S K Y L I N E | Tearing Down
Faded NYC Lore, Demolition Petitions, Problems with 'Genericism', Uncertain Futures.
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Explaining the name of his 2009 monograph, Paul Goldberger recounts that he had earlier used “Building Up and Tearing Down” as the title of a memoiristic lecture, riffing on what Thomas Jefferson said about his life at Monticello: “Putting up and tearing down is my chief occupation.” “And so, I suppose, is it mine,” the architecture critic concludes of his craft. The dyad just as easily might describe the occupation of an architect. Demolition plans are no unfamiliar sight in most offices, and the canon is littered with projects lost in a pile of historical debris.
Maybe this accounts for the popularity of last week’s Skyline, which asked contributors “to retrieve a memory of a building that no longer exists.” The response was overwhelming, so we’re picking up the thread again this week, remembering buildings that stared down the bulldozer and lost.
— Nicholas Raap
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I regret never having visited Grand Prospect Hall, which was demolished last year. The South Slope event space had a long-running, low-budget TV commercial that showed off its glitzy interiors and famously ended with the owners opening their arms to proclaim “we’ll make your dreams come true.” Grand Prospect Hall lives among other icons of fading New York City lore like Dr. Zizmor or Dan Smith. I passed by it a handful of times but never went in. It had been around so long that I assumed it would last forever.
— Clara Gross
It was 2018 and architecture media was flooded with obituaries, petitions, and alternative proposals as news spread that JP Morgan Chase would undertake the “world’s largest controlled demolition” to replace the Natalie De Blois–designed 270 Park Avenue (the erstwhile Union Carbide Building) with a skyscraper designed by Foster + Partners. Neither a “palazetto” like the Pepsi-Co building, nor a pioneer like the Lever House, the project nonetheless possessed a grace all its own—or so alleged its fans. I wasn’t among them. Union Carbide, as far as I was concerned, was chiefly responsible for the largest industrial disaster in history, and so the demise of its New York headquarters seemed a strange hill for critics to die on. As architecture, it was, to me, just part of the fabric of Park Ave, hidden in plain sight. When I recently walked past the site, where construction on the Foster design inches higher and higher, I noticed giant triangular steel bracing that will lift the floor plates high above the life of the avenue to preserve pedestrian sightlines. How thoughtful. I might write a petition to demolish it some day.
— Ekam Singh
Just four weeks after I turned in an eighty-page thesis about a beautiful and threatened building in Red Hook, Brooklyn, UPS demolished it.
The Lidgerwood Warehouse, a stunning nineteenth-century red-brick building, sat right on the waterfront. It was surrounded by other warehouses of a similar era, now filled with much-loved neighborhood shops. In the summer, films were projected onto its facade, while families lounging in Louis Valentino Jr. Park looked on.
Aiming to replace it with a distribution hub, UPS partially, and illegally, demolished Lidgerwood in 2019. For a year after that the fate of the rest of the building remained in limbo, thanks to Red Hook neighbors who protested its erasure in the middle of the night. During the quiet of the pandemic, when no one at Landmarks was watching, the wrecking ball took the rest of the place down. One trace remains: a section of red wall, its peaked entrance indicating what was once there.
— Emily Conklin
BUILDING UP (NYRA ON THE TOWN)
WORLD TRADE CENTER — “The problem with ‘genericism’ is it costs so much operating budget to change the space, it may as well be a strait-jacket,” said JOSHUA RAMUS, principal at REX, seconds before the walls and floor began to move.
Ramus addressed a cross-section of the architecture press arrayed on a balcony overlooking a not-yet-finished theater in the not-yet-finished Perelman Performing Arts Center. All the participants wore dorky white helmets and fluorescent yellow vests, while Ramus arrived in all black: boots, coat, scarf, even the construction helmet. “Must be a Vader day,” someone quipped. The gaggle of editors and writers, diligently herded by their PR sherpas, came for a chance to peek inside the $500 million marble box wedged between the Freedom Tower and Calatrava’s Oculus, one of the final pieces of the World Trade Center site. The already widely published (and, for that matter, already award-winning) building, clad in nearly five thousand panels of marble sliced so thin that the sun shines through them, is, evidently, a riff on Gordon Bunshaft’s Beinecke Library at Yale. We came to see that marble glow from the inside, and it did not disappoint. “I am going to sell this hallway to a fashion show,” I heard one of the participants say as we walked down a corridor luminescent from a cliff of amber light.
But the modularity of the theaters themselves really stole the show. As we stood on the balcony, Ramus explained how the conventional approach to flexibility in architecture is to leave the space undesigned: a black or white box. Even though such blankness may technically make anything possible, the cost of building a custom theater inside of that box for just one performance would make it so that that never happened. So, REX designed the hell out of that space, cooking up dozens of very specific configurations and building mechanical equipment into the building itself to allow it to assume a given configuration at the flick of a button. While Ramus explained this strategy, the flat floor of the theater began to move, transforming into a raked amphitheater. At the same time, both its wall and the wall of the adjacent theater (resembling “acoustic guillotines,” noted the architect) disappeared into the ceiling, producing a single, larger space. It took maybe two minutes. I leaned over to a neighboring editor: “This battle station is fully operational.”
— Nicolas Kemper
DISPATCHES
2/23: Candida Höfer: Heaven on Earth exhibition opening, Sean Kelly Gallery
CHELSEA — “We stand in front of your photographs and have arguments,” said TOSHIKO MORI to CANDIDA HÖFER during opening remarks at the opening of Heaven on Earth at SKNY. Höfer’s massive, intricately detailed compositions of (mostly) architectural interiors filled the gallery, itself a Mori design. While she led the crowd from photograph to photograph with a malfunctioning mic, Höfer was less patient: declining to engage in a Q&A, she left the stage to Mori and joined her friends in the crowd.
Candida’s much-loved shots of libraries were understandably given pride of place, with sacred spaces delegated to the basement gallery. In a small gallery devoted to more mixed subject matter, I stumbled across a poignant juxtaposition: a print depicting the dramatic roofscape of Herzog & de Meuron’s Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Germany (the exhibition’s cover image), hung next to a much smaller one of Berthold Lubetkin’s London Zoo Penguin Pool, a pair of residents caught mid-waddle.
— Emily Conklin
2/24: Futures of the Architectural Exhibition Book Launch, Rice School of Architecture
HOUSTON — “I’m really glad so many people showed up,” RETO GEISER said with a laugh inside the gift shop of the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Next to him stood MICHAEL KUBO and behind him stacks of their jointly edited volume, Futures of the Architectural Exhibition. A collection of seven conversations with curators—including MARIO BALLESTEROS, GIOVANNA BORASI, and SHIRLEY SURYA—the book is a sweeping survey of museum practices that, in Geiser’s words, “plot[s] the shifts in curatorial thinking in response to changing presents, and suggest[s] pathways towards multiple possible futures.”
Finalized during the pandemic, the book project began with a joint masterclass between Rice and the University of Houston in 2019. The launch, then, had the feeling of a reunion of sorts, with past students and collaborators celebrating alongside their contemporaries. As the forty-odd guests mingled, the editors must have found it encouraging to see spines being cracked. Kubo remarked happily, “Many [curators] have already approached us about doing a second volume!”
— Harish Krishnamoorthy
2/25: Housing Justice/Housing Futures Conference, Barnard Center for Research on Women
MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS — “Housing doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” said OKSANA MINOVA of the Community Service Society of New York, succinctly capturing the seemingly infinite scope of the Housing Justice/Housing Futures Conference at Barnard’s Center for Research on Women. The six panelists tied in Indigenous rights, the environmental crisis, racial inequality, labor organizing, mental and physical health, community/social health, food access, transit, the arts and museums, oral history traditions, and women’s rights. They agreed that while the housing system is one of alienation and abstractions, the lived reality of housing blends with every part of life and society; the uncertain future of housing will reflect that.
The day’s keynote featured a dialogue between RHONDA Y. WILLIAMS and KEISHA-KHAN PERRY, who each began by telling the story of another Black woman invested in housing justice. This evocation of the personal set the tone for the event, which was marked by calls to strengthen community ties, shift away from capitalism, and remember to rest. When asked “Where do we even start?” Williams replied that “our bodies are houses too. Start there.”
— Alma Hutter
3/1: New Land Plaza: You Can’t Beat a New York Original exhibition opening, Storefront for Art and Architecture
NOLITA — On Wednesday, the Storefront for Art and Architecture opened its new exhibition, which highlights the criminalization of informal markets on Canal Street and the Lower Manhattan area from the Bloomberg administration onward. The show was produced with the Canal Street Research Association and artist Ming Fay. The crowd (spotted: GSAPP deans past and present, MARK WIGLEY and ANDRÉS JAQUE) sipped cans of wine and beer while navigating the claustrophobic gallery. At several points, the infants among us clambered over the installations, including a set of linoleum-clad stairs, and ran circles around columns topped with monumental fruit. I can’t think of a more appropriate venue for discussing liminal, but essential, spaces than this corner of Kenmare Street and Cleveland Place.
— Matthew Marani
EYES ON SKYLINE
In Skyline 103, readers clamored to see who’s in the line up for this year’s Venice Biennale.
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IN THE NEWS
Speaking of demolition, in Japan, the city of Takamatsu says it will tear down Kenzo Tange’s Kagawa Prefectural Gymnasium, which is in need of $15 million in repairs…
…in New York, construction of JFK Terminal 6 broke ground—which will see the demolition of Terminal 7 in its second phase—and the Department of Parks seeks to test five prefabricated bathrooms (one for each borough)…
…in Germany, a new events center claims to be the first building to use carbon fiber rather than steel for reinforcing concrete…
…six projects from Mexico City to Vancouver are in the running for this year’s Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize…
…a surf-side Frank Lloyd Wright house sold for $22 million (or $15,715 a square foot)…
…and the Biden administration imposed a 200 percent tariff on Russian aluminum imports, a piece of news which Archinect illustrated with an image of Frank Gehry’s Weisman Arts Museum in Minneapolis, a building clad in stainless steel.
DATELINE
Friday, 3/3
Svetlana Kana Radević: Aggregate Assemblies with Ljiljana Blagojević, Sonja Dragović, Lina Džuverović, Anna Kats, Ena Kukić, Vladimir Kulić, Mary Pepchinski, Dubravka Sekulić, Ljubica Spaskovska, Łukasz Stanek, & Alla Vronskaya
10:00 AM EST | Princeton University School of Architecture & Womxn in Design and Architecture
Saturday, 3/4
Head Hi 4th Annual Lamp Show Opening Reception
6:00 PM EST | Head Hi Bookstore + Cafe
Tuesday, 3/7
At the Parsons Table with Paul Goldberger & Tom Wright
6:30 PM EST | Parsons School of Design
Thursday, 3/9
Architectural Workers United with Andrew Daley
12:00 PM CST | Rice University School of Architecture
Emerging Voices 2023: Common Works Architects and Katherine Hogan Architects with Asa Highsmith, Katherine Hogan, Vincent Petrarca, & Marie Law Adams
6:30 PM EST | The Architectural League of New York
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