Thoughts on design and urbanism from a roman face name.

Cue woeful, seventies Elmer Bernstein soundtrack (sorry — caught the end of Serpico this weekend), fire up the Penn Station references and knit together the Identikit of bygone days obliterated before our very eyes. Oh, wait, someone did all that already. Thanks. Anyhow, one of the last remnants of the old school flavor of Union Square slipped quietly (well, not for the neighbors) away last week, when the plague of bright, red Bank of America branches, which are spreading like the blood from the elevator in The Shining, claimed the Paterson Silks building, lately know as Odd Job, one of the local extant examples of work by Morris Lapidus, the designer typically associated with everything negative about American excess.

Lapidus was an interesting designer — maybe he would be even better acknowledged as scenographer. Inevitably, when one discusses his work, the form in its entirety is rarely discussed. Most times it is an interior event or detail, or the subsequent impact his hotels had in affecting the shape and style of recreation across many fronts, from the idea of a glamorous destination being accessible to all, to swinger and cocktail culture across the generations.

Lapidus was not the progenitor of these disparate threads, but, like Victor Gruen, his accomplishments have be attributed to much more than his actual oeuvre (though given his longevity, it was substantial). As a result, there are myriad examples of work, some of it better, some far worse, that are living examples, and not likely to disappear anytime soon.

The value of the Paterson Silks building is actually an interesting contrast, since the external form is far more recognized and notable than the interiors. As Unbeige noted, when the folks at Odd Job undertook the renovation, they did not deem it necessary to modify their basic retail strategy on the interior. One could imagine a perverse ironic thrill that Lapidus would have surely appreciated upon encountering the dross of consumer culture that is the dollar store without any accommodation for the (relatively) impressive lineage of its environs.

But how much value? There is something to be said for the scale of the building, and the low-key way it managed to occupy the corner, a tyke in among giants at the edge of Union Square. Before it succumbed to the dollar store tide heading eastward, it also stood out as a remnant of retailing that recalled the mid-century history of Union Square. It was a good little building.

But good little buildings may not be worthy of preservation. They certainly aren’t to the folks currently managing such things. I might also hazard they aren’t even if the Landmarks Preservation Commission deemed it so. There are inherent problems with how ‘preservation’ is conceptualized and executed, and these problems leave us with a murky future path.

Though preservationists would have that a rigid and quasi-objective standard is employed, in practice, local boards are rife with taste-making, a practice that is typically eschewed by most public oversight of construction. There is a likely correlation among the rise of homeowners associations, local preservation boards, and a perverted notion of “states’ rights” or “local rights” which is typically a stringent taste hegemony masquerading as libertarianism.

Consequently, here is one theoretical rub — if the protection of significant structures is a certain question some years down the road, why do we not permit or mandate more rigorous oversight of construction now? In areas that are historic districts, this is already a condition of new construction — often resulting in disappointing pastiche or fawning historicism — so why not be proactive about the areas that will someday rank similarly?

There are a couple reasons why this questions lingers with little interest. One is the relative youth of American cities, most untouched by war or other disasters that would foreground issues of recreation or rebuilding absent the most degenerative force in our cities: developers. Another is the relative youth of the preservation movement, and its apparent fetishization of nineteenth century architecture, which for the early decades of the movement was intensified by the pressing need to move quickly to preserve legitimate candidates that were falling literally daily. The last problem is scale: the world used to be a lot smaller, and there isn’t much of it left. We are increasing the stock of buildings and means of recording them exponentially. And in many places we are running out of room.

The question of what to do — in terms of what to preserve next — is debated in design and academic circles, but generates less interest in large swathes of the armchair community — a situation that can be best described as not a living mandate, but as a museum with a limited purview, and the current members would rather those twentieth century preservations just go set up shop in another part of town — preferably where the modern architecture is.

Well, they have, to mixed success. One area in which they brush up uncomfortably against the traditional preservationist mandate is time: the Historic Register, which is the gold standard of protection, as might be inferred, does not admit members under 50. Localities can be more aggressive, pulling in the goal posts to 25 years. It isn’t obvious, but there are more than a few examples of buildings that might merit protection that fail to cross even the lower threshold. So even as buildings with relatively little merit besides perseverance are racing over the transom of local protection (thankfully the National Register entails a more rigorous process), there isn’t even a functioning dialogue as to what should be kept, and, often more importantly, when we need to start making those decisions about what is being made today.

If you follow this line of thinking — that each step need be taken with an understanding or expectation of determining absolute historic value as soon as possible — to its logical conclusion, the process of winnowing and landmarking would be analogous to deciding what to name your kids before you kiss on the first date.

Without a doubt, each day we lose a building, or a part of one, that is worthy of additional consideration, or preservation, for many reasons, often outside the criteria typically applied. But trying to establish an after-the-fact justification is closing the proverbial barn door, and prone to caprice once the control falls outside the glare of public consideration. An effective preservation strategy would encompass a methodology for mandating design quality from the outset. That sounds like a call for design review as part of the permitting process, and I think it’s viable. Given the number of underemployed designers, and the successes of Edward Feiner at the GSA, it’s not an unreasonable notion. And it would parallel the review process at the other end. I don’t believe you can effectively have one without the other.

It’s a shame about the Paterson Silks building. But the more acute failing is the quality of building that is replacing it. That is why the current logic of preservation is flawed — once the battle for saving has been ended there is no recourse to mandate quality going forward. I’m okay with progress, if it has value, and here there is none.