Sixties Demolitions

[ablarc]

SIXTIES DEMOLITIONS

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/002a.jpg
Pennsylvania Station (1910-64).

In the early and mid-Sixties, prolonged insanity unleashed onto New York’s great Beaux-Arts monuments an orgy of architectural vandalism. Poster boys for this exhibition of looniness have come to be Penn Station and the Singer Building, both barely over fifty when they bit the dust.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9800.jpg
Singer Building (1906-68).

Times Square’s Hotel Astor and the New York Times Building’s fanciful skin had also passed the fifty-year mark:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9900.JPG
Times Square: The New York Times Tower (1903-65) and the Hotel Astor beyond (with flag).

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9950.jpg
The Hotel Astor (1904-67)

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9951.jpg
The Astor was impossibly vast and French: three stories of space in its mansard alone.

A building’s golden anniversary generally finds owners and public alike with thoughts of demolition; starting really at about age forty, when its style has gone out of vogue, a building’s most in danger of being murdered (or as in the case of the New York Times Building, merely flayed). At that age, a building’s generally dirty, old-fashioned, boring and obsolete (like 2 Columbus Center, also about to be flayed). If it can survive to seventy it becomes “historic,” we scrub it squeaky clean and save it for posterity.

Because the Sixties’ callous demolitions now so appall us, we assume they occurred amidst vigorous protests such as you’d see today, now that we’ve re-learned to value Beaux-Arts buildings. But truth is, there was only a smattering of complaint over Penn Station, and almost none of it came from architects (in spite of what their revisionist apologists now claim).

At the time, everybody could see these buildings were obsolete, worn out and ugly; they weren’t shiny, new, functional, clean or modern. They were everything a modern architect hated. The clean, new Seagram Building (1958) and Chase-Manhattan (1960) had just sprung up to point the way; and the public had finally cottoned to the message of International Style Modernism. Progressive and forward-looking, they couldn’t wait to get more.

There were, however, these grimy, old-fashioned, obsolete buildings in the way, reminders of the benighted past, full of stuffy Victorians and Colonel Blowhards; each one was replaced with something sparkling, simple and modern.

Penn Station was replaced by a sparkling new Madison Square Garden and an office slab, which together formed a corpulent, squared-up paraphrase of trylon and perisphere:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9952.jpg
Forty years old, they no longer sparkle. Obsolete, worn out and ugly, they’re no longer shiny, new, functional, clean or modern. The owners contemplate their replacement, and the public hopes for it. Will we miss them after they’re gone?

The Singer Building was replaced by the bronzetone banality of U.S. Steel’s tower, product of the International Style’s premier practitioners, SOM:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9953b.jpg

As the Allied Chemical Building, the Times’ tired old tower was reskinned in glitzy marble and billboards:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9954.jpg

And the dowdy old Astor was supplanted by the latest thing: you could tell, because it actually had fins! Like a DeSoto:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/9955.jpg
Astor Plaza.

Right now, we’re hard at work trashing monuments of Modernism, Brutalism and Post-Modernism; 2 Columbus Circle’s an example, and the U.N. Building had better watch out if it wants to keep its Modernist character; Sert’s Roosevelt Island ziggurats have already had their cheerful little bursts of color stripped. In Boston, you can hear daily calls to bulldoze that city’s iconic City Hall, high temple of Brutalism; and suggestions are made here regularly to flatten Madison Square Garden, now just as old, dirty and obsolete as the building it replaced.

We’re still moaning over the loss of the last two Gardens; if we replace this one with a replica of Old Penn Station, I’m sure we’ll be consoled; but if not, will this make three lost Gardens to bewail?

[ablarc]

The Savoy-Plaza (1927-64, McKim, Meade and White) bit the dust along with its Beaux-Arts brethren, and it was in many ways their peer. It spoke with an ever-so-faint Deco accent, but because it was at the tail end of a style that had fallen out of fashion it never quite made it to forty.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/037 savoy plaza 2.JPG
The Savoy-Plaza.

In one respect Savoy-Plaza actually bested its peers, for it made sweet music with its neighbors, Sherry Netherland and the venerable Plaza. As the “Grand” in Grand Army Plaza, cello-like Savoy emitted staunchly rotund tones, while slender Sherry played an agile fiddle, and the Plaza mediated, viola-like. They were all French, this trio, in their jaunty green hats, and they were all hotels. Together in this most European corner of the park, they oozed plutocratic elegance:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/036 savoy plaza.JPG
Savoy was the same age as Sherry; they were both born in 1927, but while Savoy died an early death Sherry survived to become historic, and Plaza (born 1909) is not just historic but, at nearly a hundred, well on the way to a comfortable immortality.


They provided New York with perhaps its finest urban composition not actually conceived entire—as Rockefeller Center was—but piecemeal like the Piazza San Marco. A collaboration by architects over time.

Here in this stretch of Fifth Avenue, even the supporting cast was French; hovering at the trio’s outskirts in some views, Pierre, also a hotel in a green hat, sometimes joined in to make a quartet:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/038.jpg
Pierre’s the tower at left.

A 1927 aerial shows roof work on the Plaza, and Savoy and Sherry Netherland unstarted. It also shows the still residential expanse of the Forties and Fifties between Fifth and Sixth, soon to be swept aside for Rockefeller Center. This was the start of the mother of all building booms; it was after all the Roaring Twenties:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/040.JPG
Spot the Sixth Avenue El as it plunges under ground. Mansions lined Fifth Avenue immediately above the Plaza.

By the early Sixties, the Savoy Plaza had grown long in the tooth. It was replaced by the banal bulk of General Motors, Edward Durrell Stone’s white marble paraphrase of Hood’s Daily News grafted to a tepid rendition of Seagram’s massing. The music stopped. No one could harmonize with the new big guy; he was playing the kazoo.

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/042 grand army plaza 1987.JPG
1987 photo. GM presently belongs to Donald Trump, and is about to get an Apple store.

Some members of that old French gang still loiter around la Grande Armee’s Place, but they’re completely cowed by GM; Sherry hovers wraith-like in the shadow, barely visible:

http://66.230.220.70/images/post/savoy/043.jpg

There’s another, roughly contemporary but much smaller white marble building by Stone at the Park’s opposite, Southern corner; that’s the one to keep and this is the one to lose.

.

[lofter1]

Those old photos showing NYC as she was (before so many mediocre boxes replaced some incredible gems) really make me want to cry.

[Fabrizio]

"In the early and mid-Sixties, prolonged insanity unleashed onto New York’s great Beaux-Arts monuments an orgy of architectural vandalism. Poster boys for this exhibition of looniness...."

"Because the Sixties’ callous demolitions now so appall us, we assume they occurred amidst vigorous protests such as you’d see today, now that we’ve re-learned to value Beaux-Arts buildings. But truth is, there was only a smattering of complaint over Penn Station, and almost none of it came from architects (in spite of what their revisionist apologists now claim)."

The trashing is still going on.

It might not be happening with big showy "important" buildings like Penn Station, the Singer, the Astor, or the Savoy Plaza, but developers are still indeed chipping away at beautiful old New York. It might be a brownstone in Chelsea, it might be the ambience that a row of old tennement buildings provide, or maybe just a non descript brick office building in mid-town.... they´re being town down, reclad, or "renovated" with innapropriate, ugly additions. Just as people in the 60´s were unable to see the worth of certain buildings... it is the same today.

"Right now, we’re hard at work trashing monuments of Modernism, Brutalism and Post-Modernism..."

I doubt that people will ever be crying over the loss of the NYColiseum at Columbus Circle, or the loss of a Madison Square Garden. These buildings were built with one thing in mind: efficiency and cost ...and that can always be duplicated. There is no art there. The Seagrams, the CBS building, Lever House, The Ford Foundation building, 510 5th, the UN building, even the (former) Pan Am etc. are a different story.... if any of those should be threatened, there will most certainly be a debate.... as is happening with 2 Columbus Circle.

[Fabrizio]

Oh, and if you really want to weep, you should see the row of buildings that made up West 45th Street: the Helen-Hayes, the Morrosco, and the Bijou theatres (along with a small, beautiful, art-deco hotel whose name I can´t remember) all torn down and basically replaced with blank concrete walls for the hideously ugly Marriot Hotel.... and this was the 1980´s folks...

I was one of the crazies out there in the snow protesting BTW.

[NYatKNIGHT]

Cool pictures ablarc, I could stare at those old ones for hours.

[TomAuch]

This gallery makes me realize how much we've lost over the last four decades. Penn Station and the Singer Building especially.

[expose05]

Thank God there is a landmarks commission

[BrooklynRider]

One Liberty Plaza.

[expose05]

Some people say things happen for a reason. When people saw penn station get destroyed people were appauled and angry. Sadly somethings that were so historic and beautiful got destroyed and that's when the landmarks commission was created. So some good came out of it in ( Im not saying it was good to destroy those buildings) which these buildings got destroyed but so many buildings now are being saved and preserved. They are an example which mistakes were made and how we must never make those mistakes again in the future. Like Grand Central for example. It was saved :)

[Fabrizio]

We could make a nice list of treasures that were lost long after the Landmarks Commission was formed. The Landmarks Commission is great but no guarantee...

For the younger members of the forum who might not have known these beautiful buildings:

http://www.ibdb.com/VenueImages.asp?Id=1154

http://www.ibdb.com/VenueImages.asp?Id=1278

http://www.ibdb.com/VenueImages.asp?Id=1065

http://www.ibdb.com/VenueImages.asp?Id=1164

Be sure to click on the thumbnails.

These were all demolished en masse in 1982. Unbelievable but true.

Also during the 80´s: the awful recladding of the Broadway and the Palace theatres. The tearing down of the Rivoli. And even this year: the tearing down of the Studebaker building.

And this is just the theatre district.

[Comelade]

There is a super Internet site, specifically on "A PHOTOGRAPHIC ESSAY OF 19th CENTURY BUILDINGS DESTROYED IN THE 1970' S"

http://www.lostnewyorkcity.com/

[krulltime]

Wow... so many nice old buildings destroy by those big boxes... I mean maybe todays newer buildings have a better character than the sixtees big boxes.

But I guess some unwanted sacrifices have to be made... to make our wonderful skyline.

[ZippyTheChimp]

I wish I had paid more attention.

I have a vague memory of the last time I was in Penn Station, a trip with the family to vist relatives in Pittsburgh.

It was during the demolition, and what I remember most was canvas tarps draped all over the interior and pigeons.

[thomasjfletcher]

Superb thread.
"an orgy of architectural vandalism"; you said it! People really went crazy for a while. (there are still some crazies left out there!)

[lofter1]

There is a super Internet site, http://www.lostnewyorkcity.com/

Thanks for that link...

But I'm confused as to why The Cable Building (still standing at Broadway & Houston) is included.

[BrooklynRider]

Anyone know what kind of lease Penn Plaza and MSG have over Penn Station? That is one combo of buildings that is a serious blight on the cityscape.

[TLOZ Link5]

As always, ablarc provides an inimitable wealth of information with one of his excellent threads.

Speaking of Lost NYC, the webmaster of that site was a semi-regular poster here, and he always was very informative and eager to share information. He hasn't been around for a while, though; anyone know what happened to him?

[BrooklynRider]

Who was he (username)?

[TLOZ Link5]

lostnyc :P

[thomasjfletcher]

I'm still in touch with hime (Randall). He's busy selling casts he makes from rubber moulds he surreptitiously makes from carvings on old buildings. Very cool idea- I wish i could incorporate them into a design!

http://www.lostnewyorkcity.com/forums/uploads/post-8-1116716856.jpg

http://www.lostnewyorkcity.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=136

[ablarc]

I doubt that people will ever be crying over the loss of the NYColiseum at Columbus Circle, or the loss of a Madison Square Garden. These buildings were built with one thing in mind: efficiency and cost ...and that can always be duplicated. There is no art there. The Seagrams, the CBS building, Lever House, The Ford Foundation building, 510 5th, the UN building, even the (former) Pan Am etc. are a different story.... if any of those should be threatened, there will most certainly be a debate.... as is happening with 2 Columbus Circle.
That's right, it's the presence of art that makes a building worth preserving. The sad thing is that we travel through history with a blind spot for the art of
forty to seventy years back in time. For this period, the mere existence of a preservation movement not based on NIMBY considerations should be enough reason to shelve thoughts of demolition.

[lofter1]

Regarding similarities between the Baths of Caracalla and the Old Penn Station ...

While Caracalla certainly served as the inspiration for the main room of the Old Penn, there are many distinctions.

The size of the two buildings is quite distinct, with the main room (tepidarium) at Caracalla smaller (82' x 170'; 125' high) than the main waitng room it inspired at Penn (277' long; 150' high).

The lay-out of the two buildings is also quite different as can be seen in the images below.

Caracalla

http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Thermae_of_Caracalla.html (http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Thermae_of_Caracalla.html)

The central mass of the building measured 390 feet wide by 740 feet long.

The largest room, the vaulted tepidarium, measured 82 by 170 feet. The inside height of the tepidarium has been estimated at 125 feet

http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/Maecenas/rome/baths_caracalla/ac880320.html (http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/Maecenas/rome/baths_caracalla/ac880320.html)


http://wings.buffalo.edu/AandL/Maecenas/rome/baths_caracalla/ac880320.jpg




Old Penn Station

http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/Penn%20Station/penn.html (http://www.forgotten-ny.com/STREET%20SCENES/Penn%20Station/penn.html)


Waiting Room: 277-foot long, 150-foot ceiling

http://www.greatbuildings.com/models/Pennsylvania_Station_mod.html#mod (http://www.greatbuildings.com/models/Pennsylvania_Station_mod.html#mod)


http://www.greatbuildings.com/models/Pennsylvania_Station.150.jpg (http://www.greatbuildings.com/models/Pennsylvania_Station_mod.html#mod)


http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsname=Wikipedia&dekey=Pennsylvania+Station&gwp=8&linktext=Penn%20Station


http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/b/ba/Penn_Station3.jpg

[londonlawyer]

It's horrible to see all of the magnificent old buildings that we lost, but we are lucky to have kept so many as well. Areas like the UWS, parts of the UES (west of 3rd), the Village, the Flatiron Dist., etc. have mostly pre-war buildings. Moreover, I was looking at books recently of yesterday and today photos of Denver and Chicago, cities that have far, far, far fewer old structures per capita than NY. Sadly for them, they had many magnificent buildings from the late 1800's and early 1900's that were razed and replaced with crap.

[Jim Koeleman]

edit.

[ZippyTheChimp]

http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3577&page=12

Use the Search function.

[ablarc]

Some people say things happen for a reason. When people saw penn station get destroyed people were appauled and angry. Sadly somethings that were so historic and beautiful got destroyed and that's when the landmarks commission was created. So some good came out of it in ( Im not saying it was good to destroy those buildings) which these buildings got destroyed but so many buildings now are being saved and preserved. They are an example which mistakes were made and how we must never make those mistakes again in the future.
Yeah, but have you been following the Landmarks Commission's recent performance? It's the little gems we're losing these days --the ones that give fine-grained character to a place.

.

[Peakrate212]

Yeah, but have you been following the Landmarks Commission's recent performance? It's the little gems we're losing these days --the ones that give fine-grained character to a place.

.

I like Bloomberg. But, he needs to rethink his appointment of Robert Tierney at Landmarks.

Unlike recent administrations including the Guliani era, Mr. Tierney's job is extremely important, as development pressures are pushing every site in NYC to re-evaluated for expansion, demolition, etc to maximize the FAR.

Look what has recently fallen: Horn and Hardart 57th street, Warhol Factory 33rd st, The Sutton Theatre, Le Madri building 18th st, the Beekman Theatre.

Look what is going: The Drake hotel, West 55th and west 54th street townhouses, west 13th street carriage house.

I think the time has come to evaluate EVERY BUILDING IN THIS CITY - start with Manhattan, as the pressure is greatest there.

We cannot afford to look back as we do to the 1960s and ask, "Why didnt anyone do anything?"

[lofter1]

What makes you think that Tierney isn't doing exactly what he's been appointed to do?

[TREPYE]

http://www.techno-science.net/illustration/Architecture/Gratte-ciel/Img/Singer_Building_1.jpg
Does anybody know why the knaves that decided to demolish the Singer Building chose its particular site. I mean they could have built Liberty Plaza a block away or something. Couldn't they? Why, why, why did they have to go out of their way to demolish that beauty when there might have been other sites available???

[Fabrizio]

Treype: Have you ever seen the movie Sunset Boulevard? See the scene where Norma Desmond pulls up at the studio in her 1920´s limousine ...in her hat and stole. She´s laughed at by everyone.

It´s the 1950´s... there was no nostalgia for the past.

The people that did protest the distruction of these buildings were oddballs. There were the gays...there were the busybody, "little old ladies in tennis shoes" as they were called back then. Oddballs interested in art and culture. These odballs were against "progress" ....against "all the construction jobs that will be created"....against "all of the office space that Manhattan needs".

Today you might call them "preservationists"...but back then, if term NIMBY had been yet coined that´s probably what most would´ve called them.

[ablarc]

It´s the 1950´s... there was no nostalgia for the past.
And you couldn't look to architects...their Orwellian education told them these weren't even architecture.

You looked in vain for Singer, Penn Station or even Chrysler in an architectural history textbook; they had all been edited out, like Trotsky.

[Ed007Toronto]

Does anybody know why the knaves that decided to demolish the Singer Building chose its particular site. I mean they could have built Liberty Plaza a block away or something. Couldn't they? Why, why, why did they have to go out of their way to demolish that beauty when there might have been other sites available???

Probably because the developer owned this building and not one a block away.

And just because these buildings are architectural marvels doesn't mean they make great office space. The developers were no doubt looking to make more money by offering modern office space. Most of these older buildings can't offer that no matter how much money you invest in bringing them up to date. Part of the reason many are now becoming condos.

[ablarc]

No doubt most folks on this board can’t fathom how Penn Station was torn down without much protest.

But there’s a great opportunity to observe first hand a similar dynamic forming right this minute in Boston over that city’s iconic and world-famous City Hall, which the mayor just proposed to sell.

You can observe first-hand and in real time the architectural “cognoscenti” of Boston’s forum howl for this now-much-hated building’s destruction. Like Penn Station in the early Sixties, Boston City Hall is the victim of deferred maintenance and changing fashions. Like Penn Station, it’s dirty, dysfunctional and in an outmoded style not yet rehabilitated. It’s hard to believe that architects and the public alike mostly hated Penn Station and called for its replacement by something up-to-date and profitable on its valuable and underutilized site. You can find those very self-same sentiments expressed about Boston City Hall here and now: http://www.archboston.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=524

A unique opportunity to glimpse history in the making by the likes of us.

You might even be tempted to join in.

After all, what's being proposed for destruction is a Sixties building !

Here's a chance to vent.





P.S. Be sure to scroll through all pages of that Boston thread. A fascinating read: everything you need to know about how we lost Penn Station.

.

[kz1000ps]

Lol, Ablarc. I just posted my first post in that thread. But I must say -- the original Penn Station is considered by nearly everyone to be aesthetically far superior to its replacement, regardless of architectural ideals behind it, while with Boston's City Hall, there's no comparison made to the old "old" city hall, regardless of invisible theories -- it's so ugly to so many people that it doesn't even bring up comparison to any other buildings. It's just plain ol' unenjoyable.

I ventured into the place for the first time a couple weeks ago (when I got the unofficial shots of the new tower), and I found it to be what others have said -- cold and hard to navigate. And entry to the building beneath the hulking mass does NOT inspire feelings of transparency and access, let alone compassion.

[TREPYE]

No doubt most folks on this board can’t fathom how Penn Station was torn down without much protest.

But there’s a great opportunity to observe first hand a similar dynamic forming right this minute in Boston over that city’s iconic and world-famous City Hall, which the mayor just proposed to sell.

You can observe first-hand and in real time the architectural “cognoscenti” of Boston’s forum howl for this now-much-hated building’s destruction. Like Penn Station in the early Sixties, Boston City Hall is the victim of deferred maintenance and changing fashions. Like Penn Station, it’s dirty, dysfunctional and in an outmoded style not yet rehabilitated. It’s hard to believe that architects and the public alike mostly hated Penn Station and called for its replacement by something up-to-date and profitable on its valuable and underutilized site. You can find those very self-same sentiments expressed about Boston City Hall here and now: http://www.archboston.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=524

A unique opportunity to glimpse history in the making by the likes of us.

You might even be tempted to join in.

After all, what's being proposed for destruction is a Sixties building !


I don't know about that Ablarc. I don't think it is a good comparison. Penn Station, as run down as it was at the time, was something New Yorkers were proud of and for good reason as it was a beautiful structure. I don't know if there was much ambivalence among New Yorkers. As far as Bostons City Hall; yeah, some people like and some hate it but I never recall hearing "oh, you gotta go check out Bostons City Hall". I Never went out of my way to see it and now that I see what it looks like it I don't feel like I missed much.

It think that this quote by the Boston forumer Ron Neuman says it all:

http://www.archboston.com/forum/templates/subSilver/images/icon_minipost.gif (http://www.archboston.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7471#7471)Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 6:03 pm Post subject: Call me a philistine if you must, but if a prominent new public building continues to be soundly rejected by the public after 38 years, it's a failure.

What 'new' structures do you see on tourist postcards representing the city? The Hancock Tower, the Zakim Bridge, probably even the long view from the harbor incorporating Rowes Wharf and International Place. But not City Hall.

Even the ambivalent Bostonian says:

http://www.archboston.com/forum/templates/subSilver/images/icon_minipost.gif (http://www.archboston.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=7496#7496)Posted: Tue Dec 12, 2006 11:14 pm Post subject: I'm so forever torn with this building. One side of me appreciates the architectural style, but the other side thinks it is absolutely atrocious. I definitely like to see the city hall plaza developed before razing city hall, but if after the plaza is redeveloped and it still looks like ass, then tear that shit down.

Why hasn't The Boston City Hall been designated as a landmark??
Key to this comparison is to postulate wether or not Penn station would have been designated as a Landmark had this protection been available at the time. I think it is safe to say that it would have with flying colors. Ultimately, the biggest reason that Penn was demolished is because it fell into the wrong hands at the wong time. The a-holes who brough it didn't give a flying f---about how the citizens of NYC felt about it.

If there is one good thing about these 60's projects it is that "emotionally" they are very easily replaceable. Think about how readily people would accept the demolition of Mr and Mrs Skylinekillers themselves: One Chase Plaza and One Liberty Plaza for the possibility of getting much better architecture. I think that the same thing is going on in Boston

[GVNY]

Ablarc, I am very confused regarding your comments. You believe that correcting one of the most horrific errors in city planning, which involved the complete destruction of a thriving neighborhood and intersecting streets for a useless plaza and eyesore brutalist architecture, is equal to that of the deconstruction of the beautiful, landmark Pennsylvania Station?

If so, I question your judgement.

Edit:

I recant my comments, Ablarc. Although I do believe this specific Boston urban renewal project to be one of the most horrific errors in city planning in history--which it is--the fact is is that City Hall was indeed constructed and that it was and is an important piece of architecture, and thus should be saved and appreciated. You have helped me understand why my first calls for the entire site's destruction were unwarranted.

I view Boston City Hall as a monstrosity, but its importance and influence on architecture cannot be understated, and thus it must be saved! And if you are one of those people, similar to me, who dislike this building with a passion, save the structure to appreciate it and to present it as an example to future generations of how not to build.

The plaza on the other hand...inexcusable. Raze it and return the narrow street grid and dense, urban fabric. Alas, if the entire block was demolished for a superior replacement, I would not be upset.

Ablarc, if there was one person I have learned from in regards to city planning, it is you! I have read many of your accomplished, intelligently thought out threads and posts, all of which have influenced my thoughts on city planning significantly. I jumped the gun regarding your opinions on Boston City Hall, truly believing your reasoning was flawed. But I was wrong, and through the mastery of your reasoning, have reinstated my trust in you. You're a brilliant city planner, even if you may not be one professionally.

[ablarc]

...the original Penn Station is considered by nearly everyone to be aesthetically far superior to its replacement...
Only today ... not then. That's entirely my point.

You have to believe me about that and resist the temptation to rewrite history to what you think it must have been to make sense to you in hindsight. The "hindsight" of folks who weren't there is at direct variance with public opinion at the time of demolition. Hard to believe, but true.

Though I was young, I was aghast at what was happening; it gave me a permanent distrust of conventional wisdom applied to aesthetic judgment, and that has carried over into my professional life. In fact, it directly influenced me to become an architect.

"How could people have been so blind?" Well, they had a slick, shiny and state-of-the-art new Madison Square Garden (took years for it to get dirty and "ugly" in peoples' eyes) and progressive high-rise offices to replace a lumbering, uneconomical, space-consuming and "ugly" embarrassment --and, why, even the station was made functional and economical below ground for its dwindling users...


so ugly to so many people that it doesn't even bring up comparison to any other buildings. It's just plain ol' unenjoyable.
EXACTLY what travelers and most members of the public said about Penn Station ...and virtually all architects!

Hard to believe? Certainly, to anyone from today who didn't actually witness it.


I found it to be what others have said -- cold and hard to navigate. And entry to the building beneath the hulking mass does NOT inspire feelings of transparency and access...
This could be --verbatim-- a quotation from a member of the Sixties public. They saw an inhuman and relentless fascist colonnade; if you take off your rosy glasses and approach it with a different mindset, you can train yourself to see another like it at Farley.

The love-fest that now swirls about Penn Station commenced some years after its disappearance; no premonition of it at all if you didn't encounter one of Penn Station's rare crackpot defenders of the time (youthful though I was, I was one of these. I couldn't believe what people were saying and doing as I watched Penn Station come down).

After a few years, the rosy glasses of nostalgia made folks forget how dirty and --yes!-- difficult to navigate and hence UGLY the building was perceived as being. But if you were a time-traveler to 1964, you wouldn't believe what people thought. It's not what you think today.

Not even Vincent Scully --who cemented a career with his later "scuttle in like a rat" comment-- had much to say at the time; he --along with his architect buddies-- was enthralled with Modernist ideology, which saw Penn Station as the derivative, structurally dishonest sham pastiche that Howard Roark certainly would have seen it as. What do you think Frank Lloyd Wright thought? And Le Corbusier? Hint: Boston City Hall was being conceived at the time --and again contrary to today's revisionist beliefs, the public embraced it when it opened. The revulsion came much later, just as with Penn Station.

I'm just a reporter from a past that most forumers can't have actually seen (a kind of Martian witness).




The first glimmers of regret are starting to dawn, I notice, in folks' perception of the 2 Columbus Circle affair.






It's good to beware of public opinion. I bet you can find some confirmation of that in the world of politics.

[MidtownGuy]

right on, ablarc

[ablarc]

Key to this comparison is to postulate wether or not Penn station would have been designated as a Landmark had this protection been available at the time. I think it is safe to say that it would have with flying colors.
Not safe to say at all. Having been there I can personally vouch for that.

We always like to find evidence in the present of our superiority to the benighted recent past.

That's what we're busy doing with Boston City Hall.

[MidtownGuy]

I saw just now, for the first time, some pictures of Boston City Hall. I like it! Sure, it's looking a bit shabby but this building must be saved. What presence. It's a great example of it's time and I personally think it's beautiful, though I know many here will think I'm nuts. One thing though, I never liked vast barren plazas. What's up wit that?!

[ZippyTheChimp]

Key to this comparison is to postulate wether or not Penn station would have been designated as a Landmark had this protection been available at the time. I think it is safe to say that it would have with flying colors.Cart before the horse.

Public impetus to establish landmark laws would have been preceded by an appreciation of the building as worthy of preservation.

[Fahzee]

I saw just now, for the first time, some pictures of Boston City Hall. I like it! Sure, it's looking a bit shabby but this building must be saved. What presence. It's a great example of it's time and I personally think it's beautiful, though I know many here will think I'm nuts. One thing though, I never liked vast barren plazas. What's up wit that?!

Exactly. the plaza surrounding city hall is the aesthetic equivelant of a vacant lot. From just about any angle, it looks unfinished, and forbodding. (and ridiculously windy in the winter)

And yet, that might be the point
- with all of the barren, open space, the actual city hall becomes otherworldly.
Everytime I visit boston I've felt that the City Hall complex is a bit of an architectural Catch-22. The plaza helps enforce the presence of city hall but at the same time, the plaza increases the impersonal feel of the building.

[TREPYE]

Not safe to say at all. Having been there I can personally vouch for that.

We always like to find evidence in the present of our superiority to the benighted recent past.

That's what we're busy doing with Boston City Hall.


Cart before the horse.

Public impetus to establish landmark laws would have been preceded by an appreciation of the building as worthy of preservation.

Im confused. I'm not going to pretend that I was there cuz I wasn't so my conclusions about the public appreciation of Penn Station are based on the articles speaking against its demise and the formation of the Landmark Preservation being directly related. If people didnt appreciate it enough how is it that they were gavanized to create an agency to protect future prospective landmarks? Or was Grand Central station more beloved and thus its impending demolition motivated people more than the actual demolition of Penn Station?

[MidtownGuy]

with all of the barren, open space, the actual city hall becomes otherworldly

Your right. Otherworldly is a really good word to describe it. I always thought that aesthetic was beautiful, just hostile. Like something from an old sci fi movie. I'm thinking one of the Planet of the Apes episodes.

[ablarc]

I personally think it's beautiful, though I know many here will think I'm nuts. One thing though, I never liked vast barren plazas. What's up wit that?!
What's up is Modernist concepts of space and civic virtue. The Modernists in question were: Planning Czar and Moses Clone Ed Logue, Master Planner I.M. Pei and Prizewinning Architectural Geniuses Kallmann and McKinnell (the latter only 25 years old at the time).

Modernist space was traditional urban space turned inside out: instead of Piazza San Marco as outdoor room surrounded by building walls it was City Hall Plaza surrounding a sculptural lump in the infinitude of unbounded space. The plaza’s space stretched shapelessly from here to Timbuktu --a concept familiar from every suburb and from Sixth Avenue.

In Boston, the problem was exacerbated by preservationists’ insistence on a visual corridor to North Church, which made the plaza especially leaky where there should have been an inside corner.

The supposedly civic and democratic space was so vast that when tens of thousands gathered there to protest Vietnam, the crowd seemed paltry. Not even the Red Sox were able to fill it.

[ablarc]

If people didnt appreciate it enough how is it that they were gavanized to create an agency to protect future prospective landmarks?
They weren't galvanized immediately; look at the time line.


Or was Grand Central station more beloved and thus its impending demolition motivated people more than the actual demolition of Penn Station?
Yes.

Beaux-Arts architecture had become popular again. By that time, Singer, Savoy-Plaza, Astor and New York Times were all gone. Without murmur.

[kz1000ps]

Only today ... not then. That's entirely my point...

EXACTLY what travelers and most members of the public said about Penn Station ...and virtually all architects!

Hard to believe? Certainly, to anyone from today who didn't actually witness it.

I understand the whole "don't rewrite history under today's terms" mantra. I've read Walter Whitehill's "Topographical History", among others, and considering that (arguably) Boston's preeminent architectural historian was for the new building before and after it was built speaks volumes to myself -- In other words, I feel I have a decent grasp on what people were thinking then, and see parallels to our attitudes today.

What I don't see, by attempting to put myself in future people's shoes (a sketchy proposition I know), is anyone getting all warm and fuzzy over a picture of the by-then-demolished City Hall by Kallman + McKinnell. While I don't care either way if it stays or not (economics behind keeping it is a whole 'nother story), I highly doubt that aonther 40 years from now anyone besides architects and art historians would lose a wink of sleep over its disappearance. Unless of course the new city hall turns out to be even worse than the current one, which is entirely possible.

Of course this argument brings up the whole issue of the common man versus the cultured art critic, and while you say "beware of public opinion," I say to that "just as much beware those who can seemingly talk forever and in effect say nothing." I don't prefer either side, but in the case of City Hall, I side with Joe-sixpack.

[ablarc]

Your right. Otherworldly is a really good word to describe it. I always thought that aesthetic was beautiful, just hostile. Like something from an old sci fi movie. I'm thinking one of the Planet of the Apes episodes.
Albany is even more so. And how about Brasilia? Or Chandigarh?

Modernist space. Grows out of Corbu. He liked things big.

When he came to New York, he said: "The buildings are too small and too close together."

If you put lots of space around something you can step back and appreciate how BIG it really is.

[ablarc]

What I don't see, by attempting to put myself in future people's shoes (a sketchy proposition I know), is anyone getting all warm and fuzzy over a picture of the by-then-demolished City Hall by Kallman + McKinnell.
You won't have to wait too long. Chances are you can expect Bob Campbell to weigh in any moment. Though he'll appear to equivocate in his usual even-handed tones (brief genuflection to Joe Sixpack's view) you'll be able to read his position accurately enough.

.

[Jasonik]

40 years from now the public will want to demolish Frank Gehry's buildings because they are violent, out of context and impractical to maintain. Only "architects and art historians" will "lose a wink of sleep" over it.

The only reason there are anything other than generic banal shopping mall civic buildings and cookie-cutter tract development is because of "architects and art historians".

Architecture and Architectural appreciation are only elitist rarefied concepts to our vastly underappreciating public because of the paucity of education regarding the continium of Western Architectural History given to "Joe Sixpack" (of juiceboxes) when a child. We can have all the preservation societies and committees but they will be for nought if gradeschool developers and real estate speculators are not educated about arguably the most important aspect of their future vocations.

If people are kept naive then politicians will continue to be tempted to stage grand gestures and appeal to (uninformed) public opinion and play political three card monte with public land, private developers, and eminent domain.

[ablarc]

^ Largely true, alas. Populist impulses won't do the trick, 'coz popular taste is fickle.

Preservationism has been with us since way before Penn Station's demise. In the Depression, the WPA produced a definitive register of American Colonial architecture, Williamsburg was "restored", and in the Eighteenth Century, Nicholas Hawksmoor slapped a contextual Gothick front on Westminster Abbey.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Im confused. I'm not going to pretend that I was there cuz I wasn't so my conclusions about the public appreciation of Penn Station are based on the articles speaking against its demise and the formation of the Landmark Preservation being directly related. If people didnt appreciate it enough how is it that they were gavanized to create an agency to protect future prospective landmarks? Or was Grand Central station more beloved and thus its impending demolition motivated people more than the actual demolition of Penn Station?My recollection of the time is that there never was any general public outcry for preserving Penn Station, or support for the Landmarks Preservation Law enacted in 1965. I believe that the vocal opposition to the destruction by an influential minority made city government realize that it had a public relations embarressment on its hands.

The public involvement of note at the time was the designation of Brooklyn Heights as a historic district, and even there it was an affluent neighborhood that had recently been faced with destruction by the BQE construction. The rest of the city hardly noticed.

Grand Central Terminal was designated a landmark in 1967, but I don't think was any more beloved than Penn Station. Pennsy had merged with NY Central to form Penn Central RR, but it continued a downward spiral that was reflected in the deteriorating condition of the terminal throughout the 70s.

Landmarks got its teeth when the city sued the railroad in 1968 to stop construction plans which challenged the legality of historic preservation.

The case was heard by the US Supreme Court in 1978, the first time the court ruled on the matter of landmark designation.

Exerpt from Court ruling (http://Exerpt from Court ruling)

As Jasonik noted, the public attitude has not changed. Historic preservation is supported by a vocal minority.

[ManhattanKnight]

Exerpt from Court ruling (http://Exerpt from Court ruling)



Broken link? Here's the full decision for anyone who's interested:

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=CASE&court=US&vol=438&page=104

[Fabrizio]

I think its very hard for young people to understand the 1950s and 1960s mindset.

They first started to talk about tearing down Penn Station in 1962.... put that in context. That was the year of the Seattle Worlds fair.... the monorail. I was a little boy, but can still remember the photos of that thing in the magazines we would get delivered, Life and Look.

Astronauts were national heros. John Glenn was like a major rock star.

Jet travel was still new and the big deal. Being a stewardesses was like THE sexiest job on earth. The new TWA terminal was what modern travel was all about.

In !964 you had the NY Worlds fair with super futuristic architecture. You had the Beatles, the Mustang, the GTO, the mini-skirt. These were all national phenomena, that friggin took the country by storm. The message was about being modern and young.

So where does an old drafty TRAIN STATION for gosh sakes, fit into all of this?

Good riddance!

[ablarc]

The message was about being modern and young.

So where does an old drafty TRAIN STATION for gosh sakes, fit into all of this?

Good riddance!
And now it's happening all over again ...except now the train station's a drafty old City Hall.

[Bob]

I suspect a major reason many of these old buildings were lost is lack of proper maintenance. Many were filthy, out of repair, ugly, etc. A building starts to die the moment it is built! Proper upkeep is therefore essential.

[kz1000ps]

Standing tough under stars and stripes
we can tell
This dream's in sight
You've got to admit it
At this point in time that it's clear - the future looks bright!

On that train all graphite and glitter
undersea by rail
Ninety minutes from New York to Paris
well by '76 we'll be A.O.K

"International Geophysical Year"
Donald Fagen, "The Nightfly", 1982

[ablarc]

I suspect a major reason many of these old buildings were lost is lack of proper maintenance. Many were filthy, out of repair, ugly, etc. A building starts to die the moment it is built! Proper upkeep is therefore essential.
Exactly.

Some folks can't see past the dirt.

[ZippyTheChimp]

I think that was a major factor in the lack of support for 2CC - broken sidewalk, barricaded entry, debris, in the lobby half dead trees poking out from the perennial sidewalk shed.


I think its very hard for young people to understand the 1950s and 1960s mindset.

They first started to talk about tearing down Penn Station in 1962.... put that in context. That was the year of the Seattle Worlds fair.... the monorail. I was a little boy, but can still remember the photos of that thing in the magazines we would get delivered, Life and Look.

Astronauts were national heros. John Glenn was like a major rock star.

Jet travel was still new and the big deal. Being a stewardesses was like THE sexiest job on earth. The new TWA terminal was what modern travel was all about.

In !964 you had the NY Worlds fair with super futuristic architecture. You had the Beatles, the Mustang, the GTO, the mini-skirt. These were all national phenomena, that friggin took the country by storm. The message was about being modern and young.

So where does an old drafty TRAIN STATION for gosh sakes, fit into all of this?

Good riddance!

It wasn't just young people.

Teenagers today probably see the preceding decades in a more linear way than in the 60s. There was a distinct chasm that separated the worlds before and after WWII. We still use the terms today: pre-war, post-war.

The image of Europe's old architecture that American 20-something GIs brought back home was something like this:

http://www.anicursor.com/3ad/trotman2.jpg http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/trs/images/hamburg-bombing3b33646r.jpg

[TREPYE]

So what you folks are trying to tell us "younglings" is that the acceptance of the demolition of Penn, Singer, Savvory etc. was just a fad. Modernism presented a new and "space age way" of doing things thus it became more acceptable in the name of progress.

So how do you explain our mindset today? Some (if not most) would beg to have the likes of architectural masterpieces in the quality and scale of these Beaux Arts structures. Glass is the wave of the future in scrapers and at points I can't stand its repetitive unimaginative mundane impact.

Perhaps our level of progress has "plateaued" out to the point that since it can't get any better the repetitive notion of our contemporary architecture makes us wish for the structures of the past. Has architecture progressed to a level of practicality that does not allow us to economically facilitate the next wave of natural progress such as building "structural expressionism" style scrapers such as 80 South street, or building much taller towers (without the finagle of masts ala NYTimes Tower, BoA)? This natural progress may entice us a little more and make us not envy the structures of the past so much.

[Luca]

Ablarc convincingly argues against the mind-trap of ahistorical thinking in relation to preservationism and deftly deflates the purely populist "what people like/dislike" measure of conservation worthiness as being too predictably time-dependent ('everyone' hates the 30-50 year old buildings).

I also thought Fabrizio evoked the futurist/progressivist slant of the 60s well.

Nonetheless, I think you can push the relativism too far. There are objective standards in building and urban patterns. There are also considerable ideological constructs in architecture, especially where major public buildings are concerned. I would argue that hyper-minimalist/brutalist buildings and Corbusian/Bauhaus urban form represent a nadir in the content and expression of those objective qualities so that, historical/cultural parallels notwithstanding, the demolition of the signer building and the demolition of, say, most of Albany are not of comparable artistic (de)merit.

That said, I think the most infamous/iconic examples of 50s-70s architecture should be preserved:
1. as mementi insania per admonitio moliori
2. because, dislike them as we may, posterity may judge them differently and great buildings do not belong just to those alive today, not unlike nature, say.

[ablarc]

...dislike them as we may, posterity may judge them differently and great buildings do not belong just to those alive today, not unlike nature, say.
Tolerating ... even re-introducing ... wolves in the wilds.

For future generations.

.

[ablarc]

...you can expect Bob Campbell to weigh in any moment. Though he'll appear to equivocate in his usual even-handed tones (brief genuflection to Joe Sixpack's view) you'll be able to read his position accurately enough.
As predicted:

THE ARCHITECTURE
Brutal, powerful structure of 1969 is now out of style

By Robert Campbell, Globe Correspondent | December 13, 2006

As much as any building in the world, Boston City Hall is a measure of changing fashions in architecture.

It's hard to believe now, but in a poll of architects and historians in the bicentennial year of 1976, the building was voted one of the 10 greatest works of architecture in American history.

No way would that happen today. And even back then, the building was a lot more popular with architects than it was with the public.

The design for the building was chosen by a panel of expert jurors in an open design competition. Any architect in the United States could enter. The winners were two Columbia University architecture professors, Gerhard Kallmann and Noel Michael McKinnell. Both were inexperienced -- McKinnell was still in his 20s -- and neither had actually built a building before.

City Hall opened in 1969. And 1969 was the era of what is called Brutalism.

Brutalism was an architectural style of massive, powerful, raw concrete buildings. The term comes not from the English word "brutal" but from the French "beton brut," which means raw or unfinished concrete.

The style was derived from the late work of the most famous architect of that era, Le Corbusier. Boston City Hall, in fact, is pretty closely modeled on what is perhaps the French architect's greatest building, the monastery of La Tourette in southern France.

Corbusier's love of raw concrete was inspired by his discovery of World War II pillboxes on the coast of France, concrete buildings thrown up quickly for defense. They seemed very real, very honest, not like something a sophisticated architect had fussed over.

But La Tourette is modest in scale. Blown up to the proportions of City Hall, Brutalism does become brutal. From the beginning, most people found it intimidating.

The powerful outward thrust of the middle floors, as seen from outside, is the architects' way of letting you know that these floors are occupied by the important people, namely the mayor and the city council. But they look not so much important as aggressive, even threatening.

The biggest problem with City Hall, though, is the interiors. Indoor walls made of gray concrete, often without much natural daylight, are depressing. And there are a lot of them.

Those who admire the building sometimes argue that architecture doesn't have to be beautiful to be great. For them, City Hall is an ugly, wonderful, powerful, unforgettable building.

But fashions come and go in architecture, as in any field. City Hall today is definitely out.

One thing everyone agrees on is that the building could easily be improved. Even the original architects, who now run a very successful national practice out of Boston, say they would welcome some changes.

The multistory atrium, which is now open at the top to the sky, and therefore the rain, could be glassed in to become a delightful winter garden. A restaurant at the top of the great entry staircase could be a place for staff and public to meet and schmooze.

Even a bit of ivy on the exterior wouldn't hurt. The architects' original idea of a beer hall in the basement, like those in many German city halls, could be revived.

Mayor Menino would like the site and the plaza sold for redevelopment. The city could make a profit that way. But City Hall, whatever you think of it, is in an ideal location, easy to reach by subway. They mayor's been talking about tearing it down for years. He should be thinking instead of making it the best that it can be.

[Fabrizio]

Luca writes:

"I would argue that hyper-minimalist/brutalist buildings and Corbusian/Bauhaus urban form represent a nadir in the content and expression of those objective qualities so that, historical/cultural parallels notwithstanding, the demolition of the signer building and the demolition of, say, most of Albany are not of comparable artistic (de)merit."

I dont know this city hall except from photos.... but I do love the brutalist style. Howerever, I will agree that historic buildings like Penn Station and the Singer building, as well as so many of the small historic buildings we are seeing torn down today, have one element that make them even more important than the landmarks built after WWII: the hand of the artisan.

Rough, poured concrete can look chic, as far as my taste goes, but the sculptures, reliefs, mosiacs, murals, wood work.... and other building techniques that pre-WWII buildings have, are out of use today and nearly impossible to duplicate. Often for that alone, they should be considered for saving.

---

[MidtownGuy]

Keep, the building, make the improvements. Surely the described grey interior walls can somehow be warmed. Perhaps keep some raw areas, color-washed by LED light installations, and adding modern finishes in other areas.
The proposed wintergarden sounds promising. Certainly improvements can be made to the plaza to make it more inviting. Some kind of minimalist water feature, some concrete benches at the very least
http://static.flickr.com/132/322208807_6e4dba09e4.jpg
and you know,some kind of greenery in the front yard wouldn't hurt. There are ways to do it harmoniously with the architecture, not interfering with the monumentality of the building's presence. I would not add trees, best to keep the immediate approach clear, but some lowslung plantings to break up the monotony of all those bricks would go a long way.
http://static.flickr.com/142/322213405_d8f465f63b.jpg
Can beton brut be power-cleaned somehow? i know beton brut wasn't supposed to be pristine by original intent, but a little bit of freneshening up
is in order.

The more I look at this building the more I absolutely love it.
http://static.flickr.com/144/322218262_b39e4aaea8.jpg

[Fabrizio]

Midtown: as Im sure youve seen in your travels, big empty piazzas can work beautifully. Isnt it interesting that this one does not.

A great, big, red brick piazza.... no trees.... no furniture...not even steps:

[MidtownGuy]

Absolutely. ^^It's like night and day.
The above scene is urban theater. A place to linger.

[ryan]

I love this building, but I hate everything built in the 80's - especially anything by Michael Graves. I don't think you can overstate the subjective nature of fashion. Every generation changes things - just for the sake of change (encouraged, no doubt by planned obsolescence).

That said, the baby boomers have a specific hate of old things. My mother told me she thought Penn Station was "creepy" and "scary - like a horror movie" so she was really happy when it was replaced. She also hates Victorian anything, and loves anything newly built.

Think about "haunted" or "witch's" houses - always ornate pre-war buildings. It's a part of our cultural subconscious.

[lofter1]

I've never been inside the Boston City Hall, but have had the dis-pleasure of navigating the interior of one of NYC's Brutalist public buildings: the Manhattan Family Courthouse (http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcas/html/resources/man_familycourt.shtml) at 60 Lafayette Street (1975; Architect: Haines Lundberg Waehler).

This is how it originally appeared from the outside, clad all in shiny black stone, as cold as midnight ice:

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dcas/images/buildings/man_newfc.jpg

The original design was also seemingly ill-conceived -- and notoriously hard to maintain with spalling everywhere. Hence the exterior recently has been re-clad, now in a lighter granite -- more windows have been cut into the facade to allow better light into the building and the public lobby area has been re-formed.

However, the interior on the upper floors where one finds the courtrooms and other public areas remains in its original Brutal state: all exposed concrete and odd angles -- with every hallway running at diagonals so that upon entering one is immediately confused and feels lost and overwhelmed by the building itself. This is hardly what a citizen should be meant to experience in a place that is supposed to serve the people of the City. Rather, in this building at least, one feels that the Machine of Justice has taken control and will do with you willy-nilly as it pleases.

A comment by the architect? Perhaps ...

But the result of this particular building is that it dis-empowers and reduces the individual.

To me that shows a total failure of public architecture.

[kz1000ps]

From nearly two years ago:

http://img157.imageshack.us/img157/2145/dscf0060uy0.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[ablarc]

Midtown: as Im sure youve seen in your travels, big empty piazzas can work beautifully. Isnt it interesting that this one does not.

A great, big, red brick piazza.... no trees.... no furniture...not even steps:
Siena is fully enclosed by buildings, so it feels like a room.

No leaking space, no roaring traffic.

[pianoman11686]

So what you folks are trying to tell us "younglings" is that the acceptance of the demolition of Penn, Singer, Savvory etc. was just a fad. Modernism presented a new and "space age way" of doing things thus it became more acceptable in the name of progress.

So how do you explain our mindset today? Some (if not most) would beg to have the likes of architectural masterpieces in the quality and scale of these Beaux Arts structures. Glass is the wave of the future in scrapers and at points I can't stand its repetitive unimaginative mundane impact.

Perhaps our level of progress has "plateaued" out to the point that since it can't get any better the repetitive notion of our contemporary architecture makes us wish for the structures of the past. Has architecture progressed to a level of practicality that does not allow us to economically facilitate the next wave of natural progress such as building "structural expressionism" style scrapers such as 80 South street, or building much taller towers (without the finagle of masts ala NYTimes Tower, BoA)? This natural progress may entice us a little more and make us not envy the structures of the past so much.

These are some good questions, and they might even explain why there's a greater level of (perceived) apathy among the public about architecture, as some people have noted. Can we even say there's a definitive architectural style in vogue today? I've heard it called "post-Post Modernism," but I'm finding it difficult to define what that means. I guess you could say the current trend is a less strict interpretation of Modernism, but there's so much else out there: deconstructionism (Gehry, Libeskind, Herzon/DeMeuron), structural expression, as you mentioned, the occasional PoMo, and some more classical revivalism.

It's a strange question, but: is architecture finished going through a stylistic evolution? Is it just going to be a mix of styles from now on, instead of a new dominant one like Brutalism coming along? And does this, in any way, make structures like Boston's City Hall all the more significant?

[ablarc]

I would argue that hyper-minimalist/brutalist buildings and Corbusian/Bauhaus urban form represent a nadir in the content and expression of those objective qualities so that, historical/cultural parallels notwithstanding, the demolition of the signer building and the demolition of, say, most of Albany are not of comparable artistic (de)merit.
That may be, but even this will vary with time.


That said, I think the most infamous/iconic examples of 50s-70s architecture should be preserved:
1. as mementi insania per admonitio moliori
2. because, dislike them as we may, posterity may judge them differently and great buildings do not belong just to those alive today, not unlike nature, say.
The only solution, imo, is to landmark anything and everything that a decent number of art historians ever declared in print to be significant architecture. That would have saved Penn Station and 2 Columbus Circle alike, and it would save Boston City Hall, even with all these buildings at their nadir of popularity.

That's the only time a building is endangered anyway. If it can survive the trough it's home free.

If such a mechanism existed, it would stir activists to lobby art historians to take a greater interest in buildings like Shelly's Automat (and ...lawdy... those Midtown townhouses (Lehman, et al.).

[TREPYE]

It's a strange question, but: is architecture finished going through a stylistic evolution? Is it just going to be a mix of styles from now on, instead of a new dominant one like Brutalism coming along? And does this, in any way, make structures like Boston's City Hall all the more significant?

An adequate point indeed. The current style a somewhat diverse. But this diversity does not make us disregard the quality of previous architectural styles the way they were disregarded in the sixties. Perhaps the relics of prewar were just simpy better thats why the likes of Boston's City Hall are a lot more easily expendable than say if the same thing was happening to the Municipal Building in NYC.

I was kinda hoping that some of the [percieved] elders statesmen involved in this discussion -namely: Ablarc, Zippy, or Fabrizio- would answer the relation of todays mindset (as I described it in my previous post (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=135823&postcount=64)) to the mindset in the 60's.

[ablarc]

But this diversity does not make us disregard the quality of previous architectural styles the way they were disregarded in the sixties. Perhaps the relics of prewar were just simpy better thats why the likes of Boston's City Hall are a lot more easily expendable than say if the same thing was happening to the Municipal Building in NYC.
Not so; in fact you're demonstrating the very same blind spot for Boston City Hall as folks showed towards Penn Station when it was City Hall's age. Think of yourself as driving a car with a broad c-pillar. It produces a blind spot, and you carry it around with you. It's always there, the same distance back at all times as you travel through time. The blind spot is ALWAYS there toward the architecture of 35-60 years back.

If Boston City Hall survives to the year 2025, I dare say it will be regarded as a higher architectural achievement than the Municipal Building. That's because by the eternal principles of architectural tectonics, it actually IS.

You can catch a discussion of this as well as a graphic presentation of the blind spot here: http://architecturalboston.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=501&start=30

[TREPYE]

Not so; in fact you're demonstrating the very same blind spot for Boston City Hall as folks showed towards Penn Station when it was City Hall's age. Think of yourself as driving a car with a broad c-pillar. It produces a blind spot, and you carry it around with you. It's always there, the same distance back at all times as you travel through time. The blind spot is ALWAYS there toward the architecture of 35-60 years back.

If Boston City Hall survives to the year 2025, I dare say it will be regarded as a higher architectural achievement than the Municipal Building. That's because by the eternal principles of architectural tectonics, it actually IS.

You can catch a discussion of this as well as a graphic presentation of the blind spot here: http://architecturalboston.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=501&start=30

I think you are talking in terms of nostalgia for a defunct architectural style. Forget about age and time, lets take the 4th dimension out of this. Suppose they were the same age (Municipal and Bostons City Hall). In those terms I'm speaking about sheer quality and "what would you rather have in your city" type of preference. And does this have a bigger impact on the ambivalence among the public of whether to keep it or not?

Another interesting aspect (bigger than the nostalgic component) to this is what is it being replaced with. If it is another SOM type glass box then people would definitely rather have the brutalist City Hall. If its something like Calatrava's Path train station does it take the sting out of loosing it?

[pianoman11686]

I think you are talking in terms of nostalgia for a defunct architectural style. Forget about age and time, lets take the 4th dimension out of this. Suppose they were the same age (Municipal and Bostons City Hall). In those terms I'm speaking about sheer quality and "what would you rather have in your city" type of preference. And does this have a bigger impact on the ambivalence among the public of whether to keep it or not?

I think what he's saying is that you just can't "forget about age and time," that the passage of time itself influences how people perceive "quality." And that perhaps only the most qualified individuals (art historians and such) can make an unbiased, objective assessment of a building's value, and whether it is worth preserving.

My only question is: how do you select this "panel of experts," and exactly how influential will their opinion be on public policy?

[TREPYE]

Yes I know that, but its how scholars and buffs look at it. These Bostonians are not looking at it like this otherwise perhaps the major would not want to sell it and there wouldn't be such ambivalence in the Boston thread.

[pianoman11686]

I think ablarc has once again deftly proven the difference between good architecture as something to be appreciated, and something to be worshipped. For anyone who hasn't read through the Boston forum, ablarc's post there makes it worth doing so. You'll find an analysis that can't possibly be realized, or even fully understood, by the public at large (that includes their representatives in power). The disconnect is as real and significant as that exists between reason and emotion: you either view something and "feel," or you view something and "think." Ablarc thinks, and makes an effort at doing so; the rest of us, for the most part, only feel, and refuse to think out of laziness, fear, or sheer lack of competence.

Ablarc: you briefly mention, in that post, Venturi and the "duck." I'm only slightly familiar with his theory, but in any case: you would not approve of that kind of approach in evaluating real architecture, correct?

[TREPYE]

you either view something and "feel," or you view something and "think." Ablarc thinks, and makes an effort at doing so; the rest of us, for the most part, only feel, and refuse to think out of laziness, fear, or sheer lack of competence.


Yes, good point. But with anything in terms of impact; a nice scraper, a painting, a hot broad you dont have to think about em, just being able to look at em and admire them, as shallow as its sounds, is what most people base their opinions on. This is how a relic like the Municipal Building may have more impact than the BCH. I agree it is much more fufilling and even beautiful to add depth to things in terms of knowledge, history and significance. And it could add a lot of charisma to something as superficially mundane as BCH. In BCH's case is there enough to make people want to glorify the structure.

[ablarc]

Opposition Growing to City Hall Sale


BOSTON - Preservationists and architects are scrambling to save City Hall from the wrecking ball, citing the brick and concrete building’s significance as an example of classic modernism. Earlier in the week during an annual address, Mayor Thomas Menino revealed plans to sell the current City Hall property and construct a new facility in the South part of Boston.

Susan Park, head of the Boston Preservation Alliance, tells GlobeSt.com that members of the non-profit organization will meet next Wednesday to discuss the Mayor’s plans.

“In today’s world, is City Hall the most efficient building going? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have architectural significance,” says Park, adding that she expects the alliance to issue a statement on its position following next week’s meeting.

Architect David Fixler, a principal with Einhorn Yaffe Prescott and president of the New England Chapter of Docomomo, an organization that promotes the documentation and conservation of buildings considered to be part of the modern movement, tells GlobeSt.com that members are concerned the structure, once hailed as one of the most significant buildings in the country, will be destroyed.

“This is a building that has always had its troubles but it has a place in history,” says Fixler, noting that the building and the surrounding plaza has hosted everything from anti-war and desegregation demonstrations to summertime concerts during its 40-year history.

Fixler, who has worked on the building, says the structure has always been treated as a historic building by preservation groups, the Boston Landmarks Commission and the National Trust.

“It has become Boston’s great public gathering space. In that sense, it has become the locus of civic life,” Fixler says.

But the building also has architectural significance, he notes. An award-winning building that has long been considered an architectural marvel by architects, City Hall was named one of the 10 most significant buildings in the United States in the mid-1970s by members of the American Institute of Architects, Fixler says. Today, it remains an example of classic modernist style.

Fixler says he expects Docomomo will take a position on the building’s sale in hopes of preserving the structure that he says remains symbolic of Boston’s rebirth as a world class city.



Link (http://www.globest.com/news/803_803/boston/151434-1.html)

[Jasonik]

I'm glad Docomomo got involved, I was wondering when we'd hear from them. I've had the opportunity to meet Mr. Fixler and he is a passionate scholar and advocate for important modern buildings. I know he did some excellent consulting for Radcliffe on their library not long ago.

[Citytect]

I think Boston City Hall is one of the most intriguing structures I've ever experienced. There's so much to think about in those walls of raw concrete. It's simultaneously unsophisticated and monumental. I think it represents the function of City Hall well. It's a public building but, on the whole, it remains behind-closed-doors. It's a place for the powerful publicly-appointed city leaders, not so much for the general public. It's a maze designed for those in-the-know. Just try to walk into the place and blindly navigate the passageways and stairs; you'll be lost. The building's way of mockingly saying, "You don't belong here." I love that. It's honest.

The plaza is problematic though, especially during Boston's harsh winters. It's definitely one of Mr. Pei's duds. It should be a public space the general public will use - the truly "public" part of the complex. It's current state is simply not functional. It's particularly unfortunate because the location could support a lively public plaza (busy T station, nearby attractions, etc.). The big hurdle is auto traffic around the plaza.

[ablarc]

40 years from now the public will want to demolish Frank Gehry's buildings because they are violent, out of context and impractical to maintain. Only "architects and art historians" will "lose a wink of sleep" over it.
You can trust art historians more than architects in this regard.

Anecdote to illustrate why:

Student in art history class refers to a work’s “beauty.” Eminent professor (Skull and Bones) corrects student: “We don’t use that term. We’re professionals.”


Architecture and Architectural appreciation are … elitist rarefied concepts to our … public because of … paucity of education …

If people are kept naive then politicians will continue … to stage grand gestures and appeal to (uninformed) public opinion ...



So what you folks are trying to tell us "younglings" is that the acceptance of the demolition of Penn, Singer, Savoy etc. was just a fad.
Hating 35-60 year-old architecture is a permanent fad that follows us around through time. Little wonder: architecture of that age is what we just got through supplanting with something “better.” We want it gone. It’s unprogressive.


Modernism presented a new and "space age way" of doing things … So how do you explain our mindset today? Some (if not most) would beg to have the likes of architectural masterpieces in the quality and scale of these Beaux Arts structures.
Beaux-Arts buildings are now older than 60, so we like them again. They’re antiques, and everyone likes antiques.

They’re back in fashion. What’s out of fashion now, and endangered by our inevitable aesthetic blindness, is Modernism.

Ironically this thread’s title, “Sixties Demolitions,” referred initially to demolitions of earlier buildings perpetrated in the Sixties by proponents of the modern. Forty years later, we’re seeing buildings of the Sixties threatened on all sides by the same blindness. The thread’s title serves equally for both phenomena because it’s really one phenomenon.


Glass is the wave of the future in scrapers and at points I can't stand its repetitive unimaginative mundane impact.
See, you’re already starting to have your doubts. Wait thirty-five years, and they’ll be full-blown. You’ll be satiated with the architecture of today and longing to replace it with whatever is fresh and new at that time.


Perhaps our level of progress has "plateaued" out to the point that since it can't get any better the repetitive notion of our contemporary architecture makes us wish for the structures of the past.
It hasn’t plateaued. You’re just looking at the inevitable effects of time on our attitudes toward artifacts. That’s what art historians study (scientifically, I might add), and that’s why you can trust them –and only them—to be objective. They’re trained to be. They don’t use words like “beautiful.”


I think you are talking in terms of nostalgia for a defunct architectural style. Forget about age and time … Suppose they were the same age ([New York’s] Municipal [Building] and Boston’s City Hall). In those terms I'm speaking about sheer quality and "what would you rather have in your city" type of preference.
Sheer quality: Boston City Hall is better, hands down. It’s a much greater intellectual synthesis, a hugely more significant creation of the human mind.

By contrast, the Municipal Building is mere picturesque pastiche, a pretty re-arrangement of pre-existent themes. Easy to like, like a Viennese torte.

(An art historian will tell you that because he understands art.)


And does this have a bigger impact on the ambivalence among the public of whether to keep it or not?

As Jasonik has already pointed out, public opinion is ignorant and fickle and the victim of zeitgeist. When the time comes, the public will likely change its tune (especially if City Hall is cleaned and "restored," meaning improved to present-day expectations) --though there are certain works of art that are always difficult for the public, such as those by James Joyce or Schoenberg.


… the Boston forum, ablarc's post there … You'll find an analysis that can't possibly be realized, or even fully understood, by the public at large (that includes their representatives in power). The disconnect is … real and significant …

Here’s some of the Boston post. Sorry about its length:

Some things are hard to like unless you make an effort (and maybe always will be). Examples are opera, caviar, Gertrude Stein, Zen Buddhism, James Joyce, cilantro, Garcia Lorca, twelve-tone music, Immanuel Kant, Jorge Luis Borges, twelve-tone music for the umpteenth time, Jackson Pollock, foie gras, frog’s legs, tripe, brains, oysters, Steve Reich, Kasimir Malevich, Michelangelo Antonioni, Leonard Cohen and Brutalist architecture. All acquired tastes.

Explaining why you could like these things is hard for the same reason most folks don’t bother with understanding: you have to rack your brains, and that’s work. It’s easier to just dismiss it. The list above contains difficult food ingredients and difficult human achievements. By definition, the difficult human achievements took intellectual rigor to create and they take the same faculty to grasp.

Most folks who throw in the towel a few pages into Finnegan’s Wake don’t really dare dismiss Joyce, coz they’ve heard he’s deep. They read on the Net that literary critics think Ulysses the greatest novel of the English language, and they’re not about to put in the effort to see if that’s true. So they leave it at that.

More folks feel free to diss, say, Wagner without making any real effort to see where he’s coming from; the fat sopranos provide them with a cheap shot --even as doubts may linger about whether they got it right.

But most of us have heard we’re all experts in architecture; after all, we spend most of our time in it.

Don’t you believe it !

Few of us go anywhere near any real architecture most days, just as most of what we read isn’t literature. Architecture is not synonymous with buildings, and most buildings aren’t architecture.

Architecture is rarefied artistic rigor applied to making a building. This means dreaming up a unified and meaningful whole. All works of art are that; they hang together.

I design forty or fifty buildings per annum, and most years not one of them qualifies as architecture. Most clients not only don’t want architecture, but if they catch an inkling of what it is they actively loathe it. And well they should, because it can’t possibly serve their purposes unless they’re already looking for it, for architecture is never just utilitarian; even the Bauhaus is anything but that.

Confronted with the prospect of architecture, most clients wisely recoil in horror, knowing it will alter their habits, demand maintenance and understanding, may expose them to their peers’ ridicule or censure, will leak and make them hot or cold, and likely lighten their wallets. Architecture is much too risky; anyone who really wants it already has a somewhat masochistic devotion to art. These folks are rare and easily identified.

City Hall is a collection of fat sopranos.

Once you get into its conceptual reality, you won’t just like it; you’ll love it. Did you ever meet a lukewarm opera buff?

Empty platitudes about how powerful and bold the building is: I’ll spare you that because you can see it for yourself,

But since I have to design buildings myself I can reveal a little about how hard it must have been to juggle all the components of City Hall so they hang together as an artistic whole.

The fancy term for this is tectonics, which the dictionary says is the science or art of assembling, shaping, or ornamenting materials in construction.

In keeping with their Modernist predilections and their minimalist leanings, Kallmann and McKinnell made their art out of the science. The question was: how much compositional interest would emerge from the rigorous and correct application of a very small number of rules and their intersection with the nature of the narrow spectrum of building materials chosen. Like Mies: they believed that less is more, but not so little it’s a bore.

Their building’s tectonic components are the structural and mechanical systems, and there’s precious little else to this building (except glass infill where the structure isn’t). The structural materials are brick and two kinds of concrete: poured-in-place and precast, which has a different nature.

And here’s a surprise: in their reductionist zeal, they made the upper levels’ structure double as the mechanical system. Concrete ducts !! You can see them clamber up the building’s outside; that’s what those massive cement fins are that function “decoratively” at the upper levels, like colossal dentil molding. Simultaneously they serve as the building’s structure and enclosure. To synthesize, to hang together, to do more with less.

“I like an arch,” replied the brick, when Louis Kahn famously inquired what it wanted. That wasn’t the answer Kallmann and McKinnell wanted to hear; as card carrying Modernists, they knew arches were verboten. So they relegated brick to their building’s lower realms, where it wasn’t required to make openings (something it does pure and correct without steel only as an arch). Earthbound, it became a metaphor for terra firma, a role confirmed by organic fusion with the vast brick plaza, and by the literal fact that brick is clay.

From mother earth spring foursquare geysers of once-fluid concrete: congealed, they’re cement sequoias, at once lofty, sturdy and as differentiated as individual trees in a forest. These are the mainframes both literally and figuratively of the entire civic structure. They hold up the building, they link earth to sky, at the entrance they greet you with soaring sylvan monumentality onto which you can project your civic pride in Boston’s virtuous government or feel oppressed by its corruption and bureaucracy: the same forms will serve for either, the choice is yours.

From here, space corkscrews heavenward past cantilevered council chambers, elevator shafts, monumental stairs and a now bunkerish mayor’s office that you could freely visit in happier days. Like the brick below, all this poured beton brut reminds of Rome’s identical brick and concrete building technology: solid, compressive, imperial, built for the ages, and susceptible to barbarians.

Here also may lie the building’s symbolic weakness, for on top of all this poured monumentality and upbeat symbolism lie draped like wet blankets: three layers of precast bureaucracy! O, parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.

Oh, it gives those folks a view who are confined there all day. But mostly it gives you the completed composition that was this entire building’s formal impetus from the get-go: an inverted-pyramid composition motivated by a desire to depict. In Venturi’s terms it’s a duck, for this building is actually a thinly disguised sculpture, a statue of … another building! And that building is the Monastery of LaTourette.

So there you have it, another layer of symbolism: City Hall as monastery ;). Or perhaps you’d prefer: City Government as inverted pyramid :). Or would you care for Topheavy Government :D?

The fact that the top is precast is brilliant, because precast is the next logical progression in the structural evolution of masonry as you go up light to the sky and forward in history. Industrialized factory construction allows a uniform and standardized module, and steel reinforcement permits an almost gossamer lightness in the context of this building’s otherwise pachydermal ambiance. Mechanical systems are threaded through the gaps, and lighting courses through the lower chords in a marvel of integrated design.

What to a layman seem clunky beams with rectangular gaps register as elegant Vierendel trusses to an engineer, supported correctly at their fifth points, ends cantilevered. The panel points of these supports are conveyed downward as columns or transfer beams to the lower floors, which therefore acquire the exact and regular modular order of their upper brethren, like a drumbeat but with contrapuntal improvisations. A tour-de-force of spatial ordering that fully integrates the building, like writing a business letter in iambic pentameter.

Did someone say “cantilever”? Why that’s a thematic subtext throughout this building, where all outside corners are cantilevered and all three upper floors are corbelled (cantilevered) outward from the floor below. Structure in the service of massing. Like writing an iambic-pentameter business letter in which now all the sentences rhyme.

It turns out City Hall’s proportioning and dimensioning is done according to the Modulor (Golden Section) as in Corbu’s original of which this is a formally structured set of improvised variations. That’s like adding yet another layer of integrating formal order, infinitely subtle, like making each sentence in the business letter start with a letter in an acronym.

Does all this matter? What is it really but a shameless display of virtuoso skill and intellectual rigor? Even fuller of artifice than Vermeer’s little optical highlights -- to those who can see them-- or Mozart’s abrupt forays into minor keys. Does it matter that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is all organized –macro and micro-- out of a pattern of four notes? Does that make it better than if it were pleasant melodic noodling? Does it matter that the iconography of a Gothic portal may reveal prophetic secrets of the Book of Daniel? Does it matter that the juggler finally figured out how to add a seventh twirling plate? Would it matter if the complete discography of Max Roach vanished tomorrow? Does it matter? Of course not.

What use, after all, is art when we can replace it with profit –especially if we can simultaneously declare it ugly and have most folks murmur agreement. And what, oh what can be done with a building with dirty concrete, bad heat and a bad rap?

I can’t tell you if Boston City Hall is ugly, because to me the question is meaningless. Maybe beauty is in the eye of the beholder. All I know is I don’t have the brainpower or the creative inventiveness to pull off something simultaneously so tightly organized and formally varied in a million years of trying. So difficult…

Maybe we could respect that. Others have in the past.

* * *

One way to measure the importance of something is by how much else it has affected, and you can gauge something’s effects by the number of its imitators. If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Boston City Hall has been much admired.

City Hall’s imitators are everywhere. Charlotte has two. One is a college classroom building, another is the Charlotte Observer.

Dallas has at least one. …And it’s the City Hall !!

Boston doesn’t have an imitation of Dallas’ City Hall. Dallas has an imitation of Boston’s City Hall.

An exterior whose expression is composed entirely of its structure and its mechanical system: do you recognize the schema of the Pompidou Center?

An architect who tells you he’s not influenced by other architects is a liar. For about fifteen years, Boston’s City Hall influenced more building designs than any new building on the planet. And Boston has the original !!

Boston can be proud.


Ablarc: you briefly mention, in that post, Venturi and the "duck." I'm only slightly familiar with his theory, but in any case: you would not approve of that kind of approach in evaluating real architecture, correct?
A duck is a building in the Modernist style that therefore is required to renounce ornament. Deeply desiring to be beautiful and loved, it hits upon this strategy: if I can’t use ornament to decorate myself, I’ll make my whole shape an ornament (sculpture). That ornamental form can be abstract (anything by Thom Mayne or Zaha Hadid; perhaps Boston City Hall) or representational (the famous Long Island building in the shape of a duck; most works of Frank Gehry; perhaps Boston City Hall).


But with anything in terms of impact; a nice scraper, a painting, a hot broad you dont have to think about em, just being able to look at em and admire them, as shallow as its sounds, is what most people base their opinions on. This is how a relic like the Municipal Building may have more impact than the BCH. I agree it is much more fufilling and even beautiful to add depth to things in terms of knowledge, history and significance. And it could add a lot of charisma to something as superficially mundane as BCH. In BCH's case is there enough to make people want to glorify the structure.
Give it time.

Or maybe it’ll be like Finnegan’s Wake or Crime and Punishment: eternally difficult.

Should we perhaps burn Finnegan’s Wake?

[ablarc]

Debating the over-Hall: Boston architects, planners all have ideas on whether and how to do it

By Paul Restuccia
Sunday, December 17, 2006


Does Boston really need a new city hall and what should we do with the one we have now?

Those are questions some of the Hub’s leading architects and planners are debating in the wake of Mayor Thomas M. Menino’s call last week to sell the 9-acre City Hall site and construct a new building on a 14-acre site along the South Boston waterfront.

The 1969-built City Hall, an international award-winning building, is generally liked by architects but has long been despised by the much of the public and the mayor, who wants a new icon to reflect 21st century Boston.

“I think building a new City Hall is a good idea as long as a new building is better than the current one,” says Tim Love, principal of Utile Inc., a firm that’s done master planning work on Southie’s Fort Point District, the edges along the new Greenway and Summer Street from downtown to the new convention center.

“But whether we do build it should also depend on what is done with the City Hall site which would have to be brilliantly redesigned to make the move worthwhile,” adds Love, who has also designed several high-style condo complexes in Southie. “I like the current building but there are better uses for its nine acres.”

Love suggests a public-private partnership that would ensure that what goes on the current site will be a mix of uses as well as open space of the highest quality rather than a development solely determined by the bottom line. And if what would replace City Hall was better, he says he would support demolishing it.

Frano Violich, who is head of the Boston Society of Architects’ design committee, supports building a new city hall, but not destroying the old one.

“We have to use our imagination on how to reuse the current City Hall,” says Violich, of influential cutting-edge firm Kennedy & Violich. He suggests turning the building into a performance center or even housing and adding higher-density development around it. “I like the building, but the city’s got to evolve. It’s time to move on.”

But other architects are against adaptive reuse of the current City Hall as well as the loss of its expansive brick plaza.

“Do we really need another iconic location for a city hall when we already have one?” argues Anne Beha, who has won awards for her contemporary addition to the Christian Science Monitor library and whose preservation work includes the former Charles Street Jail, which is being converted into a hotel. “We tore down Scollay Square for this location which is at the crossroads of the city and accessible to all by multiple subway lines.”

Jane Weinzapfel of Leers and Weinzapfel Architects, who successfully adapted and added to another major 1960s iconic building, the Harvard Science Center, thinks that the same thing can be done for City Hall.

“You could add a glass addition on top with more space and redesign and brighten the interior to meet the needs of city government for the future,” she says. “Why rip City Hall out of the heart of the city and move it to the extremities? The South Boston Waterfront doesn’t need a city hall to be successful.”

But economic arguments for relocating are strong - nine acres of prime development that could fetch $300 million or more and provide millions more in annual tax revenue.

“The reason why we have the present City Hall building and plaza is because in the early 1960s Boston was desperate for renewal but that is no longer the case,” says David Dixon, a principal at the Hub’s Goody Clancy & Associates whose urban planning has won numerous national awards. “We now have a chance to add more vigor to this part of downtown that needs more people and more activity.”

If that means demolishing the current City Hall, Dixon says he would support that.

“I love the building but that doesn’t mean it has to always be there,” Dixon says. “We are a more confident city now and should build a new city hall whose image reflects us as a city of profound creativity and innovation, a building that’s exuberant and celebratory with important public meeting places that will bring people there.”

What might that new image be? Seattle has chosen to have a showpiece of green technology as its new city hall. Austin’s is a stony mass with jutting angles. San Jose’s new 18-story municipal center with its attached glass rotunda is all about transparency of a government accessible to all. And London relocated its new city hall out of its center along the Thames into a dramatic glass egg with stunning interior balconies.

Violich suggests a chameleon-like building in Southie - one where changing images can be projected on the exterior and one that uses materials that harness energy from the sun and reflect light from the water.

But cutting-edge architect Monica Ponce de Leon of Office dA doesn’t think that city hall needs a new image. She adds that it’s less environmentally friendly to demolish an existing building, one she says was “built to last.”

“We shouldn’t tear down a building important to the history of architecture just because it’s fallen out of fashion - that’s short-sighted,” says Ponce de Leon, whose award-winning work includes the soon-to-open Macallen Building in South Boston, a high-design and environment-friendly condo complex, which will have a sloping grass-covered roof. “City Hall has personal memories for me - I got married there - and has a lot of public memories as well as a place of city celebrations when the Patriots [team stats] and Red Sox [team stats] won.”

But Maryann Thompson, who designed the award-winning pavilion and vine trellises project at Arnold Arboretum, thinks the current plaza should be turned into a park with “lots of big trees” and that the current building should be refitted to be brighter and more energy-efficient.

Harvard Design School planning head Rodolfo Machado, of Boston firm Machado and Silvetti Associates, who designed a park near the proposed Southie site, feels that the current city hall is a great building that should be left as is.

“City Halls don’t move easily,” says Machado, who also designed the posh Atelier/505 condo and theater complex in the South End. “I think it’s a good idea to put a major civic building on the waterfront, perhaps a City Hall annex.”

But Menino wants a new city hall in Southie, not an outpost.

“Whether we do this or not, it should not be the decision of one man,” Beha says. “All the citizens of the city need to be involved.”

[TREPYE]

The 1969-built City Hall, an international award-winning building, is generally liked by architects but has long been despised by the much of the public and the mayor, who wants a new icon to reflect 21st cenury Boston.

“I think building a new City Hall is a good idea as long as a new building is better than the current one,” says Tim Love, principal of Utile Inc., a firm that’s done master planning work on Southie’s Fort Point District, the edges along the new Greenway and Summer Street from downtown to the new convention center.

“But whether we do build it should also depend on what is done with the City Hall site which would have to be brilliantly redesigned to make the move worthwhile,” adds Love, who has also designed several high-style condo complexes in Southie. “I like the current building but there are better uses for its nine acres.”

Love suggests a public-private partnership that would ensure that what goes on the current site will be a mix of uses as well as open space of the highest quality rather than a development solely determined by the bottom line. And if what would replace City Hall was better, he says he would support demolishing it.

“We have to use our imagination on how to reuse the current City Hall,” says Violich, of influential cutting-edge firm Kennedy & Violich. He suggests turning the building into a performance center or even housing and adding higher-density development around it. “I like the building, but the city’s got to evolve. It’s time to move on.”

“The reason why we have the present City Hall building and plaza is because in the early 1960s Boston was desperate for renewal but that is no longer the case,” says David Dixon, a principal at the Hub’s Goody Clancy & Associates whose urban planning has won numerous national awards. “We now have a chance to add more vigor to this part of downtown that needs more people and more activity.”


As unfair as it sounds it seem to be the prevailing thought among "art history non-educated" Boston public.


Another interesting aspect (bigger than the nostalgic component) to this is what is it being replaced with. If it is another SOM type glass box then people would definitely rather have the brutalist City Hall. If its something like Calatrava's Path train station does it take the sting out of loosing it?

But I think this may be the best solution....


“You could add a glass addition on top with more space and redesign and brighten the interior to meet the needs of city government for the future,” she says. “Why rip City Hall out of the heart of the city and move it to the extremities? The South Boston Waterfront doesn’t need a city hall to be successful.”

Is this a reasonable compromise ablarc?

[pianoman11686]

Here’s some of the Boston post. Sorry about its length:

Don't apologize! It's eye-opening.


A duck is a building in the Modernist style that therefore is required to renounce ornament. Deeply desiring to be beautiful and loved, it hits upon this strategy: if I can’t use ornament to decorate myself, I’ll make my whole shape an ornament (sculpture). That ornamental form can be abstract (anything by Thom Mayne or Zaha Hadid; perhaps Boston City Hall) or representational (the famous Long Island building in the shape of a duck; most works of Frank Gehry; perhaps Boston City Hall).

Gotcha. So, in a way, "ducks" differentiate themselves from structures like the highly derivative Beaux-Arts by being theoretically innovative - a sign of creative thinking. I'll buy it, but I don't think it helps Boston City Hall's cause.

Someone's just got to communicate the building's achievement as a work of mental prowess. That, more than anything, makes it worth saving. Almost anyone can look at posterity and imitate it to be "pretty"; from the sounds of it, very few can accomplish, independently, what the architects of City Hall did.



Give it time.

Or maybe it’ll be like Finnegan’s Wake or Crime and Punishment: eternally difficult.

Should we perhaps burn Finnegan’s Wake?

Still can't stand Schoenberg. Haven't attempted Finnegan's Wake (yet).

[ablarc]

Is this a reasonable compromise ablarc?
Sure, especially if the original architects get to do it. They're still around, though they've changed their style.

[ManhattanKnight]

December 17, 2006
http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/17/nyregion/17house.600.jpg

Plan to Raze Home Prompts Belated Outcry

By DAVID HAY

WESTPORT, Conn. — At the end of a road lined with freshly minted, oversize colonial-style homes surrounded by carefully tended lawns is a jarring sight: an unusual 1970s house with shredded strips of its tar roof and quartz-covered walls torn away and spread about the yard.

In this stylish town where residents are waging what seems to be an all-out campaign to bolster its colonial image, teardowns are hardly an unusual sight. But many people are horrified that a Modernist home designed by a renowned architect is about to be razed.

Since a local Web site began spreading that news last month, a debate has erupted about the character of Westport and the future of the house, which is on sought-after Minute Man Hill Road.

It was designed by Paul Rudolph, who was the dean of the Yale School of Architecture from 1958 to 1965 and a student of the Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius. Mr. Rudolph, who died in 1997, built homes and public and commercial buildings. Among them are his penthouse apartment on Beekman Place in Manhattan, Yale’s Art and Architecture Building and the Burroughs Wellcome headquarters in North Carolina.

In an interview on the Web site, WestportNow.com, Morley Boyd, the chairman of the Westport Historic District Commission, said: “If you’re looking for shock value, it’s hard to beat the loss of this house. There is not much to top it.”

But in a town where 92 demolition permits have been issued so far this year, a celebrated lineage alone is not enough to save the house. Because it is not at least 60 years old, the historic commission does not have jurisdiction. “The house is not historically significant, and any view of how good or bad an architect Paul Rudolph was is purely subjective,” said David Waldman, who runs a commercial real estate company and whose wife is listed in town records as the buyer of the house.

Mr. Waldman said that his family wanted the house for the lot. “We have a family of three young children, and a modern structure wasn’t appealing to us,” he said.

The 4,200-square-foot house, which is to be razed this week, was commissioned by Louis Micheels, a former president of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Society, and his wife, Ina.

It is an elongated series of interconnecting cubes, whose eastern end, the master bedroom suite, hovers above a sloping hillside. Thin panels on cantilevers hang above large windows, keeping the sun at bay. And typical of the experiments with new materials for which Mr. Rudolph was known, pieces of Arctic quartz are embedded in the exterior stucco, giving the off-white walls a rough-hewn texture.

“Its overlapping planes and spaces open up beautifully to each other,” said Robert A.M. Stern, dean of Yale’s architecture school. “As with his other work of the time, Mr. Rudolph managed to synthesize the dynamism of Mies van der Rohe with the spatial inventiveness of our most famous architect, Frank Lloyd Wright.”

The Micheelses recently moved to Newton, Mass., after living in the house for more than 30 years. “We are getting pretty old and we wanted to be close to our children,” said Dr. Micheels, 89, a Dutch-born Auschwitz survivor who wrote “Doctor 117641: A Holocaust Memoir.”

Still, they said they left with fond memories. The openness of its interior and the terraces facing Long Island Sound were favorite aspects of the house.
“We could see out to the Norwalk Islands, and you can’t ask for more than that,” Dr. Micheels said.

In September 2005, he and his brokers began searching for a buyer who would appreciate the house’s architectural merits and be willing to pay almost $5 million for it.

But there were no offers, and the price was reduced by about $1 million. “People are not interested in houses from the 1970s,” said Marina Leo of the Higgins Group real estate agency, who was one of the brokers. Still, the recent outcry against tearing the home down reflects a feeling among many in Westport that they have lost an opportunity to preserve a significant building.

As Professor Stern put it: “All over the world people are waking up to the fact that Modernist houses are valuable works of art. The town of Westport will be diminished by this loss.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[ablarc]

^ More stupidity.

They have a perfect right to do this.

Everyone has the right to act stupid.

Some folks even make a living at it.

[ablarc]

An interesting comment from ArchBoston's elitist curmudgeon, justin:


Yeah, but this is a public building. It's the most public of all public buildings. You can't build that without democratic input.

You can and you should. Medical practice affects the lives of ordinary people far more directly and importantly than city government. Does that call for a system where one becomes a doctor by standing for an election? Should cancer treatments be determined by referendum? Of course not: Joe Sixpack can't make useful medical judgements. Leave it to the experts, regulated at arm's length by the government.

Should biological theories be judged by popular will? Well, it's been tried recently... In fact, the whole CIty Hall debate reminds me of the Kansas school board debacle, transposed into architcture.

Is architecture any different? Here is why it may appear so: when asked about angiogenesis inhibitors as a potential cancer treatment, the average Joe draws a blank, but he has no trouble reacting to a building. The problem is that he then proceeds to take his gut reaction as the ultimate authoritative opinion, in no need of articulation or justification. You need not go any farther than this thread to see examples of that. Read Sister's posts next to ablarc's, and then ask yourself: if you were unusure about what you thought about City Hall, whose opinion would be more likely to sway you?

So here I propose a fairly low bar for who should have a say: those who have seen a large enough sample of architecture to inform their opinions, and who can articulate those opinions beyond grunting 'cool' or 'sucks'. Notice that my criteria in no way prefer any particular taste: ablarc passes them par excellence, even though I disagree with him 40% of the time.

Ron is an interesting case: articulate all right, he seems far too ready to dismiss aesthetics over utility (City Hall, Charles/MGH and the South Station waiting room discussions stuck in my memory as examples of this). Utility is a perfectly intelligible criterion, moreover one to which architecture should pay a fair bit of heed. But there are many fewer museums dedicated to flush toilets than to painting, even though the former are infinitely more useful. And is it not willful to construe usefulness so narrowly as to exclude aesthetics? Does a public building not play a useful role by exposing the citizenry to architecture that rises above the ordinary or is even challenging? Does this not outweigh the mild annoyance that 10% of the people paying their parking tickets experience when they take a wrong turn in one of City Hall's labyrinthine corridors? (City Hall has its flaws; I'm as aware of that as J.S. But fix it, don't nix it.)

In fact, I submit that calling for a vote on what constitutes good architecture is a misunderstanding not only of art, but of democracy. One doesn't give everybody the vote because everybody can meaningfully contribute to a debate on interest rates or the Near East. Rather, the people (and far be it from me to use the Greek term) function much like water does in a nuclear reactor: an inert mass that keeps the energy source (the elite) from spinning out of control.

The leaders of the Slaveowners' Rebellion of 1776 got it right: aristocratic republic is the ideal form of government. How much more so in matters of taste...

justin

[kz1000ps]

And the equally interesting response by ArchBoston's Briv:


Justin, if you were arguing against democratic input into the engineering of buildings I would agree completely. This aspect of architecture – ensuring a building does not collapse – is in a sense even more crucial than a cancer treatment or any other medical procedure because virtually every person on Earth occupies buildings. Therefore, unsoundly engineered construction has the potential to kill virtually everyone on Earth. Anyone who would advocate that Joe Sixpack be allowed to affect the engineering of a building would be summarily laughed at.


But you’re comparing the artistic aspects of architecture to life-or-death medicine. I just don’t think the argument carries water.


All art, including the art infused in architecture, is trivial – as much as it pains me to admit. There are no lives at stake here and if every piece of art on the planet were to vanish tomorrow we’d still get by. We may be a bit bored, but we’d still get by. Art is not a necessity.


Art is also a very subjective thing, unlike, say, physics or human biology. You cant really get it wrong, IMO, because art really requires the perceiver to complete its circuit, so to speak. It is that act of a person perceiving that thing, and responding to it that finally makes it art. Joe Sixpack's interpretation is as valid as Professor Whoever's. I think it is arrogant to dismiss the point-of-views of those unschooled in the esoterica of art/architectural theory. I dont believe that some special education is essential in forming a critical judgment about a piece of architecture or art. In fact, when it comes to City Hall, I believe it only serves to cloud and contaminate one’s true perception of the thing. This building communicates so loudly on such a fundamentally visceral level that I feel it is on these terms most of all by which it should be evaluated. Almost invariably, people have an instant emotional reaction to this building. It is one of revulsion, loathing, and general negativity. Why do we feel the need to think this reaction away? Seeing that such a reaction is so universal, don’t you think it is interesting, important and indicative of something real?


I'm all for knocking down City Hall and attempting to bring life back to Scolley Square. I think Kallman and McKinnell’s monster is a perversion of architecture, a symbol of undemocratic government, and a necrotic legion in the fabric of Boston. Urbanistically, it is the singularity around which that black hole called Government Center swirls.


I don’t believe that it is worth preserving on the grounds that it is some virtuoso example of that flash in the pan architectural fad known as Brutalism. IMO, there are countless better, far more interesting examples of the style in existence. The work of Gottfried Bohm and Fritz Wotruba, for example, make City Hall's tectonic voodoo, which Ablarc writes so passionately about, look downright pedestrian. Even Corbu and Rudolph had the good sense to take advantage of concrete's plasticity, unlike City Hall which is composed almost entirely of axonometric right angles. Not to mention that Kallman and McKinnel themselves have a much finer specimen of Brutalism in their Five Cent Saving Bank, IMO. Furthermore, City Hall is not original. It's a shameless riff on Corbusier's La Tourette. Perhaps all these Little Boston City Halls everyone keeps mentioning are actually Little LaTourette's?


Dont Worry, after City Hall is gone there will still be plenty more Brutalism you can visit. Chances are you wont even have to go very far – just to your nearest parking garage. And isnt it interesting that Brutalism found its true calling as the style of choice for parking garages? I attribute this to the fact that cars are incapable of feeling alienated, impotent or afraid.


To be continued...

[lofter1]

The (De-) Evolution of Brutalism ...





ArchBoston's Briv:
... City Hall is not original. It's a shameless riff on Corbusier's La Tourette ...
Convent of La Tourette (http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Convent_of_La_Tourette.html) (1957 - 1960; Le Corbusier) ...

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/da/Ste_marie_de_la_tourette_2001.jpg/350px-Ste_marie_de_la_tourette_2001.jpg

http://data.greatbuildings.com/gbc/images/cid_2463890.jpg

Begat BostonCityHall (http://www.greatbuildings.com/buildings/Boston_City_Hall.html) (1963 - 1968; Kallman, McKinnell and Knowles) ...

http://francois.schreuer.org/IMG/cache-600x450/boston_01-600x450.jpg (http://francois.schreuer.org/IMG/jpg/boston_01.jpg)

Begat J. Edgar Hoover Building (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Edgar_Hoover_Building) aka FBI Headquarters (http://www.fbi.gov/libref/historic/hooverbuilding/hqhistory.htm), Washington D.C. (1964 - 1974; Charles F. Murphy and Associates) ...

http://www.vu.union.edu/~fialkao/photos/washington/fbi.jpg

http://www.mccullagh.org/db9/1ds2-4/fbi-headquarters.jpg
copyright © 1989-2006 by Declan McCullagh (http://www.mccullagh.org/about/bio.html)

[ablarc]

^ lofter, as you know, you can do that with Penn Station, St. Patrick's Cathedral and Madison Square's MetLife Building --all only slightly diminished by that fact.

The first two examples you selected are architectural masterpieces, the third is a POS.

[Jasonik]

http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/wisconsin/milwaukee/saarinen/distantfrmsw.jpg (http://www.bluffton.edu/~sullivanm/wisconsin/milwaukee/saarinen/memorial.html)

It could be argued that Eero Saarinen did it first in 1957.

[BPC]

^ lofter, as you know, you can do that with Penn Station, St. Patrick's Cathedral and Madison Square's MetLife Building --all only slightly diminished by that fact.

The first two examples you selected are architectural masterpieces, the third is a POS.

Some day someone will have to explain the genius of the Le Corbusier monastery to me. (Prof. Scully tried and failed.) It has to be the ugliest building in all of France. Of course, that would be the French building America picked to copy, over and over again.

[TallGuy]

Oppressive. I wouldn't even want to walk into that monastery. (or Boston City Hall) For a city of its' stature, Boston has perhaps the worst city hall that i am aware of.

[Fabrizio]

"Some day someone will have to explain the genius of the Le Corbusier monastery to me. (Prof. Scully tried and failed.)"

For starters:

Go through these images:

http://www.arcspace.com/architects/corbusier/La_Tourette/

Then go through these images:

http://www.abcgallery.com/P/picasso/picasso-6.html

Drive one of these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Citroen2cvtff.jpg

Smoke these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Gitanes.jpg

eat this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Camembert.JPG

[lofter1]

Lofter -- The first two examples you selected are architectural masterpieces, the third is a POS.

It seems that with Brutalism we ultimately ended up with a whole bucketload of POS ...

I tried to find a picture of One Police Plaza in Manhattan as the next stage in the de-evolution that Brutalism has brought us, but it seems no one posts pictures of that HORRID POS ...

Is it that with Brutalism the forms are so strong that it requires a deeper level of artistry to make such buildings work?

[Fabrizio]

I dont think Brutalism can be as successful in the US. You need lush romantic architecture as a foil, you need ancient monuments as a point of reference, you need fortresses, ruins....you need to have come out of 2 world wars. You MUST have a Socialist spirit. I just dont think its an American thing.

[ablarc]

Is it that with Brutalism the forms are so strong that it requires a deeper level of artistry to make such buildings work?
That's pretty perceptive, lofter. Yes.

Also: as with any acquired taste, it requires commitment to appreciate.

[stache]

...you need to have come out of 2 world wars.

We did, actually. And we won both of them.

[ablarc]

We did, actually. And we won both of them.
Well then, how do you explain that we don't like Brutalism? ;)

[lofter1]

Same reasons ^^^ many Americans don't "get" deconstructivism ...

[TREPYE]

Now that I am more educated (thanks to ablarc) about BCH I realize that while it seems to be a creative piece of work does it really serve an emblem to the city of Boston? Yes its design speaks of government, but what does it say about Boston itself. The reason that I kept on using the Municipal Building as a comparison is because it is not just a "mere picturesque pastiche, a pretty re-arrangement of pre-existent themes" but rather a building that, in essence, its supposed to represent the city of New York.

From New York Architectural Images http://www.nyc-architecture.com/SCC/SCC030.htm

Roman Imperial, Renaissance Revival (http://www.nyc-architecture.com/STYLES/STY-Renaissance.htm)
Basing the design on their competition entry for Grand Central Station, McKim Mead and White interpreted New York City's greatest civic skyscraper in an eclectic fashion incorporating elements from from Roman Imperial, Italian Renaissance and French Renaissance architecture. The tripartite facade organization echoes that of a classical column. An arcaded loggia forms a triumphal arch marking the terminal point of Chambers Street. Above the ground floor colonnade, sculptural reliefs emphasize civic virtues: Progress, Civic Duty, Guidance and Executive Power, Civic Pride and Prudence. Emblems of municipal departments adorn panels between the second floor windows.


The design was influenced by the "City Beautiful" movement of the 1890s which promoted plans for creating public buildings in landscaped parks. The mid-part of the 34-storey tripartite facade is a U-shaped mass of austere light-toned granite over a high colonnade that forms the building's base and separates a front yard from the sidewalk. The top facade forms a colonnade of Corinthian columns and pilasters.
On the top, above the middle section of the building, there are three tiered drums on top of another, flanked by four smaller pinnacle turrets, symbolizing the four boroughs joined to Manhattan. At the height of 177 m stands the 6 m high statue Civic Fame by Adolph A. Weinman, New York City's second largest statue after the Statue of Liberty. The statue holds a crown with five turrets, symbolizing New York City's five boroughs.

For this reason I find this to be the perfect "civic" building (and I am totally against its condo conversion). Yeah its pretty and easy to look at but it also has depth that goes beyond its picturesque elements.


While Ablarc has pointed out some great reasons to like BCH and some interesting correlations that play to the virtues or pitfalls of government (my personal favorite is how it represents a "top heavy" govt:p ). I, for one, don't think it is a good city hall or civic govt building for the city of Boston. A good ambassador to brutalism and structural symbolism, perhaps, not a good city hall,

[Fabrizio]

Stache: "And we won both of them."

You are making my point.

Guys really.... read "From Bauhaus to our House" by Tom Wolfe

Living in Europe helps.

Brutalism is probably the most intellectually loaded architecture to come out of Europe. It is a European experience. IMHO it can only make little-to-no sense for most Americans.

http://www.amazon.com/Bauhaus-Our-House-Tom-Wolfe/dp/055338063X

And we must talk about Socialism. We can not have a discussion about Corbusier and such architecture with out it.

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=8438

Also European abstract art to further put things in context:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Stijl

What does any of this have to do with the American spirit?

Treypes doubts make sense.

So, although I certainly appreciate the Boston City Hall.... I can understand the stronger sentiments for a Penn Station (and the like)... what it is about, and what it represents.




----

[ablarc]

Thanks, Fabrizio, for statements that had to be made --and that nowadays represent a “European perspective.” ‘Twas not always so.

Reading through the thrice-familiar points in the Socialist Worker (http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=8438_.php)’s article I realized this stuff might not be so thrice-familiar to everybody; most Americans don’t get much schooling in the social and intellectual history of the past century or two --particularly now that the “Evil Empire” has collapsed and socialism no longer “needs to be understood.”

I was particularly struck by the oh-so-true closing paragraph and its oh-so-central point that no-one --including me-- had bothered to make about Modernist architecture:


Modernist movements in architecture were always essentially utopian, and as such suffered a fate common to all attempts at utopia under capitalism. But rather than dismiss them and abandon our cities to speculators and their twee Victoriana, we could build on the foundations of the utopians, much as Marxism took its moral force from experimenters like Charles Fourier and Robert Owen. Then, as Ernst Bloch put it, “the island utopia rises out of the sea of the possible”.

Boston City Hall is utopian. It demands a better breed of human being to live up to its Spartan rigors. That is why it’s so much hated in our easy-living times.

[lofter1]

In Tale of Church vs. School, a New Orleans Dilemma

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/19/us/19orleans_lg.jpg
Lee Celano for The New York Times
The St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, built in the 1960s, is on a site in the Gentilly neighborhood
of New Orleans where a Catholic school wants to move. Preservationists have stalled a proposed demolition.

nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/us/19orleans.html?ref=us)
By ADAM NOSSITER
December 19, 2006

NEW ORLEANS, Dec. 18 — The past always seems to be gaining on the new New Orleans. Just when one foot seems to lift out of the post-hurricane muck, the other slips.

In the latest entanglement, the move of a historic Catholic school, promising rebirth for the battered Gentilly neighborhood, has been stymied by preservationists. The school had planned to tear down an abandoned 1960s-era church in Gentilly in order to rebuild, but preservationists here said the austere, modernist structure was worth saving.

Providing an unexpected assist to the preservationists is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is vital in financing the school’s move but is balking, for now.

Dismayed politicians and residents of the emptied Gentilly district, desperate for any hint of confidence in New Orleans’s future, are crying foul. Barely a third of residents have returned to the neighborhood, one of the city’s black middle-class centers.

“This could be a blow that the neighborhood may not be able to come back from,” said Cynthia Hedge Morrell, the district’s city councilwoman. “Are you saying,” she said, “that a piece of concrete is more valuable than humans?”

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/19/us/1219-nat-ORLEANS-clr.jpg
The New York Times
The school’s choice of Gentilly had cheered residents seeking renewal.

The dispute is typical of the tough choices routinely forced to the surface here in Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath. Moving on or moving back is a theme playing out across the city, notably in a fierce struggle over the future of public housing projects.

Other signs of faltering renewal abound, like companies shifting their headquarters and employees out of the city, developers waiting on tax credits, and homeowners looking in vain for aid checks. Building projects are numerous on paper, but actual construction is much harder to detect, and it will be several years before inexpensive housing is developed.

A new survey by the University of New Orleans suggests that one-third of residents, weary of the waiting game, are thinking of leaving, and soon.

At the heart of the church standoff is the Holy Cross School, a fixture on the riverbank in the Lower Ninth Ward since the 1870s. It usually educates more than 800 boys in grades 5 through 12. The school, inundated by Hurricane Katrina, now operates out of trailers at about 60 percent of its old enrollment levels, and it wants to leave the moribund, vulnerable area it colonized when the Lower Ninth Ward was still farmland.

The school flirted with moving to the Jefferson Parish suburbs, an idea that is generally poison to city residents. But then it said it would stay in New Orleans, proposing to move to Gentilly. That decision was a rare thumbs up for the city, and even citizens living far from Gentilly felt a boost that a pillar of New Orleans’s old-line Catholic establishment would be staying.

In Gentilly itself, where on a weekday morning the loudest sound is the wind rustling through dead tree branches, there was jubilation, as well as visions of loud schoolboys and teachers crowding the empty sidewalks.

“I can’t tell you the overwhelming joy people felt with this announcement,” said Scott Darrah, president of the Gentilly Civic Improvement Association. “It was one of the most joyous occasions people in this community had had since the flood, one of the most hope-filled occasions. People all over were sending me e-mails saying, ‘Thank you, we’re so thrilled.’ ”

It is not hard to see why. Vacant houses and empty windows stare across the street at the 18-acre site that the school’s independent board is buying, at a reasonable price, from the Archdiocese of New Orleans. At intervals a trailer in a front yard indicates an owner’s rare interest in the future. All seems ready for redevelopment — or abandonment.

But there was a hitch in the good news. The site chosen by the school contains the St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, one of the city’s rare expressions of mid-20th-century modernism, an unusual structure with a white knitting-needle spire poking out from a thin, curled concrete roof that seems to float over the church’s brick-box body.

It has hardly been on the city’s list of must-see landmarks, and with its resemblance to a giant kitchen appliance, it gets mixed reviews from architects.

“It’s certainly an important modernist building, locally,” said Errol Barron, a leading New Orleans architect.

The church has been unused since the storm, and the local archdiocese was ready to part with it. The school, saying it needed the site cleared, was preparing a date with the wrecking ball. Fixing up the church and maintaining it would be too expensive, school officials said. They ringed the site with bright yellow signs advertising enrollment.

But rumblings from preservation-minded former parishioners, who had moved elsewhere, began percolating upward. The New Orleans Historic District Landmarks Commission voted to study the church, and school officials, construction plans at the ready, started to get uneasy.

Then the city’s de facto tutelary deity stepped in: FEMA decided the church might be eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. And that was a position with potentially deep consequences for the Holy Cross School, one that could mean no federal money — a potential $20 million — to help it relocate.

“It was very much of a surprise to us,” said William Chauvin, chairman of the Holy Cross board of trustees. “The archdiocese had no intention of keeping that facility.”

Now, all is on hold, a frustration to the school and its supporters. In a statement on Monday, FEMA said it was required to “evaluate the potential historic significance” of the church, though late in November an agency official wrote that it had already determined that the church was eligible to be in the National Register. Mr. Chauvin interpreted the shift in wording as a softening of FEMA’s position.

The State of Louisiana and the National Park Service must also weigh in on the church’s precise significance.

Its fans are as passionate as those yearning for Gentilly to come back. “A very exciting place to worship,” said Stephen Verderber, a professor of architecture at Tulane University, “the exact opposite architecturally from the traditional design of a church.”

But Bruce Velez, a contractor living in a trailer across the street as he fixes up a gutted house, said, “If they keep messing around, the school will go somewhere else.” Mr. Velez longs for the school.

“We were lucky to get it,” he said, looking down the empty street. “I wish they’d hurry up and tear the church down. You’re going to have kids from the 5th to the 12th grades. I mean, think about it. That’s a lot of people.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

***

More on St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church from the wetbankguide.blogspot :

In the Brown Zone with Mother Cabrini (http://wetbankguide.blogspot.com/2006/06/in-brown-zone-with-mother-cabrini.html)

Cathedral of the Lakefront (http://wetbankguide.blogspot.com/2006/11/cathedral-of-lakefront.html)

http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/262/3365/320/CabriniRoofSm.jpg
St. Francis Cabrini Church, Paris Avenue, New Orleans

http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/262/3365/400/fxcabrini8m.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/262/3365/320/fxcabrini8m.jpg)
The nave and sanctuary of Cabrini

***

Squandered Heritage in The Big Easy

http://arcchicago.blogspot.com/2006/12/squandered-heritage-in-big-easy.html

From our New Orleans correspondent Laureen Lentz, a former Chicago native, comes word of Squandered Heritage (http://squanderedheritage.com/), a website she's created with Karen Gadbois to document threats to the city's architectural legacy in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

The site includes one prominent building, the striking and beautiful St. Frances Xavier Cabrini Church, a modernist design dedicated in 1963, shown here in photographs by David Gregor. It's become the focus (http://wetbankguide.blogspot.com/2006/11/cathedral-of-lakefront.html) of a last ditch battle to prevent its demolition by the archidiocese for a new school.

http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5831/865/400/696865/299758253_d9dce90b25.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5831/865/1600/419239/299758253_d9dce90b25.jpg)

http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5831/865/400/700447/302937389_bdb7397f64.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5831/865/1600/324490/302937389_bdb7397f64.jpg)

And while most of the other structures pictured on the website are much more modest, perhaps even mundane, they're reminder of how a rich architectural heritage is dependent not just on prominent monuments but on a consistent fabric of buildings of distinctive character, such as the house on Deslonde Street, pictured below, an elegant example of the New Orleans type of shotgun structure that the website reports has been saved and is now undergoing renovation.

http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5831/865/400/739970/303012325_01067d08d5.jpg (http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/5831/865/1600/591481/303012325_01067d08d5.jpg)

[lofter1]

Plan to Raze Home Prompts Belated Outcry

http://graphics10.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/17/nyregion/17house.600.jpg


A Reprieve in Connecticut for a Modernist House


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/23/nyregion/23house_lg.jpg
Janet Durrans for The New York Times
A historic preservation group hopes to save a 4,200-square-foot stucco house designed in 1972 by Paul Rudolph.


nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/nyregion/23house.html?_r=1&ref=nyregion&oref=slogin)
By DAVID HAY
December 23, 2006

STAMFORD, Conn., Dec. 22 — A Connecticut judge on Friday ordered demolition halted on a Modernist house designed by a renowned architect, a project that has provoked a heated controversy in the wealthy town of Westport.


But the judge, Taggart D. Adams of State Superior Court, refused a request by a historic preservation group to order the owner of the house or its prospective buyer to cover the roof, which has been stripped of its tar covering, leaving the interior exposed. The group, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation, had argued that with rain forecast over the weekend, the house could suffer “demolition by neglect.”


The 4,200-square-foot stucco house, designed in 1972 by Paul Rudolph, stands out among its outsize Colonial-style neighbors at the end of Minute Man Hill Road. It is an elongated series of interconnecting cubes with cantilevered panels that hang above large windows. Pieces of Arctic quartz stud the exterior stucco, giving the off-white walls a rough-hewn texture.


Because the house is less than 60 years old, the Westport Historic District Commission cannot legally seek to delay the demolition. David Waldman, whose wife, Yvette, is listed as the prospective buyer, has said they planned to tear down the Rudolph house and rebuild because they did not think a modern structure was suitable for their family.


Mr. Rudolph, who died in 1997, was dean of the Yale School of Architecture in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was known for designing his own penthouse apartment on Beekman Place in Manhattan, the Bass house in Fort Worth, and the Burroughs Wellcome headquarters in North Carolina.


The damage to the house was visible from Minute Man Hill Road on Friday morning. A backhoe had pushed over a quartz-covered wall attached to the garage and damaged a beam supporting the entry to the front door. Windows in the living room had been smashed. Small “No Trespassing” signs had been posted, but the front door to the house was open.


The developments in court came a day after a representative from the Paul Rudolph Foundation in New York, Nepal Asatthawasi, said she had witnessed workers arriving to proceed with the interior demolition. The town has not yet granted a demolition permit, but until Friday, it had no legal grounds to deny one.


Ms. Asatthawasi, who had brought two Manhattan photographers to document the house, said Mr. Waldman asked her to leave the premises. A police officer was also on the scene.


In court on Friday, Judge Adams set another hearing on the dispute for Jan. 2 and urged the parties to come to an agreement to protect the roof. Marc Kurzman, representing Mr. Waldman, was skeptical, citing problems with liability and the likelihood of injury in allowing outside workers on the property.


After the hearing, Philip N. Walker, a lawyer for the Connecticut Trust, said it would continue to push for an agreement to cover the roof. A lawyer for the owner, Louis Micheels, was at the hearing but did not comment.


Helen Higgins, executive director of the Connecticut Trust, said: “It is good that no more demolition can take place. But it’s not good that the property can’t be secured.” Neither Mr. Waldman nor his lawyers would answer a reporter’s questions outside the courtroom on Friday.


Outside the courtroom, Mr. Waldman showed few signs of backing down. He showed his lawyers plans for the new house to be erected on the site. It will include a three-car garage and be finished by next Thanksgiving, he told them. The Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation remained steadfast.


“This state has long been a center for Modernist architecture,” Ms. Higgins said. “It’s a beautiful building and needs to be preserved.”


Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

[stache]

Guys really.... read "From Bauhaus to our House" by Tom Wolfe



Thanks I've read it. Plus I think you're pretending to live in Italy. I've watched your posts for quite some time now and you exhibit too much knowledge of day to day N.Y. to live so far away. It's always better to win a war than to lose one.

[Bob]

Guys, really now...we could lose the FBI Headquarters Building, the Yale Art and Architecture Building, and just about every other brutalist structure in the U.S., and be better off for it. Just now, for example, the New Haven Coliseum is being demolished. I don't see a lot of crocodile tears for that. Good reason!!

[TREPYE]

Guys, really now...we could lose the FBI Headquarters Building, the Yale Art and Architecture Building, and just about every other brutalist structure in the U.S., and be better off for it.

The Metlife Tower should have been first on that list.

http://www.wirednewyork.com/skyscrapers/metlife/images/metlife_grand_central.jpg

Ugh! How Embarrasing.....

[Fabrizio]

Stache writes:

"Plus I think you're pretending to live in Italy. I've watched your posts for quite some time now and you exhibit too much knowledge of day to day N.Y. to live so far away."

"too much knowledge of day to day N.Y." ....example?

-------

Treype: IMHO the ugly building in that photo is the poorly done postmodern Phillip Morris POS on the left.

If the MetLife were in another location... I think it would be considered one of NYs best.

[ablarc]

If the MetLife were in another location... I think it would be considered one of NYs best.
Actually, I think that about it right in its present location.

I like the lobby's relationship to Grand Central; coming down the ecalators is always a thrill, while the contrast of styles is satisfying.

And I like the way it provides a backdrop for Helmsley and solid closure to upper Park Avenue's space. I bet most folks look south like me when crossing upper Park Avenue; the endless open vista to the north is ungratifying by comparison.

[ablarc]

...I think you're pretending to live in Italy. I've watched your posts for quite some time now and you exhibit too much knowledge of day to day N.Y. to live so far away.
stache, it's not so hard for out-of-town folks who have lived in New York to keep up with present events --thanks partly to this forum-- and an occasional visit makes it more vivid in your mind.

A New Yorker who's a stick-in-the-mud likely knows less about what's going on in the City than this forum's enthusiastic out-of-towners.

[Fabrizio]

If we had to have a building go up behind Grand Central... could anything have been more intellegent looking than this?:

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=87806565&size=l

---

...notice how the PanAm (I just gotta call it the PanAm), in its own modern way, stands up to the Chrysler:

(Donald Trump should be put in jail and fined for his dumb-a$$ed intervention here)

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=87806442&size=l

How many post WWII towers have a skin this rich?

[TREPYE]

If we had to have a building go up behind Grand Central... could anything have been more intellegent looking than this?:


http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=87806565&size=l

---

...notice how the PanAm (I just gotta call it the PanAm), in its own modern way, stands up to the Chrysler:

(Donald Trump should be put in jail and fined for his dumb-a$$ed intervention here)

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=87806442&size=l

How many post WWII towers have a skin this rich?

I am going to have to respectfully, but emphatically disagree. Look I know that here we base our comments on personal opinion and preference. But to me this is an abominable inexcusable blemish in NYC's texture. I cannot for the life of me find any palatability to this building -AT ALL. To me along with 55 Water St, and One New York Place, One Penn Plaza, One Chase Plaza represent everything a tower should not be and that is a is large indistinguishable space filling model. Bulk disproportionate pieces of garbage. You folks wanna call it modernism/international and justify its underwhelming nature on and architectural movement, then fine go ahead. To me its a dressed pig. These styles that came about in the 60's is to an extent are a glorification of space filling models. Bottomline for the doldrums of the 60's cheaper to make. You save on the absence of ornamentation and even an actual scale model since you don't have to add much details to them. And I could just read those developers minds as they come up with such fecality: "more office space more profit, who gives a flying f--- about what this does to the character of a city".

Intelligent looking, rich skin <double take>.......
http://www.wirednewyork.com/skyscrapers/metlife/images/metlife_grand_central.jpg

besides down right ugly/banal/low quality looking how about grossly uncontextual. Surrounded by classy elegant relics of the past that epitomize class, elegance and a touch of symbolism in Greek mythology this monstrosity serves only as an obtrusive partition between them.



There is no worse and cheaper looking facade in NYC than that patchwork of grey black and dirty granite that -with not exaggeration- looks disgusting. The only thing this tower serves for is a representation of how bad things could be, with the only problem being is that what could have been became. IMHO in terms of size, facade the Metlife is the rockbottom low standard in architecture.

[Derek2k3]

SNAP!

Man that was scathing, I almost feel sorry for Metlife. I think there are many ugly buildings from the 60's that I and many people just got use to. If you have an ugly friend long enough you stop noticing the ugly and can't imagine being without them....like those ugly twins.

[stache]

Stache writes:



"too much knowledge of day to day N.Y." ....example?

-------



I'll give one the next time you do it. Happy holiday.

[ManhattanKnight]

There is no worse and cheaper looking facade in NYC than that patchwork of grey black and dirty granite that -with not exaggeration- looks disgusting.

Granite not. Pre-cast concrete

[kz1000ps]

Fabrizio must've been a bit woozy from the holiday wine and mistook the Metlife for Milan's Pirelli Building. That's the only explanation I can come up with.

[Fabrizio]

guys, guys, guys....

I'm well aware of how this building is hated by the public ...and note that I mention the tower's unfortunate position.

From Wikipedias otherwise scathing review of the building (no author credit given):

"While condemned by some, many of the most influential architects of the twentieth century have commended the MetLife Building since its completion. With a shape similar to that of Pirelli Tower in Milan, MetLife is subtle while unique in its lozenge shape, in affect referencing its monumental position. Set apart from many of its contemporaries, MetLife has a heavy pre-cast facade that might have appealed to those looking for an historicist design. The importance of this design and the stress placed on its subtleties may be clearer after a close look at both Gropius's other tall building projects, such as the Chicago Tribune Tower competition."

And lets at least be honest about a few things:

Treype writes:

"...that patchwork of grey black and dirty granite that -with not exaggeration- looks disgusting."

Dirty? Actually the building was recently cleaned and is immpeccable condition. And it better be considering that: "In 2005, MetLife sold the building for $1.72 billion, the highest recorded price for an office building in the United States." (wikipedia).

The material of the skin IS concrete (a hallmark of Brutalism) but it is mixed with quartz chips (sparkle). Critizing the building for its use of concrete would be like critizing the WTC for having had skin of aluminum. Humble materials, but both the WTC and Metlife appeared to be of stone.

Treype writes: "Surrounded by classy elegant relics of the past that epitomize class, elegance and a touch of symbolism in Greek mythology this monstrosity serves only as an obtrusive partition between them."

Actually the symbolism here (as with the Seagrams and many other buildings of the International style) is the Greek/Roman Ionic order... complete with an abacus at the top:

[Fabrizio]

treype:

"These styles that came about in the 60's is to an extent are a glorification of space filling models. Bottomline for the doldrums of the 60's cheaper to make. You save on the absence of ornamentation and even an actual scale model since you don't have to add much details to them. "


A taste for the clean, minimal, unadorned can be seen in the past as well:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bob_duck/240146508/

http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=221523159&size=o

[ZippyTheChimp]

There is no worse and cheaper looking facade in NYC than that patchwork of grey black and dirty granite that -with not exaggeration- looks disgusting.


Dirty? Actually the building was recently cleaned and is immpeccable condition.

The material of the skin IS concrete (a hallmark of Brutalism) but it is mixed with quartz chips (sparkle). Critizing the building for its use of concrete would be like critizing the WTC for having had skin of aluminum. Humble materials, but both the WTC and Metlife appeared to be of stone.

^
Lousy photo taken pre-renovation.

The facade is crisp and interesting.
http://www.pbase.com/zippythechimp/image/26300067.jpg

http://www.pbase.com/zippythechimp/image/14636419.jpg

[schwenko]

When was the renovation?


^
Lousy photo taken pre-renovation.

The facade is crisp and interesting.
http://www.pbase.com/zippythechimp/image/26300067.jpg

http://www.pbase.com/zippythechimp/image/14636419.jpg

[lofter1]

MetLife Facade restoration seemingly took place in 2001 - 2002 ...

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3601/is_4_48/ai_78438037

http://www.tishmanspeyer.com/properties/Property.aspx?id=57

[ablarc]

^ Too bad they didn't restore the PanAm logo while they were at it. So much classier than MetLife's undistinguished graphics...

[lofter1]

Modernist No More:
Home by Famous Architect Is Razed




A Reprieve in Connecticut for a Modernist House


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/12/23/nyregion/23house_lg.jpg
Janet Durrans for The New York Times
A historic preservation group hopes to save a 4,200-square-foot stucco house
designed in 1972 by Paul Rudolph.



http://www.westportnow.com/ee/images/uploads/rudolphdemomatlow01130706apop.jpg

Dave Matlow for WestportNow.com
By early afternoon today, wrecking crews had little left to demolish of the house at Westport’s 16 Minute Man Hill.


nytimes.com (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/14/nyregion/14rudolph.html?_r=1&oref=slogin)
By DAVID HAY
January 14, 2007


WESTPORT, Conn., Jan. 13 — A Modernist house designed by the renowned architect Paul Rudolph and at the center of a highly public dispute over its demolition was being torn down Saturday, despite a last-minute effort by the state attorney general to save it.


Crews arrived at the property on Minute Man Hill Road just after 8 a.m. When they began demolishing the house, the police ordered members of the news media out of the immediate area.


As the morning wore on, trash-hauling trucks carried away the remnants of the 4,200-square-foot home designed in 1972 by Mr. Rudolph, the chairman of Yale’s School of Architecture in the early 1960s. The house was an elongated series of interconnecting cubes, with the eastern end hovering over the ground. By the afternoon, little of it remained.


Mr. Rudolph studied under Walter Gropius at Harvard. Later, he became famous for residences like the world-renowned Bass house in Fort Worth, Tex., and commercial buildings like the Burroughs Wellcome headquarters in North Carolina.


According to Westportnow.com (http://westportnow.com/), David Waldman and his wife, Yvette, who is buying the property, were on hand for the demolition. An attempt by Connecticut’s attorney general, Richard Blumenthal, to get a restraining order preventing the demolition failed on Friday.


He said that the judge, Taggart D. Adams of State Superior Court in Stamford, rejected the request because the house was not yet listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The judge had given the parties in an earlier suit, the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation and Mr. Waldman, a Westport developer, until 5 p.m. Friday to reach a deal.


“I was unable to get them to come to an agreement,” Mr. Blumenthal said.
Negotiations failed even though the trust had found a potential buyer: Steven Campus, the owner of a penthouse on Beekman Place in Manhattan that Mr. Rudolph designed for himself. Mr. Campus confirmed Saturday that he had made an offer.


Nepal Asatthawasi of the Paul Rudolph Foundation, who said she was ordered away from the site, called the demolition “a great loss.”


She said in a statement on Friday night that “as more and more architecturally significant modern homes reach critical points of neglect and eventual demolition, the consequences of devaluing the artifacts of our recent history will be felt by future generations.”


Morley Boyd, the chairman of the Westport Historic District Commission, said, “An irreplaceable piece of our town, indeed our state’s, architectural heritage has been consigned to a landfill. It’s hard to fathom.”


Neighbors who walked by in the morning rain were curious. “That house was on the market for months and no one bought it,” said one who declined to be identified. “Where was the Paul Rudolph Foundation then?”


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company


***

Rudolph-Designed House Comes Down

http://www.westportnow.com/ee/images/uploads/rudolphdemomatlow01130702pop.jpg
Dave Matlow for WestportNow.com
Today’s demolition of 16 Minute Man Hill ended weeks of controversy during which
preservationists tried to save the structure.

westportnow.com (http://www.westportnow.com/index.php?/v2/comments/15895/)
By Jennifer Connic
December 13, 2007

Following failed efforts by preservationists to save it, the house at Westport’s 16 Minute Man Hill designed by Modernist architect Paul Rudolph was demolished today.

Precisely at 9 a.m.—when construction can begin on weekends in Westport—a giant yellow claw of an excavator began attacking the corner of the structure as contract owners David and Yvette Waldman looked on in a light rain. By the end of the afternoon, it was gone.

The Waldmans hired a policeman to keep journalists and the curious off the property as the demolition got underway.

“It’s sadly ironic that as interest in Modernist architecture is awakening, this house goes down,” said Morley Boyd, Westport Historic District Commission chairman. “This serves as an example that underscores the importance of designating a home as historic. If a house is not designated, it isn’t safe.”

Boyd, who stood with the crowd of on Compo Road South because they were not allowed near the demolition site, said the scene was eerie.

“I’m not sure if it was because of the weather or the circumstances,” he said. “It was a disconnected feeling. We knew what was going on. I think it was more upsetting that we could not see it happen.”

Michael Glynn, an architect who had worked to try to preserve the home, said he stayed in New York because the situation was too upsetting.

“I don’t want to see it,” he said. “I can’t even bare to look at the photos. It’s so retching. I worked on this for six weeks. You don’t want it to become personal, but at some point it does.”


http://www.westportnow.com/ee/images/uploads/011307_MINUTEMANHILL.jpg
Dave Matlow for WestportNow.com
A member of the demolition crew at 16 Minute Man Hill in Westport sweeps up the steps this afternoon.
Most of the house, which was designed by Paul Rudolph, was taken down by early afternoon.


The house is not only important architecturally to Westport, he said, but it’s also an important national and international example of Rudolph’s work.

“This will reach a national and international level,” he said. “We just didn’t have enough time (to save the house). We did the best we could.”

The Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation had attempted to secure an injunction on the demolition, but the Waldman and the trust settled a week ago on the case.

Under the settlement terms, the Waldman agreed to negotiate in good faith with a potential buyer for the house. If they could not settle by Friday at 5 p.m., they would be allowed to demolish the house (See WestportNow Jan. 5 (http://www.westportnow.com/index.php?/v2/comments/settlement_reached_over_rudolph_house/)).

Helen Higgins, trust executive director, could not be reached for comment immediately today.

The trust sent a mailing to its supporters on Jan. 10 asking for financial support for the legal fees for the case. The letter states the fees could run over $20,000.

Waldman said a week ago he believed the potential buyer at one time owned the house Rudolph lived in in New York City. Glynn said he knows the potential buyer has deep pockets and wanted the house “badly.”

The sides were in court again on Friday when a last-minute attempt at intervention by Attorney General Richard Blumenthal was rejected by Stamford Superior Court Judge Taggert D. Adams.

“I am disappointed by today’s ruling,” Blumenthal said, according to The Hour of Norwalk.

“The judge was sympathetic to our claim that the house is an invaluable historic state treasure, but ultimately he found that the state lacked standing to prevent the destruction of the house because it has not been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.”

Blumenthal had acted on behalf of the Connecticut Commission on Culture and Tourism which sought to put the house on the National Register--a move opposed by the original owner, Louis Micheels. He sold the home to the Waldman for $3.2 million.

At a court hearing earlier this month, Waldman said he stood to lose his $500,000 deposit on the property unless he could demolish the home by Jan. 15 under an agreement with Micheels (See WestportNow Jan. 3 (http://www.westportnow.com/index.php?/v2/comments/judge_asks_parties_to_discuss_dismantling_rudolph_ house/)).

Glynn said he believes a fund should be set up so a survey of modern architecture can be completed, and he hopes it could happen in Westport first.

“We need to have a mechanism in place so this never happens again,” he said.

Following the house that was at 16 Minute Man Hill, he said, he’s not sure what the most significant modern-style private residence in Westport is.

“They’re all tucked away in the woods,” he said. “Many have been destroyed in the last 10 years, especially in the last five years.”

A targeted survey of the homes, he said, would help identify the architecturally significant homes.

Glynn said over all the Unitarian Church’s building on Lyons Plains Road is the most significant modern-style building in Westport after the Rudolph-designed house on Minute Man Hill.

It was designed by one of Rudolph’s contemporaries, Victor Lundy, and is a “great building.”


© 2007 by WestportNow.com

[ablarc]

^ Sad.

It's that forty-year blind spot.

[BPC]

Yes, in 40 years, the Modernists have yet to design a house that anyone would pay money to live in. Meanwhile, Frank LLoyd Wright by himself designed hundreds. Of course, our modern starchitects mostly consider themelves to important to design single family homes.

[Fabrizio]

You would have had to find a VERY design-dedicated person to own this one.

[ryan]

There were definitely FLW buildings that were demolished a generation later. Larkin building:

http://www.planetclaire.org/fllw/fllwimag/larkinco/lcebwthr.jpg

[Bob]

Pan Am Building is terrific. It's whoppingly impressive, how it looms over Grand Central. Always a great photo op. Thank goodness the owners cleaned the facade...it was getting pretty nasty there, for a spell.

[MidtownGuy]

Shame about the Rudolph house.

[lofter1]

Pan Am Building is terrific. It's whoppingly impressive, how it looms over Grand Central.


Dunno -- kinda like the way that end of Park Avenue looks pre-Pan Am ...

http://cache.boston.com/bonzai-fba/Third_Party_Photo/2005/02/12/1108223511_6007.jpg
Ayn Rand in New York, 1957.

[ManhattanKnight]

^Personally, I'd rather see a 450-foot-tall polychromed head of Ayn Rand there than that upturned, Brobdingnagian eggcrate. But, as Christopher Gray pointed out in a 1996 article, this site does have a history:


The 34-story New York Central Building, straddling Park between 45th and 46th Streets, was the last skyscraping gasp of Terminal City, the New York Central Railroad's air-rights development of about three dozen buildings -- made possible when it covered over its giant rail yard stretching from 42d to 50th Streets.


When Grand Central Terminal opened in 1913, published sketches promised a line of matching commercial and public buildings reaching north to make a formal court of honor. Although the stretch was actually developed piecemeal, Warren & Wetmore, the railroad's architects, did design the various office and apartment buildings in a harmonious Renaissance style. Finally only the Park Avenue blockfronts from 45th to 46th Street remained unimproved.


Since 1919 the railroad and the city had been dickering over traffic connections for Park Avenue around Grand Central itself -- the rise of the automobile had made the terminal a bottleneck as north-south traffic struggled with local streets around the terminal. At first only the westerly roadway around Grand Central was in public use.


In 1924 the railroad and the city agreed on a complicated network of leases and easements, and in 1926 work began on the New York Central Building, which engulfed 200 feet of what had been a public street. In exchange, the railroad opened up the easterly roadway around Grand Central, and threaded both east and west roads through its new building, creating a virtual express highway from 40th to 46th. At the same time the city widened the roadway from 46th to 57th Streets by shaving down the malls from 56 to 20 feet.


In return for the roadway, the railroad got to build a 34-story tower, 560 feet high. Warren & Wetmore designed the lower section to correspond to the Grand Central facade, complete with ornamental clock and flanking sculpture, designed by Edward McCarten.


The middle section is handsome, but the top explodes like a Caribbean coral formation -- a field of lacy round dormer windows on the roof, leading up to the delicate, arched lantern with its spire. The ornament on the building is spread out but otherwise every bit as sumptuous as that on Warren & Wetmore's 1899 New York Yacht Club on West 44th Street. The New York Central moved its offices to 230 Park in 1929.
Although 230 Park Avenue is almost universally admired today, observers of the 1920's saw it differently.


George S. Chappell, writing in The New Yorker in 1928, was ambivalent, admiring it as ''a dramatic stop sign at the end of the thoroughfare, although we cannot help sighing for the bright open sky which we used to glimpse.'' In 1929 he noted complaints that the lavish lobby had every style ''from Pullman to Paramount.''


Harry F. Cunningham, writing in The American Yearbook in 1928, bemoaned Warren & Wetmore's unreconstructed traditionalism and called the New York Central Building ''one of the greatest steps in the present backward tendency shown in American architecture.''


And Kenneth Murchison, in his column in The Architect magazine in 1928, presciently claimed that better roads would simply increase the number of cars: ''Conditions will grow worse and worse, despite anything we can do.''


But by 1967 Nathan Silver could write in his book ''Lost New York'': ''With its outline and decoration, it was able to indicate clearly its relationship to the height of a man,'' and so ''was like an enormous measuring-rod, and from miles off along Park Avenue the dimensions of half a city could be perceived.''


Like many others, he felt that the then new Pan Am (now Met Life) Building to the south destroyed the vista down Park Avenue that had been carefully modulated by the New York Central Building. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06EFDC163AF936A2575AC0A9609582 60

[finnman69]

BUT


You can just imagine the awful McMansion oversized stucco POS box that the owners are going to build. Sad to see it go. He is the most underrated architect of the 20th century.


I had the pleasure to visit and meet Paul Rudolph in his Beekman place house several times. His house is the most incredible home I have ever been in and i have been in some incredible modern homes. It has some 23 levels even though it was a triplex. Just amazing. He was a mad scientist genius. New owners bought the home, but have more or less kept it intact. What was neat about his house, was it was not a sterile box. He had lots of art and books, much of the art done by him. He loved Japanese toy robots for instance. he was also constantly tinkering with the apartment.

And that beats a ton of FLW homes.
http://www.thecityreview.com/sutton/rudolph.jpg

[kz1000ps]

You can just imagine the awful McMansion oversized stucco POS box that the owners are going to build.

Let us all thank God for Dryvit and that wonderful acronym EIFS....

[ablarc]

Rudolph has been (literally) reduced to nothingness: a performance artist purchased Rudolph's ashes and scattered them about the magnum opus Art and Architecture Building.

A fitting end?

At least a contextual one.

In context with the times.

[lofter1]

Rummaging through google books I came across a cover-to-cover /
foundation-to-flagpole tome (with lots of pictures & diagrams) on
the construction of the Singer Tower:

A History of the Singer Building Construction (http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=NKRPAAAAMAAJ&dq=%22singer+building%22+construction&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=kT5KEY5P4z&sig=uQguezzTUbHIaHnxnf4LkR6hN0I)

And some random images floating around in cyber space ...

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GON/1908_Singer_Building_NY_NY.jpg

http://img107.imageshack.us/img107/3945/thesingerbuildingatnighnh8.jpg

http://www.etymonline.com/working/Singer.jpg

singer

[londonlawyer]

London razes junk from the 60's and replaces them with great buildings. NY razed Pre-WWII gems and replaces them with garbage.

[MidtownGuy]

That sure was a gorgeous penis-shaped building!

[Stroika]

Londonlawyer, what you raise is a serious question, and I'm sure there are thousands of New Yorkers ready to engage with you on it on a serious level.

No normal person likes '60s crapitecture, in London or New York. The destruction of New York's beautiful buildings and survival of its garbage distresses anyone who knows about the situation at hand. The problem is, the free-market principles paraded by New York on the more theatrical level of real estate (London does it on a more pragmatic level, with the UK throwing less regulation at its markets) allow a developer to raze whatever he wants.

But at the end of the day, we are living in a country where politicians have to listen to the people. If you think prewar buildings are worth saving and '60s POSes are worth discarding (as I do), don't complain; start a serious movement. There's plenty of heavy hitters who would be willing to join, and loads of average New Yorkers. Just stop complaining and take action, if you mean business.

So do you? How can we get a serious movement started, rather than chatter for years about what we like and don't like? Any ideas?

[londonlawyer]

Nothing can change the situation in NY. Guys like Zuckerman, Macklowe, Solow, etc. are entrenched with people at City Hall. It's despicable.

[lofter1]

One current NYC example to counter cries of futility ...

The Highline (http://www.thehighline.org/) was saved by two guys (http://www.thehighline.org/other/contact.html), co-founders of Friends of the Highline Joshua David & Robert Hammond, who had no real power base -- but had a passion. 10 years ago Mayor Giiuliani was calling for the destruction of the Highline, claiming the old elevated rail track was in the way of development (he was merely mouthing what some property owners were telling him behind closed doors).

Now the Highline is proving to be a great economic generator. And all because Josh & Robert acted on their passion and then followed through with the hard work necessary to make the dream of saving the Highline a reality.

[UrbanSculptures]

Thanks for that link...

But I'm confused as to why The Cable Building (still standing at Broadway & Houston) is included.


My site :)

I included the Cable Building because every piece of the very unique one-of-a-kind original cable driving machinery in the basement and sub basement was destroyed and scrapped.
The machinery included 4 Corless steam engines of 1,000 HP each, 11 Heine high pressure boilers, a dynamo said to be large enough to power "5,000 incandescents", 32 foot diameter driving wheels, coal scale, brass gages, controls, an open car water powered freight elevator from the ground floor to the basement were also removed.

Had it survived in some form it would have been an amazing tourist attraction. All that's left are a few photos from an 1893 magazine that I've ever been able to locate.

[lofter1]

That ^ was all down where the 6 Angelica Cinema screens are now, yes?

[Stroika]

Nothing can change the situation in NY. Guys like Zuckerman, Macklowe, Solow, etc. are entrenched with people at City Hall. It's despicable.

Those animals may be more powerful than they should be, but that doesn't mean other, more-powerful groups, can't be leveraged.

A few thoughts:
1. Appeal to Bloomberg. Bloomberg is obviously a smart guy who, unlike his tackier predecessor, seems to know what makes any city worth living in or visiting, and he looks to be applying that to improve New York. Evidence projects and initiatives that, even if they are stalling due to funding/the fact that government does things poorly, show Bloomberg is a dedicated urbanist: congestion fees, development of wasted spaces (including train tracks air rights as in Hudson and Atlantic Yards), waterfront (East River, Hudson, Brooklyn waterfront) and park improvements, and comprehensive rezoning initiatives. Bloomberg is also far too wealthy to need any personal kickbacks or other dirty tricks from a developer, and he's eager to leave a legacy.

Bloomberg also seems to think he's involved in a rivalry with London for the title of "The 21st Century's Greatest City." He knows investors like spending time -- and money -- in places that are nice, as opposed to not nice. As Exhibit A to prove the guy is sensible, look to Lofter's example of the High Line.

2. Get the ear of financial firms. Morgan Stanley, Goldman, Merrill -- these are the guys who give Solow and Co. their money. And unlike Solow and his ilk, they also do care about not being s*&%heads: Corporate social responsibility is huge, and banks and other firms are eager to give to New York neighborhoods, encourage employees to volunteer with NYCares, etc.

Get them to realize that by voicing support for good planning/development decisions, they're helping themselves: more people want to work for them in New York, invest here, etc., if the city's actually a beautiful, exciting or pleasant place to be in.

I don't know exactly how London has codified or applied its principles of "60s garbage should be torn down before redeveloping beautiful old buildings," but if Bloomberg can adopt similar regulations, the banks would be happy to show they're the good guys by complying as well.

Finally, given their recent troubles they 1. want to improve their name and 2. don't want to give money for real estate projects that will flop. Apply more public scrutiny to things like the destruction of the Drake Hotel and maybe next time it won't be viewed as a sound investment by the banks that pay for it.

3. Get celebrities, the media and the people on your side. You obviously can't get an audience with Bloomberg or Merrill's corporate responsibility or community relations people out of the blue. We need to create a movement for a more livable city beforehand, then leverage the media and its attention to talk to the people who can change things.

A British co-worker of mine in Moscow was deeply dismayed about the wanton destruction of everything nice in Moscow and the garbage that was replacing it. Although the city, like New York, does have various preservation and architecture committees, they obviously barely did their job and were connected to the big developers (e.g., the mayor's wife is the biggest, most atrocious developer in the city and the country's only female billionaire).

He started a group of some other expats and a few Russians called the Moscow Architectural Preservation Society. They monitor endangered buildings, new developments, and shout loudly about the loss of architecture and history. I don't know if they've been able to stop any impending destructions of old properties, but they have caught plenty of media attention and are at least setting a precedent for caring about architecture and preservation -- utterly alien concepts for Russia.

Fortunately, Moscow is not New York. If you have a stereotypical idea about corruption in Russia, the reality is 1,000 times worse. Moscow doesn't give a damn about a few protesters. But the amount of media coverage they got would, in New York, lead to infinitely more results.

Additionally, people here are quite civic-minded and defensive about what their neighborhoods look like. Even in Wellesley, MA, with one of the largest proportions of McMansions in the world, locals have recently put together regulations on McMansions (http://www.boston.com/realestate/news/articles/2008/02/07/sizing_up_the_first_big_house_for_review/).

Yet there's no channel for New Yorkers to unite against the likes of Macklowe, and the Community Boards are inconsistent, irrational and halfway Communist or Luddite.

If we create a grassroots movement to raise the city's architectural and preservation standards while recognizing that development must continue and prod it to be of good quality, the potential audience is vast. Newspapers and TV stations are always desperate for a story, and famous faces like Robert DeNiro have a history of activism and glamming up Tribeca.

The point is, there are many outlets to help change things if you have a compelling argument that change needs to come.

4. Dial L for London. If they've been able to get developers to raze the crap rather than the gems they destroy here, they must have a method for doing so. Is it stricter preservation bylaws? Is it an awareness that an older building, nicely renovated, can bring greater long-term profits than a glass-and-steel box, built on the cheap and with a shelf life of 15 years?

If they have been able to do what New York has not, we should get in touch with private and government city planners there to see how they've managed this. Steal their best practices and apply them here. That's all that lies behind Bloomberg's congestion pricing scheme.


Solow and Macklowe won't ever get any better, nor will the next generation of developers. People have to fight back, or else these guys will keep making money the easiest way -- buying whatever they can, knocking it down and building on the cheap. At this point, there's not much opposition.

Luckily, things are ripe for change. As evidenced by the hedge fund exec who is opposing Extell's Pier 40 plans (which I personally like), bank bosses live here too, and want to live in a place that doesn't suck. The realization that New York needs to be a great place to live in order to remain the world's investing capital is also compelling Bloomberg to make sounder urban-planning decisions. But until people apply some sensible pressure, Zuckerman and the others aren't doing much to help the banking execs who finance them or the city government that approves their plans.

Hell, NIMBYs have luck doing that, and their arguments are selfish and illogical.

All that's needed to improve the quality of New York architecture and development is for a group of dedicated, smart people to point these things out and act as a catalyst. We can either gripe or bring about change, and until we do the latter, Solow and his "boyz" will keep taking the lazy, cheap way out.

[lizbeth li]

Thanks Lofter for some shots I haven't seen. What is it about this building that's so entrancing, it keep coming up in all sorts of threads and I even had a dream about it (and no Freudian stuff please). Did anyone ever see it live? I kick myself because I used to work downtown when it and the whole newspaper row were still there, and I never noticed or remember a thing now, amazingly -- they were all just indistinguishable big buildings to me (coming from Brooklyn). Anyway, did the building look as spectral and haunted in life as it seems after death?

[lizbeth li]

I also think a 400+ foot statue of Ayn Rand would be wonderful (she could be holding miniatures of Gary Cooper and Pat O'Neil in her palm) and a whole trend could start. I also suggest a 400+ statue of Woody Allen replacing the parachute jump in Coney Island and a 400+ statue of Bobby Fisher replacing the crumbling Erasmus Hall in Flatbush.

[NYatKNIGHT]

The lively 12-page discussion about landmarking the Silver Towers was turned into its own thread: Silver Towers - I.M. Pei (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showthread.php?t=17144).

Go there to continue that discussion.

[Jim856796]

Why doesn't anybody recognise the City Investing Building? It was demolished to make way for One Liberty Plaza, too. It was completed in the same year as the Singer Building.

[lofter1]

Here's the City Investing Tower from nyc-architecture.com (http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GON/GON011.htm) (in front -- just to the north -- of the old Singer) ...

And here's what they have to say:



The City Investing Tower, built in 1908, was gigantic - and an utter mess.

The awkwardness of the building stemmed partly from the fact that the investors
bought every parcel of land on the block, except one (see photo). They could only
build two wings instead of a nice symmetrical three.


http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GON/GON011-A01.jpg

[antinimby]

What a terrible trade-off: the Singer building + City Investing for One Liberty Plaza. :(

Other all-time terrible trades that just tears your heart out:

...obviously the former Penn Station for MSG (:mad:) but also the lesser known "Newspaper Row" for a bunch of entrance ramps to the Brooklyn Bridge.

All of them really hurts.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/ParkRow.jpg

[Jim856796]

I don't think One Liberty Plaza is bad. I also think the City Investing Building and Singer building are interesting, but I don't want them brought back. the 13-47 floors of the Singer Building were quite small, but if those two buildings were still alive, we would have converted them into residential. The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company Tower probably has similar floor size to the Singer Building.

[antinimby]

You can't have them back even if you wanted to. The Singer and City Investing, especially the former, would be extremely difficult if not impossible by today's standards, to replicate.

Meanwhile, One Liberty Plaza can be replicated over and over and over and over again very easily, although, no one in their right mind would even do so today.

What does that tell you about each of them?

[BrooklynLove]

Just this past weekend I was walking down Broadway south of Chambers and had a sinking feeling upon thinking of the demo of the Singer building. I really miss it eventhough I never saw it in person.

[expose05]

i remember seeing pictures I think on old pictures of nyc on skyscrapercity . com and it had pictures of inside the singer bldg lobby. It was beautiful. It they can rebuild and reconstruct old palaces in europe that were destroyed by war they sure can rebuild this one, but it would be a hell of a lot money. Plus I think if it would it would take the project planning forever to gets on its feet. But you never know.