This seems as fitting a thread for this article from the NY Times as any...
December 23, 2007
Architecture
Manhattan’s Year of Building Furiously
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
LET’S take a minute to pat ourselves on the backs.
For decades I’ve been whining about how far New York has slipped behind other world cities in the support of serious architecture. While Abu Dhabi, Shanghai, Beijing and even Paris have been pushing the boundaries, churning out one adventurous building after another, our city was wallowing in a swamp of pseudohistoricism and corporate mediocrity that — to skeptics like me, at least — threatened to transform it into a dull theme park for the superrich.
But this year the city may finally have turned a corner. In the past nine months alone New York has witnessed the unveiling of nearly half a dozen major architectural landmarks. Frank Gehry’s headquarters for IAC/InterActiveCorp along the West Side Highway, Jean Nouvel’s luxury residential building in SoHo, Bernard Tschumi’s Blue Building apartments on the Lower East Side and Renzo Piano’s tower for The New York Times may not rank as these architects’ greatest works. But they are serious architecture nonetheless, in an abundance the city hasn’t seen in decades.
And they will soon be joined by some outright gems. Ground has been broken on Mr. Gehry’s Beekman Tower, whose crinkly, titanium facade will rise more than 70 stories over downtown; Mr. Nouvel’s 75-story luxury tower next to the Museum of Modern Art in Midtown promises to be the most mesmerizing addition to the skyline since the Chrysler Building in 1930.
What is more, this flowering was complemented by some architecture exhibitions with provocative subject matter and fine scholarship, defying the common wisdom that architecture’s popular appeal in mainstream culture is somehow a sign of its growing superficiality. A Gordon Matta-Clark retrospective at the Whitney Museum and “Piranesi as Designer,” an elegant little show at the Cooper-Hewitt, showed that architecture’s current obsession with deep psychological forces is part of a historical continuum.
The Museum of Modern Art’s architecture and design department meanwhile seems to have new energy now that Barry Bergdoll has taken over as chief curator. In July it opened the hauntingly gorgeous “Lost Vanguard: Soviet Modernist Architecture, 1922-32,” documenting the decay of buildings from one of the most vibrant periods in 20th-century architecture.
But the revelation of 2007 was “Robert Moses and the Modern City,” staged concurrently at the Queens Museum of Art, the Museum of the City of New York and the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. A complex portrait of the man who ruled New York’s urban development for more than half a century, the show made a strong case that Moses’ vast infrastructure and slum clearance projects were a nuanced mix of good and bad, as opposed to the outright evil depicted in other accounts. By invoking his legacy, the show raised pointed questions about today’s planning strategies, especially the government’s diminished role in shaping the public realm.
Like most fairy tales New York’s embrace of architecture has a dark side. If many of these shows pointed up our rich architectural past, they also served to remind us that the majority of today’s projects serve the interests of a small elite. And this trend is not likely to change any time soon. The slow death of the urban middle class, the rise of architecture as a marketing tool, the overweening influence of developers — all have helped to narrow architecture’s social reach just as it begins to recapture the public imagination. From this perspective the wave of gorgeous new buildings can be read as a mere cultural diversion.
Additionally, New York is about to embark on a handful of vast developments that could alter its character more than any projects since the 1960s. Twenty-five million square feet of commercial space is planned for Midtown. Madison Square Garden and the woeful Knicks may relocate to the site of the James A. Farley Post Office building, which was supposed to be a grand site for a new Penn Station. An enormous expansion of the Columbia University campus into Harlem has enraged local residents. And let’s not forget ground zero, a black hole of political posturing, cynical real estate deals and outright stupidity.
To date, there is little sign that intelligent design will play a major role in any of those projects. On the contrary, every revision heightens our creeping awareness that when serious money is at stake, business will be as usual.
But it’s the holidays. Cheer up. Drink some eggnog. There will be plenty to worry about in the new year.
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I ❤️ NY
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