In a town filled with vanglorious personalities of all stripes, a large number of whom are stature challenged, how is it you can’t get through a thousand words about a Libeskind without a reference to their height? One can only assume the complex favor pulling and negotiating that went on to generate the profile of li’l Danny’s wife, Nina (too bad she doesn’t have a name that can conveniently be diminutized) didn’t go so far as to insulate against the snide little jab that comes at the end. Otherwise, it’s some standard fare Lives stuff, a rehashing the ‘they met at camp’ cuteness, and dances around the lawsuit. Not that anyone, even the Post really, is saying Silverstein is particularly aggrieved in the dispute (no one seems to feel fondly toward the man), but the Times goes even handed, paraphrases an unnamed official who declares them both jerks.
What’s that about the Libeskinds again? Oh, right, they’re short.
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All that’s left is a dishy Gawker peice on how being an assistant there sucks.
Rounding out what seems to be an all RedHo/IKEA kind of day is the show at the Urban Center (457 Mad), Ikeagrams, which consists of alternative proposals for the area IKEA wants to take over, developed last year by grad students in Ben Pell & Ted Brown’s studio at the Syracuse (via The Architect’s Newspaper). Through September 15.
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Ikean’t wait.
We haven’t lived here so long that we can claim to have watched that many neighborhoods crest the tide of gentrification, rising our caucasian entitlement boat right along with it, but we’ve been here enough to feel frustrated that we didn’t strike decisively in this place or that. It’s a downside to being a fan of navigating the city on foot as both a practical matter and as a form of entertainment. Of course, we forget that this doesn’t signal any inherent ineptitude, only that we have always lacked the familial largess that has sowed the seeds of so many ‘Lives’ that will cause fleeting anger for the interminable future.
But, in a victory for soiling precious neighborhoods of the future, or only signalling that the next round of gentrification will be truly suburban, the Ikea Red Hook plan got a little boost (though the extent won’t be known for several weeks, when the final vote occurs) yesterday at its planning hearing, reports the Daily News. It took some free shirts and bus rides to get the vote out, but they managed a roomful of supporters. Given that it will bring jobs and cheap, poorly manufactured (but attractive) furniture to what is still ostensibly a working class neighborhood (as well as being reasonably accessible to large swaths of Brooklyn that truly are), you can see why it upsets some people, particularly those who fear it will obviate the opening of a West Elm. But the opposition may have a point about the surface parking; given that hundreds of millions of dollars is being pursued to ferret out the last vestiges of parking on the Hudson River, isn’t letting Ikea have the cheap way out (which is par for the course for them) a little short-sighted?
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This can’t be for us, it’s far too nice.
Though we aspire to exclusive previews and hot items like any good proto-media source, for now we have to rely on chance for leading edge news. And so it was, walkng by the local office of Allied Works, the folks working on the renovation of 2 Columbus Circle (the putative new home to the Museum for Arts and Design [MAD]). When the blinds aren’t drawn, you can espy a pretty developed model, and, less easily, see some renderings of what were probably schematic stage concepts. Given the polish of the model, it’s likely the latest and greatest. And from what we saw, there’s good chance that great is an adjective we will want to use over and over.
The final form will be determined by the fact that the bulk of the original floorsplates and structure will be retained, so the overall effect, from the exterior, will be a reskinning. But how that will be manifest can produce a number of different effects. The renderings are more immediately striking, a series that show a progression of opacity, the most drastic revealing an iridescent skin that retains the overall form very precisely, but manages to completely invert the stolid character of the existing building. Though it is a simple concept, the result is commanding (and contextual, give the sequence of buildings initiates, which include Swanke-Hayden Connell’s Steelcase showroom, the David Childs Ego Exercise Center and the Gulf+Western building)
The model appears to be more opaque, with what are probably large stone panels interlocking in an exaggerated zipper pattern (this is a motif that recurs in Cloepfil’s work, attributable in part his experice with Mario Botta and Mitchell/Giurgola). The panels themselves are score vertically through the pattern, but this is not a jarring, but a complimentary gesture.
It remains to be seen MAD can complete the funding in time to secure the site (which is still somewhat contested, more on the money side than the distraction of the campaign to delcare the building a protected historic site), and that which we got a little preview of is still far from a resolved building, but the impression we were left with was an exciting one. Given the dearth of compelling ideas and visionary owners in this city, it does give something to look forward to. The only time we seem able to build a quality building is for a musuem or similar cultural space (see: Scandinavian House, Seaman’s Museum, American Musuem of Folk Art, etc.), and that’s unfortunate, but the perhaps the high-profile location will inspire the land barons inhabiting the distaster across the way to more a more nuanced understanding of what good design is.
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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.
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Maybe they are worried if they rename the subways, no one will figure out how to get there.
Providing more ammo that they aren’t a fusty, out-of-touch barnacle on the shell of New York culture, the Met is once
again threatening to withhold support of the renovation of the Lincoln Center. And, again, the renovation of the ostensibly most important urban arts center in the country might be stalled by a dispute over parking. That’s right. Parking. As you lather yourself up in superiority over how we don’t fall victim to the narrow individual interests that scuttle visionary thinking out in the sticks, each time you walk by the rusting (okay, it’s water damage, but whatever) hulk on 65th street, remember that no progress is being made because of concerns not that, not unlike a country fair or a NASCAR race, the bumpkins won’t be able to get out of their cars on time.
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First, they have to figure out how to cancel Dr. Zizmor’s contract.
Sure, the whole concept of this is gross, particularly given the sad state of local, state and federal support (let’s hear it one more time people; if you don’t think a $250 billion dollar highway bill isn’t a car subsidy, they you should get all your ‘market price’ produce from Europe) that make such recommendations necessary, but we still can’t let this go by without quibbling on one point. The naming rights of Union Square aren’t worth anything? I’m sorry, but people paid to put their name on football stadiums in Tampa Bay and Indianapolis. Perhaps they should acknowledge what the real problem is: god forbid people express any independent will in the face of corporate mandate, but they won’t do it becuase the last major rebranding effort in New York (6th Avenue) still hasn’t worked entirely, and that was the city doing it. Of course, now that all the trains are automated, you can insure the success of the Levitra Bedford Street stop.
Back in the real world (not the one where the crazy old coot suburban father of your friend rants that the interests of shareholders — which typically means guys who think living on Hilton Head and wearing pleated chinos with Polo shirts tucked in is the apex of civilization — trumps everything else in the universe, even if it means taking another chunk out of our culture irrevocably), the Daily News provides some background on the mysterious dark territory beyond the Essex Street platform on the J/M/Z, and the interesting historical nugget that there was an actual Delancy family, and they ran a cherry orchard.
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LMDC to downtown: Don’t throw out the HEPA filters yet.
Someone, in the form of Rep. Jerry Nadler, has finally started asking some hard question about the Deutsche Bank demolition. The 130 Liberty Street structure, which was damaged (though, more appropriately, should be listed as ‘destroyed’ since that will be the eventual state) in the WTC attacks, was purchased by the LMDC this year, and is slated for what is being called ‘deconstruction.’ Though fans of mid-eighties architecture might note the sick irony of a developer finally embracing decon on a large scale, the process, even completely devoid of what prompted it, is far from a joke.
Documents obtained by Nadler indicate that there may be levels of contaminant in the building (particularly asbestos) that range as high as 150,000 times EPA limits. This makes the actual process of demolition complex and expensive. Kevin Rampe and the LMDC was typically high-handed in its response, arguing basically that the estimates presented by Nadler were artificially high because Deutsche Bank was lying to land a favorable insurance settlement. That Rampe would accuse Deutsche Bank of basically perjury is interesting. The alternative is worse, which is that even though everyone agreed that the building, in its current state, was impossible to reinhabit (and any renovations were near impossible to calculate), to the point that they weren’t even sure how to destroy it, the LMDC stepped in and made a bureaucratic decision to assume responsibility without any EIS, engineering studies or bids from contractors. Don’t they have some fiduciary responsibility? If so, this would seem to be a considerable breach. Even though they are projecting a completion date, they aren’t releasing a demolition and transport plan, instead only vaguely claiming that precautions will be taken (which apparently will be minimal; the netting in place was intended to prevent remnants from falling, not to provide any environmental encapsulation) once they start and figure out what’s exactly inside.
Regardless of all this, like the WTC attacks themselves, this process will be an engineering landmark because never before has a building of this scale, constructed in the era between traditional materials and the current awareness of what harm may come from modern building materials, has been taken down. It’s an inevitability that will come up over the next 40-80 years, as large buildings reach the end of their useful life (a calculation that in many cases might be more financial than structural; most of these buildings are steel-framed, but a gut — meaning stripping to the frame — renovation would produce many of the same problems as complete demolition), this will begin to be a considerable issue. One that was pretty much ignored when zoning for behemoths like this.
What you get instead it the push over the past decade to create ‘Demolition Porn’ — where a typically publicly funded facility like a sports stadium, built with the promises of decades of service must be destroyed after less than 20 years to make way for newer, larger, gargantuan subsidies of private enterprise — which is simply a bait and switch process to make others pay for clean up. See, when you demo via implosion, upwards of 20% of the structural materials (mostly concrete, and, often, concrete mixed with a number of carcinogenic substances found elsewhere in the construction) will be pulverized and thrown into the air, borne conveniently away from the site by wind, leaving everyone who lives or works in the area covered by a fine dust that would, on most job sites, be considered hazardous, and not because they contain deadly substances, but merely due to the size of the particulate (thanks to the incomparable John Young for this analysis). But the upside to the contractor is huge: in exchange for a small pickup full of C4, your disposal costs go down considerably. Though nothing is being projected on a similar scale for 130 Liberty Street, you can be sure one of the reasons it was not was due to the incredible violence of the act, which would have been impossible to suggest in that particular location.
None of this information bodes well for downtown residents, who will get to watch another building be destroyed from the WTC attacks, in sickeningly slow motion, watching and pondering it piecemeal, questioning all the attendant issues that no one was able to process in the moment, but became readily apparent after the fact. The response of the LMDC and their lack of sensitivity to this — ranging from simple decorum for what might be emotionally charged to outright callousness of the actual, measurable, potential for physical harm to workers and residents — borders on appalling.
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Magic Carpet Ride.
A friend who moved to town a number of years ago, intending to live out one of the various myths of New York living (in his case, showing up with the proverbial $100 and the clothes on his back — a gutsy move no doubt, but one that was abetted by our couch and steady fiscal underwriting — with the goal of becoming a star; he’s getting close, so there is something to be said about chasing dreams), and just after he got here, he spoke rather arrogantly about how he was truly going to consume all that the city offered in its rich tapestry of arts and culture, in a way that we were evidently failing. We had all gone to college in a southern backwater, and then lived there a short while. Therefore, the contrast of what was available here bode well for a transformation that was incomprehensible to our heretofore provincial lives.
Of course, as any wage-slave liberal arts grad learns, it’s easier said than done. The spring our friend arrived coincided with the Biennial, and we smiled chidingly when we predicted that, unemployed and living smack in the middle of Manhattan was no guarantee (relating the experience of looking at listings, thinking ‘oh, I have weeks to do that’ and then of course not — the worst example of this being the Gerhard Richter at the Dia, which was up for nine months without successfully inducing our attendance). And of course it wasn’t. Almost ten years later, we aren’t sure he’s been to a single Biennial.
We have learned, thanks to the intercession of other, more determined friends, that it takes a certain amount of focus and attentiveness to make it to this or that show. And thus it was with such focus that we trekked up to Grand Central to catch the Rudolf Stingel show before it closed.
The Stingel installation is a 27,000 square foot carpet that fills Vanderbilt Hall (which is the hall you pass through if you are entering from 42nd Street). Stingel refers to much of his work as painting, though it is typically created using actual or perverted forms of manufacturing. In this case, it is a custom carpet, derived from a stock pattern typically used in hotels. The repeat area is several flowers of varying sizes, set against a variegated background. It’s hard to discern where the intervention is, aside from the coloration, though, given some contract interiors work these days, that too is open to question. The palette is muted pink, blue and beige, with the flowers starkly offset in black. Looking squarely at it is slighly more intense than a typical carpet, and garish. Viewed obliquely, the overall effect is surprisingly subdued. The limestone of Vanderbilt Hall is richer in hue, the net effect being that for a moment, one might think they walked into a well-intentioned maintenance idea gone awry.
The sheer magnitude of the piece (a characteristic of a number of the installations that have been there over the past few years) is impressive, but it is competing with the most commanding public space in New York. Thus, aside from perhaps a direct assualt on the majesty that is Grand Central, we can’t imagine what might stand at least as an equal to the space.
The peice is also undermined by the limited access: the transverse doors are closed, and when we were there, the eastern portion was roped off by TensaBarriers, creating a stark visual detriment. Lastly, and not insignficantly, we gave up being capable art critics a long time ago, resigning ourselves to the complex intersection of hieghtened aesthetic sensibilities overlaid with a liberal dose of postmodern cynicism, so any judgement is suspect and hopelessly subjective. All we could think to do was have a seat.
This wasn’t so much a test of art, but also public life. We have found, to a disappointing degree, that many places don’t like it when you sit on the floor (a similar experiment in Union Station, in DC, resulted the Privileged White Guy treatment — a guard asking in a careful voice ‘are you all right sir?’ instead of poking us with the butt end of a baton). But both the art and the sanctity of GCT survived us placing our ass squarely in the middle of a big piece of art. What is so striking every time we visit is how the space manages to absorb noise and create a subduded, warm, atmosphere. The carpet certainly helps this, and it is a retrograde, rec-room kind of experience to sit with arms splayed, leaning back and watching the late afternoon commuters hustle through. And whereas on strictly formal terms, we have a ‘no decision’ on the art, we think you should go and judge for yourself, if for no other reason than to go an hang out there for an hour or two. Rather than rushing through to catch a train (should you actually have any reason to go north of the city), it’s a wonderful place to wander around. And, like us, after a quiet oasis of art, go and get good and drunk at the Campbell Apartment. It ain’t cheap, but it’s worth it. You’d better hurry, since the carpet comes up at the end of the week.
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All’s fare when courting the LIE vote.
So the federal government approved the reallocation of the remaining LMDC/Liberty Bond for the construction of the George Patakie Re-election Tunnel. $2 billion is left, and it is being handed over, with no detail on if that remaining sum is a current surplus, or if any other initiatives in progress will be defunded. One would assume at least that John Zuccotti isn’t getting his West Street tunnel. But beyond that, it’s a lot of rah rah about how Long Islanders can get to work easier. Those very same Long Islanders who have been exempt from the ‘commuter tax’ since Pataki entered office. And those same Long Islanders who will suffer a five (yes, five!) percent increase, thanks to fare increases rolled out by the MTA yesterday. Before you get too upset about this ‘give with one hand and take away with the other’ gesture, please note that unlimited weekly Metrocards are going up fifteen percent, and monthly, ten. This pales in comparison to the unlucky stiffs on Staten Island, who will get with a fifty percent uptick. Why is this increase necessary? Well, in part because the MTA is engaged in a capital campaign, part of which is crucial (continued station renovations and upgrades) and some of which is going to expanding that system. The two projects that are most extensively funded and developed are — wait for it — rail connections to Long Island. Even though subway riders already bear a greater portion of the cost of their ride through their fare(s), almost $5 billion (four of it the portion of the airport connector that isn’t funded by the Liberty Bond money, and the rest for the East River Access project connecting LIRR to Grand Central) from this new increase — which, it appears, will further extend that discrepancy — is being allocated to help the reddest, richest two counties in the state.