Billionaires' Row

All photos DC unless noted

Pictures from a recent trip to New York

Rafael Viñoly's pencil tower as seen from 57th Street. I still like it. Well-resolved facades - direct, elegant, no nonsense, no shame. Looks good --or at least commands attention-- from all over town and the region. Very New York. A crowd of these? Art history teachers always liked San Gimignano, right?  And income disparity is nothing new in New York.

Another plus: it makes Trump Tower look small.

From designboon.com

Each window measures approximately 10 x 10 feet. Interiors by Deborah Berke: http://www.designboom.com/design/deborah-berke-on-the-interior-design-of-432-park-avenue-01-17-2014/

Double-height technical floors are open to lessen wind loads, breezes pass through them. There is an elaborate system of dampers and floor slabs have added mass on upper floors to lower oscillating movement under wind pressure:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

Portzamparc's tower on West 57th, with its fussy glass skin is, as Viñoly has said, "horrendous".
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/05/13/rafael-vinoly-apologises-432-park-avenue-super-tall-skyscraper-new-york-comments-screw-ups/

Herzog & de Meuron, 56 Leonard Street. Source: Dezeen

 A summary of star-architect designed projects underway in New York from January 2016, including three by Herzog & de Meuron and one by Álvaro Siza:
https://www.dezeen.com/2016/01/29/16-residential-luxury-condos-famous-architects-changing-new-york-construction-boom

An inside look at the tower by Viñoly and Herzog & de Meuron's Leonard Street tower in Tribeca:
Justin Davidson
"Fancy Prisons for Billionaires Are Reshaping the Manhattan Skyline"
New York Magazine,  May 9, 2017
 

Photo: Jeff English

 Bjark Ingel's West 57th Street rental block: I took a stroll with my friend Jeff around the finished building.  The impact from the street is brutal. You see how cheaply it is thrown together. On the back side on West 58th Street the ground floor is full of floor-height mechanical louvers, and on 57th the aluminum-framed storefront glazing isn't much better. Though at least this facade got some sunshine. A design for the distant view - and the media view.

The idea of living there isn't very appealing. Too much like a beehive, you imagine the warren of narrow corridors on every floor, and the little studios and one-bedrooms. Like an over-dimensioned college dorm or, inevitably, decks of a cruise ship.

The location is not attractive except for the river views for the best units, but that's nothing new on Manhattan's formerly industrial and fast-developing Hudson River environs.

More on this project in my blog entry of May 12, 2015



Food truck in front of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Who needs art?

New Jersey skyline from Battery Park City. A mess. I wonder what walking around Hoboken is like nowadays.

Pier 32

Central Park Reservoir. The last time I was here (1980s?), the fence was chain link. The transformation of Central Park is amazing.

Posing for bridal photos in Central Park's Conservatory Garden. Future husband looks on.

Previous post on my New York visit:
Postcard from New York
04.25.17

Postcard from New York: Calatrava's Path Station

All photos by DC

 Santiago Calatrava's work is scaleless, which is one of the reasons I generally dislike his projects for European cities. But it works well in the US, where everything else is scaleless too.

In fact, at the Ground Zero Memorial, it is the only intervention with a relatively human scale. Everything else soars up above your head or burrows under your feet. On the ground plane, you're left with a confusing mess of walks, plantings and low barriers, more confusing now while still under construction  – Libeskind's famous disappearing master plan?  Calatrava's fossilized wings become a focus point, the only visual reference within reasonable range, though they seem to be ambiguously oriented, their curving sides pointing towards I'm not sure where. In fact, the building shows what appears to be its backside to the Memorial Park (although there isn't actually a real facade, just another rear end on the other side). And it looks quite freaky when seen from the Wall Street canyons.   

In the Park, you don't even  sense the vast pits of the memorial fountains until you are on top of them, although they are stupendous in themselves. Looking over one of them, someone asked if there was another one. You'd never know. And the museum – was there a museum there? Though admittedly I was operating at less than full visual capacity.

Inside, Calatrava scores again. A clear, legible space. The white stone floor looks like an ice skating rink. As I have observed about the sandy walks and stone plazas of Spain, it’s a surface that enhances and ennobles people as they move across it, converting their progress into a choreography of presence. The secret: the ground plane is luminous and abstract, a real stage of public appearance. The only other space in New York that does something similar is the entry plaza to Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, which is raised above the surrounding streets, almost unfettered by barriers, so that it is the very air of the plaza that gives people that electric sense of being. Another European in America. The main hall at Grand Central Station has something of this expansive generosity, but in a more subdued, Beaux-Arts tone. And the populated lawns of Central Park in the summer. And Rockefeller Center. In all of these, something happens when view points are organized at varying elevations.

Another bit of European urbanity: the benches around the exterior edge of the hall, as in a Renaissance palace.

I don't think anyone has pointed out that the ribs of this hall evoke the vertical gothic ribs of Yamaski's original towers.  Despite their awkward refusal to touch ground on the white marble floor – instead, Calatrava tucks them under the mezzanine galleries in graceless little elbows, as if they were neon lighting tubes or radiator fins, bizarrely undercutting their structural reading. This isn't modern weightlessness, it's kitsch modern weightlessness. (There was something a little kitsch in Yamasaki's neo-gothic too, but no need to go into that now.)

More from my New York visit:
Billionaires' Row
05.08.17

Carvajal's Unlikely Hilton Hotel in St. Louis

Rendering, Spanish Pavilion rebuilt in St. Louis. Background, Busch Memorial Stadium, 1966. From nywf64.com

Or the strange fate of the Spanish Pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair.

One of the proudest architectural moments of the Franco regime was the critical acclaim received by the Spanish Pavilion, a design by Javier Carvajal (see my other blog entries on Caravajal here).

The AIA awarded the pavilion its prize as the best work of international architecture at the Fair. It was recognized by the Rockefeller Foundation, and cited by Life magazine as “The Jewel of the Fair,” according to the Fundación Loewe, which organized an exhibition on the project for its 50th anniversary last year.

From Fundación Loewe

With its success, the pavilion attracted the attention of St. Louis Mayor Alfonso J. Cervantes, who arranged, with the collaboration of the Spanish government, to have it reassembled
as part of the redevelopment around Eero Saarinen's Gateway Arch.

Opened in 1969 as the Spanish International Pavilion, with many of its original exhibits intact and three restaurants, it was bankrupt and closed within a year.

Contemporary postcards from www.nywf64.com

A 1970 article in The New York Times described its opening ceremonies:

"The pavilion finally opened in May, 1969, with 10 days of festivities. The cast of "Man of La Mancha" sang "The Impossible Dream"; Spain's Minister of Information [none other than Manuel Fraga], the Mayor of Seville and Jose' Ferrer flew in for the occasion; several hundred St. Louisans paid $1,000 per couple to dance at the inaugural "Beile de la Rosas," and as each woman sat down at the banquet a servant placed a red cushion beneath her feet."

After languishing empty for several years, local developer Don Breckenridge took over the property in 1976 and transformed it into The Breckenridge Inn, building a 25-story tower for the guestrooms in its former central patio. The hotel was taken over by Marriott in 1979, who added a second tower over the theater wing. "Through both conversions, developers kept the flavor of the Pavilion's Spanish origins, retaining sculpture and artwork," writes Bill Young of www.nywf64.com.

The Breckenridge Inn. From www.nywf64.com

In 2005, the hotel was sold again to Hilton Hotels and extensively renovated, leaving little of the original pavilion except for its facade panels.

From www.nywf64.com

The surprising thing about this story is that the pavilion wasn't simply demolished outright somewhere along this progressive slide from cultural ambassadorship to rude commerce.

Did selling the dictatorship in the US become unsustainable in the late years of the regime? I imagine Franco meant very little to anyone in the Midwest. It is more likely that the project was doomed simply by excess ambition and poor financial projections.

Bill Young of www.nywf64.com reports that the contents of the original New York pavilion were put on display in St. Louis, "sans the Picassos". But of course there were no Picassos on display in New York. Neither Franco nor Picasso would have permitted that!

Bill Young   

After the Fair - On to Saint Louis

nywf64.com

J. Anthony Lukas 
New York World's Fair Hit Turns Into St. Louis Fiasco 
The New York Times
June 30, 1970 

Carvajal: The Jewel of the Fair
Loewe  Fundación
October 30, 2014

Original interior. Fundación Loewe

Fundación Loewe

Mega Manhattan a la BIG

© Ike Edeani / The Atlantic

The Atlantic reports on the Bjarke Ingels apartment building currently under construction on West 57th Street (link). If it is half as good as the renderings, it's the most exciting new building in New York in years.

(Updated May 5, 2017, see below)

Ingels designs to the scale of modern development, abandoning outdated and outgrown formulas of towers and slabs, big boxes and malls.

The work reminds me of some of the landform buildings of Spanish Organicism, such as Fernando Higueras' Las Salinas Hotel in Lanzarote. A new approach to the megastructure?

Fernando Higueras, Hotel Las Salinas, Lanzarote, 1973-77

Waïf / Tumblr

Aitor Estevez 2011 / Tumblr

Contemporary postcard. Blog Postales Inventados, Dec. 5, 2009

Kirsten Capps

The Great Pyramid of Manhattan

The Atlantic

May 2015

See also: 
HOT TO COLD: an odyssey of architectural adaptation
Exhibition of work of Bjarle Ingeles
National Building Museum
Washington, DC
Until August 30, 2015
Catalog available

BIG: Bjarke Ingels Group

Update May 5, 2017

 

Photo: Jeffrrey English, April 16, 2017

I took a stroll with my friend Jeff around the finished building on a recent trip to New York.  The impact from the street is brutal. You see how cheaply it is thrown together. On the back side on West 58th Street the ground floor is full of floor-height mechanical louvers, and on 57th the aluminum-framed storefront glazing isn't much better. Though at least this facade got some sunshine. Definitely a design for the distant view - and for the media view.

The idea of living there isn't very appealing either. Too much like a beehive, you imagine the warren of narrow corridors on every floor, and the little studios and one-bedrooms. Like an over-dimensioned college dorm or, inevitably, a cruise ship without public spaces.

The location is not attractive either, but that's nothing new on Manhattan's formerly industrial and fast-developing Hudson River environs.