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August 22, 2007
UTDT. So people really like real estate on Central Park. This brilliant insight is courtesy the golden pen of Paul Goldberger, a man who was considered (by Michael Sorkin at least) to be an over-the-hill hack nearly 20 years ago. Things clearly haven't improved. Everyone -- okay, Goldberger and Felix Salmon, a man from whom you will have to pull his CDO's from his cold, dead fingers -- is gaga over the numbers and success of 15 Central Park West. I think it has a fancier name. No matter. You can't buy an apartment there, and it's not even done. Whoa! (say that in your best Al Pacino voice). Yeah, apartments facing the park sell well.
Not only that, but they are "instant classics". The mysterious prewar formula has been unearthed by the imagineers at Bob Stern's office. I can imagine some dusky eve, fog spilling through the candle-lit offices as a hooded figure marched a book with vaguely demonic figures on the cover up to Bob's desk, planted it with a thud and opened to a page that revealed... an entrance gallery with an eleven foot ceiling. Whoa! (you know what to do).
I never finished architecture school. So maybe I missed the crucial studio, "Designing apartments with 11'0" ceilings" and was consequently barred from the star chamber where they hid that book (have you ever seen the News Radio episode where Jimmy James reveals the Secret to Business? I digress. Whoa!). Paul hasn't either, and has to resort to invoking the names of a couple architects you, I and just about anyone who didn't furtively sneak a look at the index of 740 Park to see if they were included haven't heard of. Because they were mediocre hacks in service of a generation of arrivistes that have aged enough to aquire the gilt of institution. And thus their dwellings, at the time attempting to expropriate the grandeur of, say, Kesington, are now being photocopied for the latest generation of people who need the scrim of Anglophile identity to buttress their mania that amassing seven figure fortunes isn't an adequate accomplishment in a meaningless world, nor apparently a mandate to help the less privileged.
Apparently in the intervening sixty years architects forgot how to design. It's an old canard, and if you perambulate Manhattan, you would have plenty of evidence to this fact, or at least the continuation of a myth perpetuated by misguided cranks (hello!) and a gullible and uncritical press, namely that architects have much to do at all with the quality of plans in apartments in this city. Sure, some GSD student spent a bunch of time picking this light fixture over that, or argued at length with the sales agents about whether or not luxury could be adequately communicated by Viking, or perhaps the more esoteric Wolf was called for, but otherwise, the failure of new housing to evoke the grandeur of a 30-foot long sitting room isn't really about limestone sheathing or how big the windows are: it's about whether or not your sitting room is 30 fucking feet long. And it isn't.
Maybe that knowledge is lost in the sands of time (except for that paragraph, right there, above), or in that mysterious book Bob won't lend to anyone, or, hey maybe it's that people who seek outsize returns in property development are short-sighted, greedy and completely oblivious to the idea they exist in both a community and culture and have a duty to sustain it, rather than just skim the rewards off the top. No, it can't be that. Otherwise we would be awash in town filled with buildings designed by Costas Kondylis and Richard Scarano (you know, I long for the days of the mid-90's when you had to be a total development wonk to even know who Kondylis was). Of course, a 30-foot living room isn't necessarily giving back to the community but I think you can see where I'm going here.
Felix brings up the A.A. Gill article from Vanity Fair about the successes and failures of floor-to-ceiling glass and what kind of role that plays in the perception of a 'comfy' room. I'm surprised that he buys it uncritically. Might it not be a more complex issue that the modernist 'ideal' is yes, a bit nihilistic, but that's not a romanticized fetish but perhaps only a rueful conclusion about meaning and life? Nah. It's about cushions. The overstuffed cushions and Victorian details of a classic six spin a yarn that we may have attacked and devalued pretty thoroughly in philosophical circles, but when it comes time to shuffle off this mortal coil, staring down a stark, empty hallway isn't the last image we want. A lie about continuity and generations and return and afterlife is far more comforting, regardless of ceiling height
Because we can find us some 11-foot ceilings downtown, and some pretty sumptuous luxury on the part of 40 Bond, which has been the desperate hope of all us avant gardists that hiring the right guy(s) really could forestall the march of places such like the Sculpture for Living. Competing on a per square foot price point, and featuring windows that, frankly, are so big they scare me, everyone probably did the same awkward double take when the images were first leaked. Herzog & de Meuron, who walk an incredibly fine line of material mastery, formal innovations, and finding elegant and clever solutions to age old programs, all without like seeming to be the houseboys for the ultra rich and tasteful, were finally going to kick the legs from underneath this pastiche, be it Gluckman on Kenmare, or Stern on CPW.
Except they don't seem to have. Sure, those windows are big. But all they are is big windows, with odd and not very interesting extrusions clipped to them. On the upper floors, the plans actually establish a degree of parti rigor rarely seen, but, wow, how about those townhouses? That is the hell you get when developer mandates rule. The renderings actually demonstrate some saving grace, but there is no escaping the fact that the plans are sliver better than something you would see Scarano dump on Berry Street.
Everyone is waiting for the big reveal on those cast aluminum gates, but the whole shebang is going nowhere fast. And that's sad, since rumors are it's selling slower than hoped (plenty of units left), and the success of Stern's project is going to grind down the chance of something interesting. Of course, when that interesting is the sort of tripe we get from Asymptote or Winka Dubbeldam, well, no one really has anywhere to turn. I guess we all have to put our money on Norten.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
August 10, 2007
Precipitation flows into holes artificially bored in earth: a city recoils in horror.
I know that hed, or some version of it, has been written at least three or four times in the past two days. And it is certainly not to diminish the ill effects felt by the people that got hit by an actual weather "disaster". Even so, that one photo of the black sedan with a branch on its roof seems be the sole signifier of 'tornado' we could muster.
I was reading one of those 'what will happen to Manhattan in various catastrophes' pieces (global warming, terrorist attack, one day closure of Magnolia, that sort of thing), and read this fascinating fact: aside from its inability to deal with a hard rain, the subway is incredibly porous -- probably something about people needing oxygen -- and the only thing stopping if from being completely inundated by the water that enrobes (makes it sound like a delicious éclair, no?) it are massive, continuous operating pumps. Not every tunnel, I'm sure, but if we lost power for an extended period of time (say, six to eight days), and diesel was hard to come by, most of our subway system would return to the water table from whence it was carved. This may be all hearsay, but isn't it fascinating? They say the average American is two paychecks away from homelessness, but the MTA couldn't even make it with a payday loan. The doom sayers then went on to say foundations would be undermined and buildings could collapse. Even I'm not that gullible. That would take a couple weeks or more.
The point being that 'advanced' culture, like the human body, is resilient yet terrifyingly delicate. Read the piece in this week's New Yorker about how one wrong snippet of DNA (out of three billion) will make you chew off your fingers while yelling "No! Stop!" at yourself in horror if you want a more detailed explication on this point. The other problem is that Americans cling to a lottery/instant gratification culture. We invented it. As a consequence we think most everything can be fixed by an "all-nighter" montage accompanied by soft rock and interspersed with moments of levity though non-fatal accidents and the blossoming of at least one romance. Really, sneak in the EPA sometime. I bet John Hughes wrote our plan for global warming.
So people are bandying about 'infrastructure' a lot this week, and not just because it's probably the biggest word they'll use. And surely enough, the nominal powers-that-be -- the ones, you know, who let things degrade into such a shoddy state -- have demanded all nighters from the MTA and DOT's nationwide. On the latter point, ours was refreshing direct and to the point: the Brooklyn Bridge rates very low on the extant safety scale. Sally forth tourists! Just don't do anything terrorist-like. Given the recent pronouncements, this is likely to be expanded to include walking. Good times.
The MTA, a fascinating body at the center of two massive land use schemes that are going to forever blight big sections of our town, and likely to enshrine the name Peter Kalikow as the only New Yorker who manages to make Robert Moses look enlightened, was called on the carpet -- an awfully damp one this week. Turns out the problems that befell the subway this week are exactly the same as the last "big" rain. Which was, um, three years ago. What happened in the interval? Well, they MTA didn't upgrade their security, they didn't develop a workable strategy for providing communications for rescue workers in the tunnels. Oh, and they didn't get much money from anyone.
In the same vein as our get quick rich inanity, we Americans love to subscribe to lots of other contradictory and illogical myths: that we are a meritocracy, that we really can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, that governmental control over essential services is bad, and oh, that New York isn't the center of our culture, economy and net benefit to the region, state and feds. The upshot of all this is that while massive subsidies are afforded to every jerk who moves to Westchester or Montclair or Litchfield Country (in the form of highway bills, artificially low gas taxes, regional transit subsidies and exemption from city income tax), no one thinks that state or fed should fund our transit system -- the circulatory system of an economy that keeps Joe Bruno from having to work at 7-Eleven. We're talking billions of dollars in tax revenues lost to people who keep lecturing us on how we can't run our city. When is the last time that Rochester was a profitable enterprise?
So the MTA has been forced to issuing crippling debt obligations to pay for maintenance that was deferred for decades, leaving it in no position to upgrade the system (though the city shrank for a short while after the 70's debacle, unlike all other large American cities, has grown non-stop since its founding), let alone address the systemic problems that result in fiascoes like this week. Paris and London have added lines at least once a decade, and are still expanding. Britain and France recognize the cultural and economic rewards of continuing to provide services to their most crucial metropolitan areas.
Now, the MTA doesn't do much to create sympathy for itself. Water inundating the system (did you know that when a tunnel gets flooded, they dry off the third rail by hand? Aside from the lunacy of that as a system, imagine that being your job: "Is it off? Are you sure?") is certainly a decent excuse for shutting down lines, but a web site? Yeah, the web site goes down when it rains. I mean, they aren't hiring taxi drivers to develop buildings for them anymore, but the same stench that pervades the air of New York whenever Giuliani claims he saved us from WWIII is kicked up when someone is forced to type "MTA Chair Peter Kalikow". Really, just as a matter of symbolic form that guy has to go. Given that there is no future in private funding the subway, why not put someone everyone already suspects is a socialist in charge? It's time to ask Gene Russianoff to put his money where is mouth is. What's the worst that can happen -- he will run the MTA with his special interest in mind? A special interest that is, um, the riders. Now that there is a crazy idea. One a New York politician could never understand.
Found always via this Permanent Link.
August 2, 2007
I'm thinking of a number. With the dog days upon us and the first legitimate heat wave about to break, that means it's time for everyone's favorite season: September 11th Memorialization Contrempts! This year's model doesn't break much new ground, the singular complaint being the decision to move the ceremony from Ground Zero proper to A Park Across the Street. It has a proper name, but I think they write it on a chalkboard (I swear it's been named five things in the past decade), and it is mostly paved. You know the space -- the long swath of concrete that dips down from Broadway to Liberty and mostly looks like a really wide street with poor markings.
The relocation has to do with the fact that Ground Zero, at long last, is a construction site. A group that purports to represent the interest of the Families is opposed to moving the ceremony, and applied for a permit for another ceremony, presumably on Ground Zero -- it's interesting such formal language was used here. Does the PANYNJ have an actual, pre-existing form for this? Did they use the new parade permits?
The Port of course rejected the request, but agreed to stop construction for the day. An unacceptable compromise, I'm sure the families will say. I guess in the interest of sensitivity, no one asked the obvious question: okay, so maybe it's fair to complain this year, when the actual construction work is focused on the tower portion of the site, even though to anyone involved in the building trades, the notion that only a corner of the site is 'under construction' is absurd. But what are they going to say when the actual Memorial construction is underway? Every square foot of dirt is sacred and all, but they did agree to and support the memorial design, and eventually some concrete is getting poured there. Are they really expecting to engineer the construction plan so that it will be practical and possible to have people clambering all over a live construction site to hold the memorial?
As of late this afternoon, the latest word is that the planned memorial will be moved closer to Ground Zero -- 'within sight' of it, though Zuccotti Not-Park is about as close as one can get. Expect more posturing over the next couple weeks.
Also recently noted was a subtle, unannounced renaming of the Freedom Tower. The Port Authority has taken to calling it "1 World Trade Center, the Freedom Tower" (which rolls off the tongue about as elegantly as "Frederick P. Rose Hall Home of Jazz at Lincoln Center" -- located in the Time Warner Center). It is admirable we have begun to jettison the sad spectacle of forced symbolism, though I suspect this might also cause issues with the families. The September 11th attacks destroyed all of the World Trade Center (Buildings 1-7), though anyone who visited it regularly could only readily identify 1WTC and 2WTC (the Twin Towers), and 7WTC (just because it was tall), and even though most people didn't know which was 1WTC or 2WTC. Buildings 3-6, I doubt even people who worked in them could keep them straight. Naming the new tower '1' again does two things: presumes to replace the lost tower, and ignores the other.
Since we aren't replicating the Towers, enumeration is an interesting problem of signification. One approach would be 3WTC, which would acknowledge the absence of first two, a fact affirmed by the voids in the memorial. Since 7WTC is already complete, it's perhaps awkward. And there is the fact that there was a 3WTC. So 8WTC is not so elegant (lesser than 7WTC in name, and by all this logic 7WTC should be renamed).
Clearly, there is some real estate marketing at work as well. Even with thousands of government employees being volunteered to patriotically work in the Building That is Still Being Named, there are concerns about it's commercial viability. And the machinations developers go through to prefix their projects with a one make Chinese number superstitions seem quaint. You don't think it's effective? Just look at One Hudson Square. If, you know, you can find it.
And if the 'It's Number One!' doesn't sway you, this sexy, sexy rendering certainly will. Released just today, it is intended to assuage fears that the base will be 15 stories of opaque, security fetishized Logan's Runchitecture. Turns out we are all just being nattering nabobs, because the main entrance is going to be a 'celebrated' 60 feet of glass that looks down on the memorial plaza. Take that! And take a bombproof wall that is, um, 55 or so feet tall, and put it, well, four feet inside of that glorious expanse of glass. There will be slits to admit light (David, call them oculi -- it will sound better when presenting it to credulous undergrads) and illuminate the opaque wall above security. Classy. Maybe they can paint a big '1' there.
I didn't really end up on a number that made sense, given all these variables. You could simply call it "The World Trade Center". Because if you want to come up with something to replace the 'Freedom Tower' is needs to be easy to say. No one is going to say 1WTC when they can say 'Freedom Tower'. Maybe they can just point.