Preservation of Buildings Too New to Be Landmarked

[Kris]

Young and defenseless

Preservationists begin to target interesting, everyday buildings too new to be landmarks but old enough for the wrecking ball

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

March 3, 2004

When it opened, the train station had been hailed as an emblem of technological prowess and a model of gracious engineering. Just 25 years later, it was an obsolescent, leaky, low-rise occupying a valuable patch of Manhattan real estate. Developers began to agitate for the right to bury it in skyscrapers, while preservationists defended it as a beloved architectural landmark. The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission could do nothing, as it has no jurisdiction over buildings less than 30 years old. The bulldozers arrived at dawn and by the end of the day, Santiago Calatrava's World Trade Center Transportation Hub, which had been welcomed with fanfare and much critical swooning in 2008, was gone.

The specter of such a scene from the not-so-distant future, multiplied by thousands of similar cases all over the country, is changing the historic- preservation movement.

Eventually, activists will run out of Victorian houses and Art Deco theaters to defend against the depredations of time and capital.

The future of preservation is the recent past.

In the nation's changeable landscape, buildings pop up and get torn down with dizzying rapidity. Shopping malls open, and, a decade or two later, lie vacant. New mansions make way for newer and larger mansions. Companies erect grandiose headquarters and then vaporize, leaving made-to-order shells along the highway.

Swissair built an acclaimed headquarters just off the Long Island Expressway in Melville in the mid-1990s and abandoned it in 2002. The building has sat vacant and for sale ever since. The fact that it was designed by Richard Meier, who created the Getty Center in Los Angeles and the Federal Courthouse in Islip, offers no guarantee of permanence.

The rush to replace

Good contemporary architecture, always a precious resource, is often a victim of the rush to replace. Too new to benefit from the power of nostalgia but already old enough to look dated and shabby, buildings become especially vulnerable when they reach their mid-20s.

"It's at this point that, to the non-architectural historian, everything starts to seem old and in need of change or demolition," says Frank Sanchis, senior vice president of the Municipal Arts Society, New York's leading preservationist organization. "Buildings hit a low point in terms of respect or popularity when they get to that age."

The case that galvanized the movement to watch over newer buildings in New York was that of the Bronx Developmental Center, also designed by Meier.

Located just off the Hutchinson River Parkway, it was showered with encomiums when it opened in 1977 - "sure to be ranked among the great buildings of its time," according to the American Institute of Architects' "AIA Guide to New York City." The facility for the mentally handicapped brought its clients into the jet age with a metal cladding like an airliner's skin. In 2002, it was partially demolished to make way for the Hutchinson Metro Center, a suburban- style office complex that aspires to pure blandness and achieves that quality handily.

Its loss blindsided the architectural community. "When they started the demolition, I got phone calls from people on the Hutch, asking what we knew, and we didn't know anything about it at all," says Vicki Weiner, a preservationist at the Municipal Arts Society.

"It was one of the landmarks of modern architecture, but it wasn't eligible for landmark status yet."

The magic age

Local landmarks ordinances generally apply only to buildings at least 30 years old, while state and national Registers of Historic Places apply only to structures at least 50 years old. Of course, even if the Bronx Developmental Center had been eligible, someone would have had to press for its designation as a landmark, which is to say that someone would have to have had an inkling that it was threatened.

"We don't usually plan for the future of preservation," Weiner says. "We react to crises."

In the wake of that fiasco, the Municipal Arts Society launched a campaign to identify the city's not-yet-landmarks: notable buildings that might need informal protection before the law could protect them. The project was hardly scientific: Anyone who happened across the nomination form on the Web or in the arts society's lobby could submit a recommendation. A jury of architects, critics and scholars culled 135 entries down to 60. On March 11, the jurors will meet to rank the list in preparation for publication and an exhibit later this year.

Creating a contemporary canon is a volatile, diplomatic task. Idiosyncratic buildings elicit ire as well as admiration, and emotional reactions merge with aesthetic ideologies and persistent rivalries. In some cases, the memory of what had to be razed in order for a potential icon to go up proves an enduring source of bitterness.

"This is difficult stuff for some people," Weiner says. "You just try getting a bunch of architects who are over 40 to look at buildings from the 1980s and think about preserving them."

Architecture of the '60s

Even the architectural hot potatoes of the 1960s can still scald. Take Edward Durell Stone's Huntington Hartford Museum, the white marble oddity that sits, waterlogged and vacant, at the southern curve of Columbus Circle. It has split preservationists into battling camps.

The Museum of Arts and Design intends to buy the museum from the city and give it a total overhaul, cheered on by those who feel Stone's original is a sad little postscript to his illustrious modernist career. On the other side, a consortium of activists is suing the city in hopes of having it landmarked.

It's easy to imagine the combination of scorn, disbelief and insistence that sloshed around the discussions of Der Scutt's brass-fronted, 68-story Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, an emblem of vulgar luxury when it opened in 1983. Architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable gave its famous atrium, clad in peach-colored marble, one of her virtuosic brush-offs, writing that its awkward proportions were "unredeemed by the posh ladies' powder-room decor that totally lacks the cosmopolitan style to which it so aggressively aspires."

Yet, there it is on the Municipal Arts Society's provisional "Watch List of Future Landmarks," along with Philip Johnson's Madison Avenue headquarters for AT&T (now Sony), nicknamed the Chippendale Building; Gordon Bunschaft's slope-sided Grace Building on Sixth Avenue at 44th Street and James Polshek's New York Times printing plant in College Point, which looks as though it were made of colored blocks.

The Donald Trump chapter

If Trump Tower is included in such distinguished company, it may be partly because of its architecture, but also because it stands for the whole Donald Trump chapter in the history of New York City. This is where the struggle to preserve the recent past gets sticky, because whether a building is beautiful or beloved represents only part of its cultural worth.

"What's difficult with modern preservation is that a lot of people don't think the vernacular, the everyday buildings, are that interesting," says Nina Rappaport, co- chair of the international modern architecture preservation organization DOCOMO.

"The icons are easy," she adds, citing the Seagram Building and Lever House, triumphs of 1950s modernism that were given landmark status without a major struggle. "With the in-between buildings, the regular office buildings, it's harder for people to understand their value."

Few places in America would wish to be so sweeping as to declare large numbers of those "in-between buildings" off-limits to developers, particularly when they consist of generic, shoddily built glass boxes. Cities cannot refuse to change; they can only grow or wither.

Still, some buildings that are initially unloved or ignored become symbols of their eras, or accidental repositories of history. Rescuing them often requires engaging in ferocious internecine combat with other preservationists, who value architectural quality above all else. One current battlefield is Harlem, where developers and the city have been feverishly gutting, renovating and replacing entire dilapidated blocks with condominiums and shopping centers, while activists howl that the urban core of black history is being scrubbed away.

Ground Zero sensitivity

The destruction of the World Trade Center has made the issue of scrapping relatively recent architecture all the more sensitive. The ongoing scrimmage over which parts of Ground Zero to set aside as untouchable, and which to plow under, will be one of the more fascinating preservation processes to watch over the coming months.

Urbanism does not consist only of heroic architectural monuments, as history does not consist only of major events. Often, unremarkable structures become valuable in hindsight, as examples of particular moments in the relationship between necessity and design. Think of the Manhattan phone booth, the espresso shacks set up in front of gas stations all over Oregon, or the forlorn farm stands sprouting between office parks on Long Island's former fields. They are all fragile, expedient shelters whose only long-term future is probably in a museum.

In recent years, a wing of the preservationist movement has turned its attention to the ordinary and the not-so-old. The Modern Committee of the Los Angeles Conservancy, for example, is a collective of post-boomers dedicated to preserving such ephemera as roadside diners, bowling alleys and drive-in movie theaters.

No legal barriers

In most cases, no legal barriers prevent property owners from destroying cultural gems, so the Municipal Arts Society's "Watch List" functions mainly as a tool of persuasion, especially effective when used in tandem with the venerable strategy of buying lunch. "There's nothing you can do to prevent the demolition except what we dream up," says the society's Frank Sanchis. "It may be nothing more than notification and encouragement of the owners not to destroy. That's part of the project we haven't gotten to yet."

That's the part where danger lurks. Most owners are horrified at the prospect that their property could get landmarked, forcing them to run all future renovation plans past another bureaucratic entity, thereby narrowing their choices and driving up their costs.

Some people who own significant offices or factories less than 30 years old, will respond to the Municipal Arts Society's "encouragement" by promising to be respectful of the original design.

Others will raze and rebuild before their buildings are old enough to be protected - and preservationists will thus have hastened the demise of the very structures they tried to save.

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.

[Kris]

May 16, 2004

NEW YORK UP CLOSE

Keeping Good Buildings From Dying Young

By ERIKA KINETZ


The Marriott Marquis, often reviled but deemed significant.

Fine architecture, like wine, needs time to ripen. Buildings must be at least 30 years old before the Landmarks Preservation Commission will even consider designating them as landmarks. Time, the theory goes, allows a building's significance to emerge.

But in the years it takes to temper taste, a building can also be destroyed, and on May 7 the Municipal Art Society unveiled a "watch list" of 30 potential landmarks, all constructed between 1974 and 2004, that are too young for protection. By pointing out their significance, the society hopes to help preserve them until they can be designated.

Vicki Weiner, the Kress Fellow for Historic Preservation at the Municipal Art Society, began the project in 2002, after the Bronx Developmental Center, a 1977 building by Richard Meier, was significantly altered. "There was a consensus that it was a late Modernist masterpiece," Ms. Weiner said. "But it was under 30 years old."

Ms. Wiener put out an open call for nominations, and a nine-member jury of architects, historians, critics, curators and designers whittled the 150 entries down to 30.

Some winners, like the I.B.M. building, came as no surprise.

"It really reinvented the idea of what privately owned public space could be," said Sherida Paulsen, a former chairwoman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission and chairwoman of the jury.

Others were controversial, like the New York Marriott Marquis hotel, in Times Square, an imposing concrete and glass tower, which in 1985 rose on the site of several beloved Broadway theaters. "The Municipal Art Society fought to save those theaters," Ms. Weiner said. "A lot of people have a visceral reaction to that building. A lot of people find it unlovely."

But the jury ultimately decided that the building was of historic significance, because it spurred the city to designate many of the remaining theaters as landmarks and helped hasten the revival of Times Square.

A photographic exhibition of the jury's selections, which also include the Citicorp Center, Trump Tower, AT&T/Sony building, Grace Building and Roosevelt Island tram station, is on view in the lobby of the Urban Center, at 457 Madison Avenue near 50th Street, until June 8. The jury will discuss its choices at the Urban Center Wednesday at 8 p.m.

How did the jury select only 30 structures from the 150 entrants?

Ms. Weiner explained: "How would you feel if this building was lost?" That seemed to be the bottom-line question."



Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

[BradRousse]

Is the full list of buildings available anywhere?

[ZippyTheChimp]

Municipal Arts Society webpage...

http://www.mas.org/ContentLibrary/30Under30.pdf

[Kris]

http://www.mas.org/ContentLibrary/30Under30photos.pdf


REVIEW

Save the Skyscrapers

BY JUSTIN DAVIDSON
STAFF WRITER

May 7, 2004

If, out of all the buildings erected in New York in the past three decades, you could protect just 30 from being demolished someday, which would you choose? Would your list include, say, a fire station in Brooklyn? Or a housing project looming over the FDR Drive? How about the Marriott Marquis hotel at Times Square, a gloomy glass fortress constructed on the ruins of three old theaters?

The Municipal Arts Society, which in the 1970s struggled in vain to save those theaters and block the construction of the Marriott, has now placed the much- loathed hotel on a list of distinguished works of architecture erected since 1974. The society has laid out its idiosyncratic choices in "30 Under 30: A Watch List of Future Landmarks," an exhibit that opens today in the lobby of its Madison Avenue headquarters.

Shocked by the wanton recycling of Richard Meier's famous Bronx Developmental Center into a generic office park in 2002, the society launched a project to identify and monitor distinguished buildings from New York City's recent architectural past. An informal request for ideas from the public yielded about 150 candidates, which a jury spent months whittling down.

The result is emphatically not a compendium of the city's prettiest modern buildings, says Vicki Weiner, the Municipal Arts Society fellow who organized the project. "It's an anthology of architectural representations, design ideas, social movements, historical moments and individual architects' careers. The jury was thinking about how important these buildings are, regardless of whether we love them or hate them."

So, for example, the inclusion of Taino Towers in Harlem recognizes the fact that while high-rise public-housing projects in many cities have become icons of failed idealism that trap residents in decaying brick behemoths, in New York City they often actually worked. Peter Eisenman's 1983 firehouse on Rockaway Avenue in Brooklyn, a wildly inventive arrangement of interlocking cubes, reminds us that the city has a history, however erratic, of commissioning adventurous design. Why, then, the Marriott Marquis? Because, ugly though it is, it launched the 20-year rebuilding and reglamorizing of a derelict Times Square. The very idea, in 1981, that tourists might choose to stay in the infested and dangerous heart of midtown represented a long- range vote of confidence.

The Municipal Arts Society's list does include some obvious showpieces, such as the slant-topped Citicorp Building, Philip Johnson's AT&T (now Sony) Building, the American Museum of Natural History's Rose Center planetarium and Richard Meier's new twin condominium towers in Greenwich Village. "They're a collection of world-class buildings," says the architectural historian John Kriskiewicz, who assisted the jury with research and is curating the exhibit. "Not every one of them, but most of them, any city would be proud to have."

Still, the society is inviting public disagreement with its choices: Visitors to the gallery can fill out suggestion cards. "We're hoping to be provocative," says Kriskiewicz. "We want people to talk about architecture and design. The more people talk, the more they will look and the more they will demand better design." More than a definitive roster of greatest hits, the list aims to be a stimulus to thinking about how endangered even the most significant building can be when a developer wants it destroyed.

WHEN & WHERE

30 Under 30: A Watch List of Future Landmarks, through June 8 at the Municipal Arts Society, 457 Madison Ave., Manhattan, For hours and information, call 212-935-3960 or visit www.mas.org

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.