436 West 20th Street has recently added a prominent steel I-beam above its roof ridge and a large skylight on its north slope as shown in this photo taken on September 15th. A visit that day to the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the Department of Buildings found no evidence of applications or approvals for these additions to the 1835 rowhouse, which falls within the Chelsea Historic District. The Landmarks Commission’s Rowhouse Manual specifically states that a permit is required for construction of a skylight within a historic district (although it doesn’t address big red I-beams). One end of the new beam is supported by the building’s west gable wall, at right in the photo above. The top of this wall was historically lower and almost flush with the roof plane. It now extends above the roof, creating a parapet. The wall’s profile has further been changed by the introduction of a level section at the bottom of its front slope. The house’s brick chimneys were rebuilt to their current, and likely original, height as approved by the Landmarks Commission, but then extended by several feet with prominent sheet-metal turbine ventilators. Even the rearmost of these is visible from the street. ArchiTakes first posted photographic evidence of unapproved construction at 436 West 20th Street in March. Within weeks, the Landmarks Commission issued violations and the Department of Buildings audited and failed the building’s job filing. The building’s owner and developer, realtor-to-the-stars Michael Bolla, responded with threats of legal action aimed at silencing ArchiTakes. (more…)
In February, a Daily News article by Jason Sheftell described 436 West 20th Street as “one of the most perfectly restored homes in Manhattan.” Cracked and displaced bricks and window lintels are now features of its façade, following restoration by its owner, the real estate broker Michael Bolla. ArchiTakes first reported on the building in a March post, “436 West 20th Street Rises Above the Law.” Bolla is now marketing the 1835 rowhouse as “Chelsea Mansion.” It stands within the Chelsea Historic District. (more…)
White stains of efflorescence mark new brickwork at 436 West 20th Street. The gable end of the 1835 rowhouse has been raised several feet and given a gambrel profile. The original peaked roofline is clearly legible in darker-looking brick, about four feet down from the new roofline. “You have to pay attention to history,” the building’s new owner and co-developer, Michael Bolla was quoted in the Daily News last month. “It tells you everything. Here history told us to spare no expense to return the house to its original form. This house has all kinds of history.” The house in fact falls within the Chelsea Historic District, and its exterior is therefore the equivalent of a designated landmark. In raising its roofline, Bolla has violated the permit his renovation was issued by the Landmarks Preservation Commission. With the raised gable end, Bolla appears to be setting the stage for a raised roof, and maximum exploitation of a penthouse he clearly views as a cash cow. (more…)
Henry Wellge’s “Greatest New York”, published by The New York Times Company in 1911 and featured in a new exhibition at the New York Public Library, places the city within a liquid embrace. Its foreground features the Jersey City waterfront. New Jersey commuters transferred from Central Railroad of New Jersey trains onto ferries bound for Lower Manhattan, tracing a ferry route first established in 1661. The New Jersey ferry slips are at center in the detail below.
“. . . I became aware of the old island that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees . . . had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (more…)
Stern’s presumptuousness may owe something to the huge attention and acclaim that attended upon 15 Central Park West, the luxury condo he designed for the Zeckendorf Brothers. Based on classic prewar apartment buildings by Rosario Candela, the project is probably the biggest real estate phenomenon New York has ever seen. Quarterly New York real estate reports had to be adjusted to factor out the distorting influence of its astronomical sales. The website Curbed took to calling it the “limestone Jesus”. At a time when New York developers were finally hiring serious architects like Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel to generate appeal, 15 CPW might have been seen as the ultimate vindication for architecture’s claims to create value. For architects who take their profession seriously, though, it was disappointing that what made the project so successful wasn’t the kind of quality that imagination can make out of thin air, but Stern’s accurate sense of what investment bankers want, and how many times over the building’s limestone cladding paid for itself.
For a Vanity Fair article on 15 Central Park West, Stern posed atop its concierge desk, weakly mimicking the classic image of an urbanely macho Robert Moses poised on an I-beam over the East River. Stern shares Moses’ ego, if not his public mission, a distinction emphasized by this photo’s gated setting. What lies beyond is for the privileged few.
Arnold Newman’s 1959 photo serves as the cover for Robert Moses and the Modern City. Moses famously said “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Unlike Stern’s, his omelets were for everyone’s consumption. What lies beyond is a public realm. (more…)
A rendering shows the main entrance of Robert A.M. Stern’s George W. Bush Presidential Center. “I’m not considered avant-garde because I’m not avant-garde,” Stern says, “but there is a parallel world out there – of excellence.”
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 reportedly 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 lobbied the Landmarks Commission to protect the building, Stern was designing its replacement, yet another bland 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 Timespiece 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.” (more…)
With Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower (photo: Scarletgreen/Flickr) headed for demolition, the world will lose not just one of the few executed works of Japanese Metabolism, as noted earlier this month by Nicolai Ouroussoff in the New York Times, but a rare built example of plug-in architecture. The Capsule Tower might at first appear no more than a quaint, dated vision of the future, but a look at its durable influence and vital legacy show an icon of growing historic significance whose loss will loom larger in the years to come. (more…)
Jean Nouvel presented his design for the new MoMA tower in a public hearing at the City Planning Commission yesterday. Calling it “zee meezing peez of zee pizzle”, Nouvel made a case for the spike of his “Tower Verre” as a natural fit within the sawtooth rhythm of Manhattan’s skyline. Describing its lack of bulk and the way it leans back from the street and attenuates into the sky as resulting in a “modest” building, Nouvel also placed it within the historic context of the “needle” like buildings rendered by Hugh Ferris. It’s hard to sell a building that exceeds its as-of-right zoning height by 161 feet as contextual, but Nouvel clearly had a receptive audience in the Planning Commission. The concern expressed for preserving the building’s poetically tapering peak was reminiscent of the 1980s rage for skyscrapers-with-tops.
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 by Robert A.M. Stern that will leave Stanford White’s Gould Memorial Library off-center on its historic quadrangle. (more…)
The 1914 Loose-Wiles Sunshine Biscuit Company garage
The City University of New York has demolished a 1914 garage on its LaGuardia Community College campus that was part of the historic Loose-Wiles Sunshine Biscuit plant in Long Island City. The building had been protected by its formal status as “eligible” for listing on the State and National Registers of Historic Places until the New York State Historic Preservation Office (SHPO) issued a Letter of Resolution allowing its demolition in January. The ground on which the building stood will be paved for parking. (more…)
