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. 

White bracing between the panes of glass in lessening volume gives the entrance an extraordinarily airy feeling, one of hospitality, and one of the best uses of a new-ish prevailing theory that the exterior and interior of a building should be fluid, that you don't quite notice, or care to notice the exact moment you're in. I find something lovely about that on a quantum level. 




And that wall that came too soon? Covered in polished black granite, doubling the feel of the size of the room, reflecting the polished black granite outside on the memorial. 

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.

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. 

The building that reaches back eight centuries.

I've noticed lately almost every time someone new to the city hits the corner of 48th and 8th, they look north, take out their phone, and take a picture. One forgets, living here, how startling some views are. Up the block?

It's a good building.

Worldwide Plaza is a 52-story tower rising far above its largely five-story neighbors in Hell's Kitchen. When it opened in 1989, it was, in fact, the tallest building west of 8th Avenue and the tallest one built west of 8th since the McGraw Hill green explosion of Art Deco style in 1931.

I simply call it the Number 2 Pencil Building. It's palette, shape and silhouette remind me of every standardized test I ever had to take. 

There was talk of building the tallest building in the world on that site, a block of a parking lot by the time the mean lean years of the mid-70s had rolled round. But a zoning law that gave developers tax incentives for including public spaces in their programs convinced the design team, particularly the chief architect, David Childs (Time Warner Center, One World Trade Center) of legendary Skidmore, Owens and Merrill, to split the building into three, in this, Mr. Childs' NYC debut. 

The first is the tower, One Worldwide Plaza, an office building whose large square footage per floor lured companies like Cravath, Swaine & Moore, the Japanese investment bank Nomura, and the international advertising agency of Ogilvy & Mather to what was then one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. 

The second building is a residential tower. It is separated from the office building by a breezy plaza where neighbors sit and relax under the gaze of a beautiful sculpture/fountain representing the four seasons. Underneath all of that, small movie theaters that, even better, have been converted into off-Broadway venues. 

At the 9th Avenue end of the block the project lands comfortably into its smaller surroundings with a series of townhome-like apartments and retail shops, all echoing the architectural fireworks in Tower One. 

To understand the building, its good to know a little history.

The first two Madison Square Gardens sat on the northeast corner of Madison Square Park. The first was unremarkable. The second was Stanford White's masterpiece, a Doge's Palace with a tower based on the Tower of Seville. It took a brave man to take on the design of that which would replace it, and that man was Cass Gilbert.

Gilbert, who designed the (old) Customs House, The Woolworth Building, and The US Supreme Courthouse, took as his inspiration for the new New York Life Insurance Building the Cathedral of Salisbury, home to the oldest clock in the world, the best of the four original copies of the Magna Carta, and, to this day, the tallest church spire in England. 

The John Constable painting of Salisbury Cathedral that, ironically, hangs in NYC at The Frick.









Gilbert modified this early English Gothic form and gave us modernist lines with the grace of Gothic elongation. And instead of a spire, he gave us pyramid of 25,000 tiles covered in 24-karat gold.





















The third Madison Square Garden sat on the block between 8th and 9th, between 49th and 50th. When it came down in 1968, the neighborhood, never good to begin with, began it's decline Into one of the foulest in America. (From 1969 to 1986, almost impossible to think of today, an entire block in midtown Manhattan was a parking lot.)(You'll never know what I went through to find this picture.) 

David Childs to the rescue. 

Replacing a Madison Square Garden had been done. So like a good artist, he bows in deference and passes on the torch. He gives us the massing of Gilbert's quasi-Gothic/Modern office building and adds a 'Salisbury tower' of his own, affectionally referred to as 'David's Diamond.' It's copper elements add cool green to the sky, it's 'skylight' at the top flashes, dazzling, at night. 

At the base, a wonderful surprise awaits. An oval arcade of shops with glass skybridges takes you around the entire periphery of the building, its drum-like shape belying the squareness of everything above. Mr. Childs quite literally fits a square peg into a round hole, and rather seamlessly for his efforts. Above you rises the warm earth tones of creamy, ochre-y oranges, in brick and precast concrete, and rich-feeling brown granites and marbles.

It falls dead center into the Postmodern, the affinity for square windows, its accessories, like the  oversized sconces, classic, but reeking of the 80's. It exudes strength through its extreme massing, but its sense of play in shape and color make it festive, like a drum majorette, leading the city out of its misery and into a new Golden Age. 

Yeah. It's worth a picture.