ArchiTakes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was ready for something like that. . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House design was publicly presented in a 1947 Museum of Modern Art retrospective of his work curated by Philip Johnson.  Mies had first conceived of a glass house in 1945.  Johnson later said, “I pointed out to him that it was impossible because you had to have rooms, and that meant solid walls up against the glass, which ruined the whole point;  Mies said, ‘I think it can be done’.”  The Farnsworth House was completed in 1951, Johnson’s own Glass House in 1949. 

In Green Hills of Africa, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”  It might as accurately be said that all modern houses come from Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House.  The first of its many offspring was actually built before it.  Philip Johnson, who advanced Mies’s American career by mounting a Museum of Modern Art retrospective of his work in 1947 and by steering the Seagram Building commission his way, was so inspired by Mies’s concept for a glass house that he built one for himself, beating Mies to the punch.   Read the rest of this entry »

The General Theological Seminary’s Chapel of the Good Shepherd overlooks the center of one of New York’s best blocks.  The Seminary’s brick collegiate gothic buildings were designed by Charles Coolidge Haight.  The Chapel and bell tower of his design were built in 1886-88.

The block of West 20th Street in Chelsea between Ninth and Tenth Avenues is one of New York’s most graceful.  It makes for an excellent way to approach or leave the current north end of the newly opened High Line park, just across Tenth Avenue.  Read the rest of this entry »

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  Read the rest of this entry »

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.  Read the rest of this entry »

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.” Read the rest of this entry »

A sketch of the Brooklyn Bridge by Lewis Mumford

On the eve of another 9/11, a love letter to New York from Lewis Mumford comes to mind.  His autobiography, Sketches From Life, describes a youthful walk across the Brooklyn Bridge when he caught ”a fleeting glimpse of the utmost possibilities life may hold for man.”

Yes: I loved the great bridges and walked back and forth over them, year after year. But as often happens with repeated experiences, one memory stands out above all others: a twilight hour in early spring – it was March, I think – when starting from the Brooklyn end, I faced into the west wind sweeping over the rivers from New Jersey. The ragged, slate-blue cumulus clouds that gathered over the horizon left open patches for the light of the waning sun to shine through, and finally, as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jagged mountain of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth Building, still caught the light even as it began to ebb away. Three-quarters of the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against an indigo sky.  Read the rest of this entry »

It’s one of New York’s redeeming qualities that it never runs out of sights to offer even a regular wanderer of its neighborhoods.  In addition to planned street-scapes and open spaces, endless random combinations of elements accidentally yield distinctive places.  ArchiTakes launches its “New York Places” category with one of these, in Brooklyn.

The block of Greenpoint’s Guernsey Street between Meserole and Norman Avenues is, through some accident of soil and light, towered over by forest-scaled locust trees.  Their shade makes entering the block feel like stepping indoors from outdoor light.  The palpable ceiling they create takes the metaphor of street as outdoor room a step further, while the repetitive tenements on either side make credible room walls.  The west side of the street in particular, with simple, flat brick building faces, creates a quiet backdrop for the subtle magic of the light, which gives the block something of the unreal, indoor and expectant quality of a stage set.  More effectively than any porch, arcade or terrace, this block blurs the sensations of indoor/private and outdoor/public, creating a pleasant disorientation.   Read the rest of this entry »

In his 1932 essay, The Frozen Fountain, Claude Bragdon wrote, “A building, however lofty, must end somehow, and the designer’s ability is here put to the severest test, and will be measured by the success with which this termination is affected – by the beauty with which his building dies on the white counterpane of the sky”.  The durability, if not the morbid imagery, of this view came through last month when City Planning Chair, Amanda Burden, said of Jean Nouvel’s proposed MoMA Tower, “How this building meets the sky is not only in the tradition of great New York City architecture, but it’s absolutely essential that it culminate in a very sophisticated and distinguished apex.”

Bryant Park may be the world’s best place to conduct a quick survey of skyscrapers and their tops, from Bragdon’s day to Burden’s, as demonstrated by an hour’s photos.

“What makes a great New York Skyscraper?  The greatest of them tug at our heartstrings.”  So wrote Nicolai Ouroussoff in his review of the new Times tower, which he found “unlikely to inspire that kind of affection.”  William Van Alen’s 1930  Chrysler Building sets the bar for heartstrings.  As Bragdon wrote in The Frozen Fountain, “The needle-pointed fleche of the Chrysler Tower catches the sunlight like a fountain’s highest expiring jet.”  Bragdon’s analogy exactly captures the imagery and emotional appeal of jazz age skysrapers:  ”upward gushing fountains, most powerful and therefore highest at the center,” with surrounding “cascades descending in successive stages from the summits to which they have been upthrust.”  Read the rest of this entry »