Robert A.M. Stern, part 2

September 24th, 2009

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.

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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.

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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 »

Robert A.M. Stern, part 1

September 17th, 2009
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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

Here Was My City

September 10th, 2009

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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 »

Guernsey Street

September 3rd, 2009

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.

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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 »

An Hour of Skyscrapers

August 27th, 2009

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.

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“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 »

Smarticulation

August 20th, 2009

Smarticulation is facade articulation intended to make a building look purposeful and important.  It is primarily found in large buildings with glass curtainwalls and achieved by crisply projecting or recessing an area of the facade by two or three feet.  This shallow modeling has no impact on the use of the building, so it can be applied as an afterthought to a fully worked out design, and anywhere on the face of the building without impact on function.  Smarticulation is therefore often applied retroactively by designers who worry that their projects look dull. 

 

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The Orion, Cetra/Ruddy Architects’ condominium tower at 350 West 42nd Street, projects smarticulation to liven up and slim down its north facade.   

Smarticulation may or may not actually occur where there’s a special function behind the articulated surface, but it neither serves nor expresses any underlying special use.  This is for the best, given that the details of a large building’s inner workings are almost certain to change during the many years that pass between its design and completion of construction.  Read the rest of this entry »

How to Meet the Sky

August 13th, 2009

Philip Johnson said that outdoor sculpture “lights up the sky”.  He was talking about the way solid and void energize each other in an interplay of figure and ground, a principle that certainly applies to tall buildings.

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Flatiron Building postcard view

Much of the Flatiron Building’s appeal to artists and photographers, for example, lies in its siting on an acute intersection where views allow the sky to nearly engulf the building and come to earth.  The figure of the tower becomes more positive by virtue of the emptiness of its background, while the complementary interlocking form of the background gives the sky a positive quality.  Read the rest of this entry »

Influential "Life" Cartoon Turns 100

August 5th, 2009

 

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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.”   Read the rest of this entry »

Plug-in Architecture Loses an Icon

July 30th, 2009

 

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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.  Read the rest of this entry »

Nouvel's Tower Verre Not the Only Vision in the Hearing Room

July 23rd, 2009

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. 

 

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Rendering of Jean Nouvel’s Tower Verre 

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10 of the Best Houses from the Last 25 Years

July 16th, 2009

Architakes launches its Lists category with 10 great houses.  If there’s a common thread, it’s the way good design makes more from less.  In chronological order: 

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Magney House, Bingie Point, NSW, Australia, 1982-84

Glenn Murcutt, Architect

Murcutt’s houses reflect the life-simplifying advice of Thoreau.  Typically only one room deep, their interiors are intimate with nature.  A half-dozen Murcutt houses might have made this list.  Their agrarian vernacular forms and materials impart a humble dignity and cheerful informality that’s pitch perfect to their landscapes.   Murcutt has designed more great houses than any living architect. 

The publisher TOTO’s complementary volumes, The Architecture of Glenn Murcutt, and Glenn Murcutt: Thinking Drawing/Working Drawing, both by Gusheh, Heneghan, Lassen, Seyama & Browell, 2008, respectively have the best photo documentation and architect’s drawings.  Glenn Murcutt: Buildings + Projects 1962-2003 by Francoise Fromont, 2003, Thames & Hudson is also an excellent work.  The Magney House is covered in detail in Three Houses: Glenn Murcutt / Architecture in Detail by E.M. Farrelly, 1993, Phaidon.  Read the rest of this entry »

Stanford White’s Bronx Pantheon To Lose Pride of Place

July 9th, 2009
Gould Memorial Library, 1896-1902, is called one of Stanford White's most important achievements by his biographer, Paul R. Baker.
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.  Read the rest of this entry »

Is World’s New Largest Building the Spawn of Manhattan’s Muni?

July 2nd, 2009

Abraj Al-Bait Tower under construction in Mecca will be the world's largest building

Abraj Al-Bait Tower under construction in Mecca will be the world's largest building.

Does this building look somehow familiar?  The pointed center tower surrounded by minions and topped with a gold sculpture, the embracing wings, the arched entrance in the foreground and the side arcades; is there not a family resemblance to Manhattan’s Municipal Building?  

The Manhattan Municipal Building

The Manhattan Municipal Building (1909-1914)

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CUNY Demolishes Historic Queens Building

June 25th, 2009

The 1914 Loose-Wiles Sunshine Biscuit Company garage

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.   Read the rest of this entry »