The first memory I really have of reading architecture criticism that resonated with me was Michael Sorkin calling Paul Goldberger a dick. Well, okay, it wasn’t exactly that. Maybe he was speculating wistfully on the time when we wouldn’t have to listen to his turgid enamations at the Times, in rather graphic terms (please, if someone has a copy of Exquisite Corpse, could you look it up? I swear I remember a column where he was wishing for his death). Being young, impressionable, and mostly ignorant (at least two of those qualities are still in ready supply), I came to two quick conclusions: Michael Sorkin was cool and Paul Goldberger was not.
Consequently, my opinion has not changed much, even after I made the good faith attempt to test this thesis first hand. Given that I was just recently slagging Cesar Pelli, Goldberger’s paean to the Goldman Sachs tower (just being finished in Jersey City) in this week’s New Yorker challenged me to think a little harder on both counts.
Goldberger’s point is basically that Jersey City sucks, and that the sad striving of city leaders over there trying to compete with the Financial District has led to a development plan that is a thousand miles wide and a foot deep. Not knowing the Jersey City waterfront, except for what is visible from this side, it seems like a plausible comment. Then he makes the bizarre claim that the Goldman Sachs tower is ‘the most beautiful’ in New Jersey — and that it is part of New York. Even though the rest of the article is about how tepid the Jersey City waterfront is compared to Manhattan (so much so that Goldman is building a second tower because no one — meaning the bankers — is willing to do the reverse commute, even it is five minutes from TriBeCa by ferry), he wants us to see this particular part as somehow ours, because, if I’m reading him correctly, from certain vantage points in midtown, you can’t tell conclusively it isn’t in Manhattan. I assume the reverse of this has been happening in Jersey for years, people saying that the Worldwide Plaza is the most important tower in East Weehawken.
Then he gets really nutty, going on about how Pelli has finally reached some Third Age of tower design bliss (shortly after the finished the Petronas Towers, maybe?), after some false starts, including the Carnegie Hall Tower — which I had forgot, to the point where I even felt sheepish in calling him a hack the other day, since that is one of the few large buildings in this town that I like. But to hinge this argument on that hulking mess across the river? Please. He dismisses everything else on the Jersey City skyline, which leads me to believe he has never walked down Water or Pearl streets. I look at that same waterfront every day, and quite frankly, I’m surprised its (relative) quality. Though some of it is decent, none of it is exceptional, least of all the Pelli building, which is monstrously out of scale, meeting the ground as poorly as the other recent perverse exercise in entasis, the SwissRe tower in London. Given how mediocre much of the spec office space is in Manhattan, it’s not much of a stretch (or pun) to invoke the canard about glass houses.
The back pages he inhabits are a pretty innocuous place for Goldberger to dodder around, and so I’m not going to exhibit the same punk energy Sorkin did (even if I think it was cool). But take a look at his last paragraph and think about substituting ‘post-William Shawn New Yorker‘ for Jersey City and see how it plays. Maybe that man has more wit and subtlety than we give him credit for.
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Pellucid.
The first memory I really have of reading architecture criticism that resonated with me was Michael Sorkin calling Paul Goldberger a dick. Well, okay, it wasn’t exactly that. Maybe he was speculating wistfully on the time when we wouldn’t have to listen to his turgid enamations at the Times, in rather graphic terms (please, if someone has a copy of Exquisite Corpse, could you look it up? I swear I remember a column where he was wishing for his death). Being young, impressionable, and mostly ignorant (at least two of those qualities are still in ready supply), I came to two quick conclusions: Michael Sorkin was cool and Paul Goldberger was not.
Consequently, my opinion has not changed much, even after I made the good faith attempt to test this thesis first hand. Given that I was just recently slagging Cesar Pelli, Goldberger’s paean to the Goldman Sachs tower (just being finished in Jersey City) in this week’s New Yorker challenged me to think a little harder on both counts.
Goldberger’s point is basically that Jersey City sucks, and that the sad striving of city leaders over there trying to compete with the Financial District has led to a development plan that is a thousand miles wide and a foot deep. Not knowing the Jersey City waterfront, except for what is visible from this side, it seems like a plausible comment. Then he makes the bizarre claim that the Goldman Sachs tower is ‘the most beautiful’ in New Jersey — and that it is part of New York. Even though the rest of the article is about how tepid the Jersey City waterfront is compared to Manhattan (so much so that Goldman is building a second tower because no one — meaning the bankers — is willing to do the reverse commute, even it is five minutes from TriBeCa by ferry), he wants us to see this particular part as somehow ours, because, if I’m reading him correctly, from certain vantage points in midtown, you can’t tell conclusively it isn’t in Manhattan. I assume the reverse of this has been happening in Jersey for years, people saying that the Worldwide Plaza is the most important tower in East Weehawken.
Then he gets really nutty, going on about how Pelli has finally reached some Third Age of tower design bliss (shortly after the finished the Petronas Towers, maybe?), after some false starts, including the Carnegie Hall Tower — which I had forgot, to the point where I even felt sheepish in calling him a hack the other day, since that is one of the few large buildings in this town that I like. But to hinge this argument on that hulking mess across the river? Please. He dismisses everything else on the Jersey City skyline, which leads me to believe he has never walked down Water or Pearl streets. I look at that same waterfront every day, and quite frankly, I’m surprised its (relative) quality. Though some of it is decent, none of it is exceptional, least of all the Pelli building, which is monstrously out of scale, meeting the ground as poorly as the other recent perverse exercise in entasis, the SwissRe tower in London. Given how mediocre much of the spec office space is in Manhattan, it’s not much of a stretch (or pun) to invoke the canard about glass houses.
The back pages he inhabits are a pretty innocuous place for Goldberger to dodder around, and so I’m not going to exhibit the same punk energy Sorkin did (even if I think it was cool). But take a look at his last paragraph and think about substituting ‘post-William Shawn New Yorker‘ for Jersey City and see how it plays. Maybe that man has more wit and subtlety than we give him credit for.