) Holl asserts that the distinction mattered to him, in his book Architecture Spoken:

I had been working on a vision called Parallax Towers years before, in which I envisioned horizontal linkage of vertical thin towers. The notion of these as hybrid buildings, meaning they had offices, living, commercial aspects and they were linked in section, orchestrating what is normally known as a vertical typology into a horizontal one. The flexibility of that idea would work for the program we were given for this new project. Peter Eisenman and I fought until the end on how the horizontals should meet the verticals. I always wanted them to move, as in my original project from the early nineties, but he wanted them straight. The compromise was to keep them straight.

Despite this lost battle, Holl would speak proudly of the end result in a lecture at SCI-Arc on September 11, 2003, and bitterly reject architecture critic Paul Goldberger’s description of its “icy rationality.” Nonetheless, his earlier resistance to the squared-off default, in what he calls “endless and enormously confrontational meetings,” is telling.   

Like his World Trade Center proposal, Steven Holl’s Parallax Towers, envisioned to rise from the Hudson off the Upper West Side of Manhattan, are distinguished by sloped bridges. In describing their varied pitches as movement, Holl underscores the way they express human volition and motility. The unsolicited project is one of several created by Holl before his time was commandeered by real commissions. When these visions were collected in an exhibition called Edge of a City, the architect Stan Allen wrote:

They belong to a tradition of utopian realism like that of Superstudio and Yona Friedman in the sixties and the Japanese Metabolists in the fifties; they recall Raymond Hood’s Residential Bridges and Le Corbusier’s urban proposals of the twenties and thirties. As with other architects working in this tradition, there is something seemingly arrogant in Holl’s assuming the power to remake the image of the city. Yet this is the territory in which these projects operate most effectively: not as concrete proposals, but as infiltrations of the collective imagination, producing an idea of what the city could be.

Allen’s reference to popular suggestion and the collective imagination relates this territory to myth, and its expression of shared human fears and desires.   

An image from Superstudio’s 1969 Continuous Monument is shown above Steven Holl’s 1977 Gymnasium Bridge project. They share a visionary tradition and have formal similarities. Both projects substitute a multi-purpose blocky framework for individual buildings. In Superstudio’s hands, this form taps fears of oppressive “scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide,” while Holl makes it a utopian bridge to social re-engagement in a mixed-use – “hybrid” is his constant word – building that hints at the idea of a floating horizontal skyscraper and weightless architecture. For decades, Holl would build on the Gymnasium Bridge in other visions and, notably, major commissions for real buildings.   

The building section of Steven Holl’s 1992-2002 Simmons Hall at MIT is shown below a 1990 Berlin Free Zone image by his friend Lebbeus Woods. Rebellion against cubic space is seen in both. Holl is about creating the experience of spatial porosity found in cities like Naples; Woods is about myth-like narratives - and political provocations - of transformation. Neither aim is catnip to businesslike clients. Holl is known for turning away commissions that would deny his vision; Woods was a full-fledged rebel angel, refusing to serve clients at all, the better to create uncompromised new worlds.   

The body’s interaction with the physical world, its movement through space and time, and its experience of changing perspectives are architecture’s starting point for Steven Holl, reflecting his interest in the phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In this photo of his Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, static Cartesian space and the vanishing points of its diminishing perspective grid are assiduously avoided; subjective experience is prioritized, and the body’s fundamental nature as a sensate, moving entity is engaged and celebrated. The man who designed this space must indeed have regretted seeing his World Trade Center vision regress into the square world’s frozen grid, for its experiential lockstep if not its association with domineering, externally applied reason.

In what might be a belly-of-the-beast view inside Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, New York’s 1960 Union Carbide Building lends grim new meaning to “vanishing point.” Its static cage of X, Y and Z-axes captures a work atmosphere on the verge of precipitating into a half-century hail of Cartesian cubicles. Union Carbide was designed by SOM, the firm responsible for the One World Trade Center tower we will have. SOM’s own more poetic, torqued and asymmetrical early versions of the tower ultimately succumbed to the old default of geometric simplicity, a lifeless twist on the original Twin Tower boxes that Lewis Mumford called “just glass-and-metal filing cabinets.” The genius of Mumford’s characterization is its underlying indictment of such architecture’s failure to inspire, its complicity in the modern world’s debasement of human lives. The Union Carbide interior photo could illustrate Joseph Campbell’s words in The Power of Myth:

When you think about what people are actually undergoing in our civilization, you realize it’s a very grim thing to be a modern human being. The drudgery of the lives of most of the people who have to support families – well, it’s a life-extinguishing affair…. an imposed system is the threat to our lives that we all face today. Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes? How do you relate to the system so that you are not compulsively serving it?… The thing to do is learn to live in your period of history as a human being…. By holding to your own ideals for yourself and … rejecting the system’s impersonal claims upon you.

Flattening – and flat-surfaced – architecture reflects both the tyranny of powers which have the wherewithal to build, and that of the intellect over emotion and nature. This architecture is so pervasive and accepted as to be invisible, leaving its source and merits rarely examined. David Pye is an exception, in his book The Nature and Aesthetics of Design:

A flat surface will touch any other flat surface at all points…. Thus a mason building a wall need not fit each stone he lays to the stone below it. Having cut all his stones to flat surfaces first, he knows that any stone will bed steadily on any other without having to be fitted to it individually.

The versatility of flat surfaces is not commonly seen in nature. Stones which cleave under frost exhibit it; but the breadth of its application was a discovery of man’s, and one of his most valuable, for it enabled him to reduce the cost of construction in all materials very considerably. An extension of the discovery was that if the components of a structure were ‘squared’, i.e. were given two flat surfaces at right angles, then they would not only touch each other at all points of the adjacent surfaces, but would also do the same to a third component.

We take all this very much for granted. Any house and its contents, and the toy bricks on the nursery floor, showed us this before we could talk. The extraordinary rigmarole which I have had to use in writing about it is perhaps evidence that we take it as part of the natural order of things, which it is not….

Only those parts of a component which touch others need be squared. The sides and under surface of a beam need not be squared for the sake of economy, yet from the earliest times we see that this was done, exhibiting the tendency to standardization which appears in all constructional design…. Standardized pieces of material provide the designer with convenient limitations on shape from the start of his job, of the sort which are always welcome, and perhaps necessary, to the designer.

As Pye notes, we take this unnatural flatness for granted from infancy, impose more of it on ourselves than necessary, and have even become dependent on it. That it has infected our brains is proven by the cortical push-back we feel while walking between the tilted walls of Richard Serra’s sculptures, and in the Muller-Lyer optical illusion, which tricks only eyes brought up in orthogonal space. All this matters to the extent that squaring disguises limits placed on us both by others and ourselves. Lebbeus Woods wrote in his book Radical Reconstructions:

Architects usually design rectilinear volumes of space following Cartesian rules of geometry, and such spaces are no better suited to being used for office work than as a bedroom or a butcher shop…. While architects speak of designing space that satisfies human needs, human needs are actually being shaped to satisfy designed space, and the abstract systems of thought and organization on which design is based…. Design can be a means of controlling human behavior, and of maintaining this control into the future.

If this sounds Orwellian, think of the mason’s pre-squared stone, which saves him hunting for one that fits naturally but compels him to build straight walls, and compare what Orwell said about clichés in his essay Politics and the English Language:

If you use readymade phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious…. They will construct your sentences for you – even think your thought for you, to a certain extent – and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself. It is at this point that the special connection between politics and the debasement of language becomes clear…. Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.

The worst aspect of this control may be that it comes from what Woods calls “abstract systems of thought.” Ever since Superstudio contrasted the orthogonal orthodoxy of its white, gridded, rectilinear Continuous Monument with soft green nature, Cartesian architecture has stood for our bloodless intellect – Goldberger’s “icy rationality” – in mortal combat with our true nature. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell illustrates this dialectic with an example from Wagner’s Ring:

When Siegfried has killed the dragon and tasted the blood, he hears the song of nature. He has transcended his humanity and reassociated himself with the powers of nature, which are the powers of our life, and from which our minds remove us.

You see, consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of the total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body….

If [a] person insists on a certain program, and doesn’t listen to the demands of his own heart, he’s going to risk a schizophrenic crackup. Such a person has put himself off center. He has aligned himself with a program for life, and it’s not the one the body’s interested in at all. The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what the values are that they should be living for.

If Campbell’s reference to what “the body’s interested in” merges nicely with Steven Holl’s focus on bodily engagement with architecture, his use of myth and emphasis on self-determination all but define Lebbeus Woods, author of such titles as Anarchitecture and Radical Reconstructions. In the latter, Woods wrote: “The mythless man stands eternally hungry, surrounded by past ages, and digs and grubs for roots.”

Woods’ image Lower Manhattan has the psychological resonance of myth. Water of course represents the unconscious. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell describes the well in Grimm’s Tale, “The Frog King,” as “that unconscious deep (‘so deep that the bottom cannot be seen’) wherein are hoarded all of the rejected, unadmitted, unrecognized, unknown, or undeveloped factors, laws, and elements of existence.” As if to convey this, Woods replaced the drained harbor’s smooth bed with plummeting cliff faces rendered in jagged lines, the non-linear complement to the establishment laws that rule above the surface. The unconscious is further invoked by Woods’ description of “peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is.” As Joseph Campbell noted, humans are the consciousness of the earth. For all its skyscraping, the Lower Manhattan of Woods’ vision is just a veneer of civilization, “relatively small human scratchings on the surface” of a deeper realm that dwarfs it and puts it in perspective. Woods seemed to suggest the possibility of living in accord with this deeper reality, saying: “The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed, and, in the drawing, there are suggestions of inhabitation in that lower region.” His own analysis is otherwise limited to observations on scale and density. In text accompanying the image’s publication in a 1999 issue of Arbitare he wrote:

Manhattan is not Big, but Too Small, which accounts for its congestion, its unique cultural intensity. Lille and Shanghai cannot becomes cultures of congestion, no matter how big they are or become. At issue is the matter of scale, not of size. Scale is something more subtle than size, having to do with precise relationships.

In exaggerating Manhattan’s containment, Woods’ image both emphasizes its intensity and makes it read as a single structure housing all the activities of the city. It may be his response to the statement by Le Corbusier to the American press, which Woods quotes, that “your skyscrapers are too small.” But by then, Corb was already infiltrating the collective imagination with visions of multi-use mega-blocks, which would come to bastardized and damning fruition in New York’s housing projects.

To be continued . . .

The Dutch architectural photographer Iwan Baan took this helicopter photo of Downtown blacked-out by Hurricane Sandy. A memorable New York Magazine cover, it resonates with a century-old genre; views of a transformed Lower Manhattan from above New York Harbor.

Lebbeus Woods died on October 30th, as Sandy left his downtown neighborhood in the darkness captured by Baan’s photo. His 1999 drawing, Lower Manhattan, shows the Hudson and East Rivers dammed, draining the harbor. “The underground – or lower Manhattan – is revealed,” Woods told BLDGBLOG’s Geoff Manaugh in an interview, continuing:

So I was speculating on the future of the city and I said, well, obviously, compared to present and future cities, New York is not going to be able to compete in terms of size anymore. It used to be a large city, but now it’s a small city compared with Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Kuala Lampur or almost any Asian city of any size. So I said maybe New York can establish a new kind of scale – and the scale I was interested in was the scale of the city to the Earth, to the planet. . . . I wanted to suggest that Lower Manhattan – not lower downtown, but lower in the sense of below the city – could form a new relationship with the planet.

So it was a romantic idea – and the drawing is very conceptual in that sense.

But the exposure of the rock base, or the underground condition of the city, completely changes the scale relationship between the city and its environment. It’s peeling back the surface to see what the planetary reality is. And the new scale relationship is not about huge blockbuster buildings; it’s not about towers and skyscrapers. It’s about the relationship of the relatively small human scratchings on the surface of the earth compared to the earth itself.

Woods’ follows long traditions in both his speculation on the future of Lower Manhattan and his use of it as a scale reference. His image is prescient in omitting the World Trade Center towers. They are probably left out, along with the Manhattan Bridge, in the interest of romantic effect. Woods says he worked from aerial photographs. Some of these may have predated the World Trade Center and other blocky buildings he also left out. He’d have had plenty to choose from, given the historic popularity of the subject and viewpoint.

Illustrator Louis Biederman’s New York City as it will be in 1999 was widely circulated via the Sunday Edition of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World on December 30th, 1900. A where-will-it-all-end reverie on Lower Manhattan’s proliferation of skyscrapers and bridges, the image inaugurates a convention of setting a future scene with fantastic airships. They contribute to a pulsating vision of layered transportation systems that would inform later images like King’s Dream of New York and reach cinematic apotheosis in the buzzing dystopian city of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Harry Grant Dart’s Some Day, in detail above, followed Biederman’s lead. Dart’s image indulged his particular penchant for fantasy airships. It appeared in the March 4, 1909, Real Estate Number of Life Magazine, alongside A.B. Walker’s influential cartoon of a skyscraper frame planted with suburban houses. (Walker’s cartoon would be revisited by Rem Koolhaas’s 1978 seminal book Delirious New York and SITE’s 1981 Highrise of Homes experimental proposal.) The 44-page Life issue includes four more futuristic views of New York, alongside eight ads for cars and six for car-related products, which paint a more accurate picture of the future.

Aerial photos of Lower Manhattan like this one of around 1930 are a staple of the era’s postcards. This example is one of many that oblige earlier expectations by delivering a foreground airship, in this case the USS Akron. It captures the locale fulfilling its role as the future’s cutting edge, farther ahead of the world than it would ever be again, and just about to be frozen as such by decades of depression, war and recovery.

Architect Raymond Hood began proposing East and Hudson River bridges with 50 to 60 story residential skyscrapers as support pylons in 1925. In 1930 he presented this photomontage of Manhattan densely ringed with residential bridges and interspersed with mountain-like clusters of skyscrapers at selected street intersections. It recalls Louis Biederman’s cartoon, New York City as it will be in 1999, both in what it envisions and its title. Hood looked forward only twenty years, calling his project Manhattan 1950. His melding of residential building and bridge is an early step in the direction of 1960s megastructures, monumental frameworks accommodating structure, transportation and all the functions of a city. The megastructure movement reflected architects’ conviction at the time of their responsibility to design the whole human environment, a scary prospect indeed.

Reyner Banham astutely identified the appeal of Lower Manhattan as a canvas for new visions of the future. His 1976 book Megastructure is illustrated with this image of Archigram’s 1963 Walking City project, showing the conceptual architectural group’s walking cities against a backdrop of Wall Street skyscrapers. Banham’s caption reads: “Their location here in the East River, with the towers of Manhattan in the background, suggests a deliberate challenge to older visions of the future . . .” By the sixties, Lower Manhattan had become the standard against which to measure urban visions, sealing its own mythic status.

Lower Manhattan’s use as a measuring stick for new urban visions followed upon its use as a scale reference. The outline of Albert Kahn Associates’ vast Dodge Chicago Aircraft Engine Plant, built for the war effort, was superimposed on Lower Manhattan in the December 1943 issue of The Architectural Forum. While a New Yorker could compare the length of this factory to a walk from the the Battery to the Bowery, the rest of the world could by now relate as well to what had become an iconic cityscape and universal point of reference. The manner in which the plant’s outline passes out of sight behind buildings as it weaves among them surpasses the purpose at hand and speaks of this terrain’s power to fire the imagination. The image foreshadows visions of city-containing buildings, sometimes rendered as visitors to New York.

Superstudio’s theoretical Continuous Monument of 1969 picks up where The Architectural Forum’s Dodge Plant image left off, encircling the very same skyscraper blocks. The Dodge Plant outline is not an unlikely influence, given its publication in a major architectural journal and its remarkable similarities. In the words of Superstudio’s Toraldo di Francia, The Continuous Monument was “a form of architecture” reflecting a “world rendered uniform by technology, culture and all the other inevitable forms of imperialism.” Fellow member Adolfo Natalini said, “. . . in 1969, we started designing negative utopias like The Continuous Monument – images warning of the horrors architecture had in store with its scientific methods for perpetuating standard models worldwide. Of course, we were also having fun.” The ultimate sixties megastructure, The Continuous Monument would circle the planet, carrying to its logical conclusion the International Style’s vocabulary of rational, gridded rectangular extrusions, and its arrogation of universal applicability to a world homogenized by progress. Manhattan’s transfixed skyscrapers are a foil for this new future, contrasting old-school object buildings and individuality with a uniform structure beyond architecture. As in Lebbeus Woods’ Lower Manhattan image, the World Trade Center towers are omitted, although The Continuous Monument co-opts and critiques their scaleless box-tube vocabulary.

The most abstracted scheme for the 2002 World Trade Center competition came from the team of architects Richard Meier, Peter Eisenman, Charles Gwathmey, and Steven Holl. Their entry’s two structures have five scaleless bridge-connected towers, all made of continuous, extruded, white, rectangular sections, and dwarfing conventional skyscrapers. It resembles nothing imagined before so much as Superstudio’s Continuous Monument, as if pieces of it had been salvaged and turned on end. Did this Ground Zero team appropriate from Superstudio’s project? ArchiTakes will be back to dig deeper.

Continued

This image by Owen Freeman illustrated last month’s New York Times post-Sandy op-ed by James Atlas, “Is This the End?” Freeman says in his blog that it was commissioned by Times Art Director Erich Nagler, who “proposed an underwater, Atlantis-type view of New York City.” Freeman shows working sketches for the Statue image as well as underwater views of Grand Central Terminal and a city intersection with skyscrapers. The Times’ selection of his Statue of Liberty image says something about what rattles us most. It also extends a long tradition of using the statue as a post-apocalyptic milestone, one with roots pre-dating the statue itself.

The Statue of Liberty is seen even farther submerged by global warming, but from above the water line, in Steven Spielberg’s 2001 Science Fiction film, A.I. As a sci-fi film device, this image has a clear heritage . . .

Franklin J. Shaffner’s 1968 film, Planet of the Apes, ends with this visual kicker, revealing that – spoiler alert! – the planet ruled by apes is no less than our own future earth, turned into a vast desert by man himself. Same recipe as now, but with sand substituted for water.

Planet of the Apes may have been the first film to show a ruined Statue of Liberty, but the idea has a longer history in print, as documented by the surely pseudonymous Joachim Boaz in his blog Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. He displays no fewer than six pulp science fiction covers showing the statue underwater, buried in desert sand, and discovered by spacemen or post-apocalyptic primitives. Selected above are, left to right, a 1941 magazine cover by Hubert Rogers, a 1953 magazine cover by Alex Schomburg and a 1959 novel cover by an illustrator known only as Blanchard.  These might be assumed to reflect Cold War insecurity, except for the Astounding Science Fiction cover from pre-Bomb 1941, which shows an overgrown statue approached by raft-borne throwbacks. Clearly, there’s something older at work.

The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1817 draft of Ozymandias, from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, includes squiggles that might be a premonition of a certain green gown. It reads:

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

The statue’s arrogance might throw one off the scent, but the use of a shattered human form as a cultural momento mori undeniably sets the stage for our 71 year-old ruined-liberty trope. “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” kicks the ladder from under whoever’s currently on the top rung. Shelley, influenced by the revolutionary writings of Thomas Paine, is thought to have been targeting the oppressive monarchy of George III.

Shelley’s poem resulted from a sonnet-writing competition with his friend Horace Smith in which both would take as their subject a ruined statue of Ramses II (photo: Mutjaba Chohan). It had recently been acquired by the British Museum and was then bound for London. Smith’s poem was originally also called Ozymandias, as the Egyptian Pharaoh was known in Greek sources. The Guardian published Shelley’s entry on January 11, 1818, and Smith’s on February 1, 1818. Smith’s version is a more direct warning to his world-dominating homeland:

In Egypt’s sandy silence, all alone,

Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws

The only shadow that the Desert knows.

“I am great Ozymandias,” saith the stone,

“The King of kings: this mighty city shows

The wonders of my hand.” The city’s gone!

Naught but the leg remaining to disclose

The sight of that forgotten Babylon.

We wonder, and some hunter may express

Wonder like ours, when through the wilderness

Where London stood, holding the wolf in chase,

He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess

What wonderful, but unrecorded, race

Once dwelt in that annihilated place.

Smith is no Shelley, but in depicting a future regression of the human race he makes an astonishing leap into modern sci-fi territory, well trod from The Road Warrior to The Road. Sci-fi has always plundered more from the arts than the sciences, as witnessed by the derivation of Hollywood’s Frankenstein from Mary Shelley’s novel, published the same year as her husband’s Ozymandias.

What made the Times prefer Owen Freeman’s submerged Statue of Liberty over his underwater Grand Central? It pulls a bigger rug out from under us as an iconic symbol of America and our values, but it has another kind of potency that relates to the sacredness of the human form. Early architects believed God made man in his own image, dignifying classical architecture’s basis in the human body. Imprinted with our own form, classical architecture would no doubt retain its power for us if we learned that God looked like a duck, because the human body is also imprinted on our psyche from day one. This is why so few things disturb us as much as the visible destruction of the body, why decapitation seems more horrible than mere death. Grand Central’s classical forms may be based on the body, but the Statue of Liberty is the body. An assault on it isn’t just symbolic, but ad hominum in a way our bodies register. We identify with the peril of chin-lapping waves.  Thank the personal violence of Shelley’s “trunkless legs of stone” and “shattered visage.” Never mind that the Statue of Liberty stands for the opposite of tyranny; the subversive power and romantic appeal of Shelley’s colossal ruin irresistibly fired the imagination as soon as America brought its ready-made colossus to the center of the world stage. Old Ozymandias was just rubbing his hands in the wings.

From right to left, Amanda Burden, Christine Quinn, Mayor Bloomberg and Boss Tweed reprise Thomas Nast’s ring of passed blame around Chelsea Market in a flyer that’s started appearing on Chelsea streets.

On October 19th, I and others met with City Council Speaker Christine Quinn to discuss Jamestown Properties’ proposed rezoning of Chelsea Market, aimed at adding over a quarter-million square feet of office space to the historic complex. I twice asked Speaker Quinn just how she saw the proposal making sense on zoning basics of use, bulk or environmental impact. She would only say that she hadn’t completed her review, but then still had no answer when we met six days later, just before the City Council’s land-use committee voted to support the proposal, surely with Quinn’s endorsement. Only Speaker Quinn could have stopped the project, but she advanced it in the face of overwhelming community resistance and without being able to say how it was good zoning.

If Speaker Quinn is already beholden to real estate interests in her expected run for mayor next year, she promises to bring to that office a fourth term of the Bloomberg administration’s worst feature; a pro-development, anti-oversight bias. In this New York, real estate runs politics and deals trump zoning. In a New York Times article on the Council’s Chelsea Market vote, David Chen wrote that in remaining “conspicuously quiet about the issue” and failing even to attend a public hearing on it, Quinn “left little doubt . . . that she had been the driving force behind the deal.” It’s pretty official when the Times calls it a deal. Read the rest of this entry »

A Daily News article on Michael Bolla’s restoration of 436 West 20th Street said “the house was raised 8 inches to become more level.” It appears to be tied to the house next door by a shared party wall. If Bolla raised his house without considering this, it might explain his house’s cracked and sloping façade.  

436 West 20th Street, the 1835 Chelsea row house that real estate broker Michael Bolla “restored” and marketed as Chelsea Mansion is for sale. When ArchiTakes first reported on the project’s violations, Bolla swore to a judge that he’d been defamed and trumpeted legal action aimed at me in an obliging press. The press failed to report that he never sued.

ArchiTakes finds Bolla’s row house still has issues at the Department of Buildings that any potential buyer should know about. Drawings have been filed to answer the Department’s objections from an April 7, 2010, audit, but construction hasn’t been modified to match these drawings. Read the rest of this entry »

Shown in gold at top are Jamestown Properties’ proposed additions to Chelsea Market: 90,000 square feet at Ninth Avenue and 240,000 square feet at Tenth Avenue above the High Line, which is shown in green. Below is what Jamestown’s proposal might look like, give or take a floor, if it were really about needed office space and not about raiding the High Line’s light, air and sky views. Call it Scheme B. Either option would require a zoning change to increase Chelsea Market’s floor area by 330,000 square feet, but Jamestown’s would need a zoning change that would perversely allow construction within the footprint of a public park. City approval of Jamestown’s proposal is nonetheless thought to be a done deal. Read the rest of this entry »

The west end of Chelsea Market’s concourse incorporates the historic Nabisco complex’s train shed. About eighty feet of its distinctive clerestory window strip would be blocked by courtyard infill from Jamestown Properties’ proposed addition of a third of a million square feet of office space above it and the High Line. Jamestown’s proposal requires a zoning change that would only hurt Chelsea Market, the High Line and the community. The proposal is slated for city certification on March 26th. While this would technically begin the city’s review process, experience says certification would all but guarantee an addition to Chelsea Market, almost certainly including the cash-cow-in-the-sky office addition above the High Line that’s driving everything. By the time a project is certified, back-room handshakes have typically secured its ultimate approval. The subsequent “review process” merely affords limited opportunities for damage control and concession-seeking by the community.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Sunday’s sunshine made the High Line’s “Tenth Avenue Square” a pleasant place to relax, even in late November. The popular grandstand feature would be cast into shadow at the hour this photo was taken if Jamestown Properties builds its planned office tower over Chelsea Market. The effect would be particularly damaging to a park highlight meant for lingering rather than strolling. Read the rest of this entry »

Echo, a belief-defying work by Spanish sculptor Jaume Plensa (JOW’-meh PLEHN’-sah) remains on view for only two more weeks, through September 11th. Like Plensa’s own Crown Fountain and Anish Kapoor’s Cloud Gate (aka The Bean), both in Chicago’s Millennium Park, Echo is both art and crowd-pleasing phenomenon. Sadly, unlike those works, Echo is not a permanent installation. If you’re a sympathetic ArchiTakes reader with adequate funds, please buy Echo and donate her to the City. If you haven’t seen this sculpture yet, and even if you don’t have the purchase price, do make it to Madison Square Park and take in this wonder before it vanishes back into whatever dimension it came from. Echo isn’t Plensa’s first giant, elongated female head, but it’s hard to believe she wasn’t conceived specifically for the park, with its trees, which she surreally dwarfs, and surrounding skyscrapers, whose vertical attenuation she echos. The sculpture is part of Mad. Sq. Art’s rotating exhibit series. Its accompanying plaque reads: “Inspired by the myth of the Greek nymph Echo, Plensa’s sculpture depicts the artist’s nine-year old neighbor in Barcelona, lost in a state of thoughts and dreams. Standing 44-feet tall at the center of Madison Square Park’s expansive Oval Lawn, Echo’s towering stature and white marble-dusted surface harmoniously reflect the historic limestone buildings that surround the park. Both monumental in size and inviting in subject, the peaceful visage of Echo creates a tranquil and introspective atmosphere amid the cacophony of central Manhattan.” Read the rest of this entry »

Photographed last week, Midtown Plaza’s piecemeal demolition brings the look of a ship breaking yard to the skyline of Rochester, New York. The image may be bracing to those who remember the project’s promise of urban renewal when it was completed in 1962, to the design of urban planner Victor Gruen. According to the Wikipedia entry on Midtown, “Gruen was at the height of his influence when Midtown was completed and the project attracted international attention, including a nationally televised feature report on NBC-TV’s Huntley-Brinkley newscast the night of its opening in April 1962. City officials and planners from around the globe came to see Gruen’s solution to the mid-century urban crisis. Midtown won several design awards.”

A Jewish refugee from Nazi occupied Vienna, Gruen said he arrived in America with “an architectural degree, eight dollars, and no English.” He went from designing Fifth Avenue boutiques to a role as one of America’s premier urban planners. Melding his insights into consumer psychology with a conviction that retail spaces could create communities, Gruen invented the shopping mall. He strove to bring the urbanity of his native Vienna and Europe to America, claiming the Milan Galleria was his model for the mall. In 2004, Malcolm Gladwell wrote in The New Yorker that “Victor Gruen may well have been the most influential architect of the twentieth century” for his creation of the pervasive archetype. Gruen’s impact continues to be registered. Gladwell’s appraisal followed on the publication of Jeffrey Hardwick’s 2004 book, Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream. A decade ago, the media theorist and concept-coiner Douglas Rushkoff began popularizing the Gruen Transfer, also known as the Gruen Effect, by which shoppers are intentionally disoriented and distracted by the retail environment, so they’ll lose focus and succumb to impulse buying. Since 2008, The Gruen Transfer has been the title of an Australian TV series on advertising. In 2009, Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner released the documentary, The Gruen Effect: Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall.

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Architect Charles C. Haight modeled the General Theological Seminary’s bell tower on Magdalen College’s, Oxford. This view of it from Tenth Avenue and 20th Street would be blocked by Beyer Blinder Belle’s proposed addition to the Seminary’s 1836 West Building. The Seminary’s mid-block grounds were designed to complement set-back garden fronts and distinguished row houses across 20th Street. Together they make one of New York’s best blocks and form the heart of the Chelsea Historic District. The addition will go before a public hearing of the Landmarks Preservation Commission at 11 AM tomorrow, June 21st.

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The Landmarks Preservation Commission has denied a recent community request to add the Chelsea Market block to the existing Gansevoort Market Historic District. In a May 19th response to the Request for Evaluation, the Commission’s Director of Research wrote that “the properties do not appear to meet the criteria for designation . . . in part due to the fact that this block does not have a strong connection to the existing Gansevoort Market Historic District, either geographically or historically.”

This was a second attempt to have the block included in the City designated historic district. The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation had earlier gotten the complex listed as part of the Gansevoort Market Historic District recognized by the National Register of Historic Places, but wasn’t able to convince the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission to include it in its own smaller version of the district that the City designated in 2003. The distinction between City versus State and National designation is critical. Lacking City protection, Chelsea Market could be legally demolished by a private owner despite its State and National Register status, which only regulates publicly sponsored alterations. The website of the New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation states: “There are no restrictions placed on private owners of registered properties. Private property owners may sell, alter or dispose of their property as they wish.” Read the rest of this entry »

David Burns of STUDIOS Architecture presented his firm’s vision of an expanded Chelsea Market, above, to a meeting of Community Board 4 last night, attended by residents wearing “Save Chelsea Market” buttons. He promptly heard one viewer’s verdict of “ugly building” endorsed by a peal of applause. The view above looks northeast from the West Side Highway. The design tries to break down its oppressive mass by collage effects which could conceivably be said to take inspiration from the accretive vocabulary of the Chelsea Market complex, although Burns didn’t seem to have the heart to even bother trying this pitch. As for fitting in, it wouldn’t be much of an issue. Chelsea Market is part of the Gansevoort Market Historic District that’s listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but this insures State Historic Preservation Office oversight only for public development.  Somehow, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, which would oversee private alterations such as those now proposed, neglected to include the Market in its version of the District. Read the rest of this entry »

The doors of developer and real estate broker Michael Bolla’s 1835 rowhouse at 436 West 20th Street remain plastered with building notices over a year after a Daily News puff piece proclaimed it “one of the most perfectly restored homes in Manhattan.” On February 10, the Department of Buildings’ website indicated that the project was issued a Notice to Revoke its renovation permit.

In the year since this website began documenting his project’s problems, Bolla has succeeded in retaining new construction built without first obtaining required approvals, while pursuing a campaign of harassment and legal threat against ArchiTakes and of public disinformation in the press.

ArchiTakes’ experience highlights the risk run by legitimate neighborhood watchdogs: deep-pocketed plaintiffs can brandish groundless threats of lawsuits against them, aiming to buy silence through intimidation and the imposition of legal costs. Such plaintiffs run a risk of their own—that their targets will call their bluff and expose them for the bullies they are by publicly taunting them for failing to follow through on bogus lawsuits they have no hope or expectation of winning. Read the rest of this entry »

Shinichi Ogawa’s 2002 Abstract House could illustrate any of the ten House Rules. It demonstrates not just their compatibility, but their potential to enhance each other. In exploiting the strategies on which the rules are based, this modest house efficiently summons spatial luxury and an undistracted connection to nature from an ordinary site.

Ogawa’s floor plan successfully transplants lessons from Mies van der Rohe’s bucolic Farnsworth House into Japan’s Onomichi City. Its long side walls extend into the outdoors to embrace a small court at each end. The courtyard walls provide privacy from nearby houses and block street level distraction. The design’s minimalism gives the tiny courts a disproportionate impact, letting nature and atmospheric conditions set the tone of the house in a more dynamic and affecting way than any decorating scheme; not as pervasively as in a glass-box house but with much bigger bang for the pane. (Pivoting panels at either end of the service core can be closed to seal off the more private zone, at right above, or stand open to replicate the Farnsworth House’s spatial loop.)  

The idea for House Rules grew out of a conversation with a couple who asked for a critique of a plan they had found and liked in a book of house plans. From the perspective of an architect, the design was disappointing but it was hard to say why. Singling out shortcomings didn’t sum up what was wrong with it and only seemed nitpicking. The problem wasn’t so much with what the plan was, but all that it wasn’t. A copy of James Ackerman’s book on Palladio was within reach, and next we were looking at a plan of the Villa Foscari: “See how both the house and its individual rooms are all perfect shapes, as if they were designed at once, and nothing feels like leftover space?” What would be House Rule 3 was born.

The rules presuppose small houses and reflect personal preferences, but a case can be made for their validity on both counts.

Small houses make sense for sustainability and in response to America’s soaring percentage of one- and two-person households, which are now the national norm. Houses designed for such small households are freed from substantial privacy and partitioning needs, and can pursue exciting spatial opportunities in their place, much as sports cars are freed from back seats and sensible hardtops.

Small houses can also bring custom design into reach. Lending practices require more money to be spent up front on land acquisition and construction for self-built homes as opposed to purchase of ready-made development houses. Economic necessity funnels the vast majority of new home buyers into speculative tract houses that aren’t based on what most of us want, but on marketing assumptions aimed at maximizing profits across the boards. Developers seem to take Frank Lloyd Wright’s view of the American house – a box full of boxes with holes punched in it for windows – as a description of what Americans really want and a recipe for sales success rather than a complaint. If Americans were more willing to live in compact, affordable houses, many more would be in a position to finance custom designs. They’d be living in smaller but better-fitting homes, and the typical American house would look very little as it now does. The House Rules aim to encourage this alternative by optimizing the quality of space and experience in such houses, adding value through inexpensive or cost-free design decisions.

Beyond economic considerations, whatever validity the House Rules may claim lies in the merit of the great houses from which they’re derived. It became clear in assembling them that individual rules could not only be illustrated by the majority of iconic modern houses, but that most of the houses used as examples embodied most of the rules.

The House Rules are an introduction to the possibilities that lie beyond developer housing. They aim to get more Americans into houses designed specifically for them by an architect. The rules aren’t meant as a substitute for an architect, but a prelude to a conversation with one.

“I’d rather live in the nave of Chartres Cathedral and go out of doors to the john,” Philip Johnson told his architecture students.  His sentiment will resonate with anyone who’s ever stood in a meadow, greenhouse, park pavilion, industrial ruin or other non-house and impulsively felt “I want to live here.”  While such fantasies are soon quashed by practical priorities, they offer valid insights.   Read the rest of this entry »