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October 22, 2004

Oh, no Mr. Robber, sir, I do not carry cash. My companion here, Peter, has the checkbook. In New York, you get used to the whims of fashion. You get used to pronouncement of what is cool and exactly, precisely when it is toppled. The capriciousness of the process can be frustrating, particularly when, say, a restaurant doesn't actually suffer a loss of quality, or a band doesn't really change. Or maybe it's good, since you don't have to listen to the braying hordes of scenesters of various stripes hogging the floor, and talking during the show. Of course, I should have a clever bunch of hyperlinks detailing my bleeding edge understanding of this or that level of hip, but fuck all that. I'm unfashionable. But, some things never change. Like Katz's or John Lurie, a consistent opinion pervades this town about the timelessness and truth of certain things. To that, we can add the belief that the West Side Stadium is about as healthy for this city as more cosmetic surgery would be for Jocelyn Wildenstein.

Yesterday, Comptroller -- and putative mayoral candidate -- William C. Thompson issued his report on the planned financing for the entire West Side redevelopment project. And he took his goddamn time about it, threatening since mid-summer to issue a position. I'm embellishing here for dramatic effect, since there's no news in the conclusion (um, in case you live under a rock or in Mike Bloomberg's basement, the gist is that the financing plan is unprecedented in its risk and out and out foolhardy -- and this from a guy who isn't even taking a position on the propriety of the stadium, other than noting that Bloomberg's claim that the stadium needs to be underway before the Olympic vote happens is hooey), except for the v-bomb he drops at the end, where he states that you can expect a big ole Bronx cheer from him when it comes time to vote (yeah, believe or not, there are one or two people who might actually have a say beyond Robert Wood Johnson III).

That's because the city needs some scratch to jumpstart development (subway line, parks and streets, infrastructure, etc.). The money will come from bonds, which are to be repaid by property tax revenue expected from the development area. But in order to obtain favorable rates for the bonds (some of which, yes, is a direct subsidy of the stadium, mostly in the form of site work, which includes building the platform over the LIRR rail yards), they need to be guaranteed by something other than the project, since those finanical markets that made Bloomberg rich don't believe the project is credit worthy above the level of junk. So the proverbial full faith and credit of the good citizens of New York is needed. And, of course, it's not really our goodness securing these rates -- it's our tax dollars. See, if the project doesn't materialize at the expected pace (and, to revisit some recent development schemes, remember that a good 10-12 unscheduled years intervened between the announcement of the four towers at the south end of Times Square and the completion of the first), there is no tax revenue, and thus no money for bond repayment. There is, however, our trusty income tax revenue, which, normally, pays for such luxuries as police officers and teachers.

So, yes, this is like when you ne'er do well cousin calls and wants to "hook you up" with some crackpot scheme to buy lakefront property in Rochester with the idea that he can make all kinds of money because "real estate's so hot right now". Except the lake is polluted and he wants to pay the mortgage by selling houses that aren't built yet. And you're, like, "what happens if it takes a while to sell the first one"? And he, who hasn't had a job since the head shop closed, says, all indignant, "Well, aren't you making good money from your law job? You can smooth over the rough spots -- dude, this is, like, a license to print money!"

So, yeah, it's like that, except the property costs $3,000,000,000.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 21, 2004

Tisoped! Tisoped! Gnikcehc eerf-tseretni! Boy, aren't those new Bank of America branches really... red? I admire, if such a phrase is appropriate in this context, a financial services organization that is willing to forgo the traditional prohibition of red in any marketing involving money, and likewise the desire to make retail banking visually similar to a Pizza Hut, but if I was going to pick a retail avatar for remaking my bank, it seems like that Crate & Barrel would be far more effective.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 19, 2004

You are my Sunshine...

[NB: A reader alerted me to two inaccuracies, which have been corrected in the text and some comments have been appended below the text]

LIVING IN NEW YORK and being a fan of architecture always means having to say you’re sorry. More precisely, it means having to say, ‘Well, it could have been worse.’ Considering that we exist at the center of architectural practice, and, allowing a four-hour travel radius, at the academic center as well, we are still condemned to rationalize positive comments about much of which comprises architectural production that ranges from embarrassing to abhorrent.

The past two years have seen notable efforts to bring nameplate architects into the otherwise banal practice of making multiple dwelling facilities in Manhattan. Whereas the loft renovation was typically the cutting-one’s-teeth opportunity for young designers, they are finding themselves outflanked by the massive egos of the architectural ruling class, who, in some cases, are doing buildings from top to bottom. The list of recent projects, some real, some announced, some abandoned, include offerings from Graves, Meier, Calatrava, Gwathmey, Foster and Johnson. No longer content to watching the acronym posse (SOM, HOK, KPF) torture itself to try and develop a newer, cheaper way to wrap what is basically a light industrial manufacturing facility turned on its end with a ‘curb appeal’ in the form of a slighter different glass skin than the neighbor, we are now able to witness four decades of intellectually and formally bankrupt design theory fail miserably in the face of New York residential real estate market.

Trying to condense this argument into a comestible critique is difficult, since I don’t want to write a thesis here, but, rather, talk about a single building that seems to be emblematic of the unfortunate confluence of all these forces: developers and their middling stable of firms reaching up to where the demigods languish, the exalted slumming long enough to find out that it really is as bad as it seems down here.

Some of this process is explicable though the more considered words of others, but the runs the risk of seeming fussy and pedantic, an odd charge oft leveled at architects (and their critics), given they must, in the end, present visceral and near permanent arguments for these ideals. And so we have here Frederic Jameson:

It will no doubt be observed that the symbolic act of high modernism, which seeks to resolve contradiction by stylistic fiat (even though its resolution may remain a merely symbolic one), is of a very different order and quality from that of a postmodernism which simply ratifies the contradictions and fragmented chaos all around it by way of an intensified perception, or a mesmerized and well-nigh hallucinogenic fascination with, those very contradictions themselves (contenting itself with eliminating the affective charge of pathos, of the tragic, or of anxiety, which characterized the modern movement) [Architecture Criticism Ideology, PAP, 1985]
The reading presented above is acceptable mostly if one divests themselves of the belief that postmodernism is a design approach best characterized (and limited to) the candy-colored pastiche of the 1980’s and exemplified by Michael Graves, and instead opens it to include what is often lumped in as ‘traditional architecture’: the recent efforts to create, or recreate, structures that ape almost invisibly types -- more often than not ones that prove to be lucrative real estate opportunities instead of significant by any aesthetic measure -- in the extant stock.

This approach is consistent with the ‘playful’ belief that postmodernism existed almost post ideology -- though some of its practitioners would have it that this free-form and arbitrary appropriation was a valid ideological approach to social conditions which enabled it. The strict traditionalist actions are cut from the same cloth, albeit with a more fitted approach. However, the guileless appropriation of history is same. Context is stripped down so that only formal terms remain, regardless of its history. Therefore, a design is admissible only when it succinctly apes its immediate environs, at all costs, and ‘authenticity’ collapses into an indiscernible mass of comfort through familiarity. To be inflammatory, but perhaps accurate, it’s the architectural equivalent of keeping the neighborhood as white as can be (which always protects real estate values).

But Jameson is an academic, not an architect. He hasn’t built a building (not so far as I know), and that’s fine for me, but when presenting such a relentless critique, you often get a little, ‘fine, but what are we supposed to do the meantime’? Folks like Manfredo Tafuri would have you respond ‘not much’, meaning that the collusion between an architect and prevailing hegemony is so inextricable that a critical practice is nigh impossible (or so reads Jameson).

There are both contemporaries and students of Tafuri who have both tried to live with the understanding of this strident stance whilst cleaving some path in the world that is hopefully adequately critical and still compelling. A strong example of this is Vittorio Gregotti, who presents this commentary about a decade later:

The spectacle is nothing but the pure form of separation: when the real world is transformed into an image and images become real, the practical power of humans is separated from itself and presented as a world unto itself… where everything can be called into question except the spectacle itself, which, as such, says nothing but, “What appears is good, what is good appears.”[Inside Architecture, MIT Press, 1996]
Unlike Jameson, he offers design that ostensibly opposes what his commentary derides. I can attest to an expression of affinity to the visceral before sanctioning his opinion. But it also occurs amidst its own historical moment, and I am merely a wide eyed naïf about that context, idealizing the Marxist posturing of an (Italian) culture that is nonetheless rabidly capitalist in many of its concerns, and in the end, may simply be another sucker for modern Italian design. Then again, maybe that’s not a bad thing.

THE HUBERT is a condominium building in TriBeCa nearing completion (photo), designed by BKSK Architects (with interiors by Alan Wanzenberg) and developed by Robert Siegel*. You're probably familiar at least with a rendering of it if you have entered the city via the Holland Tunnel over the past two years. A large ad was situated in the lot at Beach and Varick streets (the intersection you encounter if you take the third exit from the Holland Tunnel rotary), and, at a glance, implied that the building was slated for that very lot. In fact, it is to the west, on Hubert Street, behind an existing former industrial building which is also undergoing redevelopment (by Joseph Pell Lombardi, who was involved in such notable conversions as the Atalanta building, the Ice House and the Julliard Building, as well as the upcoming Mohawk ‘Atelier’).

The building is unapologetically nostalgic. One might be tempted to say respectful, but that line is getting harder to distinguish each passing year of winking irony. My initial impression of the rendering was that someone decided to do the TriBeCa loft experience in an exceptionally thorough manner. I never studied the image well, and had a hard time situating it -- the site is an ell, the bulk of which sits on Hubert Street, and the renderings obliterated all contextual elements. And though rendering technology has long passed the stage of photorealism, there are still enough tricks you can pull to make something to like more or less than it actually is. I simply assumed the rendering was a sales gimmick to generate interest in a building that was more or less a stock Costas Kondylis hack job.

But I have been removed from production long enough to discover that, no, the rigor with which the industrial loft building was fabricated whole cloth is, at times, terrifying. Or, as some preservation hack might say, appropriately respectful. Once the building was clad and topped out, you could see quickly how much it depends on the ‘Sky Lofts’ (photo) next door: the bay spacing of the windows (photo), the variegated brick pattern, color, and even the use of decorative stone caps mimics almost exactly the elder neighbor. The desire for double insulated glass, and marketability of expanses thereof has changed the proportions such that the panes run from column to column, and oddity and failure of which (photo) is not apparent in the rendering. Here again, Gregotti has a relevant observation (that is particularly acute if you wade through the Hubert sales site and see those renderings/movies):

Everything has at times been resolved, at the most superficial levels, by bestowing on the information media an importance great enough to allow construction of projects loaded primarily with the weight of their role as illustration. This gives the printed and transmitted photographic image a decisive role in judgment, and shifts the much more complex and structural notion of form, with all its reasons and resistances, in the direction of decoration, atmosphere, and syllogism.
I am tempted to detail the particular failings of this buildings, since it is a trap one gets into when one is the apologist. The ‘it could have been worse’ logic induces lassitude. And it calls to mind an argument that circulated amongst studio mates and friends (one that this continues with some to this day) -- the gap between when might be called ‘good architecture’ and ‘good building’. Among the more talented of my friends, there wasn’t much of a gap, but for those philosophically inclined towards the latter, regardless of their skill, the argument was that we should know how to make a good building, since that failure would leave a structure bereft of its most elemental qualities, an ethical failure that no amount of theorizing could polish. Further, even the most critical reading of the work of someone like Gregotti will find that good building is in evidence to an almost pathological degree, even as sources diverse as Pasolini and Tom Wolfe will point out the formal and experiential failings of Italian housing developments. And so, even as the very being-ness of The Hubert must be questioned and (ultimately) condemned, its failures as a building are notable as well, since this is a town with a housing shortage that borders on criminal.

Unlike most of the warehouse stock in the area, the building makes liberal use of setbacks, reminiscent of Hugh Ferriss renderings, as well as a few larger buildings nearby (such as 60 Hudson, the Western Union building). One certain goal was to maximize the potential for terrace space. The renderings, and even the built form, to a lesser degree, benefit from the forced perspective this allows. But since the building does not soar beyond its neighbors, the column to column glass makes the building look more squat that it needs to. Additionally, the setbacks are necessary to bring some semblance of light into building. The siting, which is so carefully obscured in any promotional materials, is due west of one of the largest buildings in TriBeCa, and more or less hemmed in by its neighbors (photo), resulting in a largish building in what is basically a side street, mid-block lot. Most of the middle and lower level units will receive direct sunlight for an hour or two at best each day. The ‘maisonettes’ are two story units touted as having direct street access, part of a recent move on the part of developers to integrate ‘town home’ living with fully engaged units. Here, the entrances will be on Collister Street, which would be called an alley if it did not date to the early days of New York, when streets were far narrower, and the entrances open on to a sidewalk that will be positively suburban in scale – in this case, three feet, but without a yard or any intermediary grass.

Such are exigencies of developing in New York. Such are the failings of architects when faced with the demand of developers. One could simply dismiss these awkward conditions as inevitable, but that simply isn’t the case. Rather, it is the result of marketing driven decisions that are divorced from a prudent design program. Collister Street will never be Charles Lane, but that fact makes no difference to untrammeled greed and ignorance of real estate agents and developers (‘Your own private entrance – on a street with only three other addresses!’).

The interesting challenge would be if all of this insipid typicality hadn’t driven the decision-making. None of the recent attempts of bringing the star power to the process have mastered the nexus of all the attendant issues (regardless of where final culpability lies in the Perry Street building fiasco, there are enough missteps on the design side to characterize the project as more failure than not). Not that perfect execution should favor any approach, and there is more than a small measure of absurdity in trying to create a hierarchy of value in what are basically homesteads that are fundamentally pornographic by most socio-economic measures.

The units that you can see, both from the plans, and now, at street level before they are knitted up with very expensive treatments, are mean little spaces, jumbled together to resolve the expectations of the vulture-driven marketing: requisite master bathroom suite, ancillary spaces with esoteric terms such as ‘media room’ that are only wide spaces with too many circulation points, all of which are simply places to pile furniture and others toys that celebrate the absurd cost of the air itself. There is no way that furniture and finish can possibly enumerate just how dear this McMansion hell is, and so, why bother?

The failures of this building call to mind a fantasy I've always had. Whenever I've looked for an apartment, no matter what my budget, I was always told, in tones ranging from helpless to sarcastic that "there's simply nothing in that range right now". Someday, when architectural nitpicking makes me rich, I want to walk into a vulture's office and deadpan that I have, say, $30,000 a month to spend, and watch them contort their face to prepare their standard line, and that if I was will to go to, say $32,000 they 'might have something'. And so, of course, the money is never enough. Since the Hubert is close to sold out, if not completely at this point, and I know squat about how to research condo transactions, I can only assume that the about $100 million worth of real estate exchanged hands. And this leads me to ask, my attempts at trenchant commentary about modernism and its lack of effective legacy in Manhattan aside, is this not enough? Is this what $100 million gets you? Nasty little suburban apartment spaces with really expensive fixtures? It's a fraud: tasteless and pointless. And almost entirely pre-sold. What incentive could there possibly be to prevent the next one?

* IN THE ORIGINAL TEXT, Tsao & McKown, who are designing interiors for a project two blocks to the west, were listed as the architects. The Sunshine Group was listed as developer. The Sunshine Group is only the marketing agent. This misattribution has little material impact on my overall thesis, but certainly is an unacceptably slipshod bit of fact checking on my part. Given the minor role of the Sunshine Group, it would seem the title of this piece should also be amended, but for the sake of newsreaders and general archiving, I'm leaving it lie.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 18, 2004

There's no such thing as adventure. There's no such thing as romance. There’s only trouble -- and desire. Many people in New York seem to hail from the Midwest. A disconcerting quantity are from Ohio, as am I. I’m often curious to discover what draws them here. The answers are often inarticulate, which is perhaps unfair since it’s hard to put a clear sense of purpose on a time of transition. Or, after a spell, we craft a nugget of clever concision that likely better represents our aspirations rather than the actual facts.

That representation is often a shaping of the ideal we concocted for our existence and this city, or, better our existence in this city, one that is inevitably latent, an agglomeration of narratives we learn through films, novels, perhaps if we are diligent, the consumption of periodicals and media from a distance, in the belief that it will allow us to become more authentically a New Yorker more quickly (and without, say, actually having to become Norman Mailer or Fran Lebowitz).

Because moving here, unless you are wealthy, is really fucking hard. And staying here is often worse. Whether that story was fully formed on arrival, or sanded and polished over time, hardening into a amulet we take out in the depths of drunken night and measure our lives, which have become adorned with better clothes, good food, the occasional foray into some cultural consumption that is absolutely superior whatever it was we knew back in Dayton or Lexington or St. Louis, the company of people mostly less interesting than we hoped, and the intractable sense of superiority of having pulled it off, against this ugly little ornament that is still far more arresting than anything we live from day to day. Maybe it’s wrapped in a Voice article from a generation ago when someone said the exact same thing.

It’s terrifying to come across something so incisive that is seems to have be wrenched from your consciousness, or worse, after having known it from years, you find yourself unable to separate your knowledge of the thing from itself, and your subsequent thinking. Maybe none of it is yours, simply a neurotic déjà vu repressed to protect your thinning ego.

The first time I saw Simple Men was the day after my most melodramatic college breakup. My last quarter, fumbling for an adult future, fears for my able to trudge through the end of a thesis, nothing exceptional in any way now, but the seeming end of the world back then, punctuated by a film that seemed so fitted for that moment that I would have had to make it were it not there (not say that I could, but still). I hate quoting films, but the lines "Tomorrow. The first good looking woman I see... I’m not gonna fall in love with her. That’ll show her!" would pretty much sum up the lives of most every male friend I’ve had for the past fifteen years.

And so if Hal Hartley didn’t exist, we would have had to invent him. But because he does, there are times where the scrabbling desire to be relevant to an uninterested universe seems redundant, since time will unveil another hidden nugget that reminds you that anything original you may have thought was rendered better, and earlier.

Moving here just as third wave of Williamsburg settlement was occurring, college graduates from Brown and RISD stumbling upon Metropolitan Avenue as if they were Columbus establishing a beachhead in the Bahamas, I watched witlessly as they brayed about how ‘over’ Manhattan was. A recent import myself, from a place that absolutely qualified as the hinterlands, but even I managed enough knowledge to point to Hartley’s incomparable ‘Theory of Achievement’ a sketch that predated us by a half decade, and one that dutifully archived the inevitable reality Williamsburg had become (even as those 'pioneers' tear at their hair about its demise now) before most of these kids heard of Neil Postman. And I want to ask them: have you seen this? Really. No, really, because if you had, perhaps a wee bit more humilty would be in order.

And today, today I saw the latest sketch from Hartley with more wit and insight than I manage over dozens and hundreds of words. His new production company, Possible Films, just released a collection of mostly hard to get short works from the past decade. One, The Sisters of Mercy, is unreleased. A remix of a video shot for the Red Hot Organization, Iris, Hartley is disarmingly blunt about what impels a filmmaker at times, noting:

I was a little shocked by how consistent I am in my aims and well as my methods: how much I like to make pictures of beautiful young women on almost any pretext, as well as how emphatic I am about pictorial composition.
This is evident in the resulting video, a series of stunning close ups of two stunning women, one who has evolved into one of those avatars of downtown life that we imagine ourselves living, or meeting, Parker Posey.

The content of the re-cut video is enough to give an idea of what the original was like ("Two young women playing out roles associated with the purchasing of real estate. Questions regarding the worries of ownership versus the worries of being un-invested. Intimations of a life filled with effort and debt."). Made ten years ago, it looks like it was shot last week. And a few minutes of outtakes of his trademark redundant, deadpan cadences while the camera lovingly ogles Posey and Sabrina Lloyd overlays the signature line from an even earlier paean to Manhattan living, Ambition, where the protagonist, after preaching of litany of qualities of world capitals and their appeal (language, culture, love of music, etc.), blurts out "I love New York because the most beautiful women in the world live here."

Is that all? Beautiful unattainable women parading the streets below the lavish, unattainable real estate? That can’t be it. Hartley himself reflects on what it is like for those of us who has accomplished what it is his protagonist in Ambition wants most: "I want the image I have of myself and myself to become one":

I have the same problems not as I did when I was answering phones for a living. Things may be different now. I have more money and it’s easier to meet women now that I have my picture in the paper, and being published with my scripts and all. But the fundamental problems of my life are still the same.['Interview by Graham Fuller', Simple Men and Trust]
And so the image of Hartley films haunt and gird me as I walk over the same streets, a series of tired aphorisms in my head: the more things change, best of times, everything is different. As satisfying as it is to see a reflection of who you are (or simply who you want to be), however wry or pointed it may be, is this an adequate substitute? Is it anything other than nonsensical for those outside your narrow slice of experience. As annoying as I find Jon Jost, maybe he is simply the Hal Hartley of the ten years before I got here, perhaps this is simply another one of those tired, obvious clichés that, if I wait long enough, will turn up in a Roz Chast cartoon, the unaccomplished liberal male who fetishes Hartley films as significant, when they are really just an elaborate version of the malformed desires of shy boys who presume that their complex yearning is the same as actually making a fucking film. I’m sure somewhere Hartley has, like, an answering machine message he left that discusses this very point. I’ll just have to wait around for him to release it. In the meantime, go buy the DVD. He’s self-publishing material, and by the look of it, still is working for distribution on his new features. Let’s try and show that New York doesn’t yet again have to depend upon Europe to support some of its most accomplished artists.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 15, 2004

I knew this place would be cool someday -- we're getting a Whole Foods! The future of the remaining plots of undeveloped land in TriBeCa are becoming clear, even as the horizon above them will be occluded. Curbed notes that the Daily News gives a roundup on the status of Lots 5B and C (just south and west of P.S. 234 at the corner of Greenwich and Chambers Streets -- follow the link, it has a useful map), as well as, what is it? Lot 25D or whatever, across the street in Battery Park City.

If you are a reader of the Downtown Express, or a fan of this site, you know there isn't much new to be gleaned from the article, and, in fact, this should be a quiz in the form of an essay question where you identify the soft spots in the reporting. But since we're all lazy thanks to the Google now, here are the answers:

1. It doesn't confirm that city settled on a sale price. Does this piece mean that the plans regarding height limits and funding (and size) of community center aren't inked, making the Resnick property still in flux? Goldman is throwing in some pocket change ($1 million) so it's not like they care if this goes through, they get to break ground next month. They were also building as of right, and the only lingering problem was Brookfield had a nominal first refusal. But since Brookfield finally signed a new tenant to the WFC (the SEC -- take that Silverstein! WTC7 remains pristine and unrented), and they are dumping properties elsewhere to marshall capital, that wasn't much of a speed bump. We're talking Goldman Sachs here.

2. Now that Foster's out, did Resnick find a local hack to trim back the plans, or are we all waiting in dread of some frosh new Kondylis masterpiece?

3. Is anyone even pretending Minskoff organization is close to a shovel in the ground in this decade? They've got to identify a site for additional affordable housing downtown, the city has to acquire a site on the east side for a new school, which so far has resulted in a lot 'piss-off's by places like Pace and the Hospital (yeah, there's a hospital over there; I can't find the damn thing and I jog by there a couple times a week). Every other likely site is getting chewed up by monstrosities by Calatrava and Gehry. And they have to find a 'quality' food purveyor, which is what happens when 'community interest' comes from a neighborhood where the only two traffic jams that happen with any regularity are car service back-ups in front of Chanterelle and Maclaren stollers in front of the latest kid-friendly store. And they say it just like that. They would say supermarket, but we already got one of those in the Food Emporium on Greenwich.

So, aside from the confirmation of the GS tower, and that was never much in doubt, did the News brings us anything concrete? Maybe. Could just be they flubbed the follow up questions. We'll wait for the next Downtown Express for confirmation.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 13, 2004

Boy, if we had PR flacks like this... This is a playing fast and loose with the definition of "Above 59th Street" (and sure to infuriate at least one Upper West Sider who will cry out "But we have a Barneys Co-op now!") -- to say nothing of our stated editorial mission -- but it's all the same to me: four deaths in Ulster County (that's an area of upstate New York somewhere north of Siberia and south of Montreal) have been attibuted to a 'rare brain disease' which is how large news organizations describe an illness that might be termed otherwise if they weren't going to be called very quickly by the very well paid lawyers of the American Beef Council (more properly the Cattlemen's Beef Board) to explain very precisely is not 'Mad Cow Disease' (in fact, they even have a whole web site about it). There still is no information whether or not this is the 'sporadic' type -- which is not causally connection to beef consumption -- or the 'variant' type, which is. The beauty of it is that even it is the time to shit your pants and start worrying about such a cluster, there's nothing you can do since the incubation period can be years (meaning, we may have all ingested the tainted ingredients back in the Go-Go 90's). This is not a site that doesn't appreciate a good burger (it is, in fact, one that can engage you in a lengthy conversation that will drain all the fun out of a good burger hunt, so it will stop at saying Big Nick's is hard to beat, Corner Bistro be damned), but, you know, I like to be really clear each time I open my mouth and insert something (other than my foot) that will mostly certainly hasten my shuffling off this mortal coil. If it's time add beef to the list, so be it. I just wish we didn't have to muddle through the dissimulations of the various machinations of beef boosters and be done with it. Test all the meat, or assume it's coming (and thus, spinning the thin thread of topical relevance, aside from our late evening pissed at the Bosox and taking it out on the namby pamby Times inebriation, this site will not be providing the results of its three year quest for the Best Burger Experience in Manhattan, which wasn't so much a structured essay as a concept held out as an ideal in other nights of inebriation that didn't involve the failure of out-of-town professional sports teams or a consideration of the irony of our siding with the outlanders, again, given the stated editorial, etc.). In the meantime, I'll be over here eating hummus and cultivating my liver disease.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 12, 2004

Don't ask us to handicap the Sox series. But you might get a little 'told you so': the LMDC announced the award of commissions for the two 'cultural' sites at the WTC today, tapping the pervasive bombast of Frank Gehry for the Performing Arts building, of whom nothing was predicted (I opted for Vinoly as an exercise in damage control over the continuing sore loser card he has been playing), and the relative unknowns of Snøhetta, picked here as the likely sacrifical lamb for the Museum facility. I have nothing to add about either: for the latter, well, I plead ignorance, even as their site has some nice projects, and for Gehry, Bilboa can offset only so many abominations of formal subjectivity. Look for the use of 'soaring' and 'expressive' ad nauseum over the next few days.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 5, 2004

Seeking proper usage advice on "shorties" joke. The LMDC has announced the short lists for the two most important comissions in New York currently unawarded. Too bad this information isn't anywhere on their site. The Architect's Newspaper brings us the details because Kevin Rampe is probably busy getting tips from Dick Cheney on how to dodge asbestos liability.

It's a good list, not a great list, which is about what could be expected. There are some interesting surprises, and some obvious nods. OMA is interesting, since Rem was all talking big about what waste of time the WTC site was before all his USA commissions went the way of Richard Grasso. Two firms made both lists: Polshek and Moshe Safdie, but ArchPaper doesn't provide info (if it is obtainable) on how many teams pursued both projects (which required seperate RFP's).

FOR THE MUSEUM building (International Freedom Center and Drawing Center), the short list is:
Pei Cobb Fried
Robbrecht en Daem (with Pasanella + Klein Stolzman + Berg)
Shigeru Ban + Frei Otto with Dean Maltz
Snøhetta

FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS building (Joyce Dance Center and Signature Theater), the short list is:
Bing Thom with Meyer/Gifford/Jones
Gehry Partners (no site)
OMA (with LMN)
Rafael Vinoly
Studio Libeskind
Schmidt, Hammer & Lassen with Adamson Associates
TEN
H3 Hardy Collaboration
Tod Williams & Billie Tsien

Smart money is on Vinoly for the latter. His deep pockets -- for an archtiect -- and simmering anger at being passed over makes this an easy way to distract him and create some more of that wonderful collaborative spirit we saw after Childs & Libeskind had their shotgun wedding.

For the former, Polshek would seem to be the leader, but given he's wrapping up the Clinton Library, the selection is before the election, we have a Republican Mayor and Governor, and the Chair of the Freedom Center is a big Bush backer, that pretty much scotches his run. Pei Cobb Fried are doing the Goldman Sachs tower across the street (they are going to actually use this one, they swear), so that dampens their chances. I'll take the dark horse, Snohetta, since the Freedom Center will be such a fiasco of progamming, they'll need a convenient sacrificial lamb -- all the better if they speak broken English when you blame them.

Found always via this Permanent Link.

October 4, 2004

There are times when people are condemned to playact. This is a quote from Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being that has always stuck with me, even as the specific context of his point wilted in memory. One reason the quote stuck is I wore it on a tee shirt for a couple years back in college. The shirt was made for a bicycle race that used to be held each year at my hippie liberal arts college during the Indy 500. It was the alternative transportation antidote to car races, five hundred impossibly small laps in front of a disused dorm building. Being a hippie liberal arts school didn’t necessarily mean it was all peace and love: the corners (it wasn’t even an oval) were sprayed with Teflon, and people retrieved compost and dung from the campus pet that quarter, a pig, which they proceeded to dump on you (the only rule of the race was ‘If you throw tomatoes, they can’t be in a can’). It was rumored one year people sought a passing circus for elephant dung.

So our team shirt bore the Kundera quote on the back (and, to give you an idea how just how smarmy a student I was, there was a Baudrillard quote on the front), and, later that summer, while interning here, I was waiting to go to a show at CBGB’s (the friends of friends duty, but I incidentally witnessed the subsequent Suckdog/Costes show, one of those things the seeming decline of makes your middle-aged laments of ‘New York has changed for the worse’ seem defensible instead of trite), and thumbing through magazines at St. Mark’s Books (still on St. Mark’s), only to be interrupted by a strident feminist, who proceeded lecture me on the shortcomings of Kundera’s characterization of women in his novels. I didn’t necessarily disagree and was even perversely pleased that someone would interrupt a stranger to engage in a fairly sophisticated bit of literary criticism, which was terminated when I replied laconically that “I made this shirt for a race where people dumped pig shit on me”. Again, where has that town gone?

This quote popped up when I came across the Freedom of Expression National Monument in Foley Square a few weeks back. Partially it was the obvious symbolism: the instillation is a shockingly red megaphone attached to a platform reached by a short ramp. There is little doubt the intent of the piece, though for the doubters, there is a plaque helpfully affixed to the base of the ramp: “You are cordially invited to step up and speak up”. The megaphone is pointed at the Manhattan County Civil Supreme Court (best known recently as the site of the Martha Stewart trial), though it could have been rotated is most any direction and been effective. Created by architect Laurie Hawkinson, performer John Malpede, and visual artist Erika Rothenberg, and sponsored by a Creative Time, it is a reprisal of its original presentation in 1984 for Art on the Beach (1978-1985), when it was sited on a beach located in Battery Park City.

My first thought seeing it across the Square was fleetingly that was this was a piece of work by John Hejduk that I did not know. Perhaps only for formal reasons, it called to mind the House of the Suicide, one of his ‘masques’ that was constructed at the Georgia Institute of Technology during roughly the same period. The similarities are not, strictly speaking, derivative, but appropriately respectful of an idea: a rigorous geometry of structure that is not inherently the most rational (as a matter of engineering precision) solution, executed in mostly rough framing, which imparts an obsessive though not explicable logic, and an overall form that is both familiar and unsettling. It bespeaks of the strongest qualities of Hejduk’s work, and a perusal of Hawkinson’s CV indicates she received her BArch at Cooper Union the year before the Freedom of Expression National Monument was first mounted.

Even as the form is a deft execution of a process that I can find little fault, the overtly social commentary would seem to be a clear departure from the spirit of Hedjuk’s work, which is frequently appended with a number of obliquely positive adjectives “personal”, “poetic” and the like, mostly meaning “strange” to many a viewer. Except Hedjuk was not apolitical. The House of the Suicide was inspired by a poem about Jan Palach, a Czech student who found the condemnation of playacting to be a sentence he could not bear, and he immolated himself in 1969, as the Soviets were crushing the Prague Spring. It was his ability to imbue form with meaning that was not hopelessly subjective or grandly didactic that he clearly imparted on Hawinkson (and was shared by her collaborators).

And so we have an example of what the intervention of ‘art’ can be at its most effective: forms that are striking of their own accord, and still beguiling enough to seek to unearth what informed their creation. Of course, a big megaphone doesn’t require much excavation. But it does strike a nice balance between the whimsy necessary to draw people while still echoing some of the strident symbolism of social protest art, much of which can be attributed to the relentlessness of the red paint.

Where it is disappoints as social action is the ineffectiveness of the tool: yelling does not make you heard. Speaking up is not rewarded with the visceral effect of an echo reverberating off the walls of unyielding institution, but instead leaks tepidly out, resulting in an exercise Kundera would understand. The symbolism of this runs counter to the vibrant spirit of the artists’ statement, and so I conclude that the disjunction is a result of the vicissitudes of making public art.

Visiting over several weekends produced little in the way of incidents of speaking out. Given the light foot traffic of Foley Square off-hours, visitors, if any, were lost or particularly thorough tourists. It looks lonely most of the time, like a toy wanting to be played with. But such trifling terms should not be taken as an attitude of diminution; it is not a piece devoid of understanding the tenuous grip of democracy, and as much as it works to be engaging, its stoic presence when no one approaches is a compelling antidote to the weighty if overcooked symbols of ‘justice’ (or not -- the INS is right there as well) that surround it. It’s a shame it was not closer to 100 Center Street during the convention, where the certain febrile emanations from those camped out to support detainees would have been the most poignant realization of Kundera’s comment.

That it feels both contemporary and emblematic of a very particular prior period makes the experience more acute. Being too young to know it first hand, but knowing enough of the genesis of the imagery, given the relative permanence of most of the buildings in the area, you can squint and imagine it is 1984 again, and the distance from the era of Reagan, the palpable anger at his willful silence regarding AIDS, and contemporaeneous development of the template for unfettered accumulation and consumption we are still in the thrall of, seems like nothing at all, carefully tracked by our big, red contrivance forcing us to recall Uncle Karl’s wisdom.

So what’s it like? Well, to that end, I must report cowardice, or worse, got the best of me. Not knowing for certain to what extent my words would or would not carpet Foley Square provided sufficient trepidation. But more damning, I could find nothing I wished to say. You, and I, have a chance to prove otherwise until November 13.

Click here to view photos of the installation.
(note: link is off site -- photos presented via the excellent folks at flickr)

Found always via this Permanent Link.