“Steel is a man-made material. We don’t know what may happen to it 100 years down the line. It may just all start collapsing.“
Those were the parting words of my very brilliant and exhausted roommate my sophomore year in college, looking up from his desk bleary-eyed, having not slept for two days. I had already finished finals and was going home for the summer. He had another week of exams in our univerity’s challenging civil engineering department.
I’m always reminded of that day when I look at Raymond Hood’s architecture, particularly his sumptuous American Radiator Building hugging the leafy southern shore of Bryant Park, and for you midwesterners, his triumphant Tribune building in Chicago.
Buildings such as these are the transitional skyscrapers, those first towers to boldly pierce the clouds with a confidence slightly undermined by design elements that reached backwards rather then forwards, perhaps to quell the nervous denizens below, perhaps to quiet whatever portentious voice like that of my roommate’s singing “Steel‘s still new, don’t sleep!”
Slathered in stone, topped with temples, gothic, gilded, and redundant twice over, these buildings almost any from 1900-1929, seem to beg polite invitation to the gatekeeper gods of the stratosphere.
Somehow Raymond Hood slept well enough to break free from that need to look over his shoulder and went on to produce one of the most stunning examples of urban architecture in his 30 Rockefeller Center, virtually defining the New York City skyline in the late 30s to the end of the 20th Century. His clean lines, his sparing use of materials and the efficient spaces they carved out of the sky are my favorite examples of what I find to be the otherwise chunky clunky and dizzingly so Art Deco. In doing so he ushered in the international movement and what we’ve come to think of as modern architecture.
His theory became for architecture what Einstein was never able to accomplish in physics: Capable of withstanding a combined aesthetic in a city in the edge of unpredented growth and ripe for renewal.
Of course, history Intervened as it will do, and New York City entered into a period of decline in the 1970s and 80s that saw the population plateau and the need for major urban planning dwindle.
But in the heady days of Mr. Hood’s optimism it was clear to him that we were running out of room on this tiny island of Manhattan. And that the boroughs soon would become home to hundreds of thousands and millions of more New Yorkers. There are renderings from this period that show at least 20 more bridges connecting Manhattan to its neighbors. And perhaps for those city dwellers who could not commit to a choice between living in say, Manhattan or Brooklyn, Raymond Hood designed a series if these ‘bridge apartment houses’ where one might find themself living not on the river but over it.
Never built. But with technology available at our fingertips today some artist have come up with some pretty compelling images of what that might have looked like. Or does in a parallel universe...
