Eyes Bigger Than Your Stomach: I Seem to Have 40 Bond Stuck in My Craw

NYT_Nico: It Was Fun Till the Money Ran Out

Nico doesn't bother to mention the role his predecessor played in hyping up this orgy of architecture for the rich, connected, and landed. I don't know if that is out of respect for the dead, NYT policy to to criticize itself, or the creeping fear that he is just as guilty as Herbie M.

July Light: Tricks of the Central Park West Druid

Last week on Friday we experienced the late summer alignment of Manhattanhenge. This pet of the head astronomer at the Hayden Planetarium is one of my favorite urban quirks: twice each summer the setting sun aligns perfectly with the crossstreets of Manhattan, and you are given the chance for a figure on Greenwich to cast a shadow onto 2nd Avenue.

Among the many reasons I love this event is, of course, that it is exactly the type of thing I collect in my little birdbrain. More significantly, it is the unexpected source of another, more ephemeral delight for us summer New Yorkers. For a week or so surrounding Manhattanhenge, each long evening takes of a special glow as the long light of the summer afternoon is allowed to penetrate deep into the city. The luminous urban evenings of the Hudson riverbank bleed deep into the grid, and the scene for us pedestrians is lit like a movie set (preferably the evening moments of Rear Window, right before the stage catches on fire). It makes me glad to be here.

Bernard-Henri Lévy Is a Lot Like Jonah Goldberg

From The New Republic:

Barack Obama can win because he is the first African-American to take, by grace of his birth, a step away from the two sides of a deep divide--and the first who may now play the card--not of condemnation or damnation--but of seduction and--as he says over and over--of seduction.

Obtuse punctuation aside, what is it about BHL that can start with a captivating kernel of critic's insight and turn it into such a glaringly false polemic? Besides the final promise of a 'coming together,' what parallel does he find between the seduction and reconciliation that make them the proper synthesis in this logic? It seems abundantly clear that his only real goal is to insert a little sex into the play of politics--something that, frankly, we have no use for this particular time around the horn.

Sticks and Stones - The Christmas Party Insult Edition

A couple of weeks ago I was at a party where our host--the genial father of a college friend--was interrogating me and a party-crasher from London about our professions.

First came the Londoner: I work in banking and spend most of my time in Russia making deals with the oil-igarchs.

This elicited approving head bobs and murmurs of 'new markets.'

Next it was my turn: I am an architect here in New York.

More head bobbing, but with this evaluation: Now there is a profession where you really have to work for your money. Hard work and plenty of it for little pay. Now, it always seems to me that the ones who are well paid are the interior decorators. They do pretty well for themselves.

I was chagrined at this little observation from our aging host. Granted, the smell of private equity in the morning tends to put me off my coffee, but I don't like having my unprofitability rubbed in my face. I managed to stammer out something about striving for permanence: I like to do work that can't be erased by something as feeble as a spackling knife.

I don't know if that really got the point across, but it didn't really matter. I was deflated. I left for home soon afterward. To add insult to injury, the coat check girl gave my scarf to someone else.

More Gawking

Once my initial sputtering at the audacious vapidness of another Slate article died down, I gave my memory a brisk shake in hope of dislodging some stray crumb of meaning that I had missed before. I was rewarded by a stale, but otherwise edible morsel along these lines: the Gawker story is one about the urbanism of New York. What's-her-face who wrote the thing attributes the vitriol of the Gawking-class to just that: a special type of class rage developed by the well-educated young aspirants of the publishing industry running up hard against the economic reality of the city's finance and real estate industries. She locates the source of their rage in their understanding that Manhattan has been stolen from them.

So this is a problem of physical displacement? Are we watching the rear-guard action of the world's best educated refugees? In a way that I kind of like, this elaboration--perhaps embroidery?--of her idea explains the strange pointlessness of the Gawker enterprise. These displaced masses are not trying to take back the homeland, they are trying to poison the well. This was certainly the sense I got from the now-defunct Gutter, Gawker's architecture gossip blog. The tone was not so much 'Nothing is sacred,' the quality our Authoress seems to locate, but 'Nothing is good enough.'. It is so exhausting for the audience precisely because this attitude has no endgame. It isn't played on a field of relative values; it is an endless rehearsal of the same attitude in postures. It is a reaction, not a strategy or even a tactic. And it's a lousy lens for watching our city.

Putting It to Bed: Boredom in Publishing

I just spent way too many minutes reading the New York Magazine cover story on Gawker. As usual, I was left with two distinct impressions from my visit to NYMag:

1. It's unspeakably annoying to have to click to a new page every 1000 words. Can't there be a better way to generate ad revenue than pre-digesting every article into fragments that make you even more distractible? Are they so embarrassed by their articles that they actually hope you won't have the conviction to finish one? Which leads into:

2. Why does every NYMag article feel like a visit to the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum? Another completely engrossing concept has been left bafflingly untouched, despite the heaps of stuff that looks like research piled up in every corner. It's amazing that two projects, so different in medium, subject, and method, can have identical personalities as unswerving underperformers.

It's a real shame to get to the end of several thousand words and not have a single one of your questions answered. The only time there has ever been anything approaching clarity skittering across the surface of my mind after one of these articles was after the profile of Katie Couric. When I opened the page I thought to myself, Of all her possible outlets, why would she open up for a profile in this magazine? When I got to the end I realized that it must be because only those jokers could have provided her with six pages of ink and basically require nothing on which to hang a story. It's kind of like someone decided to re-inflate the dessicated husk of a USA Today story back into its original NYTimes nutritiousness, but had never seen the meatier version to begin with

I'm hungry and on my way to dinner. Can you tell?

Saddam

The ghost of Saddam Hussein haunts a bench in front of my office, looking soulful and eating peanuts.

I am always amazed by the fact that you can find everybody somewhere in New York.

Basic Services

Just in case you ever thought I was going to turn my attention away from regurgitating info from the New York Times, the New Republic, and Deadspin, let me slam the door nice and hard. Last night I read Sarah Williams Goldhagen's essay on American infrastructure that just appeared in TNR. Let's see. Hmmm. Shrill? Check. Wonky? Yes. Self-righteous? But of course (this is the woman who got the ball rolling by calling out Calatrava's warm-fuzzy indicing design for the Ground Zero PATH station the kitsch it really is).

But, after some beating the reader about the head and shoulders with unfathomable statistics, she brought up an issue that is really the total mystery to me at the center of the architectural profession: how we could have such a poor relationship between the public and the professionals. She captures the stalemate pretty well from both sides, and then takes a swing (something the biggest names have been begging, just begging for) at the leading lights of the profession for happily giving in to the terms of this acid environment.

Today's city planners are seen as clueless and well-meaning bureaucrats at best, and as anti-democratic elitists at worst. Architects, landscape architects, and urban designers (including the many who do not merit the slander) are depicted as divas who care more about fancy forms than about the people who live in their buildings or the clients who build them. Expertise in the built environment is often held in public ridicule. As a result, folk wisdom has it that it is up to the public-spirited citizen--the community board activist, the local environmental review agency, the historic preservation commission--to stop them: thus unwittingly validating a salient quotation that was prominently displayed in one of the Moses exhibitions. "The critics," he once said, "build nothing."

. . .

Sadly, the public's mistrust of the experts who should be advising politicians on how to address the multifarious problems of the American infrastructure is not wholly misplaced. To be sure, there are many talented public officials, city planners, urban designers, and architects who are committed to working in the interest of the public good. Yet there are also many professionals who have resigned themselves to working within the ever-narrowing constraints that the public assigns to them of designing mainly signature projects. . . . As a result, American architects sometimes run the risk of appearing to be little more than glorified shoe designers.

I don't know why we let ourselves fall into this trap--letting the public tell us that they know better than we do and then proving them right time after time. Goldhagen would have the widely held views above as part of the made-for-TV dialectic between Jane Jacobs and Robert Moses, but somehow I am tempted to locate it somewhere else: in a basic anti-intellectual bent to American culture. After all, we gladly feed our babies toys made with leaded plastic from China only to scream bloody murder when we have to pay the price for our credulity, but as a culture, we wouldn't take the most earnest and well-documented piece of advice from an educated professional bred in one of the countries best schools and practicing in a major artistic and corporate milieu. Goods are good; ideas stink like some much Froggy cheese. A Harvard-educated doctor is a trope of trustworthy achievement. A Harvard-educated architect would be lucky to be paid the respect of the shoe designer SWG would have him reduced to.

The Gray Lady Sags a Bit

I just read Paul Goldberger’s review of the new New York Times building and the Bloomberg headquarters. It is a fairly work-a-day review, but those of us still suffering a hangover from the days of that shrill shill Herbert Muschamp, just that is reason to lift every voice and sing. The pointed end of his criticism is leveled at the design of the interior—the newsroom, to be exact. In fact, the whole reason for bringing in the Bloomberg building at all, since it is hardly a fresh addition to the city, is to make the point that the Times newsroom is a staid design gussied up in some fresh finishes while the Bloomberg example is a totally innovative approach to a media-environment which, by the way, also has some fresh finishes.

While I believe Goldberger—after all, a combination of Cesar Pelli and Pentagram probably can do a much better job at planning an interior than just letting Gensler loose in a big floorplan whose lace edging was hooked by Renzo Piano—we kind of have to take it on faith. Compare

“With its sea of cubicles partitioned by wood-veneer cabinets, it is vastly more sophisticated than any workplace the Times has ever had, but sleekness has brought a certain chill . . .”

with

“. . . some four thousand employees sit in uniform rows at identical, white-topped desks bearing custom-built Bloomberg flat-panel computer terminals.”

and tell me where, if anywhere, I can find “a newsroom truly designed for the electronic age . . . a workspace that could not have existed ten years ago.” All in all, I think I’d rather pass on both and go work in the Marin Civic Center as re-imagined in Gattica. Well, minus the eugenics.

Goldberger doesn’t answer my two biggest questions—in fact, he slides by both of them as if they’ve been answered somewhere else, and I just haven’t been keeping my eyes open. The first is why the NYT needed to build a 52-story tower of which they were only going to be occupying a fraction. The second is how we all got it passed over on us that the building is not the shimmer white tower we saw in renderings and model and instead looks armor-like and, basically, filthy before it’s even finished.

The old Times building and the new Times building are of such different scales, it’s a little hard to imagine how the same institution could find a home in both. Goldberger mentions the development team of Forest City Ratner and later talks about how most of the news room staff is actually housed in a midrise building outside of the bigger tower—something that is supposed to give these old newsies a “pride of place.” (Dolores Hayden just called—she wants her catchphrase back.) What he doesn’t do enough of as all is connect the dots of these two features of the project and tell us how the Times is basically an anchor tenant to a towering commercial real-estate mall, one with enough public and economic clout to smooth the way for such a large project, but no more the occupant of the tower than Nordstrom’s at your local Westfield development. This thing seems like a rip-roaring real-estate investment that uses the reputation of the Times as some sort of scrim over thee more real, more likely ugly, mechanisms of the principals here.

The last issue is why this thing has to look so dingy. The ceramic rods were supposed to be shimmering, ephemeral (Goldberger managed to suck that one up straight from the press release too—bonus points to the PR flacks who have made sure we all talk about the building using that word, even if in outright disagreement). I guess we should know by now, every time you hear those words, put your hand on your wallet. I can see the Times tower grow day by day from my office window, and it may be a lot of things, but light, iridescent, ephemeral, etc., etc. are not among them. Goldberger gets the ambiguous success right on:

The ceramic screens rise higher than the roof by about ninety feet, forming a light, ephemeral crown. Piano said that he wanted the tower to look as if it disappeared into the air, and while it doesn’t quite do that—in part because of its steely, battleship-gray color—it has a tensile elegance that sets it apart from every other skyscraper in Manhattan.

NOKD

A place where even Photoshop can't help you.

I've been wondering for a few months when we were going to hear news on the future of 34 East 62nd, the site of last year's most Fountainhead-ian event of architecture an urbanism: the townhouse that was blown up by its inhabitant, a rather shady-sounding dentist (?), who would rather blow up his home than let it fall into the hands of his ex-wife. The pudgy doctor, removed from the ruins of his house on a stretcher, provided a fitting form for my feelings about Howard Roark . . . but I'm getting lost on an Anti-Anne Rand tangent here.
One of the special things about this site is that it is right in the middle of the Upper East Side Historic District, an entity I feel just about as warmly as I do the darling author mentioned above. I'm still slightly shocked by the successfully self-righteous hysteria that its denizens used to squash the Norman Foster tower last year. Here they are about to get one of the most sophisticated architects in the world to slip a tower onto the top of a completely undistinguished limestone box that has been putting the neighbors to sleep since it was installed in the '50s, and all they can do is run around crying bloody murder because it will cast a shadow on the Carlyle Hotel, a location dear to the heart of every Upper Eastsider as the home of the fifty-dollar check for tea and cakes.
Clearly, I'm just itching for someone to try to stick something modern up their noses on 62nd Street. What has shown up Colonel Cathcart frame of mind--to wit, is this a feather in our cap, or a black eye? Because what we got is a modernist townhouse that is irritating the bejesus out of the folks next door at the Links Club, like someone poured a cup of sand into both Weejuns. The problem is that is also irritates the hell out of me because it is such an insipid example of a modernist townhouse, complete with every tired trope from the eroded corner windows to the quote-unquote gravity-defying slab of the facade hanging above the entry.
Because of the general lack of imagination on display in this project, I was getting ready to side with the stuffed-shirts over at the Links Club, until I got to the little part where the neigbors on the Community Board chimed in with their version of an Amicus Brief, or perhaps tighty-whities, that declared the proposed new building a poor fit.

The 91-year-old Links Club, Community Board 8 and several leading preservation groups are less sure. Playing an advisory role, the Upper East Side community board voted 27 to 5 last month to disapprove the plan on the ground that it is “not in keeping” with the historic district.

Nothing gets me more frothy in a urbanism discussion than that little gem. Ossified preservationists and other assorted cultural conservatives use it fearlessly as if it were some sort of trump card for their issue, as if they would love to have a building like this if only all of the other buildings already matched it, but, since they don't, it's aww-shucks-too-bad. In reality, all I can hear is some mother worth four or five points in a Punch-Burberry game telling her cute-in-pearls five-year-old that these buildings are simply Not Our Kind, Dear.