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 

Henry Hudson and his crew may have sailed for the Dutch, but they were hired Englishmen, and whatever wonder they felt on beholding a new world would have been incidental to the job of finding an open sea route to Asia.  What matters in Fitzgerald’s case is the inspiration he found in the region’s now 400 year old recorded history, and the water imagery it provided to what may well be the greatest page of American literature.  

A nice contrast can be found in the pungent grittiness of Joseph Mitchell’s 1951 essay, The Bottom of the Harbor:  ”The bulk of the water in New York Harbor is oily, dirty and germy.  Men on the mud suckers, the big harbor dredges, like to say you could bottle it and sell it for poison.  The bottom of the harbor is dirtier than the water.  In most places it is covered with a blanket of sludge that is composed of silt, sewage, industrial wastes and clotted oil.  The sludge is thickest in the slips along the Hudson, in the flats on the Jersey Side of the Upper Bay, and in backwaters such as Newtown Creek, Wallabout Bay, and the Gowanus Canal.”     

There’s fuel for the imagination on all levels at the New York Public Library’s new exhibition, Mapping New York’s Shoreline, 1609-2009, from the dauntingly sketchy maps Hudson had to work with, setting out 400 years ago, to a 1905 New York Bay Pollution Commission map uneasily overlaying sewer outlets on shellfish beds. 

The 1907 Atlas of the Borough of Brooklyn by G.W. Bromley & Co. features names of Coney Island amusement parks and their rides, including Trip to the Moon, Canals of Venice and Thompson’s Scenic Railway.  The blue circle at left is labeled “Friede’s Steel Globe Tower- 700 ft. high,” testifying to the credibility of  a proposal to build the world’s first single-building resort.  It was to have been the largest steel structure and the tallest and most voluminous building ever.  As noted in Rem Koolhaas’s riff on the project in Delirious New York, “by 1908 it is clear that the most impressive architectural project ever conceived is a fraud”. 

For anyone interested in maps or New York history, the show is a must-see.  The maps range from crude to spectacular, and are accompanied by aerial views and period images the captions of which make for an effortless education in city history.  One of the show’s great lessons is the extent to which New York owes its existence and prominence to waters that extend far beyond its own 578 miles of waterfront.  It’s easy today to think of New York as an isolated spike driven into the globe, but as the show makes clear, its discovery, creation and rise were all about its place in the continuum of the world’s waters. 

The six-inch wide maps of the Hudson River in the foreground are nine and twelve feet long.  The longer one, at right, an 1846 “Panorama of the Hudson from New York to Albany,” includes elevation views of topography and structures on each side of the River at a scale that might pass for accurate.  The Hudson, and later the Erie Canal, linked New York to the heartland, enhancing its greatness as a port and helping propel it to the status of a world capital.

The exhibition runs through June 26, 2010.  The Library is open from 10-6, Monday; 10-9, Tuesday and Wednesday; 10-6 Thursday through Saturday; and 1-5 on Sunday.

And while you’re at it . . .

Join a tour of the Library conducted by docents, starting from the reception desk at 11AM and 2PM, Monday through Saturday, and at 2PM on Sunday.  According to The Landmarks Preservation Commission’s Guide to New York City Landmarks, “the main building for the New York Public Library, the design for which was won in competition by Carrère & Hastings, is perhaps the greatest masterpiece of Beaux-Arts architecture in the United States.”  The building’s exterior is being restored in preparation for its 2011 centenary, with impressive results already visible on its Bryant Park façade. 

Visit Kinokuniya Books at 1073 Sixth Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets; upstairs it has one of the city’s better selections of architecture books (particularly Japanese titles) and an airy café overlooking Bryant Park, itself a designated scenic landmark.

Pay homage to Raymond Hood’s impressive American Radiator Building of 1923-24, overlooking Bryant Park from the south side of 40th Street (#40).  The Guide to New York City Landmarks says its “gold crown was originally brightly lit at night to simulate the glow of a radiator.”  Though modestly scaled, the building is one of New York’s great skyscrapers.  It has been converted into the Bryant Park Hotel.  Speaking of maps, go inside and pick up a free Manhattan Concierge Map.  Typically available at Manhattan hotels, this map is clear, detailed and far more useful as a subway map than the MTA’s – for Manhattan below 135th Street, anyway.  

Step into the Library of The General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen at 20 West 44th Street (11-7, Mon. & Thurs., 11-5, Tues. & Wed, & 10-5, Fri.).  A few steps down from the busy Midtown sidewalk, the three-story skylit library is one of those surprise spaces from another world, like Grand Central’s Campbell Apartment.  A New York Times piece a few years ago said “visiting the society conjures up thoughts of old wood and forged metal and unlocks the timeless secrets of money, power, commerce and industry at the heart of the city.”  Originally designed as a boys’ school by Lamb & Rich, architects of Teddy Roosevelt’s Sagamore Hill home, Greenpoint’s Astral Apartments and the main buildings of Barnard College and Pratt Institute, the building was bought by the now 224-year-old Society in 1899 and enlarged in 1903-05 to a design by Ralph S. Townsend with donations from member and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.  The building is a designated New York City landmark on a block rich with them, including McKim, Mead & White’s Harvard Club (#27), the New York Yacht Club, with its windows shaped like Spanish galleon sterns (#37), the Association of the Bar of the City of New York (#42) and the Algonquin Hotel (#59-61).

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.       

The normally balanced architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote two glowing reviews of 15 Central Park West.  His 2007 New Yorker piece, “Past Perfect”, pauses just long enough to ask, is ”costume-drama luxury the best that our new century has to offer?” before getting back to the building’s “exquisitely crafted marble trim.”  His 2008 Vanity Fair review, “The King of Central Park West”, is likewise awestruck save for two sentences that find the building’s exterior somewhat severe and its base less articulated than those of its neighbors.  Both pieces bristle with celebrity names and dollar signs. 

Stern’s enormous output fills many 9-pound books dedicated to his bland, pretty buildings for rich people.  The sheer proliferation of his easily turned-out product becomes a concern when it spreads to the public urban realm as a sort of invasive species, climbing like kudzu up the side of the Woolworth Building or choking out the native specimens of a historic New Haven neighborhood.   

A chummy interview of Stern by Goldberger is included in Robert A.M. Stern: Buildings & Projects 2004-2009.  Like Stern, Goldberger graduated from Yale and has taught there.  Stern’s career is bound up in Yale, where as a student he formed lasting relationships with faculty members Vincent Scully and Philip Johnson. 

Stern helped Scully research his 1962 book on Louis I. Kahn, the first book-length study of the architect, who also taught at Yale.  Scully wrote of Kahn that he “had worked himself back to a point where he could begin to design architecture afresh, literally from the ground up, accepting no preconceptions, fashions or habits of design without questioning them profoundly.  That ‘great event,’ so rare and precious in human history, when things were about to begin anew almost as if no things had ever been before, was on the way.”  If Stern ever read the book he helped Scully research, it had no effect on him.

Kahn said architecture began “when the walls parted and the columns became.”  He preferred the bluntness of Paestum’s ruins to the elegance of the Parthenon, finding them closer to the source of architecure’s power.  Architects like Stern see the past as something to be copied, often for easy profit, and as proof that the best that architecture has to offer is behind us.  Their successive re-issues carry architecture ever farther from its generating force and original vitality.  

Kahn’s interest in the past is seen by some as making way for the postmodernism that Stern would pursue with such commercial success.  In fact, Stern’s approach to design may best be defined in contrast to Kahn’s.  Where Kahn finds inspiration in the past, Stern finds a crutch.  Kahn’s Art Gallery was the first building to break from Yale’s neo-Gothic style.  In 2006, Vincent Scully called the newly restored Art Gallery ”our first modern building and our best.”  Nearly sixty years later, Stern is designing Yale’s two new residential colleges in neo-Gothic style.  If Stern stands for anything, it’s the end of architectural history, as of the 1920s.

Kahn rejected the easy road of imitation and visual charm.  In projects like the Salk Institute, he invested new forms with primitive power and timelessness.  In a world dominated by business as usual, few opportunities exist for the creation of architecture on this level.  Kahn’s commitment to it accounts for his relatively small output.  Yale twice gave him the opportunity to build.

In his extraordinary 2003 documentary, My Architect, Kahn’s son Nathaniel searches for his father – who died in 1974 when Nathaniel was 11 – among the buildings he left and the memories of those who knew him.  Interviewed for the film, Stern tries to bring Kahn down to his own level, telling Nathaniel, ”Don’t put him up on some gigantic pedestal. . . Don’t think that he was always trying to be a prince.  He was very much trying to be a player.  He wanted work, he wanted recognition. . . He was success-oriented.”  When Nathaniel asks, “Doesn’t every architect?”  Stern replies, “I can’t speak for every architect.”  Nathaniel continues in voice-over that Kahn was half a million dollars in debt when he died, and that of all his projects, only the Salk Institute made money.  Kahn was known to continue developing designs well after the likelihood of their realization or his payment for them had passed.  An architect who worked for Kahn, William Huff, remembers him turning down a prospective client who wanted a colonial house designed, and suggesting Thomas Jefferson when she asked him to recommend a colonial architect.  In a few years, Stern would have fit her bill.  Twenty-eight years ago in the Journal New Society, Reyner Banham described Stern’s ”complete lack of scruple that enables him to perform equally well in any style (or caricature thereof) that the market will bear.”

What would Kahn make of Stern today?  Of seeing Stern’s status as Yale’s Dean of Architecture used to hawk ten million dollar tract mansions in the sales material for Villanova Heights, the Riverdale development of Stern’s 10,000 to 15,000 square foot traditionally styled luxury homes?  As quoted in Carter Wiseman’s 2007 book, Louis I. Kahn:  Beyond Time and Style, William Huff says that Kahn “saw institutions as the important entities of man’s cooperative interactions,” and “loved Yale, where he found greatness as an institutional awareness – more so than his own alma mater,” the University of Pennsylvania.  Yale gave Kahn his first and last major commissions, for its Art Gallery extension and its Museum of British Art, and can claim much of the credit for creating his career.  At the end of My Architect, in Kahn’s Dhaka National Assembly Building, the architect Shamsul Wares movingly tells Nathaniel Kahn what an impossible gift his father had made to the poorest country in the world, for the asking.  Kahn, he says, ”has given us the institution for Democracy”.  Yale can take some of the credit for this.  It’s hard to believe this great institution can’t find an engaged, pluralist dean for its school of architecture who wouldn’t be so venal as to trade on its name, or use it to endorse self-serving preservation offenses.  Stern seems a vestige of yesterday’s world of self indulgence and unsustainable consumption, of Bush era deception and arrogance.  Goldberger’s 15 Central Park West pieces summon up the ghost of Herbert Muschamp, who in 1988 excoriated the previous boom’s architects for abandoning social responsibility to become ”Satan’s decorators” and “hired flunkies”.

Last year, Stern published The Philip Johnson Tapes, a book collecting his 1985 interviews of his teacher and “great friend”.  In it, Johnson says of Kahn, “I liked his work better than I liked him. . . . I never found him the great lovely guru-type.  I couldn’t stand all those long monologues about belief in truth.  I can’t stand truth.  It gets so boring, you know, like social responsibility.”  Stern seems a bit bored by truth himself, letting Johnson use questions about his fascist-leaning past as opportunities for lengthy self justification and whitewashing of his personal history into that of a “violent philo-Semite.”  Stern doesn’t even call Johnson on this unreconstructed view of Germany in the 1930s:  “I mean, Germany was being run down by the rich.  The German Workers Party was the only solution.  He [Hitler] was a magnetic, shall we say, speaker.”  Instead of asking Johnson just who he means by “the rich” or what Hitler had to say that attracted him, Stern responds, “Of course”.  It would take Michael Sorkin’s 1988 Spy exposé, “Where Was Philip,” to make Johnson eventually acknowledge and apologize for his early anti-Semitism.  

Johnson famously said ”architects are pretty much high-class whores” and often boasted that he’d design for Stalin if the price were right.  In his biography of Johnson, Franz Schulze says that he often called Stern “the best student I ever had.”  Given Stern’s record, it’s hard not to take those words in the worst possible way.  Asked in an Architect magazine interview whether the Presidential Center commission was a tacit endorsement of  Bush’s policies, Stern squirmingly said, “Look, I’m an architect, not a political commentator. Last time I checked, he was the twice-elected president of the United States. Even if it is controversial, we still need to preserve the papers of a twice-elected president. . . . And remember that most presidents are controversial and unpopular at times, but each of these people is the president, and each deserves a library.”  Then asked whether he’s been looking at presidential library precedents, Stern cites Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s as the most moving, before adding, ”He was also controversial during his presidency.”  In Stern’s Magic Kingdom, Bush may someday rank with Roosevelt.  Maybe once they find the weapons of mass destruction.  

Groundbreaking for the Bush Presidential Center is scheduled for late next year.  Saddam Hussein’s gun will be displayed there and is expected to be a major attraction. 

(Groundbreaking for Kahn’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park is planned for next month.  Kahn completed its design shortly before his death 35 years ago.  It will stand on the southern tip of Roosevelt Island, across the East River from the United Nations, an institution FDR named.  The project was kept alive and and will be executed largely through the effort of architects who revere Kahn.)

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.”

Earlier this month Robert A.M. Stern presented his preliminary design of the the Bush Library.  Stern has just the right attributes to be his fellow Yale alum’s architect: conservativism’s DNA-inscribed commitment to tradition, and an inability to refuse any commission, no matter how unsavory.  His building is the backward-gazing counterpart to the Polshek Partnership’s bridge-to-tomorrow Clinton Library.     

A muddled Bush Presidential Center is revealed in this model view.  Stern’s design calls for red brick and limestone facing.

The project will be built on the Campus of Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, where some faculty have objected to association with ”a pre-emptive war based on false premises” and “a legacy of massive violence, destruction, and death . . . in dismissal of broad international opinion.”  The Center comes to SMU attached to the “Freedom Institute”, a conservative think tank the presence of which has further angered faculty.  As reported in the New York Times Magazine, “Everything about the planned institute reminds them of what they detested about the Bush administration. It will proselytize rather than explore: a letter sent to universities bidding for the Bush center stipulated that the institute would, among other things, ‘further the domestic and international goals of the Bush administration.’ ” 

For Stern, the Library commission came as his profile reached dizzying new heights, primarily because of the phenomenal commercial success of his luxury condominium design for 15 Central Park West.  The development’s sales were enough to skew Manhattan real estate statistics for months on end.  In 2008 he was also awarded the Vincent Scully Prize, named for his old teacher, by the National Building Museum.  In December of 2007, the New York Times published a highly flattering appraisal of his turn as Dean of Yale’s School of Architecture, in which Reed Kroloff is quoted to say, “Bob Stern may be the best school of architecture dean in the United States.” 

A standard reference among preservationists, Stern’s unparalleled five volume study of New York architectural history bolsters his reputation as a scholar.  

It was Kroloff who had famously called Stern “the suede-loafered sultan of suburban retrotecture” in a 1998 Architecture magazine editorial about his appointment.  The Times piece plays up this turnabout, but in fact Kroloff’s loafer throwing had been a preamble to support for Yale’s decision; his 1998 piece went on to say of Stern, ”he is a teacher, scholar, and practitioner whose passion for and dedication to architecture are beyond question.”  Kroloff also accurately predicted that Stern would be “smart enough not to try imposing an esthetic agenda on a school that has always valued pluralism.”  While Stern’s architecture gets little critical respect, his dedication and scholarship have indeed long been viewed as unassailable.  Several of his recent projects, however, have seriously hurt his reputation among preservationists. 

Yale’s Hammond Hall has stood since 1904.  While a study found that it could be easily adapted to new use, the much loved Beaux Arts building is one of a dozen to be razed for Stern’s new dormitories.

Stern’s designs for two new Yale dormitory complexes have particularly rankled preservationists this summer.  The New Haven Preservation Trust and the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation unsuccessfully petitioned Yale to save seven historic buildings that are in the path of Stern’s plans.  Characteristically, his new gothic buildings will substitute false antiquity for the real thing, an approach that’s oblivious to both preservation principals and sustainability.  Stern’s dismissal of what is authentic in favor of make-believe meshes nicely with his past service on the Disney Company’s board of directors.    

The just-completed Superior Ink Condominium

On West Street in Greenwich Village, Stern’s Superior Ink Condominium would be entitled to its name had it adapted or added onto the original 1919 Superior Ink Building rather than razing it.   The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation had unsuccessfully lobbied the Landmarks Preservation Commission to extend the Greenwich Village Historic District to include the old building, which it viewed as a rare remaining trace of its neighborhood’s industrial past.  While demolition of an older building to make way for a larger new one is business as usual in New York, Stern’s replacement is distinguished by how much it looks like an escapee from one of the postmodern development ghettos just across the Hudson.  Meanwhile, not far up the old working waterfront from Superior Ink, the High Line Park is a glowing example of what imagination can make of a modest industrial relic, while preserving a neighborhood’s unique sense of place.

In October of 2007, the Related Companies ran an 8-page ad in the New York Times Magazine dedicated to Stern and his luxury condominium towers, including The Harrison on Manahattan’s Upper West Side.  In 2006, the facade of Manhattan’s historic Dakota Stable building had its ornamental details jackhammered off by dark of night to keep it from being landmarked, clearing the way for sale of the property to Related and construction of The Harrison.  Stern had developed a fullblown design for the condo before the Dakota Stable was defaced.  

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side, preservation groups that had welcomed Stern’s efforts to protect 2 Columbus Circle were shocked to learn that he had kept them in the dark about his client Related’s intention to demolish the historic Dakota Stable.  Even as they they lobbied the Landmarks Commission to protect the Dakota Apartment Building’s satellite, Stern was designing for the building’s replacement with yet another luxury condo.  While in contract to sell the Stable to Related, its owner rushed to deface it – literally by dark of night – as soon as the Landmarks Commission signalled an intent to designate the building.  The strategy succeeded in preventing landmark designation and protection.  Stern is quoted in the New York Times as saying that the nighttime demolition created “a controversial and awkward moment”, adding “I don’t like to tear anything down if I don’t have to.”

Stern’s design for a hotel and condominium at 99 Church Street, center, would share a block with – and tower over – the Woolworth Building, at right.  His involvement in the project proves that to Stern, no building is so great that one of his own isn’t better.

Stern has proven quite capable of doing harm without tearing anything down.  His 912 foot tower design for 99 Church Street, currently on hold, would overshadow the 792 foot Woolworth Building, one of the most significant buildings in skyscraper history.  As David Dunlap wrote in the New York Times, “the Woolworth Building, already hemmed in by the new 58-story Barclay Tower across Barclay Street, will never soar the same.”  Unlike Costas Kondylis, the Barclay Tower’s designer and Trump house-architect, Stern sets great store by historic sensitivity.  His office’s website proclaims that “our firm’s practice is premised on the belief that the public is entitled to buildings that do not, by their very being, threaten the aesthetic and cultural values of the buildings around them,”  and speaks of “entering into a dialogue with the past and with the spirit of the places in which we build.”

Stanford White envisioned his Gould Memorial Library as the centerpiece of NYU’s north campus.  Stern had other ideas.

In another exception to this credo, Stern exploited his academic credentials to convince bureaucrats at the City University of New York that the original master plan for Bronx Community College (historically NYU’s North Campus) was the work of Frederick Law Olmsted and that the scene-stealing placement of his outscaled new building there was foreordained by no less an authority.  The resulting location of Stern’s North Instructional Building and Library, now under construction, negates Stanford White’s campus master plan.  It leaves White’s Gould Memorial Library off-center on what can no longer be called its historic quad, to share prominence with Stern’s new building.  Having staked out such an important location for himself, and at such cost to a nationally significant site, Stern anticlimactically gave CUNY a scaled-up rough copy of Henri Labrouste’s Bibliotheque Sainte Genevieve rather than making good with a worthy original design.  The result is a building that acknowledges neither its classroom component nor a site that’s radically different from the Bibliotheque’s.  Stern is quoted in the 2007 Times piece saying his buildings are “recollective and reinterpretations” and that “the history of art is full of interpretations of things that went before.”  Going light on the reinterpretation can be a real work saver, too.  continued 

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.”  

Koolhaas’s description of the cartoon’s steel frame as a “rack” points to its anticipation of Le Corbusier’s famous illustration of the concept for his Unite d’Habitation of 1947-52, as a support frame into which individual prefabricated dwellings might be inserted like bottles into a wine rack, prefiguring much of what was to follow in prefabricated architecture and other architectural streams of thought.  A further link to Le Corbusier appears in the yards that surround the Life cartoon’s houses; Le Corbusier’s ”immeuble villas” apartment block project of 1922 had double-height living spaces opening onto private gardens, and roof gardens were one of his ”five points of architecture“.

Focusing on the cartoon’s details, Koolhaas continues, “The ‘life’ inside the building is correspondingly fractured: on level 82 a donkey shrinks back from the void, on 81 a cosmopolitan couple hails an airplane.  Incidents on the floors are so brutally disjointed that they cannot conceivably be part of the same scenario.  The disconnectedness of the aerial plots seemingly contradicts the fact that, together, they add up to a single building.  The diagram strongly suggests even that the structure is a whole exactly to the extent that the individuality of the platforms is preserved and exploited, that its success should be measured by the degree to which the structure frames their coexistence without interfering with their destinies.  The building becomes a stack of individual privacies.” 

Koolhaas finds ”The fact that the 1909 ‘project’ is published in the old Life, a  popular magazine, and drawn by a cartoonist – while the architectural magazines of the time are still devoted to Beaux-Arts – suggests that early in the century ‘the people’ intuit the promise of the Skyscraper more profoundly than Manhattan’s architects, that there exists a subterranean collective dialogue about the new form from which the official architect is excluded.”  Koolhaas had in fact been studying “sources capable of revealing unfamiliar or popular aspects of New York, like tourism brochures and postcards” in the lead-up to Delirious New York, according to Roberto Gargiani in Rem Koolhaas/OMA:  The Construction of Merveilles (Routledge, 2008, p.14.)

The section-based genesis of many Koolhaas projects follows naturally on his layer-cake interpretation of buildings like the Life cartoon skyscraper and the Downtown Athletic Club in Delirious New York.  Peter Eisenman (in Ten Canonical Buildings: 1950-2000, Rizzoli, 2008, p.203) sees this interpretation informing the “vertical stacking of differentiated horizontal planes that do not share a contiguity of purpose from one level to another” in Koolhaas’s 1993 Tres Grande Bibliotheque project.  Laid on its side, this stratification produces in Koolhaas’s 1982 Parc de La Villette proposal what Eisenman calls “a montage of programmatic lateral bands”.  Koolhaas’s “cross-programming”, such as his inclusion of performance space in New York’s Prada flagship store, or his unexecuted proposal to include hospital units for the homeless in the Seattle Public Library, follow up on his observation of the “brutally disjointed” contents of a single building in the Life cartoon. 

In the 1980s, Walker’s Life cartoon inspired the “Highrise of Homes” project by James Wines and his firm SITE, a fantasy of highrise housing that would allow individual freedom and expression.  As described in SITE’s Highrise of Homes publication (Rizzoli, 1982, p.41),  “The two most obvious antecedents for the Highrise of Homes are the amusing 1909 drawing of a proposal for a skyscraper as a utopian device and the 1920 fantasy depicting a cooperative apartment house built according to the owners’ individual tastes.  It should be noted, however, that these examples point up the difference between a casual joke and a topic of substantive research, and have been included here with hopes that a comparison of intent will work in favor of a better understanding of the Highrise of Homes.”  While this statement fails to acknowledge how literally the project builds on Walker’s image, SITE’s fleshing out of his cartoon’s outlines and dense proliferation of its plantings transforms the cartoon into a different kind of art and anticipates a trend found in today’s green skyscraper proposals. 

SITE credits both Walker’s 1909 cartoon and this 1920 one, also from Life, as “antecedents” for its “Highrise of Homes” project, but Walker’s image is clearly the critical inspiration and model. 

More recently, the Dutch Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany by MVRDV shows the influence of the Life cartoon, possibly by way of SITE’s verdant interpretation (photo: Benutzer:JuergenG).  A Dutch architecture firm, MVRDV has links to the cartoon by way of Koolhaas’s firm OMA, for whom two of its principals once worked. 

Last year’s proposal by architect Daniel Libeskind for a the residential Madison Square Park Tower is one of several recent highrise designs that incorporate trees in a way never dreamt of by the office ficus, and first envisioned in Walker’s Life cartoon.  An emerging breed of environmentally minded skysrapers wear green on their sleeves.

UCX Architects’ Urban Cactus apartment tower, under construction in Rotterdam, may be the closest thing ever built to a realization of Walker’s concept.

Placing the cartoon in its original context of Life‘s 1909 “Real Estate Number” not only reminds us how long New York has been obsessed with this topic, but gives us a glimpse of New York’s early awareness of itself as a skyscraper city.  Including the cover image, the issue’s half-dozen skyscraper cartoons all exaggerate distance from the ground.  (Transportation among towers by aircraft is another of their themes, which seems to have had enough serious currency to have inspired the real-life zeppelin mooring mast atop the Empire State Building and the rooftop helipad of the Pan Am – now MetLife – Building.)  What sets Walker’s houses-on-steel-frame cartoon apart from the others is its commentary on the home’s loss of immediate connection to the ground.  When the first skyscrapers were rising, apartment buildings were still a recent phenomenon.  As described in New York: An Illustrated History by Ric Burns, James Sanders and Lisa Ades (Knopf, 2003, p.236), “From the very start, the new structures generated controversy.  One resident of the Upper East Side voiced the opinion of many prosperous New Yorkers – nearly all of whom still lived in private row houses – when he declared that ‘Gentlemen will never consent to live on mere shelves under a common roof’.” 

An early apartment building, The Dakota, was designed with apartments the size of single-family row houses to entice early adopters of apartment living.  Walker’s cartoon reflects on what was most fundamentally false about this promise, the lack of contact with the ground.  On an entirely separate path, his image’s openness to interpretation has given it a life he could never have imagined.

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.    

The plug-in concept dates from an illustration by Le Corbusier for his 1947-52 Unite d’Habitation highrise apartment block in Marseilles, which in the words of architectural historian Kenneth Frampton “went so far as to envisage complete apartments being hoisted directly into position as prefabricated units, an idea depicted in a provocative photomontage where a godlike hand simply inserts factory-made dwellings into the frame, like stacking bottles in a wine rack . . . although this was not the manner in which the units could finally be fabricated and assembled.” (Le Corbusier, by Kenneth Frampton, Thames &  Hudson, 2001, p. 156) 

In setting his apartments back from the face of the concrete frame of  the Unite d’Habitation (Photo: Rightee/Flickr), Corbusier not only created recessed balconies, but expressed the “wine rack” building frame and the opportunity for color to emphasize the individuality of dwellings.  Both the unexecuted idea of modular plug-in units and the more easily achieved distinct expression of cellular units created their own traditions.

In the 1960s, the English Archigram group proposed individual buildings and an entire city made of prefabricated components attached to fixed infrastructures.  Plug-in City, designed by Archigram’s Peter Cook from 1962-64, had an infrastructure with rail-mounted cranes that would install and replace prefabricated housing, office, and shop modules planned for obsolescence.  The organically responsive, self-refreshing city would support change and growth.  This organic quality gave the name “Metabolism” to a parallel movement in Japan which shared many of Archigram’s ideas. 

A tower of plug-in “capsule” homes was designed by Archigram’s Warren Chalk in 1964.  Inspired by space capsules, Chalk’s prefabricated dwelling modules would plug into a central shaft providing structural support, vertical circulation and services.  Capsule living units would be replaced by a top-mounted crane as newer models evolved, using automobiles as an analogy.  Of Archigram’s concepts, this one most closely corresponds to any of the few Japanese Metabolist projects actually to be built, Nakagin Capsule Tower. 

Kisho Kurokawa‘s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (photo: Scarletgreen/Flickr) was completed in 1972.  The 8-foot by 12-foot by 7-foot tall capsules were prefabricated off site, installed by crane and bolted to one of two support towers.  Each unit is a complete bachelor apartment with a single porthole window, reflecting Archigram’s space capsule inspiration.  The flexibility of Archigram’s concept was never realized here, as none of the capsules was ever replaced. 

Perhaps the most sophisticated descendant of Nakagin Capsule Tower is the prototype Industrialized Housing System designed in 1991-92 by Richard Rogers Partnership, architects, and Ove Arup & Partners, engineers.  Commissioned by the Korean manufacturer, Hanseem Corporation, the system was intended to provide up to 100,000 apartments in various locations throughout Korea at a fifth the price of conventional homes.  Apartment modules ranging from 139 to 837 square feet would be adaptable to individual lifestyles.  Their installation would be ”carried out by computer-controlled cranes, much like those used to stack containers in ships”.  (Tall Buildings, by Guy Nordenson, Museum of Modern Art, 2003, p.92)  Modular units could be sited directly on the ground or attached to a tower core.  In combination, as shown in the model above, exhibited at MoMA’s 2004 Tall Buildings exhibition (building 14), some of the cellular charm of the Italian hilltown or Greek fishing village emerges.  The rich articulation and human scale of this compellingly developed design set it apart from the other 24 towers in MoMA’s exhibition.

The Micro Compact Home concepts, by Horden Cherry Lee Architects and Haack + Hopfner Architects, dating from 2001, include a “tree village” of 30 dwelling capsules mounted to steel columns and clustered around a central vertical circulation core.   As noted in Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling, by Barry Bergdoll and Peter Christensen (Museum of Modern Art, 2008), “An individual unit could be removed, whether for maintenance or replacement, without disturbing the structure at large, similar to Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower”.  At 76 square feet, the ingeniously packed, perfect-cube capsules accommodate a surprising range of activities in less space than Nakagin’s capsules.  A model unit was displayed last year in MoMA’s Home Delivery exhibition, which also featured Nakagin Tower.

Cranes of the Port Newark Container Terminal loom beyond a Bayonne, New Jersey, trailer park.  Off the architectural high road, trailer parks have long implemented the ideal of mass produced dwelling units plugged into a fixed infrastructure.  Trailers take the concept a step further by allowing homes to easily relocate from one infrastructure to another.  On a separate real-world track, shipping container technology, with its industrialized capsules constantly rearranged by cranes, parallels the ideas of Archigram. 

The firm LO-TEK, in its multiple Modular Dwelling Unit proposal of 2002, applies container technology to the mobile home precedent by way of a vertical support framework that would realize Le Corbusier’s wine rack analogy, with shipping containers retrofitted into homes serving as the bottles.  LOT-EK’s concept includes drawer-like “subvolumes” that pull out from each container’s body, admitting natural light and creating activity areas larger than the containers’ 8-foot width.  The vertical frames, or “harbors” include stairs, elevators and services.  Harbors would be located in all major metropolitan areas to maximize mobility.  The sustainability of this system begins with repurposing of containers and continues with mobility of dwellings.  The naturally varied appearance of recycled containers corresponds to Corbusier’s use of different colors on the exterior of the Unite d’Habitations to identify individual dwelling units.  Or as LO-TEK puts it, “The vertical harbor is in constant transformation as MDUs are loaded and unloaded from the permanent rack. Like pixels in a digital image, temporary patterns are generated by the presence or absence of MDUs in different locations along the rack, reflecting the ever-changing composition of these colonies scattered around the globe.”  While many real projects, including a hotel, have taken advantage of containers’ stackable-by-design character, LOT-EK’s use of a separate frame would allow true plug-in flexibility.  

Echoing Archigram’s Plug-in City, the cranes endemic to container yards would insert or withdraw living capsules.  The fixed frame proposed by LO-TEK corresponds to Le Corbusier’s “wine rack”.  

Freitag‘s shop in Zurich, 2005, takes advantage of the native stackability of containers.  The company’s product line of bags made from recycled truck tarps is inspired by the same ideas of recycling, found-object-art, and industrial chic that inform container architecture.  Enough notable examples and practitioners of this architecture, including work by pioneers like Wes Jones and Adam Kalkin, have emerged to warrant a book-length survey, Container Architecture, by Jure Kotnik (LINKS, 2008).   The movement taps into the recent explosion of interest in prefab house design, which itself signals a growing public enthusiasm for the application to housing of mass production’s potential for quality control, economy, and consumer choice.  This promise has always been central to the plug-in school of thought, and Le Corbusier’s vision of the house as “machine for living”. 

Capsule in search of a host; the mass produced Loftcube, designed by Werner Aisslinger, has been helicoptered onto rooftops and hooked up to existing building services.  The tiny scale of many modular house designs relates to plug-in architecture’s fascination with factory made object-like dwellings, and the over-the-shoulder look that modern architecture has cast on the automobile since Le Corbusier’s 1923 manifesto, Towards a New Architecture.

The Adolfo Reyes 58 apartment building in Mexico City, 2000-03, by Dellekamp Arquitectos, is not modular but adopts the appearance of stacked prefab units to individually express dwellings.  This variegated approach is part of a recent trend that borrows from the plug-in tradition and, in this case, the aesthetic of container architecture.

The architecture firm Axis Mundi proposed this alternative design for the MoMA tower in Manhattan earlier this month.  Like Nakagin Capsule Tower, the proposal has a pair of structural/service cores.  The design would allow apartment owners to customize their units’ exteriors.  In a nod to the origin of the new design’s plug-in heritage, the stair below the Marilyn Monroe image is adopted from Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation, below.  (Photo: matt2008/Flickr) 

Rendering of Jean Nouvel’s Tower Verre 

Nouvel’s tower has received praise from critics and criticism from community groups, even as Hines, its giant international developer, has advanced the project through review processes and closer to realization.  MoMA sold the site to Hines for $125 million in a deal that will cede 39,500 square feet of space in the new building back to the museum for galleries.  MoMA director Glenn Lowry pointed out in the hearing that the double-height second floor of the new tower will be especially useful to the museum for exhibition of large works by sculptors like Richard Serra and Martin Puryear.   

Opponents of the tower have generally addressed its great height.  Community members at yesterday’s hearings called it colossal, outrageously tall, and – of course – an oversized phallus.

Hugh Ferriss’s rendering of William Van Alen’s Chrysler Building

It’s been noted that Nouvel’s 82-story building will exceed the height of the Chrysler Building, an icon that in some ways haunts the discussion.  Perhaps the ultimate in pointy skyscrapers, the Chrysler Building was rendered by Ferriss approaching completion, its top still an open steel framework through which daylight can be seen.  Nouvel spoke of his building yesterday as a “skeleton” and ”also a dream”, balancing materiality and immateriality.  ”It has to disappear into the sky”, he said, in terms that seem to have Ferriss’s incomplete Chrysler in mind.  While Nouvel’s renderings don’t particularly exploit this characteristic, the building’s framing suggests how it might be achieved at the peak.  

Tower Verre’s framing model suggests how its top might be dematerialized by penetrating light.

The dissolving quality that Nouvel described would mitigate somewhat the impact of what is, after all, not the Chrysler Building but a nearly quarter-mile tall glass sheath.  This hermetic quality and the building’s height are behind architect John Beckmann’s denunciation of it at yesterday’s hearing as a “glass spike driven into the heart of New York City”.  Beckmann proceeded to put his money where his mouth is by presenting an alternate scheme that satisfies the same program in thirty fewer stories and in a more permeable form.  

An alternate MoMA tower proposal by architect John Beckmann and his firm, Axis Mundi

With open arcades at sidewalk level, and seemingly composed entirely of nooks and crannies, Beckmann’s building at first appears to be riding the trend for jiggled-box compositions like Herzog & de Meuron’s 56 Leonard Street project, but on closer inspection has a more open character, with through-building openings aloft, and elevated gardens, similar to Moshe Safdie’s Habitat ’67, as well as exterior stairways.  This upper level sponginess may not allow any greater access to the man on the street, but it invites imaginative penetration of the sort architect Robert Yudell described as the antidote to the curtain-wall skyscraper, of which he wrote:  

“We can neither measure ourselves against it nor imagine a bodily participation.  Our bodily response is reduced to little more than a craned head, wide eyes, and perhaps an open jaw in appreciation of some magnificent height or some elegantly prescribed mullion detailing.  Compare this with a 1920s ziggurat skyscraper such as the Chrysler Building.  Here we have not only the vertical differentiation of the building but chunky setbacks which conjure landscapes or grand stairways.  We can imagine scaling, leaping, and occupying its surfaces and interstices.  Even the cheap and efficient stepped-back curtain-wall buildings erected along New York’s City’s Park Avenue in the 1950s and 1960s provide us with some form of cubic landscape.”* 

Robert Yudell illustrated his essay criticizing curtain wall skyscrapers with ”King’s Dream of New York”, a 1908 fantasy rendering that shows a population almost hyperactively engaged with its city. 

Rem Koolhaas used this seminal 1909 Life magazine cartoon in “Delirious New York”.

A year later, Rem Koolhaas would illustrate  Delirious New York with ”King’s Dream of New York” and a 1909 Life magazine cartoon that shows conventional houses stacked one per floor on an open steel skyscraper frame.  It is this latter image that Koolhaas mines for a rich payload of ideology.  Calling it ”a theorem that describes the ideal performance of the Skyscraper”, Koolhaas says: 

“The structure is a whole exactly to the extent that the individuality of the platforms is preserved and exploited, that its success should be measured by the degree to which the structure frames their coexistence without interfering with their destinies.  The building becomes a stack of individual privacies. . . Villas may go up and collapse, other facilities may replace them, but that will not affect the framework. . . An unforeseeable and unstable combination of simultaneous activities . . . makes architecture less an act of foresight than before and planning an act of only limited prediction.” **

The same cartoon directly inspired James Wines and his firm SITE’s 1980s Highrise of Homes project, which sought to reconcile the “overbearing” highrise with  a “flexible and responsive habitat for urban dwellers”.***

SITE’s Highrise of Homes

As Beckmann told ArchiTakes yesterday, the exteriors of individual units in his tower could be customized by residents for personal expression and flexibility of use.  There’s an irresistible appeal both in the individual liberation of this and in the idea of the building as an uncontrolled rotating exhibit attached to the museum.  The resulting collage would respond to popular impulses that have been around in cartoons for a century, and which thrive in today’s art world.  Beckmann’s thought provoking alternative won’t derail Nouvel’s tower, but it substantiates his criticism that there are other ways.  It’s also worth remembering the power of a picture, as witnessed by Ferriss’s influence on Nouvel and an old cartoon’s on Koolhaas and his entire orbit.  Architecture in New York could use more of the grassroots initiative Beckmann has shown and more of the debate he hopes to inspire. 

This 1920 cartoon also inspired SITE’s Highrise of Homes.

 Dionisio Gonzalez‘s “Nova Heliopolis II” might have taken inspiration from the cartoon above.  Artists like Gonzalez, Laura S. Kicey and Kobas Laksa are among many who depict collage-buildings. 

*  Body, Memory and Architecture,by Kent C. Bloomer, Charles W. Moore and Robert J. Yudell, Yale, 1977 (pp.61-64)

**  Delirious New York, by Rem Koolhaas, Oxford, 1978 (pp.69-70)

*** Highrise of Homes, by SITE, Rizzoli, 1982 (p.11)

Gould Memorial Library, 1894-99, is called “one of Stanford White’s most important achievements” by his biographer, Paul R. Baker.

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.   

Part of the City University of New York, the college occupies what was originally the north campus of New York University.  Stanford White designed a campus master plan for NYU in the 1890′s, and four structures designed by him were built according to it.  They formed the head of a proposed quadrangle inspired by Thomas Jefferson’s design for the University of Virginia.  The structures built to White’s design are Gould Memorial Library, two flanking academic halls and the crescent-shaped Hall of Fame colonnade centered behind them.  The library is modeled on the Pantheon in Rome, and faces a central Great Lawn as conceived in White’s master plan.  The Guide to New York City Landmarks describes the library as “one of White’s greatest buildings” - an almost universal appraisal – and notes that “the importance of this design in White’s work was recognized in 1919 when his peers chose to create a pair of bronze doors for the library as a White memorial”.  Buildings introduced since White’s time have roughly followed his master plan on the south and east sides of the quadrangle, producing the Great Lawn he planned.  The north side of the Lawn has remained vacant, used as a parking lot, until now.  About to rise on this site is the new North Instructional Building and Library, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects.  Stern’s design will cover not just the area allocated for buildings in White’s master plan, but much of the Great Lawn as well.  Encroached upon by the new building, what is left of the Lawn will be off-center with the library, destroying the fundamental premise of White’s master plan and devaluing one of the nation’s most architecturally significant campus cores. 

Unlike White’s structures, the Great Lawn is not protected by landmark designation, a particularly regrettable oversight on the part of the Landmarks Preservation Commission.  The Lawn and the structures were conceived as a piece, open space and buildings reinforcing each other’s importance.  As the exterior focus of the campus, the Great Lawn is intentionally aligned with its interior focus, the library’s great rotunda, their classically symmetrical spaces linked and sequentially experienced by way of a processional path centered on Lawn and buildings.  A patently organic part of the total design, the Lawn is certainly as worthy of designation as the buildings whose quality it enhances.  Had it been designated, construction on the Great Lawn would certainly never have been allowed by the Landmarks Commission.  Lacking designation, the Lawn depended on CUNY’s responsible stewardship and its hired architects’ accountability for preservation.    

A campus map with Stanford White's structures and Great Lawn at center-right. The new North Instructional Building and Library will rise on the parking strip at lower right of the Lawn and on the lawn above it.

The siting of the new building contradicts recommendations of a 2005 Conservation Master Plan prepared by the firm Heritage Landscapes under a $228,000 grant from the Getty Trust.  This document, on view at the Getty Center, states that its “high priority . . . is to highlight possible locations of future buildings with respect to historic configurations and character-defining features”.  It says of one proposed building, which would eventually be Stern’s, in particular: 

“Some discussion about siting the building on the current north parking lot has also ensued.  The preservation conservation team recommends the proposed building be constructed on the site to the north across the Hall of Fame Terrace, not on the site of the north parking lot [which] provides insufficient space for a new building of the size being considered, some 90,000 square feet.  If such a large building were to be located on the parking lot site, it would likely involve shifting the northern section of the Great Lawn drive and narrowing the north panel of the Great Lawn, thus altering the historic configuration of this space.  Construction of this size building raises concerns about impacts on the Historic Campus Core, which are not in agreement with the landscape preservation treatment objectives previously outlined.  From a preservation perspective, Heritage Landscapes recommends retaining the current drive alignment and Great Lawn configuration and recommends that alternate building sites be considered.”  

Heritage Landscape’s conservation plan also documents all of the campus’s master plans, including some from 1912 and later by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.  These plans were conceived after White’s ensemble was built but before construction of any major buildings defining the sides and foot of the lawn.  They show side buildings located closer to the center of the lawn, forming a narrower quadrangle.  Although these plans were made irrelevant when new buildings were later constructed according to White’s original plan, Stern self-servingly uses them to sanction the bizarre unilateral forward placement of his 100,000 square foot building.  In written and verbal presentations of the project, Stern’s office has asserted that his building’s placement will result in “a quadrangle similar to the original landscape design for the campus by Olmsted”.  (This statement would suggest to anyone who didn’t know better that it was the designer of Central Park – and father of Olmsted Jr - who had created the original campus plan and that Stern is acting on no less divine an authority, a breathtakingly sleazy ploy even for someone of Stern’s facile means.)  At least Olmsted Jr’s plans maintained the symmetry at the heart of White’s master plan, even as they abandoned precisely what distinguished it from Jefferson’s and made it White’s own, the embracing impulse that placed the library over the lawn’s center, rather than at its end. 

A similarly deceptive strategy is followed on the website of Heritage Landscapes, the firm whose recommendations Stern disregarded in the placement of his building.  Having now drunk the Kool-Aid, Heritage ransacks it research for names with which to muddy the waters and even follows Stern’s ridiculous invocation of Central Park, this time by way of Olmsted’s partner Calvert Vaux:   

“In researching the campus landscape history, Heritage Landscapes located an 1894 design plan by Calvert Vaux and discovered an Olmsted connection.  While the Vaux plan was preliminary and not implemented, from 1912 to the 1920s a series of proposals, plans and correspondence by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr, Olmsted Brothers Landscape Architects, and Frank Miles Day, Day and Klauder Architects, influenced the core campus evolution.” 

Just how they influenced it isn’t stated.  Maybe the kind folks at Getty should get their money back.

Frederick Law Olmsted Jr’s 1912 master plan moves proposed side buildings closer to the center of the Great Lawn, substantially narrowing it. This plan was never implemented, and later buildings were located in line with White’s original master plan on the left side and bottom of the Lawn, while the right side remained vacant.

This double-talk can’t hide what’s plain as day on any drawing of the new campus plan, the negation of White’s larger concept and the diminishment of his library’s primacy.  The new building isn’t just in the wrong place; its scale is far greater than what White had envisioned and suggested by way of the academic halls he designed on either side of Gould Memorial Library.  (Had CUNY only heard of Stern’s academic credentials and not his ego?)   

Robert A.M. Stern Architects' rendering showing the new North Instructional Building and Library at right. Foreground rooftops skillfully crop the quad into a semblance of symmetry, but the dominating scale of the new building has nowhere to hide.

What kind of building does the College get for $56 million and an imponderable loss of cultural heritage?  A giant knockoff of Henri LaBrouste’s Bibliotheque Ste. Genevieve, phoned in with minimal adjustment to program and site.  The first floor contains giant classrooms that speak of unconscionable teacher-student ratios, with tiny windows so they can stand in for LaBrouste’s first floor stacks and offices.  This masquerade takes priority over green architecture considerations like the proven benefit of natural light to classroom learning.  (Stern’s website touts the building’s LEED Silver status as if it weren’t the minimum level required by New York City law.)  Upstairs, the new library has 45 foot ceilings, producing a huge volume of unused space that contributes greatly to the building’s overreaching bulk.  CUNY would certainly have better spent the public’s money finding a way to put Gould’s spectacular interior to more vital use.  The rationale for LaBrouste’s Bibliotheque as Stern’s model?  It inspired Charles McKim in his design of the Boston Public Library, and McKim was Stanford White’s partner in the firm of McKim, Mead & White.  As with the “Olmsted connection”, associations make it right. 

Here’s an association that CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein might contemplate as he hands White’s campus over to Stern; in 1981 the great architecture critic and historian Reyner Banham published a dual book review (“The Ism Count” in New Society) of the Academy Editions monograph, Robert Stern, and Whiffen and Koeper’s survey, American Architecture 1607-1976.  After noting Stern’s “complete lack of aesthetic scruple” and “an almost complete lack of congruence between his facades and his plans”, Banham asks, ”what’s it all got to do with ‘real architecture’?” He notes that Stern doesn’t rate a mention in American Architecture, which he proceeds to test for trendiness by checking the percentage of its pages dedicated to McKim, Mead & White, then riding a wave of resurgent interest.  Banham finds that the book allots Stanford White’s firm two percent of its page count, “perhaps even over-compensating for current fads in historiography, though the text is full of appreciation of the real virtues and qualities of their best works”.  Banham ends by wondering whether American Architecture “may go through enough editions over the years to find a place for Bob Stern and Post-Modernism” and concludes, ”I wouldn’t like to bet what percentage of the page count they will get”. 

Banham was right that Stern would never be recognized for ”real architecture”, but could hardly have imagined what a reputation he’d build on make-believe.  It‘s New York’s loss that CUNY can’t tell the difference.   

An early view of the campus shows the lawn as laid out by Stanford White, encircled by drives and awaiting its perimeter of buildings.

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.    

The garage was built to house trucks for the adjacent main building of the Loose-Wiles Sunshine Biscuit Company, the world’s largest bakery from its completion in 1912 until 1955.  The bakery’s famous 1000 windows allowed for a daylit workplace and gave the Sunshine brand its name.  It is now part of LaGuardia’s Campus.

The garage’s design adopted the bakery’s giant arched windows and rusticated terra cotta skin, and was crowned by a monumental triangular pediment above its corner entrance.  In its 2006 designation report for Manhattan’s Claremont Theater, The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission noted that chamfered corner entrances are unusual in New York City, “occasionally used by church and bank architects . . . as well as the handsome garage built for the Loose-Wiles Sunshine Biscuit Company (1913-1914) in Long Island City, Queens”.  The AIA Guide to New York City admired the Loose-Wiles buildings’ “Gutsy World War I architecture, some of it paying tribute to that of Otto Wagner”. 

Early in the twentieth century, the Sunshine Biscuit buildings and their massive neighbors to the east along Thomson Avenue formed Degnon Terminal, a rail-served industrial corridor with access to shipping via Newtown Creek.  In the 1980′s several Terminal buildings were converted to showrooms for the International Design Center of New York, and later to offices for public agencies including New York City’s School Construction Authority and Department of Design and Construction.   

Documents obtained from multiple sources provide details on the garage’s demolition, which was contracted by the Dormitory Authority of New York at CUNY’s request.  Section 14.09 of the New York State Historic Preservation Act requires state agencies like CUNY and DASNY to obtain SHPO permission before altering eligible buildings.  DASNY executed $3.9 million in demolition and site work contracts in the Fall of 2008, months before SHPO’s January 28, 2009, Letter of Resolution allowing the building’s destruction.

 A 2000 inspection report estimated the cost of restoring the 63,000 square foot garage at $6.5 million and the cost of replacement at $7.9 million.  The $6.5 million restoration would have been comprehensive, bringing the building into code compliance, replacing its windows and all of its terra cotta skin, and resulting in a building that “can continue to function in its intended use for another 100 years and provide a valuable service to LaGuardia Community College”.  This 2000 report was updated in 2005 to say that “the overall condition of the building has not significantly changed in 5 years”, but that “the cost at this time will have mushroomed to $9 million given escalation and increased construction costs generally”.     

DASNY’s letter proposing the building’s demolition to SHPO cites this $9 million restoration estimate and asserts CUNY’s mission “to provide higher education to those who may not have any other opportunity for college”.  It states that “repairing the Garage does not fulfill the mission of CUNY or LGCC” and concludes that demolition is “the only reasonable, prudent and cost effective alternative”. 

Had CUNY nominated the garage for listing on the State and National Registers and been successful in getting it listed – a predictable outcome for eligible buildings – $600,000 in state grant money would have become available for its restoration.  Considering these funds and the $3.9 million cost of demolition and new surface parking, the difference between a fully restored garage and a paved lot amounts to $72 per square foot.  Even with further cost escalation since 2005, this would be a small fraction of the replacement cost for a building shell of such quality and potential for adaptive reuse.  These numbers hardly make a case for undue financial hardship on a university system with a 5-year construction budget in the billions.   

Originally designed to accommodate the weight and maneuvering clearances of heavy trucks, the 2-story garage’s huge structural load capacity and spans of up to 61 feet could have served almost any use.  The upper floor in particular, with high ceilings, only nine interior columns, and a continuous perimeter of 37 giant window openings, would have adapted particularly well to classrooms, auditoriums or recreation space.  The building might also have enriched further development of the site in the manner of its terra cotta contemporaries, the Audubon Ballroom and the RKO 81st Street Theater. 

Restoring a building so pre-loaded with the green architecture virtues of flexibility and natural light, and tapping its immense embodied energy would have been a real coup for the sustainability on which CUNY congratulates itself.  It would also have been the only responsible solution from a historic preservation standpoint.  What’s lost in historical authenticity and identity of place is beyond replacement by new construction of any cost.  When NYU outraged preservationists by demolishing Greenwich Village’s Poe House and most of the Provincetown Playhouse building, at least it was a matter of private versus public interest.  CUNY is a public university system with 21 campuses and nearly 300 buildings, many of them architecturally or historically significant.  How many of these will fall in the path of its mission? 

The garage's huge steel trusses, exposed by demolition in May