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New York, New York
But if you wait for the lights to come on, there’s so much that you’ll never see
As you (probably) already know by now, I’m all about the AIA Convention. Once a year (generally in the Spring), the American Institute of Architects holds a four day event filled with keynotes and classes and receptions and tours, although all I care about are the tours to be honest. It’s usually somewhere exotic like Philadelphia or Denver, but in 2018 it was close enough to home that I didn’t even need to get a hotel room.
In June 2018, the AIA Conference on Architecture (also known as A’18) was held in New York and kind of headquartered at the Javits Center. I say “kind of” since they scattered bits and pieces throughout the city, including keynotes at Radio City Music Hall, classes at the New School and I had tour departures from the Hilton in Midtown and the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village. And of course they had a highly efficient transportation system whisking you from site to site. Just kidding. Sure (I think) there were buses, but everyone was pretty much on their own to get from place to place to place, with never (really) enough time to really get where you were going to in the first place.
My first A’18 tour was of the spectacular TWA Terminal at JFK Airport, which was being renovated into the aptly named TWA Hotel at the time. I had been there before, twice with Open House New York and a few times when it was operating as an actual terminal, but this time the tour was being led by the renovation architects and there was a lot more interesting things to see. That is, if you could actually get there.
To say that A’18 was disorganized compared to other AIA conventions was to be kind. That first day, the brain trust at A’18 decided that the tour should leave from the Center for Architecture in Greenwich Village. It is never easy to drive in Manhattan, and it’s even harder to drive a big bad tour bus through the village. We waited hours for the bus to arrive and when it did, it still took forever to get all the way out to JFK. This resulted in a much shorter tour than planned and (in order to get back to the Javits for the Regional Caucuses and Business Meeting), I had to leave the tour early (which was actually hours later than scheduled) and I still have no idea what or how much I missed. For all I know, the rest of the tour group is still there today, haunting the hallways and rooftop pool and underground conference center at the TWA Hotel.
The A’18 keynote presentations were held in Radio City Music Hall, where there wasn’t a bad seat in the house, although chances are you had no idea who you were sitting with. Conservatively, I would guess that I knew between 50 and 100 people attending that year, and it was hard not stopping to talk to people that I ran into at the Javits Center or other nearby locations. So you would think in a 6,000 seat auditorium that you’re sure to run into and end up sitting next to someone you already know. Unfortunately that’s not how it worked. There were over 25,000 people at A’18, something that the AIA later called the largest single gathering of architects in the history of the world. With that many people, they ticketed people (like me) lucky enough to get into one of the keynotes and then assigned your seat at random. Sure it was nice meeting other architects from other places, but it got annoying hearing them all complain about how they couldn’t sit together with their friends either.
As for the photos, they are both from the lobby at Radio City, where normally nicer cameras are prohibited.
Another great A’18 tour was a construction tour of Hudson Yards, and this one they couldn’t really screw up since it was within walking distance of the Javits Center. Although they certainly tried. They probably had five times as many people on the tour as they should have allowed- it was impossible to hear anything most of the time on site. Still there was a great presentation from representatives of the entire design team and a rare chance to stand on the plaza and get up close to the Vessel a year (or so) before its grand opening. For more on this, see the 2020 Hudson Yards Slideshow, specifically “2021 will you think about us, copper goes green, steel beams go rust.”
As a regular attendee of Open House New York (I haven’t missed one yet) and Archtober (I go whenever I can), there are a lot of buildings that I had already seen or been in, and I was really looking forward to seeing what amazing New York building experiences the AIA had to offer. The construction tours at the TWA Hotel and Hudson Yards were great and third construction tour at Moynihan Station (pretty space but totally impractical) is not pictured because they did not allow photographs. Still, I expected better tour options- maybe some private homes or the top of some skyscrapers or East Side Access. That said, there was one, poorly advertised and described tour that caught my attention: “ET 149 West 57th Street's Architectural Superblock: Placemaking, Sustainability, & Collaboration (Midtown West).”
The description of “ET 149 West 57th Street's Architectural Superblock: Placemaking, Sustainability, & Collaboration (Midtown West)” focused on the collaboration between architects of three buildings: The Helena, VIA 57 and the Frank. All three buildings occupy the same block, all three have the same owner (Robert Durst’s less insane brother) and all three are residential buildings. What made this tour appealing was that one of the three (VIA 57) looks like a giant, crazy, skewed pyramid hovering over the West Side Highway. And while I had seen the renderings and watched its construction, I had never had the chance to see inside.
VIA 57 was designed by Bjarke Ingels and was described by them as a courtscraper, emphasizing the courtyard feature, which follows the exact proportions of Central Park but is overall just a bit smaller. Your experience inside the courtyard (a few levels above the ground floor) starts with a densely planted wooded area with a serpentine path. This soon leads to a large open lawn and plaza with river views. The shape of the building also helps to emphasize this feeling- at its start, on the serpentine wooded path, higher floors surround you, but by the time you reach the open lawn and plaza, the building starts to fade away on all sides.
The building tour (guided by an architect from Bjarke Ingels Group) was more than just a tour of that tiny little Central Park. We started at the lobby, visited most of the (quite nice) building amenities and then visited a mid level apartment with a courtyard/south view, one that we were told was the last available apartment in the building. The apartment was fine (most New York apartments are not known for their generous oversized rooms), but the view out was spectacular. Here you get a feeling of what it might be like to live in a giant, crazy, skewed pyramid shaped courtscraper and all the views you would be lucky to have.
The last A’18 tour I was on took us in and out of the three new stations of the fabled Second Avenue Subway, a project that first appeared in capital budgets in the 1920s but didn’t actually open up until 2017. And by “open up,” I only mean that it opened up three stations of an eventual sixteen. Still, any new subway line and any new subway stations are welcome, and this tour, by the architects and project managers responsible for design and construction, was absolutely fascinating, everything from the vent locations to the sound attenuation (you’ll never find a quieter New York subway platform anywhere) to the frustration during redesign after redesign. And while there are many, many reasons that the tour guides gave for the delays and cost overruns, I think this one story is a good example. The architects proposed using more energy efficient LED lighting throughout the stations but were shot down by the MTA since it would affect their bulb procurement, storage and maintenance program. Then as the stations were nearing completion, the MTA announced a system wide plan to switch to energy efficient LED lighting everywhere, meaning that they are now paying extra money to replace something that they intentionally changed and could have been right to begin with. Never stop being yourself, MTA!
As for the first picture, it’s from the very generous concourse at the 86th Street Station and is a portrait of Lou Reed by Chuck Close. Each of the three subway stations had impressive art installations and learning about the artwork was a great part of the tour.
