Monday, November 19, 2018

The Fabulous Leonard Jerome and his house on Madison Square.


Chapter 1.
Leonard Jerome might be known to you.

He certainly should be, grandfather as he was to one of the most famous men in history. And had but one of the many winds of his life shifted ever so slightly, his name would likely have tripped off nearly every tongue on earth or, conversely, it might have simply fallen like a chewing gum wrapper into a NYC gutter.

Jerome lived large and on the margins. He had swagger. One week's lost fortune he'd make up the next month. By the age of 40, he'd played Wall Street like a concert pianist, was its uncontested King, and through speculation and investment, he amassed a fortune that catapulted him to the top of New York Society.

He was a frequent partner with Cornelius Vanderbilt, and anyone wise enough to invest in transportation in the mid-19th Century found themselves in the lap of luxury. He was an avid sportsman and along with August Belmont, Sr., brought thoroughbred horse racing to New York City in what would come the third prong of the Triple Crown, the Belmont Stakes. He went on frequent expeditions out west. With Buffalo Bill Cody.

But beyond all that, Leonard Jerome set the stage for the show of opulence that would dazzle the world over during the next 40 years in the period Mark Twain labeled The Gilded Age.

His contemporaries of similar wealth were living in second and third hand homes in Manhattan or Brooklyn. Others, like the Vanderbilts and Astors eventually built their own, but all of this generation, the first and second of this money, were reticent in display, opting for stately brownstones whose exteriors extolled something almost like thrift. Not so, Mr. Jerome.

At the corner of 26th Street and Madison Avenue, across the street from fashionable Madison Square Park, a frothy French confection began rising from several lots in 1859. It would take the entire Civil War to finish this monumental Beaux-Arts mansion, but even before it was finished, the young Jerome Family had moved in, Leonard running out those bleak nights in 1863 to defend the New York Times Building during the Draft Riots.



The home was most recognizable as perhaps the first in America to adopt the rage of all of Second Empire Paris, the sensual striking mansard roof at the sixth floor. Here it was capped with cast iron grille work and set off by heavily articulated dormers, singlets and triplets, with merry finials. The floor beneath was a row of ox-eye windows. Off the Madison Avenue flank of the home were two sets of cast iron and limestoned balconies, elegantly shadowed by awnings. Rising from the base of the building were two stories of rusticated lime as well, and an impressive portico was supported by four massive columns and topped with another balustraded balcony.



Above that, the brick work and terra-cotta began, contrasted by limestone flashing around the two-story windows with pediments and half-shells, pilasters rising through three stories and giving the wide building its length as well. Copied any number of times afterwards, but not for another dozen years at least, the time it took to digest this splendor and even attempt to replicate it, let alone surpass it. This was the largest home in NYC in its day, and with a $200,000 price tag, the most lavish.

The interiors boasted a white and gold ballroom with two fountains, one for champagne, one for cologne. The breakfast room sat seventy. The lot that separated the home from the stables was filled with the family theater, a theatre that sat 650. And the stables were designed with the same materials and he sumptuous design of the main building. Except the windows. The stables featured stained glass windows. Oh, and another ballroom sat above .

Mr. Jerome might have been better remembered had women had more of a voice in the 19th Century. He and his wife, Clara, were daughtered four times, and the three that survived into adulthood all married into the British aristocracy.


Chapter 2.
One of them flew very very high.

Leonard Jerome had nine brothers. He loved brawling. He loved yachting. He loved hunting. And, he loved opera. So much so that he joined the founding of the Academy of Music, the premier opera venue in New York City in its day, host to a number of important opera debuts in America including Rigoletto, La Traviata, Carmen, and Aida, and the center of social life for estalished New York City elite. (It was the noveaux riches, locked out of the Academy, who formed the rival and enduring Metropolitan Opera.) He named his second daughter for the soprano who took America by storm in 1850, the Swedish Nightengale Jenny Lind.

Jennie Jerome was born in Brooklyn, but grew up in the mansion on Madison Square. It was her own musical ear that made her shine among her sisters first. Her talent at the piano may very well have led her to a concert career. As unthinkable as that was for a woman at the time, the proposition came from her tutor, Stephen Heller, Hungarian composer and friend of Chopin.

As adolescence drew, so did Jennie's unusual sultry dark beauty. One quarter Iroquois on her mother's side, she caught the attention of every eligible eye in New York and abroad. And the ineligible ones as well. At the Academy she was presented the the Prince of Wales, the eldest of Queen Victoria and the future King Edward VII. It was the beginning of a long and rather well-known liason that likely turned romantic.


Known even in later years to Queen Alexandra, Edward VII's wife, who nonetheless adored Jennie for her wit and good company. They were fast friends throughout their lives. In 1873, Jennie was invited to the Royal Regatta on the Isle of Wight.

There she met Lord Randolph Churchill and three days later they were engaged. They might have been married sooner had not the settlement of her dowry taken so long to negotiate, and the arrival of the little surprise not quite eight months after the marriage was attributed to a fall. The couple named him Winston.


Leonard Jerome was Winston Churchill's grandfather.



And Jennie Jerome went on to captivate all of Europe. Winston and his brother John rarely got to see their mother, but this was typical of the time and that class. It did not diminish her in their eyes in the least. Quite the opposite, Winston once wrote, "She shone forl the evening star." Her beauty, panther-like some said, was known internationally and she had affairs with princes, artists, and Herbert von Bismarck,, son of the German Chancellor.







She wrote plays and was befriended by the greatest actress of the day, Mrs. Patrick Campbell, who went on record defending her honor. Speaking of the predominantly loveless marriages of the upper class, business arrangements made to multiply wealth and secure titles, Mrs. Campell once said it mattered not where and to whom people made love, "so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses."




Jennie married twice more, to a man 28 days older than Winston and a man six years younger. Her son was delighted, always starry was she in his eyes. She spent her time involved with the War Relief Fund, corralling her formidable connections in aid to the suffering and refugees of the Boer War and World War I. She founded and edited a magazine. She furthered the careers of all her lovers.

She had a tattoo of a snake coiled around her wrist, the only woman of her status known to have one ever.

Her liveliness, her wit, her glamour and legendary beauty lived on until it didn't in 1921 when the light left her eye. And the Brooklyn girl who lived in the mansion on Madison Square was laid to rest next to her first husband in the largest country home in the UK, the only one not a royal residence allowed to use the descriptive here: Blenheim Palace.



Chapter 3.
Lady Luck came calling

And put a lien on the King of Wall Street at the end of the 1860s. Leonard Jerome's string of affairs became public and forced his wife Clara to grab the girls and head for Paris. And the Panic of 1869 had nearly turned his highly leveraged portfolio to dust.

Jerome moved out of the spectacular home and mess of his making and the "Clubhouse Years" began. The Union League, formed out of loyalty to the Union cause, rented for a while first, for $18,000 a month. Rooms were rearranged into public dining halls, meeting rooms, and small apartments for overnight stays. And look closely, a seventh floor was surreptitiously added, barely visible as a row of windows above the original ornate ones in the mansard.

It was here that members founded The Metropolitan Museum of Art. I just came across their original mandate and it is the perfectly succinct answer to why does The Met exist, and more personally, why do I love it: To establish and maintain in said City, a Museum and Library of Art, of encouraging and developing the Study of the Fine Arts, and the application of Art to manufacture and natural life, of advancing the general knowledge of kindred subjects, and to that end of furnishing popular instruction and recreations.

The Union League moved uptown, following the migration of wealth northward. The University Club moved in for a time as their new digs on Fifth Avenue were being constructed. And finally, in 1899, The largely political Manhattan Club took residence.

Despite reworking at the hands of America's greatest architects and craftsmen, McKim, Meade & White. La Farge, Saint-Gaudens among them, despite the roll call of America's political and financial titans who wandered those halls, Grant, Arthur, both Roosevelts, Hoover, Rockefeller, Morgan, Olmstead, the mansion was doomed. Club membership throughout NYC waned as the decades yielded to one another and by the 1960s, the Manhattan Club was facing bankruptcy.

Photographs from this period reflect the deterioration.




Covered in soot, the limestone faded into darkness, the portico was gone, the cast iron masterpiece of the three-story balcony, gone and not replaced, the ornate finials, urns, and balustrades that had collapsed were never repaired, and water damaged threatened the entire structure.


And yet: It was landmarked!

The brand new Landmark and Preservation Commission, after 18 months of hearings, managed one of the first NYC landmarkings here, but the distinction of the outcome is little cause for celebration: It remains one of the only landmarked buildings ever to be demolished. After no savior came forward to purchase the property and save it, say the way Joseph Papp did with the similarly endangered Astor Library for his Public Theatre, the once glittering mansion, first of its kind in America, was lost to us all except for the few photos that were ever taken.

The building that rose on the former Jerome lots in 1974 and stands today is the Emory Roth and Sons designed, 23-story New York Merchandise Mart.



Inside are 85 showrooms for the tableware, decorations and gift industries. With its brown aluminum and smoky glass, it remains fully rooted in the mid-1970s. It is not a bad building at all. In fact, its scale and its proportions make it an exquisite example of the International Style which I admire when done well, as it is here.









But it predicts a direction Madison Square never went, that of similar glass and steel office towers replacing the fin-de-siecle masterpieces in stone that still dominate the plaza, the New York Life Insurance Building, the Metropolitan Life Clocktower and North Buildings, the Flatiron, and the oft-overlooked gem, the Appellate Division Courthouse that once sat in Mr. Jerome's backyard and seen at the foot of the Mart in the last photograph. As such, the Mart stands isolated, ignored by its neighbors in the sky, and a bit of a pariah in a neighborhood enjoying a renaissance of style.

Our landmark laws are stronger now. For now. And for that I am glad. But even to walk into the Merchandise Mart still gives me a thrill, to think some air there still lingers from the lungs of those luminaries that people these three parts. My eyes sparkle at the thought.



Thanks for coming along.

Saturday, May 5, 2018

Lawn dart.

Maybe tomorrow I'll talk about one I rather like architecturally, were it not going up where it is but perhaps somewhere else, but for today, an explanation. We are in the throes of the Super Slender Skyscrapers. And if one looks to the southern perimeter of Central Park right now, from Connecticut for that matter, one views the full-throttle frenzied rise towards the sun. 
Instead of the commercial spaces and corporate icons skyscrapers once served as, these skinny, sometimes anorexic-looking structures serve the very few. Almost exclusively residential towers, they are homes for the extremely wealthy and ominously, investments for the stealthy realty vultures, those who either individually or through some shady syndicate buy properties purely to flip for profit. Frankly, neither of those demographics add much to the quality of NYC. The extremely wealthy tend to use Manhattan apartments as pied-a-terres, and spend their capital, their time, cash, and loyalties, in the neighborhoods of their larger homes elsewhere. And the investors don't even live here at all, adding nothing to the tax base, to retail, to services. Those apartments are like vacuums, sucking in money, and falsely driving up values for the rest of us trying to live in a city that once truly valued creativity as the heartbeat of any great metropolis. 
I see these buildings going up and I think, "No actors can ever live here again. What will all these people do at night?"
And worse, they are being built on the very threat they themselves are producing. Here's how it works.
We do actually have zoning laws. They get chipped away, but we do have them. And most of them have to do with height:footprint ratio. A building can go taller if it's footprint is smaller. It was all about sunlight, ever since The Equitable Building went up in lower Manhattan in 1911, rising 40 stories without a setback and effectively removing sunshine from that block ever since.
So slender buildings buy you height. And height buys you more money in a residential building. Despite the vertigo you may feel looking at renderings of these towers, most people will pay much more to be closer to the clouds. 
But here's where it turns decidedly ugly. 
There are no more big plots of land in Manhattan. And there is a width:height ratio as well. What we think of conventionally as skyscrapers typically have a w:h ratio of around 1:7. 
432 Park Avenue has a w:h ratio of 1:15.
And, pictured here in a computer-generated image, the most egregious sky gobbler to date, 111 West 57th Street will have a gluttonous w:h ration of 1:24. I'm not sure you've ever heard me turn ugly on NYC. I'm a pretty loyal cheerleader. I loathe this building. And like it's sickly stick-like siblings, it does exactly what the zoning laws were designed to prohibit: It blocks the sun, casting shadows on Central Park and up to the center of Central Park.
How can these developers grab so much air? 
They buy the air of their neighbors. You are a museum on West 53rd Street. You house the second greatest collection of art in NYC. You are struggling to survive. The developers of the property next to yours offer you a hundred-plus million dollars or so for the aggregate air over your building to add to their air. You can never go higher now. You sold your air. And you can blame MoMA the day you envision the trucks carting the van Goghs and Monets away. I blame the developers.
They rake over the showing bones of the starving cultural institutions whose very mandates are being threatened by creating a city that increasingly makes it impossible to live here as an artist. One can just look where they are popping up like moles, around the museums, theaters, and churches that will afford the best Central Park views. Just typing that sentence made me feel like the smarmiest marketer that ever slunk around Madison Avenue.
It's always been hard to be an artist in NYC, for sure. It has never quite been impossible. I think we are making it impossible. 
And these spikes on the landscape go straight through my heart.



Friday, April 13, 2018

To know a new Liberty.



Since the post-9/11 precipitous drop in NYC tourism, 85% by most estimates, numbers have gradually risen and finally surpassed the high mark of the Summer of 2001.
We anticipate over 60 million visitors to NYC once 2018 has been tallied.
The fourth largest sector of NYCs economy, in fact we now have the challenge of accommodating tens of millions more visitors in our already stressed venues, some stretched beyond capacity.
And these venues have an added layer of security that takes time and precludes some of the unfettered pre-9//11 access.
But America at its best is the Mother of Invention and some innovators over on Liberty Island have come up with an elegant solution to a troubling situation: How do we make Liberty, mandated and enshrined as it is thus in our founding documents, accessible to all?
More precisely, most people can no longer get into the base of the Statue of Liberty, for a whole host of reasons. No insurer will carry the policy any longer. The second level of security to the pedestal is often time prohibitive. And only a select few are allowed up into the statue itself any longer, making it impossible for groups to do so.
Believe me, we understand your disappointment when you thought you were going in, only to be thwarted. We'd like you to go in, as well, especially as the museum, which includes nothing less than the original torch, is infuriatingly just feet away right there in the pedestal.
While the solution was right under our noses, it was also a minefield for missteps, taking one of the most iconic, treasured, emotionally charged symbols in the nation and rearranging her home turf. But a separate museum on Liberty Island was planned nonetheless, topped itself out last month, and will be ready for business by Spring next year.
And from the moment I laid eyes on the renderings, I was on board 100%.



Instead of occupying the land on which it might sit, it seems to inhabit it; a gently sloping hill looks as natural as if it might always have been part of the original topography, a hill that will be living, living with all the indigenous flora of the island when the native Americans shoaled its shores for oysters.



It elevates itself with all the materials that comprise the Statue itself, iron, bronze, granite, concrete, and, of course, the famous copper which over time will green in a green design gone to great pains to meet the highest standards of sustainability. And like the original torch that was shredded itself to allow for glass plates once electricity became available, that old torch will be visible to everyone, sitting in its lovely glass house and elevated there for you to enjoy whether you enter the Museum or not.


Alongside the torch with be the other wonderful exhibits chronicling the leaps in engineering and metalwork that made this 'new Colossus' possible, including much of Eiffel's original iron skeletal pieces, all replaced with stainless steel circa 1984-1986.
But for me, the most stunning element of the design is its most subtle, and my hats off to the firm FXFOWLE for taking a mandate and making it manifest.



If you look closely at the angles and shapes, and one must grab a little distance to do so, say, those people up on the pedestal, it resembles some abstracted shadow of the Statue, as though Liberty has embraced all of those people not just on top, but on the ground as well, that Liberty is indeed accessible to all, and even extends herself to embrace those who might have thought they were beyond her reach. It is a profound gesture. And I find it very moving.
And I can't wait to bring you there, large enough to hold all of us, no security, no extra fee, and after that hassle getting on the boats, it will feel just like freedom.



Sunday, January 28, 2018

Such a lot of wonder. All around. 4WTC.



For me, Paris is the prettiest city. That may not be the most enthralling adjective; one could say it about a lollipop. And Paris is a bit of a lollipop, and gooey marzipan, dripping with delight, grand but delicate somehow, ou grand et petit, comme les palais près du Pont Alexandre III, and ringing with harmony. 




This comes of tearing a city down and starting from scratch under the exacting, exhaustive eye of France's youngest ruler before Macron in 2017, Napoleon III, and one of history's boldest visionaries, Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann. Chosen by the Emperor after a grueling competition, Haussmann went about creating the center of Paris in his own image. The swagger of wide boulevards connecting royal residences with major cultural institutions, four major parks, and overflowing with his distinctive florid style, at every turn, on every block, an architecture whose describing adjective honors the father: Haussmanian. 






Five story buildings clad in creamy limestone line the miles of streets, whose intersection with the many angled boulevards make for some pleasing concoctions. The classicism from which he drew abounds.The Greek columns, the Roman arches, but slathered all over that with very little regard for anything like restraint are the very French festoons of oak clusters and laurel swags, cartouche, balustrades, touches of sensual twisting vines of a far-off emergent Nouveau in grille work and magnificent lampposts. And capping every building everywhere, the gentle slopes of the dormered, charming mansard roofs.




Take, as an example, the masterpiece by Charles Garnier, this pinnacle of the Second Empire style, The (old) Paris Opera, whose breathtaking opulence garnered its architect bragging rights immediately. Everyone referred to it as Le Palais Garnier. It certainly took my breath away when I emerged from the Metro surprised to find it right behind me and struggling to fit in into my field of vision. It is almost too much, in a sumptuous way, the gilt, gilding the lily, and inside, beyond the legendary Grand Staircase in the soaring lobby spaces, its gallery is a dizzying display of some kind of Neo-Baroque encyclopedia of everything beautiful in the universe. Many prefer this walk to the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. 


Why do I go on like this? Not everyone liked it. The Haussmann Plan for sure, for its rigorous adherence to a kind of zoning aesthetic, the loss of centuries of history as nearly any trace of Medieval Paris was wiped off the map, and The Palais Garnier in particular--in fact, its controversies continue as the Opera has effectively moved out to the newish, boorish Opéra Bastille. It was seen as folly, and the memory of all those who had fought and died in the Revolution and subsequent communard uprisings seemed sullied by this ostentatious display of whatever fetish with royalty compels a population to suppress their own needs for the glory of the few.

But given time, architecture grows on people. And we, as cultural consumers, have some responsibility here as well, to engage with it, and ask ourselves, "What, exactly, is going on here?" It can be difficult to do that in the case of major urban developments when so much is happening so quickly. It's only when we allow for the specific individual charms of each building in Paris or, say, Hudson Yards for a contemporary example, does an apparent monotony flower into harmony. I think our brains struggle for an early context, a rudimentary understanding, and we settle on that typically shallow analysis until we take the time to really let a concept, a painting, a building sing. 

And that happened for me a few days ago at the oft ridiculed and cruelly critiqued site of the new World Trade Center.

I was, as usual anymore, with a group. The first building to be completed in what is called the 'original periphery' of the first World Trade Center was the new Tower 4. So we've been living with this building, and many of us almost daily, since November 2013. I made some early assumptions about it until Thursday when I had a brutally frank reckoning with myself, standing at its very feet:  I have no idea what that building is doing. I set out correct my record. 

The architect, Fumihiko Maki, is Japanese and the 1993 Pritzker Prize Winner who studied both in Japan and in the States, taught at Washington University in St. Louis, worked for a stint at NYCs premier firm, Skidmore Owens and Merrill, and whose works are sprinkled across four continents. They include the Annenburg Center for Public Policy at Penn, the MIT Media Lab, and the somewhat prototypical 51 Astor Place, a less successful version of Tower 4, its squat, massive array of glassy angles seems dropped uninvited into a once uncongested plaza.

Despite 51 Astor, he is renowned for fusing an Asian love for delicacy, form, and craftsmanship with a Western flair for statement and confident power. His Tower 4 is this difficult duality rendered exquisitely. And my rather lengthy French Introduction was to make an initial point here about why Maki's building is great art. 

During the Second Empire, Parisian architects turned to their classic predecessors for a template. Their movement was a Neo-classic movement, paying homage, using the best elements of great civilizations, referencing the drama of the Baroque for good measure, and then throwing the art forward with the kind of lavish details that made a statement about its population: Our carefully crafted culture is something we treasure here.

Maki produces Tower 4 at a similar crossroads in architectural movements. The Modernists were, for a time, supplanted by the Postmodernists. But as I alluded to in the discussion of Johnson's AT&T Building, the movement didn't have the breadth of possibilities to sustain itself, and some 'purists' wanted a return to a sleek modern form indeed for its purity, its practicality, and in the case here, its appropriateness among all the buildings going up at the plaza which are intended, according to master-planner Daniel Liebeskind, to represent healing crystals standing guard over the memorial called Reflecting Absences. Maki's is a Neo-modern building. It is derivitive only to the extent that the Modern is a jumping-off place for him. Watch how he deconstructs the elements of the ubiquitous glass box and subtly reassembles them into something distinctly of the 21st Century.

(There are already a number of movements beyond the Neo-modern! The Metamodern, the Remomodern, and, for my Canadian friends, Vancouverism, for example. Artists are always way ahead of us.)

So while I thought I'd met Tower 4 before, I hadn't. I'd made those early assumptions. I'd think it was one thing, and then, on other days, I'd think, no, I was wrong, this is what that building is doing. I get it. But it was still cursory. I was still wrong, and, oddly, satisfied for a while to be so until my subconsciously frustrated brain found itself on the threshold of revelation. 

I did appreciate the lobby for its unabashed success from the day the building opened. I find it entirely inviting, calming, graceful, and deceptively vast. Let me first contrast it to the bottom of the most famous flashy new guy on the block, One World Trade Center. The bottom twenty stories of Tower One comprise a reinforced concrete bunker. It was designed to make people feel safe. It is certainly very safe in there, reinforced as it is with the thickest rebar ever manufactured. But when one thinks this through, it is a capitulation to fear, a design driven by panic. 


Now when I first saw a photo of Tower 4's lobby under construction, I was underwhelmed, too. Its depth looked constricted, its height protracted, the tension all wrong, its ceiling sloping down to an abrupt wall that seemed to be in the wrong place, cutting the room off too quickly. But I underestimated the grace of Maki's use of materials. 








And all of that leading to corridors treated with softer richer colors of brushed mahogany panels interspersed with floor to ceiling LED displays depicting clouds and waterfalls and any number of soothing images. It says to me, "We will live our lives as humans, with civility. This is what WE cherish." 









What was confounding me was its shape. For the life of me, I could not figure out how the building was put together and what it looked like as a whole. And that's unusual for anyone. Because our early assumptions about the shape of a building are typically correct. Not all, but the majority of buildings throughout history use symmetry for its pleasant effect and it's simplified floorpans. We assume symmetry in fact. Symmetry is an ingrained, perhaps evolutionary hallmark of attractiveness in Western culture certainly.  As a species we tend to pick more symmetrical mates as it was a perceived indicator of a sturdy gene pool. We like it in our art, as well. Lacking that, we yearn instead for balance. In a Victorian conscious display of asymmetry, we still can see the shape of the thing.


I can't think of too many buildings that rely on an optical illusion to shatter your expectation. 



When you encounter Tower 4 for the first time, it is normally from Church Street or Broadway behind Church. From this vantage, Tower 4 looks like a conventional shaft of a building, like the original Twin Towers, in fact, and Maki allows the only glass detailing on the building, near the top, some vertical glazing, a tender nod to the outer wall columns so recognizable on the first towers.


And let me talk about the glass here. Floor-to-ceiling panels that fit into panes so precisely, so uniformly throughout, that the seams on the entire building are barely visible. This is glass-wall-curtain construction like we have never seen, a testament to Maki's precision and just as much the precision of the army of glaziers and fitters, engineers, formen/women who execute the design. Hats off. 



The wall on Church shines liquid-like, a vast mica crystal, sharp, cool, but not off-putting, no, more cool in a refreshing way, like spring water. 





But it is when you walk around the building, to the sides that face inward towards the plaza and the profound sadness of that day, and the days and years of courage that followed, do Tower 4's surprises reveal themselves to you. 




It is not an uninterrupted 74-story shaft. At the 50th floor, it is as if half the building had blown away, and on a dramatically sharp angle as well. It is stunning, with a whisper of pain or sadness in the razor-like edges. For the first four years, I thought it was two towers in extremely close proximity to one another. 














But that is an illusion. Maki runs two chamfered corners up 
the length of two edges of the tower. In the delicate, oragami-like folds, our mind sees a separation that does not exist, a lovely metaphor in and of itself. 








So what does this building really look like? It started to drive me crazy because you can never take it all in at once. Ah. But you can climb above it and look down at the footprint, thanks to the galaxy of satellites Google Maps has circling the Earth looking down on us, and no doubt in our windows.



So, here for you, my poorly-wrought findings:

The building I thought was two vertical towers, side by side, is actually two buildings on top of one another, a trapezoid on top of a parallelogram. And I've marked the chamfered corners as well.




Look at the artistic capital Maki earns with this ingenious use of space. Two separate angular vertical towers would be nearly impossible a sell as commercial real estate in the Financial District where the wide-open floor plan has become the preferred model for efficiency. So, we have an Eastern solution of form to a Western predicament of space.





But by making us see that which is not there, he is making us see two towers again. One broken, the two of them clinging to one another, closely, embracing nearly, some have said fraternally, the little brother, wounded, protecting his big brother from the brunt of the calamity. 


I look at this building now and I see love. It is a massive, but simple abstraction of love, dressed in perfectly fitting glassy gossamer, so reflective it rises and nearly disappears, into the heavens.


It took me four years plus change to get there, but the unobtrusive second-shortest tower at the new World Trade Center is a masterpiece. And a reminder for those us who are symmetrically challenged, balance is lovely too.

Thursday, January 18, 2018

Hands off.

Some buildings are important. And a building doesn't have to be good to be important. And 'good' is a fuzzy bit of subjectivity anyway. But there is no denying the importance of Philip Johnson's pink granite monolith on Madison Avenue, variously known as the AT&T Building, The Sony Building, and currently, 550 Madison Avenue.



It is an important building on many levels: 

  • For breaking the International Style's stranglehold that choked skylines the world over, a movement Johnson himself chronicled and curated particularly in a MoMA exhibit as far back as 1932, those rectilinear glass boxes that elegantly reflected the austerity and practicality of a post-World War era. 
  • For the sheer number of historical architectural movements and buildings it references. 
  • And for the moment in time it captures on two fronts: The realization of Postmodernism as a bona fide theory on a grand public scale, and the culture of corporate power it, frankly, buries before the building is even finished.

Philip Johnson was witty, charming, irascible, mean-spirited, mercurial, celebrity-driven, the most sought-after architect in the 80s. His buildings are in Houston and Pittsburgh and Boston and DC and Minneapolis and Dallas and all over Manhattan and Europe for that matter. And they are statements, each and every one. He was also, apparently, immortal, working every day until his last at the age of 98. He molded the idea of 'starchitect,' that an architect's one great work necessarily made him (usually a him) a great architect. I wonder.

He was responsible for some truly great buildings. His PPG Place in Pittsburgh is a Neo-gothic monument to the company's plate glass roots and a siren call to Pitt's Cathedral of Learning a few miles away. His own Glass House in New Canaan, CT is positively Greek in its simplicity. And working with his mentor, Mies van Der Rohe, he produced the interiors for the now legendary Seagram Building on Park Avenue, particularly The Four Seasons Restaurant which put or at least kept the building on the map.

But his 101 California Street in San Fransisco looks dangerously serrated and top-heavy, his telescoping elliptical Lipstick Building in Manhattan promised far more than it delivered, its one trick underwhelms, and his AEGON Center in Louisville is a little too reminiscent of something Albert Speer may have designed for the Reich, a stylistic and philosophical flirtation Johnson notoriously indulged in the early 30s and that shadowed him the rest of his long life. 

That brings us to some middle ground here.

In the late 70s, the largest corporation in the world was AT&T. Some said their influence and control of communication in the US and internationally made them as powerful as a fourth branch of the US Government. 


Their original home at 195 Broadway was a 1908 wedding cake of a building that, still standing, boasts the largest number of exterior columns of any building in the world. 







In a gesture to cement their visibility, AT&T commissioned Philip Johnson to design a building that would set the company apart from every other company by setting it apart from every other company building. They decidedly did not want another glass box. They told this to Johnson, the man who had helped design the best of them, The Seagram, which remains, arguably, the purest and most successful corporate statement in the Modernist Movement. 

The Modernists hoped to develop an architectural vocabulary that would define the 20th Century in the way Classical and Gothic defined theirs. They took Louis Sullivan's credo 'form follows function' to its most fundamental ends. It was van Der Rohe who said, "Less is more." Using the new materials at their disposal, concrete, glass and steel, Mies van Der Rohe, Le Corbusier, Marcel Breuer and Walter Gropius, the architects most associated with defining and articulating Modernism, designed dozens of carefully proportioned, simple and simply beautiful glass boxes whose ornamentation relegated to the forms themselves and the richness of materials. The curtain-wall construction, copied ad nauseam throughout the 50s, 60s and 70s (and often by less inspired architects, think of the nearest office park near you) changed city skylines all over the world. 

The masters called theirs The International Style. And it was Philip Johnson who personally brought them to light in America through his position as MoMA's first curator of architecture in the 1930s. He made himself a king-maker. But Philip Johnson himself was not an architect until about the age of forty. The man who was known towards the end of his life as The Dean of Architects, the man whom every good contemporary architect, Daniel Liebeskind, Richard Meier, the late Zaha Hadid, called 'uncle,' the man quoted regularly among architects ("A room is only as good as it makes you feel."), the first winner ever of architecture's Oscar, The Pritzker Prize, studied philosophy as an undergrad at Harvard. He went back to school at 36, and ended up designing hundreds of projects and over 50 of the most recognizable buildings in the world. 

What kept Johnson young was his restless mind. Having reached the apex of Modernism with The Seagram Building, he quietly sniffed the air for the next emerging style. It has been said of him, he was responsible for no innovations himself. He just cleverly, presciently timed his association with a new style to make you think he invented it. And the next style in the air was Robert Venturi's 1960 treatise against the severity of the International Style. Venturi countered 'less is more' with 'less is a bore' and called for a post-Modern movement, a reaction to the Modern. Postmodern buildings might have ornamentation particularly through one or more classical references. These classical references are often fragmented, without function, and or wildly out of scale. The effect is often one of whimsy. And enough with the black or silver metal. Let's bring some bold color to the drawing boards. 

The movement makes its debut small, in homes, then shopping malls. And you're seeing them now in your mind's eye, from your youth if you're around my age, the Greek columns, the oversized crown molding, the oddly placed window. Vegas and later Atlantic City were fertile grounds for Postmodernism with their themed hotels and casino floors. College campuses used the form to find cohesion between their earliest buildings and their contemporary counterparts. And European cities find it a problem-solver for the same reasons. But it was Philip Johnson who put the movement in encyclopedias. 

Out of the twenty-five renowned architects AT&T asked to submit proposals, only Philip Johnson failed to do so. They chose him anyway. In 1978 he disappeared into his studio and on January 8, 1979, he emerged on the cover of Time Magazine no less holding his model.






This, would be no Seagram Building.

For the largest corporation in the world, a stone tablet, rising unbroken for 37 stories, controversial from the word go for its lack of setbacks, the selfish way it occupied the sky. For one of the most powerful corporations the world had ever known? Pink granite. Miles of it. At the bottom, the opposite of form follows function. A seven-story entry arch. Surrounded by a sort of breezy loggia.

But it was the topper that took the world's breath away in some kind of collective audible gasp. Entirely ornamental, it was a pediment in the Greek tradition, but pierced by a fragmented oculus, its Roman allusion. Almost immediately, people noted a resemblance to the chair back and highboy ornaments used by Thomas Chippendale in his iconic furnishings. Just as immediately, The AT&T Building was nicknamed The Chippendale Building. 





Because Postmodernism suggests wry little winks and nods to history, the designs can bear capriciousness. That top is more than capricious, it is a complete flight of fancy. And the building has more oddities at first glance, like the set of three oculi near the base at each side of the building. I see them and think, "Why?" But the building as a whole is actually a careful documentation of some of the great design throughout history. 

Built in thirds like a Greek column, the building has a clear base, the shaft in the tallest rise of the building, and the capital, here the fragmented pediment. The massing of windows in the shaft may seem arbitrary. But there are three columns of them. The two outside sets further divided into thirds (with a sliver column to the side of each). And the center set of windows is broken into nine small columns, three threes in fact, three being the Palladian ideal, the Vitruvian ideal, the liturgical ideal. 









But there is an almost subliminal ode to quality written into the face of most of the building: It is remarkably reminiscent of the English Rolls Royce radiator grill.


Because the windows are set back, the granite cladding on the steel beams--it's really just a conventional Modernist building 'tarted up in that season's drag,' one critic said--flows uninterrupted up and down the length of the building, adding to its verticality, but emerging at the base to look like actual columns, like the columns in the original AT&T Building six miles south. And while the pediment is the showstopper, the base is where Johnson exercises his vast knowledge of architectural history. 

In a bargain for additional height, Johnson promised the city public space. He put it at the bottom of the building. 


The bottom of the AT&T Building resembled an Hypostyle Hall, an Egyptian temple of a dark and quiet forest of tall columns lit from above (hence the three oculi and four tall openings above them on each side) representing the marsh at the beginning of time, primeval, the columns rising like the great papyrus, and here in Johnson's iteration, a room of contemplation, a retreat for the Mad Men and Women hustling up and down Madison Avenue. 





























The entrance is monumental, and all built on a scale to house the enormous statue of many names and many homes. Sculpted in 1914, The Genius of Telegraphy was hoisted atop the old AT&T Building at 195 Broadway in 1916. By then, AT&T had spun off its telegraph division as Western Union and immediately the sculpture was renamed The Genius of Electricity. But at 24-feet, second in size after the Statue of Liberty and covered with 40,000 sheets of gilt, everyone called him Golden Boy. He appeared on phone books for decades. In the 1930s, he was renamed The Spirit of Communication and stood his aerie perch until Johnson gave him indoor ground floor digs in 1984.

  




The archway incorporates the height of the statue and the added height of a clerestory window, the huge center oculus that. moonlike and full, seems to hurl itself up the building to some lesser phase at the top. 

The base, too, thoroughly references Brunelleschi's early Renaissance masterpiece, the Pazzi Chapel in Florence, its entrance, an archway flanked by columns, its interior, multiple oculi, a vaulted ceiling, and the delicate opened columned walls of a cloister. That Johnson would recreate this solemn environment with exactitude, but on an enormous scale, to house the god of AT&T no less, was utterly ridiculous. But if you recall, that is indeed one of the four major tenets of the movement. 















































































In its tripartite structure, the bottom holds the classical elements of three major civilizations, Hypostyle, the Greek description of an ancient Egyptian room of columns, like the Palace of Athena and dominated by a Roman arch. That it hurtles through the centuries to recall the architect of the Renaissance, in every sense of that phrase, is a stroke of genius. But consider that it continues on through the fabric of time to tie this aesthetic journey into that of its home town and the other, earlier end of the 20th Century, and keep your head from exploding. Because it does all of the above and then reminds us of the base of the 1913 New York City Municipal Building and its Neoclassical A-listers McKim, Meade, and White who were taking the classical elements popular in the moment of time just before theirs and stretching them into one of the world's first skyscrapers while Johnson is taking a skyscraper and stretching long-forgotten classical elements back into it.



















That, my friends, is important. It is carefully considered. It is the conversation every artist has with the ages out of respect and deference. As a jumping off place into the unknown.



That it never worked was most definitely a fault of the architect, but the deck was stacked against him. In 1982, halfway into the construction, two years before the doors opened, AT&T divested itself of nearly half of itself, spinning off the local exchange part of their business, Ma Bell, into the Baby Bells of 1982. It was that or be forced to do more to avoid Anti-Trust penalties. AT&T was indeed a monopoly, convincing us some monopolies like utilities were necessary to keep service uniform. It was a lie. Shrouded in mystery. As was the bottom of this building. Stone-like but really steel, and dark and darkly inscrutable like the machinations that happened behind the carefully packaged windows upstairs, it turned out not to be so comfortable a place to take a break. It made people nervous. 

Golden Boy was moved out early on. He never quite worked on the ground. His room, big as it was, turns out? Not quite big enough. He seemed stuffed in there. And the only good view of him was from across the street, where the unfortunate paning of glass made him look jailed, not imprisoned as much as in a holding cell awaiting arraignment, Indeed, he was moved on to three subsequent facilities like a Menendez brother. 

AT&T had to take a tenant almost immediately and Sony occupied half the building from the outset.  In 1996, Sony commissioned the very accomplished architect Charles Gwathmy to 'adjust' the troublesome base. Gwathmy sealed in the open spaces with windows and Sony shops, but he left the building recognizable.




Sony purchased the building in 2002 and ten years later, sold it for $1.1 billion to two property investment firms, Olayan and Chetsfield. In October of 2017, the new partners announced plans to have the Norwegian firm Snøhetta design millions of dollars of renovations. Like Gwathmy, the people over at Snøhetta are no slouches. They were given the commission to design the new Library. At ALEXANDRIA! And their NYC resume includes designs for the new layout of Times Square and the 9/11 Museum.

And here is where the firestorm erupted. 

Philip Johnson died in his Glass House in Connecticut in 2005. He's not around to advocate for himself. So his acolytes have taken to the streets, screaming witty epithets like, "Keep your hands off my Johnson!" 

The bulk of Snøhetta's renovations are centered around the base, which is where the public in NYC interface with a skyscraper. As obvious as that may sound, its importance cannot be overstated. Snøhetta proposes stripping away the granite from the bottom seven stories of the building, exposing its dirty little secret, its a Modern skyscraper underneath. They further propose to replace the granite cladding with a seven story 'curtain of glass,' ribbon-like to suggest a lightness, movement. We know, for sure, statistically, scientifically, people go in spaces they can see clearly from the sidewalk. Whatever food festival/vertical retail combination ends up in there will do well until tastes change as, of course, they will. 


But gone forever will be that rather startling array of references, gone will be that soaring interior that made you feel something. Even if it was creepy, so creepy they filmed a Batman in there, you felt something. And look carefully, gone will be the illusion of columns that run the length of the building into the sidewalk. They were an illusion, but they gave the building roots, sea legs, a presence on the street. As proposed? The building looks like it could pancake down on itself at any second. It won't. But I wonder we are trading one anxiety for another. And thrown to the gutter is Johnson's greatest premise, that a building in NYC has to have a good top and a good bottom, and they must refer to one another. I mean, better to change all the rest of the building and leave the bottom than have thirty granite stories floating un-moored to a glass shed.


I'm not the fan of Postmodernism I once was. I remember being tickled by it, and its historical elements piqued my interest enough to read up on them and understand the arc of architecture, how it is, I believe, the art form that most informs us of the culture that created it. But think of that moment in time, the 1980s and 90s when Postmodernism had its day. I find its playful references cynical now. It was a cynical time. A 'Me Generation' where selfishness needed cynicism to justify itself. I think Johnson's worst excesses were his cynical, selfish ones. 

And too many Postmodern designs were executed as overwrought and bulky, like this nonsense in Tokyo:



In the way its cousin could be, by the way, the earlier response to Modernism known as Art Deco. I love Art Deco for putting up a fight, salvaging ornamentation in its streamlined way, the way it does so elegantly and subtly at Rockefeller Center. But I hate it at places like the old General Electric Building blocks away where its array of marbles and finishes gives me claustrophobia and vertigo.

Both movements were a way out, though. Imagine living in Rome in 77AD and thinking if I see another arch I'm going to feed myself to the lions. Or living in Northern France in 1318 and seeing another pointed arched stained glass window going up. Philip Johnson showed us there was an end to the endless glass boxes of Modernism. The man who brought us Modernism delivered us from it. In this building. 

It deserves respect.