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Brooklyn, New York
We are we are who we are who we are, we couldn’t change it even if we tried
This second page of the slideshow focuses on building tours and starts in Archtober, an annual month long festival sponsored by AIA New York that is pronounced Arc-tober and not Arch-tober, something which took me some years to realize. As part of this program, AIA New York offers Building of the Day tours which are starting to get harder and harder to book as more and more people realize just how great these tours almost always are. Luckily this year I got into three of them and we’ll start with the one I was looking most forward to, the tour right here at the renovated Domino Sugar Factory on the waterfront in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
The Domino Sugar Factory is a very interesting project that gets even more interesting the more you learn about it. The landmark facade of the original building was kept preserved and intact, but it was completely hollowed out and replaced by a brand new building inside. Ingeniously, PAU (the architects who designed this) removed all of the glass windows on the historic facade, left a gap between the new and existing, and used a reflective glass facade on the new building. That gap- which is highly visible in the lobby and from the office floors- can feel downright magical at times as you look through the facade or back to reflections of it.
The glass building is taller than the existing facade, and it culminates in a dramatic glass barrel vault event space with killer views of the Williamburg Bridge and also of the building itself, including the central smokestack and the back of the recreated Domino sign- the original was saved, cut up and rearranged as art in the lobby- if you scroll up you can see what that looks like.
As for that dramatic glass barrel vault event space, it was everything I hoped it would be and the main reason I was interested in getting inside this building. It does make me wish that such a great space was a little easier to get into- if only it was a public restaurant or a public observatory or even a pure public space with seating, more people would be able to enjoy it. As of now it’s a space only for those lucky enough to be invited to a wedding here, or, like me, lucky enough to snag one of those harder and harder to book Archtober Building of the Day tour tickets.
Our second Archtober Building of the Day tour was at Nine Chapel, a wonderful residential building in Downtown Brooklyn designed by SO-IL. Like all Archtober tours, it was led by the project architects and they took us into almost every floor and space they could. What sets Nine Chapel apart are a few things. First its massing, with its angled walls and its angled balconies, would have been interesting all by itself. Second the upper floor apartments are all connected to the core by a shared outdoor space. This means that if you come home on a cold day, you enter the ground floor lobby indoor space, board an elevator, go outside again and then inside a second time through your own front door. This was an odd experience, but one which really does reinforce a separation between your home and the building in a way that could end up being really interesting. The third thing that sets Nine Chapel apart from any other residential project is that hard to ignore facade, with perforated metal screens that made every angle and opening feel more interesting and also managed to look damn great on a late afternoon under a perfectly clear blue Arctober sky.
My third and (technically) last Archtober Building of the Day tour was Gordon Bunshaft’s Lever House, which just sparkles now after its most recent renovation. The tour took us through public and tenant spaces, as well as on to the outdoor terrace above the floating podium. And while I do not agree with some of the design choices made by the tenant’s architects (which are thankfully not pictured), the building's renovation was so well done that it felt (at times) like we were transported back in time to 1952, which felt like a good thing.
Even though I toured the United Nations in October and, more specifically, took an architecture tour of the United Nations in October, this tour was not an Archtober event. Although it easily could have been. The architecture tour took us to all of the major rooms, went into some depth about the landmark building’s architecture and design, and went out of its way to mention to us that despite its extraterritoriality status, that if we were to commit a crime at the United Nations we would still be turned over to US authorities for prosecution. Hopefully this fact is shared with all tours and our architectural tour wasn’t being singled out because we looked especially suspicious.
If you know me personally, you know that I’m an architect and that I remain involved in my local AIA section- the Architects League of Northern New Jersey, or for anyone who doesn’t want to type that much, the ALNNJ. This spring the ALNNJ offered three interesting tours, which I’m summarizing with these four pictures. First up is inside the LG Headquarters Building by HOK- an interesting building with a lot of fun LG experiences inside. Next up is an escalator to nowhere, or to be more accurate, and escalator to Grand Central Madison in New York. We were given a private tour by an architect who worked years on the project, and the tour made me appreciate some of the design decisions that I otherwise was not a fan of. And the last pictures are from an ALNNJ tour of St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church and National Shrine at the World Trade Center site. That tour featured the Architect of Record (who worked with Santiago Calatrava) and the priest, who surprised us all by letting us touch St NIcholas himself. The church has a relic- a golden glove that includes actual bones from the actual St Nicholas’ actual hands. It may have been the first time I ever touched a human bone, and most definitely the first time I ever touched the human bone of the hand of a saint (or anyone) who died some 1680 years ago.
The building tours continue with a tour of Modulightor, a building in Manhattan designed by Paul Rudolph that I had been in before with Open House New York. This visit this time though felt a little more special. The Paul Rudolph Foundation offers twice monthly Open Houses, and even though there were lots of people there, it was nothing like the crushing Open House New York crowds that jammed into its relatively small and complex spaces.
I once worked with a guy who had worked at Paul Rudolph’s office when he was younger. He said that it was often difficult to hand draft working drawings of the buildings since they were always so complex and always so difficult to understand. He told me that to explain the buildings, Paul Rudolph would sit next to him and perfectly hand draw complex perspectives just to explain to his own staff what he could see in his own head. This is what makes Materialized Space: The Architecture of Paul Rudolph at the Metropolitan Museum of Art both wonderful and kind of frustrating. The drawings are spectacular, but I would have loved to see interior/sectional models or 3d rendered videos of his unbuilt work just so I could understand it more. A case in point is his design for the Lower Manhattan Expressway, the Robert Moses project that would have leveled a good chunk of SoHo. The drawings are spectacular but the building would have been awful, or at least I think it would be. I have no way of knowing this though, and the exhibit seems uninterested in letting me know more about it anyway.
Now this is a complex space I can understand. We’re back at Jeanne Gang’s wonderful Gilder Center at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, this time for a building tour led by an architect from Studio Gang. The space is pretty wonderful, and learning more about it made me somehow appreciate it even more. The tour was kept generally to the public spaces (I would have loved to actually get into the actual archive, although seeing it through glass was probably enough), and included time in the library, in the butterfly vivarium (not pictured) and in the Invisible Worlds interactive exhibit (which is pictured below).
Careful readers may remember that on the previous night lights themed page, I mentioned that the James Turrell skyspace visit was the first of two sites I visited this year as part of the surprise OHNY at Night program. The second site was this one at 2 Penn Plaza, where I heard a detailed presentation all about the lighting design that made me like 2 Penn a bit more. The building’s most distinctive feature is a large overhang (called the bustle by the design team) that has a two block long programmable lit ceiling. It covers a space that leads to the Madison Square Garden entry and a plaza that is technically public but usually feels off limits. Except for when I was there and it was raining, then it suddenly becomes a busy, active (and dry) space. That rain also affected the building tour since the best two spaces inside the building are really outside- an impressive terrace on top of the bustle and also a killer rooftop view right over the Garden, through Moynihan and all the way to Hudson Yards.
