ArchiTakes

Henry Wellge’s “Greatest New York”, published by The New York Times Company in 1911 and featured in a new exhibition at the New York Public Library, places the city within a liquid embrace.  Its foreground features the Jersey City waterfront.  New Jersey commuters transferred from Central Railroad of New Jersey trains onto ferries bound for Lower Manhattan, tracing a ferry route first established in 1661.  The New Jersey ferry slips are at center in the detail below.

“. . . I became aware of the old island that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world.  Its vanished trees . . . had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby  (more…)

Stern’s presumptuousness may owe something to the huge attention and acclaim that attended upon 15 Central Park West, the luxury condo he designed for the Zeckendorf Brothers.  Based on classic prewar apartment buildings by Rosario Candela, the project is probably the biggest real estate phenomenon New York has ever seen.  Quarterly New York real estate reports had to be adjusted to factor out the distorting influence of its astronomical sales.  The website Curbed took to calling it the “limestone Jesus”.  At a time when New York developers were finally hiring serious architects like Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel to generate appeal, 15 CPW might have been seen as the ultimate vindication for architecture’s claims to create value.  For architects who take their profession seriously, though, it was disappointing that what made the project so successful wasn’t the kind of quality that imagination can make out of thin air, but Stern’s accurate sense of what investment bankers want, and how many times over the building’s limestone cladding paid for itself.    

For a Vanity Fair article on 15 Central Park West, Stern posed atop its concierge desk, weakly mimicking the classic image of an urbanely macho Robert Moses poised on an I-beam over the East River.  Stern shares Moses’ ego, if not his public mission, a distinction emphasized by this photo’s gated setting.  What lies beyond is for the privileged few.    

 Arnold Newman’s 1959 photo serves as the cover for Robert Moses and the Modern City.  Moses famously said “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”  Unlike Stern’s, his omelets were for everyone’s consumption.  What lies beyond is a public realm.  (more…)

A rendering shows the main entrance of Robert A.M. Stern’s George W. Bush Presidential Center.  “I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde,” Stern says, “but there is a parallel world out there – of excellence.” (more…)

This year is the centenary of a cartoon that has had a remarkable influence on architecture.  Published in Life magazine’s “Real Estate Number” of March, 1909, the full-page cartoon by A.B. Walker shows conventional houses stacked on an open skyscraper frame.  Its caption reads, “‘Buy a cozy cottage in our steel constructed choice lots, less than a mile above Broadway.  Only ten minutes by elevator.  All the comforts of the country with none of its disadvantages.’ – Celestial Real Estate Company”

Walker’s cartoon was rediscovered by Rem Koolhaas and extensively analyzed in his seminal book, Delirious New York (Oxford, 1978, pp.69-70).  Koolhaas ignored the thrust of its caption and saw in the cartoon’s picture ”a theorem that describes the ideal performance of the skyscraper: a slender steel structure supports 84 horizontal planes, all the size of the original plot.  Each of these artificial levels is treated as a virgin site, as if the others did not exist, to establish a strictly private realm around a single country house and its attendant facilities, stable, servants’ cottages, etc.  Villas on the 84 platforms display a range of social aspiration from the rustic to the palatial; emphatic permutations of their architectural styles, variations in gardens, gazebos and so on, create at each elevator stop a different lifestyle and thus an implied ideology, all supported with complete neutrality by the rack.”   (more…)

With Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower (photo: Scarletgreen/Flickr) headed for demolition, the world will lose not just one of the few executed works of Japanese Metabolism, as noted earlier this month by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times, but a rare built example of plug-in architecture.  The Capsule Tower might at first appear no more than a quaint, dated vision of the future, but a look at its durable influence and vital legacy show an icon of growing historic significance whose loss will loom larger in the years to come.  (more…)

Jean Nouvel presented his design for the new MoMA tower in a public hearing at the City Planning Commission yesterday.  Calling it ”zee meezing peez of zee pizzle”, Nouvel made a case for the spike of his “Tower Verre“ as a natural fit within the sawtooth rhythm of Manhattan’s skyline.  Describing its lack of bulk and the way it leans back from the street and attenuates into the sky as resulting in a “modest” building, Nouvel also placed it within the historic context of the ”needle” like buildings rendered by Hugh Ferris.  It’s hard to sell a building that exceeds its as-of-right zoning height by 161 feet as contextual, but Nouvel clearly had a receptive audience in the Planning Commission.  The concern expressed for preserving the building’s poetically tapering peak was reminiscent of the 1980s rage for skyscrapers-with-tops. 

Rendering of Jean Nouvel’s Tower Verre 

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Ground has been broken on a new Bronx Community College building that will leave Stanford White’s Gould Memorial Library off-center on its historic quadrangle.  (more…)

The 1914 Loose-Wiles Sunshine Biscuit Company garage

The City University of New York has demolished a 1914 garage on its LaGuardia Community College campus that was part of the historic Loose-Wiles Sunshine Biscuit plant in Long Island City.  The building had been protected by its formal status as “eligible” for listing on the State and National Registers of Historic Places until the New York State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) issued a Letter of Resolution allowing its demolition in January.  The ground on which the building stood will be paved for parking.   (more…)