A bit late

Up in the Air

Driving north on the FDR Drive this weekend, I saw again from the slow spot just before Waterside Plaza (definitely not ugly) the twin spires of Times Square, One Bryant Park and 4 Times Square. They were rather indistinct against the haze, because both stabs at tallest status devolve into an array of openwork struts as they reach their peak. If you didn’t know the skyscraper below you’d barely be able to tell them apart, but for OBP’s asymmetric white-glass wrap. (Isn’t that about the dullest image you’ve ever seen? When you Google OBP the renderings rather than the reality pop up first.)

I suppose the idea was dematerialization. The Times tried it with their tower, extending the white (but look gray) rods past the glass curtain wall. But it doesn’t work. Next to the solidity and sculptural qualities of the Chrysler spire, they all just look lazy and unfinished. They don’t fade into the ether. They clutter our skyline with pseudo-techy masts. And from most angles, you can’t even tell which is tallest. Tallest is for the blogs, completely immaterial on Manhattan’s streets.

In May in New York Magazine, Justin Davidson argued we needed Jean Nouvel and his Tower Verre to save our skyline from the uninspired spires. I love Jean Nouvel’s work. Its too muchness, its one-thing-at-a-time, its themes all remind me of Eero Saarinen and make me smile. But I couldn’t agree with Davidson that Nouvel needed the extra unzoned height to make his contribution. For spires in New York, height doesn’t matter, style does. And a real architect can design something wonderful within the parameters. Bowing down (and offering variances) for institutions with good taste, like MoMA, or starchitects from abroad, like Nouvel, begs developers to bait-and-switch a la Atlantic Yards, and turns the city into a free for all.

I agree the skyline needs to grow and change, and I’d like someone to make something better than the Chrysler Building. But that building was beautiful because of, not despite, zoning. I’m with Ada Louise Huxtable.

‘It is the wrong building in the wrong place,’ she writes in an e-mail message. ‘I have watched the town houses and brownstones on 53rd Street go down like dominoes over the years—it was one of the loveliest streets in the city—but the fact that they are gone does not make this building right. What I see is an enormous real-estate deal with cultural window dressing, a case history of how the zoning rules can be used to do something they were never meant to encourage.’

It’s ironic that the Westin Times Square, which is one of the ugliest buildings in New York, actually managed to do what its neighbors do not: create a distinctive top. The Hearst Building eschews a spire. That flat top is, I think, a suggestion of infinity and a refusal to play the game of extra feet sans architecture. Does anyone think less of Norman Foster’s achievement because it doesn’t overreach? True, you can’t see it from everywhere, but what’s the point if the spire is a stranger?

Paper Revelations

Writing reveals a lot about a person. Is he sloppy? In love with the sound of her own voice? Ambitious beyond his powers? Trying to be too cute? Late, perpetually, disastrously late? What you are on paper is not that different, in most cases, from what you are like in real life. After each semester I teach architecture criticism at D-Crit at SVA or NYU, I feel like I have just participated in a seminar-size group therapy session, trying on the role of the wise, calm, suggestive but not restrictive therapist. I know I can’t make someone a better writer, but I can show a student the special qualities he is missing in his own work, or how a little more structure could make her insights clear to all.

As I read first drafts and then revisions, I am seeking that feeling of calm I get when I read the best pieces of journalism. The calm that comes from the feeling that the writer knows exactly where he or she is going. The calm that comes from descriptions that don’t leave you with unanswered questions. I prize visuals (obviously), but also flow. There’s no need to rattle off credentials, true authority comes from a sense of completeness, nothing left out, themes stated at the top brought round to some satisfying and literary conclusion.

The problem with thinking like this is that you start to do it all the time. On this blog, I know I keep picking at the New Yorker, but that’s because I need to have something to aspire to. I want it to be better, and to treat the things I care about (design, architecture, the visual world, even the classics) with the respect and insight they deserve.

Reading a lot of architecture criticism for those same classes, I also start to develop a running mental list of the writerly tics of those critics far higher in the ranks than I. Paul Goldberger, for example, who I have to say in a way that can only read as presumptuous, has gotten a lot better. On the Rise, a collection of his early reviews for the New York Times, has the flimsiness and ephemerality of blog postings. We no longer care about many of the controversies, and he has apologized for his support of postmodernism (scroll down). At the New Yorker he has more room and more time, and his early tendency to make it all about the architect has expanded. If you ever want to know what to say in conversation about a leading member of the profession, just read Goldberger. His review of Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower is one of his best—energetic, vivid, experiential, characterizing man and building as one. His review of Arquitectonica’s Westin Hotel is also extremely funny, but partly inadvertently, as he tries to apologize for the architects’ lapse into…ugliness. This week’s very early assessment of Jean Nouvel’s 100 Eleventh Avenue (I building I love for simultaneously reminding me of Kristin Chenoweth’s Emmy dress and out-sparkling Frank Gehry) is a model of his form, surveying the career and telling you exactly what to think:

Each of the angled windowpanes—there are more than sixteen hundred—reflects light slightly differently, making the building glitter like sequins in the afternoon sun. If you are tired of the way every modern building feels flatter and thinner than the one before it, well, so is Jean Nouvel…

Nouvel’s designs, for all their bombast, are conceived as a whole. You can take them or leave them, but tone them down and you’ve missed the point.

For once, I couldn’t agree more.

Bonus! Paul Goldberger on the Colbert Report.