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New York, New York
In a trance, in a taxi, just keep driving please don't stop, out of the neighborhood, the multiverse, iron and rust
This page’s slides are generally local and start off with some sites from this year’s Archtober, which is pronunced Arc-tober and not, as I thought for years, Archtober.
Archtober is a month long event sponsored by the local New York City AIA Chapter and it’s all about architecture. Its feature event is something called the “Building of the Day,” a tour of a specific building somewhere in the city. This year I was lucky enough to be able to attend four of these tours, and the first was a construction tour of Kohn Pederson Fox’s One Vanderbilt, a skyscraper under construction right next to Grand Central Terminal that will top off at 1,401 feet high, taller than the Empire State Building and the fourth tallest tower in Manhattan. On our construction tour, on a cold rainy October, er, I mean Archtober afternoon, we learned about the structure and the terracotta facade and rode an (always) terrifying construction elevator to a higher floor so we could come face to face in the rain with the Chrysler Building, at least for a moment. Luckily we will one day be able to revisit these views since the building will come with a public observation deck which, at 1,000 feet high, should put you right about at the height of the top of the Chrysler Building’s spire. and have an glass floor outdoor observation deck just a few feet lower than that other one on the far, far west side.
Our next Archtober site is called Solar Carve, a spec office building located off the High Line just a few blocks north of The Standard. The concept of the building is pretty simple and fairly smart- it maxes out its allowable volume but also cuts (or possibly carves) away its corners to minimize its affect on the neighboring High Line Park. Designed by Studio Gang, Jeanne’s Gang’s wonderfully named office, it’s a wonderful, well detailed building inside at a great location with killer views, although its best amenity is actually outside. Tenants only have access to a private roof garden where the river and the city all look close enough to touch.
After landing at night, I stayed at the airport hotel before transferring early the next morning to a downtown one
Before we leave Solar Carve, here are two pictures from its roof. First up is the view straight down from high above the High Line, and second is a view of (probably) the next big thing, still under construction. This little island will be called “Little Island” and its a public park near the end of the High Line designed by mad genius Thomas Heatherwick, who is working hard to take over the west side as he completed twin(ish) residential buildings on the High Line and has already successfully opened up Vessel at the other end of the (high) line.
Our next Archtober site is the just re-opened Museum of Modern Art, one of my favorite art museums anywhere (along with the Walker in Minneapolis, the Pompidou, the Tate Modern and. I don’t know, let’s say MASS MoCA), and a museum that I have been a member of for (what feels like) ever. The MoMA that I grew up with was the one with the Cesar Pelli glass wall escalator well, the one with the small lobby with the Jasper Johns painting, the one with the hard to find room for Water Lilies, the one with the bookstore in the Philip Johnson building where everything good was in the basement and the one with the architecture and design department on the very top floor with the model of Falling Water. That museum no longer exists, it was destroyed in the 2004 Yoshio Taniguchi renovation that I had a hate/love relationship with. That renovation created a completely new museum that got stellar reviews and one that I initially hated, and as the years passed, I slowly softened to the redesign. I still missed the quirkiness of that (for me) original MoMA, but the new MoMA certainly was well designed and far more efficient than the one I remembered. When MoMA announced another expansion and renovation, this time by Diller,. Scofidio + Renfro, I was both interested to see it and had some trepidation about what changes would come to a place that I finally started to really like again.
One of the weird things about the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro additions is that you have to hunt them down to find them and, when you do, they don’t necessarily feel new. The revised entry with the sunken gift shop (where everything good was in the basement) feels kind of like it was always there. And the new galleries inside the Jean Nouvel building don’t really feel that different than the Taniguchi galleries, although the specialized, kind of hard to find room for Water Lilies is appreciated. There is also a hard to find, honestly inconvenient but beautiful new stair, with details that get more and more impressive the more that you think about it. It will take me some time to really understand and appreciate all of these changes and additions, but so far, the building (or, more accurately, buildings) hold a lot of promise.
One thing I am not sold on yet though was the museum’s decision to totally rethink and rehang its collection. Their idea was to mix disciplines to show connections and contrasts (which occasionally work really well) but, as an architect, the loss of dedicated architecture and design galleries is honestly painful. Even if there is an occasional model or drawing in a more prominent place in the collection, it feels now like architecture and design is an easily ignorable afterthought. The ghost of Philip Johnson must be pissed.
This fourth (and last) Archtober 2019 site that I visited was a tour of Steven Holl’s brand new Hunters Point Library, something that I had been looking forward to for some time. And by “some time” I mean about a decade. The design was released way back in 2011 but it took all this time to finally put the building together. Inside it’s a complex series of spaces that frame views of Gantry Park and the river and the city, a place which honestly does not photograph as well as it feels.
And while the building may be successful architecturally (and it is), it does still have some issues. First off the detailing is sometimes questionable. I’m sure there are reasons that certain decisions are made during design and construction, but some of them just feel a little off here and those decisions can sometimes get in the way of enjoying the building. The other issue involves codes. For safety reasons, the just opened building already had to close a staircase in the children’s library and close the roof garden (unless there is supervision) because both are just too dangerous. And all those levels create great space, but little concern was given to people with accessibility issues who can not get to large portions of the building. Considering there was so, so much time between design and construction, it’s kind of hard to understand how these issues were missed all this time.
There are no building code issues here in the Bronx at the New York Botanical Garden Holiday Train Show, but that’s primarily because there are no miniature people to occupy the miniature trains and miniature buildings. But if there were miniature people to occupy the miniature trains and miniature buildings, chances are that they would be terrified of the giant plants and people with cameras taking pictures at every possible angle. And they would also probably be wondering why there are trains everywhere circling their world yet the train never stop for them to get on. Perhaps I’m overthinking this one.
There’s no overthinking here. This is the lobby of the Cunard Building on one of the first blocks of Broadway downtown, one of the most architecturally magnificent interiors in the city. However, since too much is not enough, the lobby was transformed into a ticketed attraction by Moment Factory called “SuperReal.” They mirrored the floors and hid mapped projectors all over the place, creating a looping, often mesmerizing show that felt (sometimes) like you were in someone else’s dreams. And if that wasn’t enough, there were also a scattering of giant white balls that bounced around and almost never bounced where you wanted them to go. Fun.
