horizonr

At Grand Central, Time for Flags to Leave the Station

The Grand Central sky, as it always was — and should be again

On 10 July 2007, The New York Observer published an abbreviated version of the following essay arguing that it's time for the flags in Grand Central's main hall to come down. You can read the Observer essay here.

Of the more than 1,100 New Yorkers who responded to a Gothamist poll based on the Observer essay, fully two-thirds agreed that the Grand Central flags have overstayed their welcome.

::  ::  ::

Unbidden, they came. Not in response
to any appeal, official or otherwise,
but as visceral, desperate, speechless inarticulations of solidarity and resolve.
In a matter of hours after 9/11 morning, there were thousands of them, and they were everywhere in New York — on storefronts; in building lobbies; on bumpers, subway cars and lapels; lining the avenues.

Among all those impromptu American flags were two
placed in the iconic main hall of Grand Central Terminal: The first, a flagpole standard, soon was joined by an enormous 40-foot-by-20-foot banner, vertically suspended over the center of the room. Smaller flags have been hung in Grand Central's main hall before, especially during times of war, according to Metro-North spokeswoman Margie Anders,
but a flag of this size — nearly four stories tall — is
"basically unprecedented".

Both flags hang there still. But they can no longer mean
what they meant in the days and weeks after 9/11. Now, four-plus years into a war that, according to a recent CBS poll, more than three-quarters of Americans think is going "badly" and more than 60 percent think we should never have started in the first place, the flags at Grand Central don't unite us; they divide us. This is only the most obvious reason they must come down.

Box Is a Box Is a Box

"The Treachery of Images" (1928-29), Rene Magritte

Is Philip Nobel, the "resident curmudgeon" of Metropolis magazine, going soft already? Probably too soon to tell, but historians of such things —€” do such people even exist
yet? —€” may well look back on this moment and say that this was when Philip Nobel started to lose it. Asked why, they will say that it was one part Nobel, one part never-ending crisis of Modernism, one part New York Times Building and, oh, 10 parts New York.

I'll get back to this momentarily, but we needn't wait for the verdict on Philip Nobel to know that, despite "getting one in" occasionally, large-scale Modernist architecture has spent most of the last 40 years on the ropes. Among the first to put it there were architect-scholars Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour, with their pithy and generously illustrated 1972 study Learning from Las Vegas. Whether or not you've already read Las Vegas, you should read it now to see how right —€” and how much more wrong —€” the authors turned out to be.

What Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour mostly saw when they surveyed the Modernist built landscape of the late 1960s was "heroic and original" architecture that was irrelevant, they said, because it did not speak with explicit symbols
that most people could understand.

As Experts with Ideals...[Modern architects] build for Man rather than for people —€” this means, to suit themselves, that is, to suit their own particular middle-class values, which they assign to everyone...Developers build for markets rather than for Man and probably do less harm than authoritarian architects would do if they had the developers' power.

One does not have to agree with hard-hat politics to support the rights of the middle-
middle class to their own architectural aesthetics, and we have found that Levittown-
type aesthetics are shared by most members
of the middle-middle class, black as well as white, liberal as well as conservative.

The authors nicknamed "heroic and original" buildings
ducks —€” after a duck-shaped poultry stand on Long Island that appears in Peter Blake's 1964 book God's Own Junkyard. These were buildings "[w]here the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by an overall symbolic form": a "kind of building-becoming-
sculpture."


The "Long Island Duckling" (1931), in Flanders, N.Y.

The B-side of the authors' class critique was that ducks
were not only aesthetically elitist but unnecessarily —€”
and inappropriately —€” expensive:

We architects who hope for a reallocation of national resources toward social purposes must take care to lay emphasis on the purposes and their promotion rather than on the architecture that shelters them.  This reorientation will call for ordinary architecture, not ducks. But when there is little money to spend on architecture, then surely greatest architectural imagination
is required. Sources for modest buildings and images with social purpose will come, not from the industrial past, but from the everyday city around us, of modest buildings and modest spaces with symbolic appendages.

So it was that, opposed to "heroic and original" ducks, the authors —€” inspired by the schlock commercial architecture
of the Las Vegas strip —€” prescribed an "ordinary and ugly" alternative: decorated sheds. Exactly as mundane as they sound, decorated sheds were buildings "[w]here systems of space and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them."

Sketch from Learning from Las Vegas

Summarizing the distinction between duck and shed, the authors wrote: "The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional building
that applies symbols."

For them, ducks were symptoms of a sickness within
the basic culture of architectural design:

To replace ornament and explicit symbolism, Modern architects indulge in distortion and overarticulation. Strident distortion at large scale and "sensitive" articulation at small scale result in an expressionism that is, to us, meaningless and irrelevant, an architectural soap opera in which to be progressive is to be outlandish.

Writing later that "[i]f articulation has taken over from ornament in the architecture of abstract expressionism,
space is what displaced symbolism," the authors conclude:

...this is not the time and ours is not the environment for heroic communication via
pure architecture.

When Modern architects righteously abandoned ornament on buildings, they unconsciously designed buildings that were ornament. In promoting Space and Articulation over symbolism and ornament, they distorted the whole building into a duck. They substituted for the innocent and inexpensive practice of applied decoration on a conventional shed the rather cynical and expensive distortion of program and structure to promote a duck...It is now time to re-evaluate the once-horrifying statement of Ruskin that architecture is the decoration of construction, but we should append the warning of Pugin: It is all right to decorate construction but never construct decoration.

THERE are still ducks, and there are still decorated sheds. But the line between the two is no longer so bright and clear as when Learning from Las Vegas was published in 1972. Modernist explorations of program- and site-driven form —€” from Eli Attia's 1972 design of Pennzoil Place for Philip Johnson to Foster & Partners' 30 St. Mary Axe —€” along
with continued experiments in the deep texturing of
building surfaces, have often made it difficult to tell
which is a shed and which a duck.

On Foster & Partners' Hearst Tower, for example, the stainless cladding on the external structural members is obviously ornamental. But so are those big notched corners. Both the chamfering and the structural detailing are executed on such an "heroic" scale, to use the authors' word, as to mask the fact that the tower is, for all intents and purposes, a box. This is a high-end decorated shed, to be sure, but a decorated shed nonetheless. "Duck" and "decorated shed" becomes a distinction without a difference.

I digress, but not much. For while it's not that difficult to see why many people read the Hearst Tower as something other than a decorated shed (that's the idea, dear), some are just as seduced by —€” and confused about —€” buildings that are more open about their essential decorated shed-ness.

Look at the word that Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour chose to  reinforce what they really meant by decoration: applique. That's a word that those of us who came of age in the 1970s would have associated with the felt cut-outs, brocade and sequins on our grandmother's purse. Applique. Tacked on.

There could not be a clearer illustration of that in our own time than the ceramic-tube screens bolted on to every 52-story facade of the soon-to-be-completed New York
Times Building, near Times Square.

New York Times Building: Model by Renzo Piano Building Workshop and FXFowle 

Ceramic tubes aside, the building, designed by the Renzo Piano Building Workshop and FXFowle, bears a striking resemblance to the new Bloomberg Tower (right), which no one would describe as anything other than a very nice box.

Indeed, isn't that what the new Times tower is too, a very nice box —€” a shed —€” with more elaborate decorations?

NIMBYopolis

 

What would happen if city planning departments everywhere decided, willy-nilly, that the building practices of two, three, four generations ago would now become law? No new building would be allowed to punch through the 6-story ceiling
of the old neighborhood. And, well, if the city needed to grow, it would just have to find
other ways to do it.

This was never an issue in the Ohio Valley river town where I grew up. Not that Owensboro, Kentucky, was an architectural backwater. I've always had a soft spot for this little ode to Mies, designed by Skidmore,
Owings & Merrill and completed in 1962.

But as Louisville gets ready for its Rem-tacular close-up, Owensboro, the economically flatlined "capitol of western Kentucky," has never been under imminent threat from a rogue invasion of tall buildings. And yet, in the 1960s and 70s, Owensboro, Kentucky, did put a couple of intrepid toes — literally, two — in the shallow end of the Pool of High-Rise.

Given the results, the low-rise people of Owensboro probably wish planners had just capped their "skyline" early and called it a day.

It all started when Gabe's Shopping Center opened
at the southwest corner of 18th and Triplett Streets in
1959. Built a generation before the strip mall, with parasitic ubiquity, began to chew up ever-larger swaths of the urban fabric in places like Owensboro, making such developments the paradigmatic trope of a suburbanized America — Owensboro's population within the city limits is the same 55,000 today that it was in 1959 — Gabe's Shopping Center was nonetheless and, for all intents and purposes remains,
a strip mall.

Originally anchored by a W.T. Grant's dime store on one end and the Bi-Lo drugstore on the other, Gabe's Shopping Center today looks out across its parking lot to the antiseptic glare of the new-ish BP station and convenience store on the corner.

The BP, a model of spotless corporate efficiency, seems to look back with a mix of pity, shame, and reproach. For unlike so many other older shopping centers that have long since been retooled into slick little cash registers with cupolas on top (often with shiny gas stations out front), Gabe's somehow never caught up with the times. Always a little shambly and forlorn, it stands like Moses looking over into the Promised Land, a ghostly reminder of a vision that did get fulfilled,
just not here.

Indeed, the BP station serves as a "dis-intimation" — a "putting the dogs off the scent" — of the largeness of vision that once held forth on this site. For a shopping center wasn't the only thing Gabe Fiorella opened at 18th and Triplett in 1959. Where the BP now stands was a restaurant — yes,
he called it Gabe's — that for 20 years was fine dining in Owensboro, Kentucky.

On the point of the corner was a bigger-than-life-size statue of Gabe himself. With his trademark red jacket, black trousers, white shirt, and black colonel string tie, Gabe — tonsured, smiley-toothed, black-horn-rimmed Gabe — stood atop a 6-foot pedestal on a revolving platform, his right arm raised, forearm right-angled from the elbow, hand straight, and palm forward in a perpetual hello. Really more of a stereotypical "Indian" "How!" Round and round and round, 24 hours a day. "Welcome to Gabe's!"

And in late 1963, Gabe Fiorella completed construction of Owensboro's first tall building. There, on the southern edge
of the little world Gabe was building at 18th and Triplett Streets, Gabe's Tower Inn — a 13-story cylinder of a hotel, clad in a rainbow of pastel-painted panels — was a slice of Miami in western Kentucky. By the time I was a kid in the early 1970s, Gabe's Tower — swimming pool at the top; restaurant-in-the-round just below; and still rising alone
from a field of one- and two-story houses — was the
undisputed marvel of Owensboro, Kentucky.

Gabe's Tower, post-pastel

IT was at about this time that Owensboro built its second — and last — tall building. "Designed" to "house" the elderly, Roosevelt House — now Roosevelt I, to distinguish it from the much smaller Roosevelt II, which went up next door in the early 1980s — put 18 stories of federally subsidized concrete right on the small city's main thoroughfare. It's a real HUD* special.

Like Gabe's Tower, Roosevelt I was, and remains, a "tower in the field." Except for a handful of 6-story bank buildings downtown and a few buildings of similar height scattered elsewhere, Owensboro is at heart the same 1- and 2-story town it was in 1963.

The difference is that the charmless Roosevelt I hasn't a trace of the earlier tower's whimsy or optimism. At the very least, the town's tallest building could have offered the town's eldest residents — who live here, after all, only because they have to — the town's best views, opening north to Owensboro's beautiful old residential neighborhoods and parks and to all of its old-growth trees, with the Ohio River and Indiana farmland in the distance.

Instead, every apartment window looks east and west, to
the placeless borderlands of strip malls and storage sheds, where wall-to-wall privilege comes with a brass chandelier and a double-height atrium on a quarter-acre lot. One after the other.

Presumably there will continue to be a waiting list for Roosevelt I, so long as enough people need the kind of social welfare that the building provides. But in every other way that matters, Roosevelt I is a building with no character and no future. Ask anyone in low-rise Owensboro to name the worst building in town, and you will hear the same quick
and fatal judgment as when Roosevelt 1 was completed
in the mid 1970s.

Owensboro's business and municipal leaders had welcomed the previous decade's construction of Gabe's Tower as a sign that Kentucky's stepchild city — then and now, the state's third largest — was finally ready to join Louisville and Lexington at the ball. (It never did.)

But in a town small enough to make everyone's "backyard" the same, the decision to build Gabe's was a Not-In-My-
Back-Yard initiation rite — and, as it turned out, Roosevelt I practice run — for Owensboro's rank and file, who sought vigorously, albeit without power or money or voice, to
keep a tower that tall (!) from being built.

Four decades later, Gabe's is an endearing folly, a bit
like New York's long-embattled 2 Columbus Circle (which, coincidentally, was completed the year after Gabe's, in 1964). The tower has been an economic disaster for most of its peripatetic life; has long since traded in its period pastels for
a tellingly conservative pale gray with black stripes; and,
by right, should have been demolished years ago.

And yet, Owensboro can't quite seem to let go of its quirky landmark. Last month, Gabe's Tower was sold for $280,000 to a developer who promises to make it, once again, a hotel.

NONE of this would be worth mentioning if the New
York City Department of City Planning wasn't pushing a reactionary rezoning of the East Village and Lower East Side that, if successful, will set these Manhattan neighborhoods back a hundred years.

New Yorbanism

Oh, alright, so maybe not every New Urbanist is a parsimonious, fearmongering, paternalistic prig.

But it's fair to say that what's gone wrong with New York's architecture and urban development over the last 30 years has a lot to do with the ascendancy of New Urbanist thinking in the City's planning, political, and media establishments — a traditionalist mindset that began to take hold in New York in the 1980s, well before anyone formulated these ideas into an ideology; came into its own in the 1990s, under Rudolph Giuliani; and now is coming home to roost in large-scale projects from ground zero to Atlantic Yards.

It's true that any number of the planners, critics, and
urban advocacy groups who shape political and public opinion about New York's built environment haven't signed the New Urbanist charter and would never introduce themselves that way at a cocktail party.

They are nonetheless functionally New Urbanist, to the extent that they tend to place ultimate faith in the street grid; profess to favor small buildings over large ones; given the choice, would prefer a classical or "vernacular" building
to a contemporary one; and are prepared to sacrifice urban vitality to get these things.

But solving New York's Architecture Problem is not simply a matter of "outing" New Urbanists in High Places (although that’s probably not a bad place to start). There are other players, too.

Joining New York's "professional urbanist" class are
(1) inveterate Not-In-My-Back-Yard-ists working to make sure that nothing modern or large or even remotely tall
gets built in "back yards" across the City; (2) the most
Big Developer-coddling City Hall and City Council in recent memory; and, of course, (3) the Big Developers themselves — three constituencies that couldn't care less about anyone's charter or theory but their own.

Together, all of these forces — sometimes working independently, sometimes forging small alliances — have created in New York a mutant strain of Modernist-inflected New Urbanism that is less an agenda than a condition, a
word that perfectly registers the sense of a sickness.

I call it New Yorbanism.

Many will tell you that what I call New Yorbanism is really
the long-expected Second Coming of Jane Jacobs — the 21st-century reclamation of the Prodigal Daughter of New York Urbanism. New Urbanist, NIMBYist, and Big Developer-ist actors, each starring in the title role of guess who, strut the stage of New York planning and architecture wearing a thick pancake maquillage of Jane, performing endless variations on the same well-rehearsed soliloquy: "Jane Jacobs is New York. I am Jane Jacobs. I am New York."

But neither of the impulses that feed the New Yorbanist condition has anything to do with Jane Jacobs. Line up a New Urbanist, a NIMBYist, and a Big Developer-ist alongside the irrespressible Jane, and it's very clear which of these things
is not like the other.

Which begs the question: Where, now, does Jane Jacobs
end and New York begin?

Farce in 1'52"

This fall, Larry Silverstein hired Giroud Pichot, a small architectural animation firm, to create what amounts to a high-end commercial for his latest efforts. This seductive little movie has been out there for several weeks now. If you've already seen it, have another look after this review. If not, consider this the set-up. Movie to follow.

In September 2001, just nine days after 9/11, Larry Silverstein declared his intention to build 4 or 5 buildings of 50-60 stories on the World Trade Center site. Ever since practically the whole world rejected Silverstein's plan in July 2002, he and the rebuilding authorities have been desperate.

Desperate for enough of the right people to believe that
they — Silverstein and the authorities — were taking the next World Trade Center in a new and better direction. And desperate for these same people to believe this Fiction of the New fervently enough to make them forget the original.

Using a calculated rhetoric of images and words, Silverstein and the authorities have continued to adorn their Emperor with more and more and more elaborate new clothes, to the point that many people — far too many — are not able
to recognize that the Emperor is every bit as naked as before.

Indeed, most of New York's politicians and virtually all of the national news media — starting with The New York Times — have long since climbed up on the Emperor’s float and, even now, are waving to the crowd from on high. Whether out of genuine enthusiasm or self-deludedly hopeful exhaustion, much of the crowd is waving right back.

It's been quite a parade.

The organizing idea for this campaign has been a
little something called "the Libeskind vision." Now,
Larry Silverstein has coopted three more architects — Norman Foster, Richard Rogers, and Fumihiko Maki —
to help sell this vision.

But this, unveiled in September 2006...

...is the same as this, unveiled in July 2002, more than two months before Daniel Libeskind was even on the scene.

Karl Marx famously said something to the effect that "history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce." The problem with farce is that the less obvious it is — the more it seems to resemble straight-up Shakespearean comedy — the longer it takes the masses to realize that there's something insidious going on.

And who wants to think hard thoughts, anyway, when
they could be clapping along to a good song and dance at
the Emperor's parade?

If you've ever read Aldous Huxley, you know that this was the crux of his warning: For once society starts believing the burlesque, it risks laughing itself all the way over the precipice and down, down, down into the Brave New World below. And once that happens, it's all over.

Think I'm kidding? Watch this movie. It's a cautionary reminder of the lengths to which desperation will go — especially when it's armed with a big checkbook.

Enjoy it if you must. Replay it a few times. Just don't
be seduced by the spectacle: The prim, slim, elongated, slightly chilly, high-heels femininity of the towers in this animation is an utter fantasy.

Absent the George Gershwin and Kander & Ebb soundtrack — deployed here to render the proposed plan as a kind of sunny, Jazz Age confection — the hyper-congested, light-starved, streets-and-sidewalks reality produced by the bulky corporate monoliths that would actually get built under this plan would not be the charm this movie promises. It would be a curse.

There have been plenty of machinations at ground zero
these five years.

This movie is the the most dangerous piece of
propaganda yet.

comments john@johnlumea.com

Of Streets and Superblocks (Postscript to The Kinks)

Photo by Peter Page, 1985.

Is an argument against streets at the next World
Trade Center an argument against streets in general?

No. It is a critique of the New Urbanist planning dogma
that streets —€” and, in New York, the street grid —€” is in
every case the right answer and superblocks in every case the wrong one.

And it is an indictment of those pro-street New York City planning groups who, in the wake of 9/11, sold the public a bill of goods; who misled their captive audiences into believing there was but one kind of superblock —€” the long-demonized "World Trade Center superblock"; and who used that reductio ad absurdum both to mobilize the public and the news media in favor of streets and to (thus) narrow the possible futures for the next World Trade Center.

The Kinks, the Cotswolds and the Next World Trade Center

This is Bourton-on-the-Water, a tiny idyll in the English Cotswolds. It's my friend Michael's favorite spot in the
whole world.

To understand why, it helps to know that Michael is a latter-day, non-Tory — i.e., altogether more complex and interesting — incarnation of the Englishman most of us non-Brits have in mind when we hear that Gilbert and Sullivan song: a tweeds-and-cravat-wearing gentleman scholar who — although he wasn’t born until 1960 — still can't completely forgive the Germans; still can work himself into a righteous tether over the decline and fall of old English carmakers like Rover, Morris, MG and Triumph; and is never happier than when he's ambling around a place very much like the Leicestershire market town he grew up in.

Which is to say, a place very much like Bourton-on-the-Water.

Michael introduced Bourton to me sometime in the late 1980s, when we were students together at St. Andrews University in Scotland. That was around the time he also introduced me to The Kinks by playing me their classic 1968 album The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.

It turns out that the early prophets of the British Invasion and the quintessential hamlet of the English Midlands hold some of the most important lessons for ground zero, which I'll come to shortly. The convergence couldn't have been more fitting, even then.