Silver Towers - I.M. Pei

[antinimby]

I. M. Pei’s Silver Towers Could Become a Landmark


http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/02/11/nyregion/11pei.span.jpg


By Sewell Chan
February 11, 2008 (http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/i-m-peis-silver-towers-could-become-a-landmark/), 3:32 pm

The Landmarks Preservation Commission is expected on Tuesday to schedule a hearing on whether to designate Silver Towers/University Village, a concrete complex designed by I. M. Pei that was part of Robert Moses’s vast urban renewal program, as a historic landmark. Preservationists have urged such a move, arguing that New York University’s proposed campus expansion could some day threaten the towers, which sit at the edge of the university’s campus in Greenwich Village.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation first proposed that Silver Towers be designated a landmark in 2003, and built a coalition that included residents of the complex, local and national preservation organizations and elected officials to support the idea. One of the complex’s three towers, 505 LaGuardia Place, is a middle-income cooperative, where the owners and residents supported the landmark designation. New York University, which owns the other two towers and has suggested developing as many as one million square feet on the site of the original “superblock,” had opposed landmark designation, but has since relented.

The university’s president, John Sexton, said in a statement today:
The planning principles on which we collaborated with local elected officials and community groups are the standards to which we expect to be held. We believe this step is an important one that demonstrates our respect for the ‘ecosystem’ in which our University exists. Both we and our partners took a major step in developing a relationship of trust last week; we think the action we are announcing today makes real our intention to continue building that trust.
The site of the complex was originally part of a 40-acre urban planning site bounded by West Fourth Street, Spring Street, Sixth Avenue and Mercer Street. In 1963, New York University took over 5½ acres of that site to develop a middle-income housing project, with one-third of the apartments for people who lived or worked in Greenwich Village and the rest for university staff members and their families.

“The completed project, finished in 1966, consists of three towers with bold concrete sculptural gridded facades grouped around a monumental plaza,” the Landmarks Preservation Commission said in a statement. “Silver Towers was the culmination of a series of designs started by Pei in 1953 which aimed to bring concrete construction to a new level of refinement and economy.

The complex’s gridded wall reveals the module of the interior rooms and integrated the mechanical systems by setting air-conditioning vents into the spandrels. The pinwheel site place of the towers, together with the deeply set windows created an animated, sculptural composition. Each tower is oriented differently and preserves sight lines along the city streets.”

At the center of the plaza is a giant sculpture by Carl Nesjar, a reinterpretation of Pablo Piccaso’s “Portrait of Sylvette.” Nesjar executed the work on site, using concrete with sandblasted black Norwegian stone aggregate, while Picasso advised him on translating the original small metal sculpture to a new scale and material and on the placement of the work.

According to the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the sculpture is one of only two public outdoor Picasso sculptures in the Western hemisphere. (The other is the giant, unnamed steel sculpture at the Daley Center in Chicago.)

Silver Towers won numerous awards, and was named one of “10 Buildings That Climax an Era” by Fortune magazine in 1966. It also won the American Institute of Architect’s National Honor Award, the City Club of New York’s Albert S. Bard Award and the Concrete Industry Board Award. In 1983, Silver Towers was cited when Mr. Pei won the Pritzker Prize for his architectural career to date.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[Stern]

That complex/buildings is no landmark although the Picasso sclupture is.

[antinimby]

I fully agree. It is so obvious that Andrew Berman's GVSHP's real intention here is to prevent NYU from building on the complex.

[Fabrizio]

The community groups are right.

And can we give credit where credit is due? After all, it wasn't also for them, what WOULD the Village look like today?

Keep this complex pristine. Especially considering the damage NYU has already done recently.

-----------

The complex is very beautiful. And they certainly are landmark worthy. ( and OF COURSE I would have rather had the small buildings that these most likely replaced, but that is another story...).

BTW: They have cousins in Philadelphia. Those in Philly are on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places:

http://www.emporis.com/en/il/im/?id=253258


---

[Stern]

I find your statement duplicitous; this is a Robert Moses housing project that surely replaced hundreds of beautiful old buildings. These towers in the park are a scourge on the city landscape, it is the beautiful old buildings that these towers replaced that define the village, why landmark a mistake?

[Stern]

Further I'd rather have NYU expand on this ugly concrete wasteland than destroying more beautiful old buildings and churches throughout the city which is there current program.

[alonzo-ny]

I agree, allow them space where the buildings there presently wont be missed as much as more beautiful older structures.

[Fabrizio]

They are simply among the most attractive modernist apartment buildings in the city. This is good architecture.

Muschamp in the NYTimes:

"...I. M. Pei's stylized Brutalist residential buildings, Silver Towers and Kips Bay Plaza, are major works of the postwar decades..."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E03E5DA103AF930A35751C0A9649C8B 63

"Silver Towers won numerous awards, and was named one of “10 Buildings That Climax an Era” by Fortune magazine in 1966. It also won the American Institute of Architect’s National Honor Award, the City Club of New York’s Albert S. Bard Award and the Concrete Industry Board Award. In 1983, Silver Towers was cited when Mr. Pei won the Pritzker Prize for his architectural career to date.

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/11/i-m-peis-silver-towers-could-become-a-landmark/

These BTW, predate the Pei Society Hill Towers by about 5 years... yet the towers in Philly have been landmarked since 1999.

[Stern]

I wish architect critics would look at projects for themselves instead of playing the architect name game. These are housing projects, they have no context with the village, they are entirely set apart from the city, the fascade is cold and monotnous. IM Pei is probably the most overrated architect of all time.

[Fabrizio]

These ARE set apart from the city... they are bad urban planning.... yet they are ALSO great architecture.

The UN building, the Seagrams Building (to name just two)... are also bad urban planning, but they are also great works of art.

And yes, the facade IS cold ...as are so many things that are chic and elegant happen to be.

Caviar:

http://www.emporis.com/en/il/im/?id=237824

[Jasonik]

BTW: They have cousins in Philadelphia. Those in Philly are on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places:

http://www.emporis.com/en/il/im/?id=253258


---

Their (http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GV/GV016UniversityVillage.htm) closer relatives are the 1971 Harbor Towers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:DowntownBoston.jpg) in Boston.

Of course they are also hated:It's often been said, in fact, that the best thing about living in the Harbor Towers is that you don't have to look at the Harbor Towers. In the '90s, the city rezoned the waterfront so nothing like them could ever be built there again; the changes now limit building heights and require projects to include more open space and access to the waterfront. While it'd be easy to attribute the hostility to the familiar chasm between architectural taste and popular appeal, even Henry Cobb, the buildings' I. M. Pei–affiliated architect—who went on to build his masterwork, the John Hancock Tower, in Boston—is inclined to agree with the mob. "I do not regard Harbor Towers as my best effort in Boston," Cobb says via e-mail. "I am sympathetic to those who believe that in the perspective of history this could be seen as the wrong project in the wrong place at the wrong time."
source (http://www.bostonmagazine.com/articles/the_harbor_towers_towering_contradictions/)

[Fabrizio]

I would MUCH rather look at the artistic and timeless Harbour Towers than the already dated post-modern mish-mash that has grown up around them.

Be that as it may: no, their closer relative, design-wise are the Sociey Hill Towers.

--------------------------------------------------------

Fine design... Harbour Towers vs Perry Street:


http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v33/ronaldo/ooa.jpg

[lofter1]

The buildings which used to sit on these blocks where both Washington Square Village (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_Square_Village) (1958) and Pei's Silver Towers (http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GV/GV016UniversityVillage.htm) (1963) now stand were basically the same masonry & cast iron buildings you still find east in NoHo and south into SoHo. It's hard to find photos of how this neighborhood looked circa 1955. Jackson Pollack (http://home.nyc.rr.com/jkn/nysonglines/broadway.htm) lived at 76 Houston (near Wooster) in the mid-1930s.

Here's a quaint little thing (http://www.irishinnyc.freeservers.com/catalog.html) that apparently sat on Bleecker near Mercer back around 1870:

http://www.irishinnyc.freeservers.com/bleecker.jpg

Interestingly the original NYU redevelopment plan for these new super blocks called for a third WSV-like slab (http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/WSV-plan1.gif) to be built where the three Pei towers rose, with low rise building creating a street wall along the north side of Houston Street.

For those who are not fans of the existing buildings a visit to the NYU drawing board might be of interest. [ Document with lots of drawings HERE (http://www.nyu.edu/nyu.plans.2031/pdf/OpenHousePresentation.jan30.pdf) -- pdf !! ] NYU's recent proposal for future growth offers multiple plans for "in-fill" buildings whch would rise between the two slabs of WSV (see below), in the open space around the STs and on the site where the low-rise Coles recreation building now stands along Mercer (between Houston & Bleecker). CURBED (http://curbed.com/archives/2008/02/05/purple_people_eaters_nyus_expansion_plans_illustra ted.php) has a full report.

http://curbed.com/uploads/2008_2_nyu4.jpg

I have no doubt that City Planning will make some adjustments to existing zoning to allow NYU go build taller / bigger in the immediate area -- which I suspect is one reason for NYU's change of heart about giving Landmark status to the 3 Silver Towers (see City Realty article below).

NYU says it now supports landmark designation
of its I. M. Pei Towers

City Realty (http://www.cityrealty.com/new_developments/)
11-FEB-08

http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/V2/new_devs/new_home/pixel.gif http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1202772545_nyuexpwasv3.jpg

New York University announced today that it would support the designation of the high-rise Silver Towers complex designed by I. M. Pei as official city landmarks.

The three towers were built in 1967 and the Landmarks Preservation Commission indicated today on its website that it has scheduled a calendaring meeting for tomorrow on the two Silver Towers that the university owns and principally house faculty members and a third tower where the university leases the tower to the 505 LaGuardia cooperative corporation.

The three towers surround a large sculpture by Pablo Picasso in a plaza and they are on the north side of Houston Street between West Broadway and Mercer Streets.

In a statement, John Sexton, the university's president, said, that "The planning principles on which we collaborated with local elected officials and community groups are the standards to which we expect to be held. We believe this step is an important one that demonstrates our respect for the 'ecosystem' in which our University exists. Both we and our partners took a major step in developing a relationship of trust last week; we think the action we are announcing today makes real our intention to continue building that trust."

The university had announced an agreement recently with locally elected officials and community groups on principles for a planned expansion of 6 million square feet over the next 25 years.

Subsequently, it disclosed details of some of the expansion plans under consideration including filling in much of the open spaces of two major and famous "tower-in-the-park" housing complexes it owns south of Washington Square Park.

The agreement stated that it will pursue re-use of existing buildings before developing new facilities as well as creating academic and residential centers outside of the Washington Square Park area where it is based and where it has been expanding significantly in recent years.

Mr. Sexton's remarks did not mention the university's plans for another major complex it owns nearby, Washington Square Village, which consists of two very long and handsome slab apartment buildings with colorful facades and sculptural roof elements designed by Paul Lester Weiner in association with S. J. Kessler & Sons in 1960.

"To compromise for the superscale of the slabs and their comparative anonymonity, Weiner and the landscape architects, Sasaki, Walker & Associates, attempted to humanize the open spaces with lavish plantings as well as fountains and ingeniously designed street furniture," Robert A. M. Stern, Thomas Mellins and David Fishman noted in their book, "New York 1960, Architecture and Urbanism Between the Second World War and the Bicentennial." The university document discussed "filling in the superblock" and presented three "concepts" that would insert new academic and residential buildings between the two Washington Square Village buildings and "attempts to utilize them as a 'buffer' between the new development and the surrounding area. In the 30-page document presented at an "open house" about its expansion plans last week, the university noted that feedback from the community indicated that "the University must achieve a balance between adding density within its current property footprint and expanding beyond that footprint." The university's document said that it "will eek to utilize and renovate existing buildings prior to seeking development sites for new buildings." It stated that "the South Blocks between Houston and West 3rd Street could accommodate up to approximately 2.5 million additional gross square feet above and below grade," adding that "This is the greatest future opportunity for additional space on NYU-owned property."

***

[Fabrizio]

wow, what great research (as usual)... thanks.

[lofter1]

... great research ...

YW & Thanks back ^ Hopefully I didn't go too far.

At times I have been known to bore ... deep into an issue ;)

[stache]

As one walks along Bleeker coming from the west, you come up to this NYU nightmare and it's absolutely horrible. It's a cross between Brasilia and a prison.

[TREPYE]

^Agreed. Landmark this?
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GV/2003_10_silvertower1.jpg


Gimme a break.:rolleyes:

This is the crap that creates all that clutter in the landmarks office that prevents real landmarkable buildings from being deisgnated and protected. :mad:

[DarrylStrawberry]

^
Amen.

[lofter1]

Seeing as how I've spent half my life within a couple of blocks of these three (and have some fondness for their brutality), I ask folks to consider this:

Face it ... NYU is gong to build. But these will NOT be torn down. IMO it's better to Landmark them and preserve the "towers in the park" (which on this site is interesting -- except on cold windy days when the plaza is BRUTAL) rather than allow NYU to do in-fill between the towers, thereby losing the greenery and trees. Also not s good idea to allow anything tall on the corner of West Bway / Bleecker. The green spaces along LaGuardia between Houston & W 3rd should be preserved (it's ashame that it doesn't continue all the way up to Washington Square park on the west side of Bobst Library).

I'd guess that both the Silvers and WSV are built-out to maximum existing FAR.

Anyone know if that's the case?

I'd rather they upzone the Coles site -- and build something tall on a base there, creating a streetwall along Bleecker / Mercer / Houston and which relates to the Silver trio. One of the "proposals" in the NYU pdf shows something like that with a large-ish tower rising at Houston / Mercer and another smaller tower rising at Bleecker / Mercer.

With good architecture that could be a good plan.

[stache]

Don't expect anything nice coming out of NYU.

[Fabrizio]

What is so funny to me, is that design-wise, these towers are on par with the new things on Bond. It is unquestionably great architecture.


http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GV/2003_10_silvertower1.jpg

[stache]

They might look fine out in the Bronx, for example, but they are not suitable for a dense area like the central village. They are part and parcel with the Moses expansion of Houston St., just blast it through with no other consideration of the area.

[Fabrizio]

I don't think anyone will dispute that this is bad urban planning. Such buildings would be built very differently today in the Village.

And most likely, so would Lincoln Center, the Seagrams Building, the UN, the UN apartments, the Manhattan House apartments, etc...

Rather than just dismissing them, it might be interesting to discover why Muschamp, Fortune Magazine, the American Institute of Architects (and etc.) unanimously consider them so highly. Or why Pei's similar towers-in-a-park in Philadelphia, have had landmark status for 20 years now.

Are they all idiots?

[stache]

Let's tear down a few square blocks in Florence and slap up a duplicate copy of this development and see how much everybody likes them.

[lofter1]

>> snap <<

:D

[GVNY]

Though not necessarily removed in the 60s (much of it was), I created this little post to demonstrate some of the immeasurable losses suffered by New York City in recent decades.

Singer Building, 1 (http://img235.imageshack.us/img235/1481/s2so.jpg), 2 (http://img72.imageshack.us/img72/6113/singerbuildingandcityinvestmen.jpg), 3 (http://img115.imageshack.us/img115/3079/godofcitiesnh1.jpg), 4 (http://img403.imageshack.us/img403/4606/singerbuilding1908newyoul7.png),5 (http://img225.imageshack.us/img225/6853/singerbuildingatnight19pr6.png), 6 (http://aycu25.webshots.com/image/22664/2005058355825745056_rs.jpg),7 (http://aycu19.webshots.com/image/24338/2005026529311918906_rs.jpg), 8 (http://aycu40.webshots.com/image/22679/2005025550785080406_rs.jpg), 9 (http://aycu29.webshots.com/image/24228/2002658720686780450_rs.jpg), 10 (http://aycu08.webshots.com/image/23767/2002667314580213438_rs.jpg), 11 (http://aycu14.webshots.com/image/18813/2002637908517928468_rs.jpg), 12 (http://aycu25.webshots.com/image/23664/2000856894593259755_rs.jpg),13 (http://aycu29.webshots.com/image/24148/2000894583545007877_rs.jpg), 14 (http://aycu09.webshots.com/image/18768/2000811821791415335_rs.jpg)

Luxury Hotels of Europe, here (http://img118.imageshack.us/img118/448/newyorkcityviewofsherrytw1.jpg), here (http://img123.imageshack.us/img123/1457/newyorkcitysherrynetherih6.jpg), here (http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/3144/newyorkcitysherrynetherdx6.jpg), here (http://www.shorpy.com/files/images/5a18131u1_0.jpg), and here (http://aycu01.webshots.com/image/40520/2004669305731526103_rs.jpg).

The World Building--here (http://img301.imageshack.us/img301/3861/worldbuilding18958ug.jpg) and here (http://img137.imageshack.us/img137/2686/worldbuilding18943kw.jpg)--formerly located on Newspaper Row (http://img20.imageshack.us/img20/341/newspaperrow18979ac.jpg) and once the world's tallest.

The crowded majesty of the ghetto Lower East Side, here (http://aycu26.webshots.com/image/21905/2000883070716733598_rs.jpg).

The docks and excitement of West Street, here (http://aycu27.webshots.com/image/43786/2002085704505691378_rs.jpg).

Industrial Lower Manhattan, here (http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2050/2170742902_b434352462_o.jpg) and here (http://aycu31.webshots.com/image/41430/2004913425937238699_rs.jpg).

[ablarc]

The old stuff is gone. The Pei buildings are with us. They may or may not be better than what they replaced, but as Fabrizio insists, they are very high quality architecture, and almost certainly better than anything NYU might replace them with today.

To compare them with public housing in the Bronx is like lumping Seagram in with all the other flattop curtain-wall boxes. If you can't see the difference ...

[ZippyTheChimp]

Let's tear down a few square blocks in Florence and slap up a duplicate copy of this development and see how much everybody likes them.Not really the point.

What's done is done.

[stache]

To compare them with public housing in the Bronx is like lumping Seagram in with all the other flattop curtain-wall boxes.

Who said anything about public housing? Do you think all of Bronx county is nothing but public housing?

[Fabrizio]

For the record:

A good portion of the center of Florence (on both sides of the Arno) is modern architecture. Nearly everthing you see in the fotos below is from the 50's and 60's:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hazboy/1250871436/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickmayon/362041901/sizes/o/
With the excepton of the buildings in the far background and the stone structure along the left... everything is "new":
http://www.flickr.com/photos/global-wandering/492289368/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kane1173/423468579/

>> snap left << >> snap right <<

--

[infoshare]

...... quality architecture, and almost certainly better than anything NYU might replace them with today.

To compare them with public housing in the Bronx is like lumping Seagram in with all the other flattop curtain-wall boxes. If you can't see the difference ...

Yes I can see this is quality architecture: that is, it has qualities that I find unattractive ;). Landmark status: not this building, not in my opinion.

[pianoman11686]

I'm sorry, but these are not worthy of being landmarks.

I find it deliciously ironic that a project associated with urban renewal and the worst side of government planning has found supporters in people like Berman. These people need to get their stories straight. And as if it even needs to be said: this is clearly NOT about architecture. It's about money, pure and simple.

[Stern]

I don't think anyone will dispute that this is bad urban planning. Such buildings would be built very differently today in the Village.

And most likely, so would Lincoln Center, the Seagrams Building, the UN, the UN apartments, the Manhattan House apartments, etc...

Rather than just dismissing them, it might be interesting to discover why Muschamp, Fortune Magazine, the American Institute of Architects (and etc.) unanimously consider them so highly. Or why Pei's similar towers-in-a-park in Philadelphia, have had landmark status for 20 years now.

Are they all idiots?

This is a horrible argument. One could likewise argue that 60 Wall Street is great because 17 State Street, the Sony Building, and the Citicorp Center are great postmodern buildings. This building is nothing like the buildings you listed, its concrete, its cold, its monotonous, its set apart from the city and has a graceless honeycomb fascade, all combine to provide great views for residents. It goes against the communalism of a city and it makes no apologies about it, its as if the people here want nothing more than their own selfish desires, their own private park, their own parking, driveways, unobstructed views, its a suburb that the rest of the City must take time to walk around and unfortuantly look at.

[Fabrizio]

Would SOMEONE answer this:

"Rather than just dismissing them, it might be interesting to discover why Muschamp, Fortune Magazine, the American Institute of Architects (and etc.) unanimously consider them so highly. Or why Pei's similar towers-in-a-park in Philadelphia, have had landmark status for 20 years now."

Are they all idiots?"

(oh and let's add ablarc to the list...)

Well? Are they?

[pianoman11686]

I'm sure none of those people have ever been wrong about anything before. Just because they praise these buildings means we should take them at their word? Please. It's not like we're on an architecture forum, or anything like that.

Like I said, the main story here is not even about architecture. It's about NYU placating the community which is becoming increasingly hostile to their expansion in the Village - in some cases, for good reason.

[pianoman11686]

Gothamist (http://gothamist.com/2008/02/12/nyus_silver_tow.php)

February 12, 2008

NYU's Silver Towers: Potential Landmark - or Eyesore?

http://gothamist.com/attachments/jen/2008_02_nyusilver.jpg

Later today, the city will discuss whether the I.M. Pei-designed Silver Towers should be landmarked. The Observer reported that NYU announced its support today, a reversal from an earlier position over three years ago.

The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation pushed for landmarking the complex, located between Bleecker and Houston Streets and LaGuardia Place and Mercer Street, a few years ago, calling it "an innovative modern design by I.M. Pei." The GVSHP's support may have been to thwart further NYU expansion, as one 2004 rally for the Silver Towers' landmarking also included a protest for NYU's plans to building a "large new Science Center in the midst of the complex."

GVSHP still wants to designate the whole superblock (including the Morton Williams building); GVSHP's Andrew Berman said this superblock's design was "sensitive." However, Manhattan Institute fellow Julia Vitullo-Martin told amNew York, "Silver Towers destroyed the Manhattan street grid and did so deliberately. We probably should be rethinking landmarking if the city is going to landmark these kinds of developments. If you stood in front of Silver Towers and asked people walking by if it should be in the same category of Grand Central Station, I am sure they would say no."

NYU says it could still theoretically build more buildings in the open areas, even if the Silver Towers were landmarked.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission will discuss the Silver Towers around 1:45PM at the Municipal Building (1 Centre Street), 9th Floor. See the other things being discussed on the agenda (PDF). And back in 2004, City Councilman Alan Gerson told the Villager, "Where else do you have a combination of I.M. Pei and Pablo Picasso? It’s an exemplar of modern, high-rise urban building and planning, defining an era of architecture. It’s cries out for it. It’s a no-brainer." The Picasso in question is an interpretation of Picasso's Bust of Sylvette by Carl Nesjär. And here are some more pictures of Silver Towers (http://www.bluejake.com/archives/2003/10/07/silver_towers.php).

***

Poll results:

What do you think of NYU's Silver Towers?

They are ugly and an eyesore. 44% (194 votes)
They are so ugly they are awesome. 23% (104 votes)
They're not the worst but they don't need to be landmarked. 33% (147 votes)
Total Votes: 445

[lofter1]

One thing that has to be taken into consideraton when judging the Silver Towers is their context with Houston Street at the time they were built. Since the widening of Houston Street in the 1920s (when the Independent Line (http://www.nycsubway.org/articles/historyindependentsubway.html) subway was constructed beneath Houston Street -- it opened in 1932 and was a pre-Moses City project) the stretch from The Bowery to West Broadway has been a black hole. During construction of the subway portions of buildings along the widened Houston Street were chopped off, leaving brutal blank walls and narrow lots which for years were used only for parking. Unfortunately even the recent upgrades taking place on Houston have failed to address some very basic issues, such as widening the sidewalks and making the entire stretch more pedestrian friendly. The Silver Towers don't help the pedestrain relationship one bit -- but the towers didn't create that situation.

[Fabrizio]

Pianoman... haven't you been told time again about the strawman thing? You put words in peoples mouths and then proceed to argue with what you have made up.

I ask "are they all idiots?"... the spirit being: "what is it that they see?"

I did not ask anyone to take them at their word.

Got it?

[pianoman11686]

I'm sorry I didn't see past the words and discover the "spirit".

Suffice it to say that these buildings are contentious works of architecture, at best. Just because you say so-and-so "unanimously consider them so highly" doesn't mean there aren't diverging opinions - many of which, there are.

[Jasonik]

Would SOMEONE answer this:

"Rather than just dismissing them, it might be interesting to discover why Muschamp, Fortune Magazine, the American Institute of Architects (and etc.) unanimously consider them so highly. Or why Pei's similar towers-in-a-park in Philadelphia, have had landmark status for 20 years now."

Are they all idiots?"

(oh and let's add ablarc to the list...)

Well? Are they?

I think there is generally a confusion about landmarking that may be at play here.

Generally something is landmarked because it is significant, either historically or architecturally, usually a blend of the two.

Pei is a significant architect. It can be, and has been argued that Silver Towers are a significant work in Pei's oeuvre. This last point appears to be in contention from viewing the negative comments here.

Some would appear to believe that just as any five year old can draw a Picasso and any parent of a five year old is qualified to choose a child's work over Picasso's, so too can architecture be dismissed simply because of personal foibles regarding stylistic or aesthetic taste. It's as though architectural scholars and critics who can place works within the context of the International canon and the whole continuum of occidental architecture may be brushed aside on the principle that taste needn't be cultivated nor erudite, -- just a simple matter of opinion.

"Of course the critics are wrong when they disagree with me - because it is merely their opinion against my own, and my opinion can't be criticized, for it is mine and I am entitled to it," they seem to be saying.

I would argue this complex needs to be landmarked just to guard against the inevitable call to reclad or paint or some such heinous superficial fix to improve the ugly towers or build upon their greenspace.

[Fabrizio]

I think those schooled in architecture, and architecure enthusiasts, like these buildings because they are beautiful... not so much because they are by Pei (and therefore somehow beautiful by default).

What are they seeing?

[pianoman11686]

Jasonik: what is your opinion concerning the community's opposition to NYU's proposal to construct a new science building on the site of the one-story Morton Williams supermarket?

[lofter1]

On that point ^ I believe you're referring to a plan such as the one shown in this rendering (the Morton Williams supermarket is currently at the lower left, where the new building outlined in orange is shown):

http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1202772545_nyuexpwasv3.jpg

It has to be understood that the Morton Williams / possible NYU science building site at the SE corner of Bleecker / LaGuardia is NOT a part of the Silver Towers property. No matter what happens to Silver Towers that corner site is developable.

IMO the most important aspect of any plan for that site is that the beautiful Community Garden along LaGuardia be maintained. If that means allowing for a taller tower for the science project then I have no problem with that whatsoever. However the massing shown above is not well thought out. And any tower going up on that corner will disrupt the "pin wheel" lay out of the Silver Towers -- as a new tower will rise somewhat in line with the Tower on the SW part of the SIlver site.

[pianoman11686]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Berman, GVSHP, et al. included the supermarket site within their proposal to landmark the entire superblock. I'm fairly certain that means NYU would not develop anywhere on that site.

[Jasonik]

Pianoman,his one?

http://www.cityrealty.com/graphics/uploads/1202772545_nyuexpwasv3.jpg

In the plan view the new building should move to the right and straddle the street in a continuation of the pinwheel plan allowing each building clear sightlines from all four faces, or a 7 or 8 story ell at the corner pushed out to the sidewalk containing the greenspace, or leave it green, or do what ever they want. I mean NYU owns the property, shouldn't they be allowed to do with it what they wish, even ruin it?
(Lofter beat me to much of this I've noticed.):)

What are they seeing?
The pure expression of an ideal executed with elegance and clarity. A rare uncompromised artifact from a period that earnestly believed architecture was able to change society. A period when practitioners felt they had discovered some archetypal axioms about the built environment and confidently set out to manifest these essential and timeless truths.

[Stern]

Would SOMEONE answer this:

"Rather than just dismissing them, it might be interesting to discover why Muschamp, Fortune Magazine, the American Institute of Architects (and etc.) unanimously consider them so highly. Or why Pei's similar towers-in-a-park in Philadelphia, have had landmark status for 20 years now."

Are they all idiots?"

(oh and let's add ablarc to the list...)

Well? Are they?

They're the same critics and publications that will say anything by Gehry, Piano, Calatrava, Pei, Wright, Mies, is gold. No architect has a 100% success rate, although those that play the architect name game will say as much.

[TREPYE]

I think there is generally a confusion about landmarking that may be at play here.

Generally something is landmarked because it is significant, either historically or architecturally, usually a blend of the two.

This is key to my rationale. These buildings are neither. If anything they are very close cousins to the residential cookie cuttter designs that most people abhor. Perhaps not exact but definitely in the spirit of those simplistic, developer-friendly profitable designs.

I would argue this complex needs to be landmarked just to guard against the inevitable call to reclad or paint or some such heinous superficial fix to improve the ugly towers or build upon their greenspace.

Maintenance of the status quote should not be a rationale for landmarking.


What are they seeing?

Well I can tell you what most of them who do not live in NYC (including Ablarc and yourself) dont see and that is the experince of looking at them everyday or a few times a week (not a few times a year) and enduring their presence in this citys fabric. You guys love to romantisize pictures on the internet but you dont constantly have to walk past them and grumble at their sights cuz they look and feel so out of place in the context of their surroundings. And not only that but looking at how much better archtiecture has gotten since the 60's emphasizes their mediocrity. The same goes for a tower like Metlife, look at it everyday and constantly try to tune it out because it goes against everything that you can consider appealing.

[ablarc]

And any tower going up on that corner will disrupt the "pin wheel" lay out of the Silver Towers -- as a new tower will rise somewhat in line with the Tower on the SW part of the SIlver site.
Accurate observation; here as at Society Hill, Pei's placement of the towers is precise and essential to their effect.

The fix here is simple, however: rotate the new tower above the supermarket 90 degrees about its own vertical axis. With its long side running north-south it'll then be quite harmonious.

Of course you can expect the surface treatment to be screwed up and unsympathetic. This is, after all, 2008.

[ablarc]

Well I can tell you what most of them who do not live in NYC (including Ablarc and yourself) dont see and that is the experince of looking at them everyday or a few times a week (not a few times a year) and enduring their presence in this citys fabric. You guys love to romantisize pictures on the internet but you dont constantly have to walk past them and grumble at their sights cuz they look and feel so out of place in the context of their surroundings. And not only that but looking at how much better archtiecture has gotten since the 60's emphasizes their mediocrity. The same goes for a tower like Metlife, look at it everyday and constantly try to tune it out because it goes against everything that you can consider appealing.
I moved into Washington Square Village as they put the finishing touches on these towers. I was as enthralled by them then as I passed them daily as I am now. In fact, I would detour off LaGuardia Place to stand between the towers, and was even more thrilled later when they installed the Picasso. I'd take visitors through circuitously en route to Houston, and they never failed to be impressed. (It was the supermarket tht depressed me.)

Out of place? To be sure. But so was (is) Washington Square Village and (come to think of it) McDougal Alley. In fact, is there really that much difference between "out of place" and "delightful surprise"?

Not all places have to conform. New Yorkers especially could be aware of that fact, living in such a diverse place.

I can't agree that architecture has gotten better since the 60's. Urbanism has, but not architecture. And the urbanism is still full of dogma --as you illustrate-- though the dogma has changed.

And I completely disagree with your assessment of MetLife (I assume you mean the one that used to be PanAm).

So, you see, there is room for a diversity of opinion on these matters, and you don't need to assume that your opinions are universally shared. :)

[antinimby]

The fact of the matter is that these towers are not going anywhere anytime soon. For one, imagine the outrage it would cause if someone even hinted at displacing all those residents in them just so they can be redeveloped and in all places, like Greenwich Village?

Not gonna happen.

Therefore, landmarking them is really redundant. The other argument is on whether the open space will get redeveloped and as someone has already pointed out, some of those spaces will get redeveloped regardless.

With that said, this is really an example of how the landmarking process has become a tool for both sides (see I'm not being one-sided) to further their agendas. It has become less about art, architecture and more about what it can do to help each side's cause.

I don't see the urgency to protect this complex since not much will happen to them other than what will happen anyway even if they were landmarked.

[alonzo-ny]

The fix here is simple, however: rotate the new tower above the supermarket 90 degrees about its own vertical axis. With its long side running north-south it'll then be quite harmonious.

Of course you can expect the surface treatment to be screwed up and unsympathetic. This is, after all, 2008.

The first statement is true but unless the facade treatement is flawless then its a waste of time. One only needs to look at Perry West to see that.

[lofter1]

I did some deep digging and came up with some old photos (mostly circa late 20s / early 30s, after the IND Line had been cut under Houston Street) of the blocks where the Silver Towers & WSV now stand. Most of the buildings in these shots came down in the late 1950s ...

1. The north side of Houston Street looking west from near Broadway (the Cable Building is seen at the far right)

2. The NW corner of Mercer & Houston (current site of Coles Athletic Center)

3. Wooster Street between Houston & Bleecker (site of the SW Silver Tower)

4. No. 113 - 123 Bleecker, between Greene & Wooster (site of the southern block of WSV)

5. BONUS Shot: A Berenice Abbott photo of a shanty town that grew up along the south side of Houston near Mercer
after lots were cleared to make way for construction of the IND Subway under Houston Street

***

[TREPYE]

So, you see, there is room for a diversity of opinion on these matters, and you don't need to assume that your opinions are universally shared. :)

I never assumed anything. I was stating my personal and exclusive point of view of the nature of some folks' observations. :)

I uderstand that both you and fabrizio both lived here but that is where my point of architecture getting better comes along (which we disagree about). Amidst all the new developments that were coming along and you saw everyday during the epoch that you lived here these towers could have been on the positve side of the contrast. Whereas many of the new towers that I see everyday today (and consider better) completely minimize their design.....all of this of course IMO:)

[lofter1]

Trepye: Do you honestly believe, from an engineering / architecture POV, that the Silver Towers are no better than the majority of residential towers built around NYC?

I pass between these towers several times each week -- often taking different paths across the site.

It's hard for me to understand how anyone could pass close by the Silver Towers on a regular basis and fail to recognize -- not to say like -- the expertise & skill that is apparent, not only in the execution of the construction but in the layout of the site as a whole (despite some of the indignities which various aspects of the complex have suffered over the years).

[Fabrizio]

Well I can tell you what most of them who do not live in NYC (including Ablarc and yourself) dont see and that is the experince of looking at them everyday or a few times a week (not a few times a year) and enduring their presence in this citys fabric. You guys love to romantisize pictures on the internet but you dont constantly have to walk past them and grumble at their sights cuz they look and feel so out of place in the context of their surroundings. And not only that but looking at how much better archtiecture has gotten since the 60's emphasizes their mediocrity. The same goes for a tower like Metlife, look at it everyday and constantly try to tune it out because it goes against everything that you can consider appealing.

When I lived in NYC, I experienced looking at them often. And I still get a thrill seeing them. But then again, I also get a thrill seeing hand sewn button holes and perfectly set sleeves.

[stache]

You forgot Vikki Carr! ;)

[NYatKNIGHT]

Lofter, those old photos are fantastic, I always wondered what Houston Street looked like prior to the Razing, thanks. It's no surprise that it was once far superior from a pedestrian's perspective. The worst stretch today is the entrance to the underground parking garage right out onto Houston Street.

[ZippyTheChimp]

I moved into Washington Square Village as they put the finishing touches on these towers. I was as enthralled by them then as I passed them daily as I am now.My psychiatrist lived in the Silver Towers.

[Fabrizio]

1960's + Greenwich Village +psychiatrist + Silver Towers + Picasso sculpture = very cool

---

http://youtube.com/watch?v=Dm9SnuH_CN4

--

[vanshnookenraggen]

I hope these towers are landmarked so that one day decades from now when all the low income housing projects have been torn down these still remain as an example of towers-in-a-park that worked. After all, in the 1960's the city was tearing down buildings left and right that we today cherish, but we only cherish them because they have stood the test of time.

Give these towers 20 more years and people will be happy they are still there.

[pianoman11686]

In the plan view the new building should move to the right and straddle the street in a continuation of the pinwheel plan allowing each building clear sightlines from all four faces, or a 7 or 8 story ell at the corner pushed out to the sidewalk containing the greenspace, or leave it green, or do what ever they want.

Yes, this seems like the most prudent thing to do. Unfortunately, even such a logical solution will be illegal if GVSHP's landmarking proposal goes through, which covers the entire superblock.

I mean NYU owns the property, shouldn't they be allowed to do with it what they wish, even ruin it?

Are you being sardonic or just sarcastic?

The pure expression of an ideal executed with elegance and clarity. A rare uncompromised artifact from a period that earnestly believed architecture was able to change society. A period when practitioners felt they had discovered some archetypal axioms about the built environment and confidently set out to manifest these essential and timeless truths.

Pretty wording, but I think it's mainly just that: wording. The design is pure, no question about it. But this complex is non-unique. It was (is) a manifestation of a style that had become dominant many years before its construction. It was neither groundbreaking, nor monumental. It was "slum-clearance" by decree; in my book, it represented the worst side of planning. Perhaps not the worst side of architecture, but certainly unbecoming of landmarking.

To anyone who has closely followed Berman and his society over the years, as I have, I think it's fairly plain to see that his raison d'etre is neither preservation, as his society leads us to believe, nor encouraging beneficent development. He is much more a public advocate for the anti-development crowd than a preservationist. NYU has been, and is, one of his main targets - which is why I'm not the least bit surprised that he has been leading the fight to landmark both this superblock, and a wide swath of the South Village, for years now.

Consider this: if preserving, or improving the site was his goal, then what possible justification would exist for preserving the entire block in amber, when it is obvious that the one-story supermarket mars what is otherwise a balanced layout? I agree with some of the other opinions here, on how a new structure could be positioned to blend with the other buildings. Unfortunately, this will not even be taken into consideration.

Attached is a recent photo of the site. Tell me: is this worthy of being landmarked?

[Stern]

Two words...

Commie block.

[Fabrizio]

LOL. I love that "recent photo" of the site. Was that done with a pin-hole camera?

Guys, really, if you can not at a glance see how spectacular this is...

Will someone please show us some modern facade/window treatments that are better than this. Thank you:

http://joelraskin.smugmug.com/photos/187895107-L.jpg

(Now that is how to set in a window. I guess it could be compared to 28 BondStreet... except in some ways, it's even better)

If you all can not see the brilliance in that facade, then sorry... I can only question your ability to understand architecture.

---

http://joelraskin.smugmug.com/photos/187895094-L.jpg

[ZippyTheChimp]

Pin-hole camera. HAHA.

Pianoman: The idea is to use an unflattering photo, not a godawful one.

[pianoman11686]

Um, it's not my photo. Taken from Google Street View (hence the copyright in the bottom right-hand corner).

[lofter1]

btw: That lousy street-view photo isn't even all that "recent". Note that the blurry lettering on the supermarket storefront should spell "Morton Williams" which has been the name of the store for 4+ years, but it's still showing the previous name -- "Amalgamated Supermarkets" -- from years ago. :p

[Ed007Toronto]

Interesting that google is using old photos for street view. Are they all old and, if so, where are they getting them from?

[lofter1]

How does that google street view thing work to begin with?

Dos google have college kids driving up and down the streets of every city & town, snapping away? Or making a vid?

[Ed007Toronto]

Not sure. Right now they are doing places like Manhattan. Some of the main streets outside of Manhattan are done but the rest are not. Good question.

[TREPYE]

If you all can not see the brilliance in that facade, then sorry... I can only question your ability to understand architecture.


What an dismissive, self righteous comment. Gee, sorry Fabrizio we dont all sare your exquisite and sophisticated taste. LOL...please dude get a grip :rolleyes:.

Oh, and BTW IMO the facade is not that "brilliant" but if you think so it is very nice, good for you. :)

[Stern]

Seriously. I never understand comments like that. If he thinks his opinion is the only one that matters why even post on a forum?

[stache]

I've tried banning him for a week to see if that would improve his behavior but I see that's not working. He's just not very socially integrated.

[alonzo-ny]

Fabrizio is the be all and end all of the forum, didnt you know?

[lizbeth li]

The whole area around these buildings is dead. I have walked past them maybe a hundred times in my life and I remember cutting through only once, like they are two dimensional and the land around them is computer generated and hardly an open park. The buildings themselves are ugly and the only thought I've ever had about them is that some NYU faculty probably have some great rental deal -- meaning the rest of the world didn't count.

[Fabrizio]

Oh come on guys... shall I pull out a rash of similair quotes by others that are thrown around here all the time?

In fact, I will say it again and mean it in all sincerity: If you all can not see the brilliance in that facade, then sorry... I can only question your ability to understand architecture.

Look at it this way: I would also question someone's ability to understand architecture if they could not see the brilliance in the Seagrams building, the Lever House... in a whole group of other buildings too.

Wouldn't you?

Oh c'mon Stache. I mean, really, if that quote deserves a ban then go ahead and ban me.

So here I am, dumbfounded. Educate me, show me, explain to me how that facade is below-par.

( And I am not talking about personal taste. This building has nothing to do with my personal taste.)

I'm looking for help here: let's see some modern apartment building facades that can top that as far as design and construction.

If this is "commie block" public housing etc...if it is so poor... well there must be plenty better. Let's see it. I'm waiting.

Also: remember all the contraversy about 2ColumbusCircle? As far as I was concerned the thing could be torn down... good riddence... I always found it ugly and a poor use for that plot.

BUT I could completely understand the arguments by those who were in favour of saving it. I could understand the buildings importance in the history and culture of the city.
I could see that and understand it. It could not be dismissed. And I could not dimiss the illustrious group of scholarly people that praised the building by saying that "they're playing the architect name-game" etc. That to me is intellectual poverty. I barely finished high school and so I do have respect for those who might know more than me. I did not like the building but I welcomed the oppurtunity to have my eyes opened by hearing their reasoning rather than just waving them away. I have no fear of learning. End result: better educated about the building's importance, still did not like the building (personal taste), still happy to see it go.

----

Worth reading:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/14/books/14dumb.html?_r=1&ref=books&oref=slogin


---

[stache]

Your audience will be wildly in favor of all your opinions. :rolleyes:

[Fabrizio]

Actually, I am the one of the few posters about the Silver Towers voicing not just my opinion.

I've posted quotes, mentioned awards etc. by people who know much more about these things than I do.

Uh... perhaps not more than others here do... but much more than I do.

[Stern]

Oh come on guys... shall I pull out a rash of similair quotes by others that are thrown around here all the time?

In fact, I will say it again and mean it in all sincerity: If you all can not see the brilliance in that facade, then sorry... I can only question your ability to understand architecture.

Look at it this way: I would also question someone's ability to understand architecture if they could not see the brilliance in the Seagrams building, the Lever House... in a whole group of other buildings too.

Wouldn't you?

No I wouldn't. In fact many have questioned the brilliance of the Seagram Building and the Lever House, it lead to a little movement called Post-Modernism, maybe you've heard of it?

[Citytect]

A letter to the LPC in favor of landmark designation for Silver Towers. I found it here (http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GV/GV016UniversityVillage.htm).

Admittedly, I'm a supporter of landmarking the towers, but I think it's very informative and convincing.

Dear Chair Tierney:

I am writing to urge the Commission to consider the designation as New York City landmarks of University Village/Silver Towers, 100 and 110 Bleecker Street and 505 LaGuardia Place, including landscaping, outdoor sculpture and furniture, and the adjacent supermarket and Coles Sports and Recreation Center (Block 524).

Designed in 1966 by I.M. Pei, the University Village/Silver Towers buildings are an early gem by one of the late 20th century’s most important and celebrated architects. The design represents an important moment in the evolution of Pei’s career and in the evolution of modern design in general, as well as an important moment in Greenwich Village and New York’s architectural development. These buildings, their overall arrangement within this superblock, and their placement within the surrounding landscaping and larger street grid, are an unusually sensitive and sophisticated manifestation of 1960’s modern design, and are, along with Chatham Green, probably New York’s most successful example of cast-in-place concrete architecture (a form rarely used anymore), and perhaps its most successful residential design from this era. The design won the American Institute of Architects National Honor Award and the City Club of New York’s Albert S. Bard Award in 1967, and Pei won the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1983 for his body of work up to that point in time; in 1966, Fortune Magazine dubbed Silver Towers one of “Ten Buildings That Climax an Era.”

In typical Pei fashion, the design not only conveys the desire for structural truth and transparency typical of traditional modernism; it also displays a stylish, visually sensual, carefully articulated abstraction, acknowledges and subtly relates to the larger urban fabric around it, and gently shapes the experience of the pedestrian at street level. University Village/Silver Towers exhibits the synthesis of structural expressionism, recognition of context and user, and sensual visual pleasure which Pei would exemplify in his later designs, and which would inform the work of other pre-eminent late 20th century and 21st century architects such as Richard Meier and Peter Eisenmann.

In the book New York 1960 (The Monacelli Press, 1995) by Robert A.M. Stern, Thomas Mellins, and David Fishman, the story of the project’s design is described as follows:

"In 1963 NYU Took title to the vacant five-and-a-half acre parcel that was to have been the site of the last of the Washington Square Village superslabs and set out to develop a middle-income housing project, ultimately called University Village…In a bold move toward creating a high-quality project, I.M. Pei was retained as architect. Initial plans called for two thirty story towers and an adjacent seven-story building; ground was broken in 1964. But by the time University Village was completed in 1966 the third building had grown in height to match the other two towers. Despite their claim that “housing is no place for monuments,” Pei and his design collaborators, who included James Ingo Freed, as well as A. Preston Moore and Theodore Amberg, organized the towers to create a monumental plaza, and the towers themselves, with their bold concrete structural grids and deep-set windows, furthered the impression of grand scale. Whereas Pei’s previous housing had tended to emphasize the regularity of the structural grid, creating almost endlessly repetitious, impersonal facades, at University Village he pursued a counterbalancing impulse toward dynamic asymmetry based on a pinwheel-plan composition of the towers, juxtaposing the window grids with concrete sheer walls to create an animated, sculpturally vigorous yet human-scaled design. The placement of the buildings on the site furthered the sense of active composition by playing the long facade of one tower against the short façade of the other. The complex gathered its entrances around an internal plaza, deliberately turning its back on Houston Street…The landscaping of the site considerably softened the transitions between the housing precinct and the neighborhood to the south.

As the focus of the plaza, Pei wanted a monumental sculpture by Pablo Picasso, who agreed to have his sometime collaborator, Norwegian sculptor Carl Nesjar, reinterpret his Portrait of Sylvette (1934), originally a two-foot-tall metal construction, as a thirty-six-foot high, sixty-ton sculpture. Working in situ, Nesjar executed Sylvette in concrete with a Norwegian black stone aggregate that was sandblasted to recreate the etched black lines of the original. Picasso was involved not only in the translation of the small construction to its new scale and material but also in its placement in the plaza. Despite the planarity of the composition, the construction in concrete, rather than the original metal, gave Sylvette a forceful, gestural presence that held its own amid the surrounding towers."

In Manhattan Skyscrapers (2000, Princeton Architectural Press), by Eric P. Nash describes the design thusly:

"Silver Towers is a fine composition that creates a modernist dialogue between openness and enclosure. The sheer, 30-story, reinforced concrete and glass towers are an elegant synthesis of many strains of modernist design, and at the same time express Pei’s minimalist sculptural sensibility. A “slightly skeptical acolyte” of Walter Gropius, in the words of his biographer Michael Cannell, Pei clearly expresses the structure of Silver Towers, but improves on Gropius’s unlovely precast concrete façade for the Pan Am Building. The warm, buff-colored concrete facades of the three Silver Towers are organized into four by eight structural bays of deeply recessed plate-glass windows. The wedge shaped piers and sloping walls soften what would otherwise be a cold, office-building-like grid.

The articulated concrete frame with deep-set windows gives the impression of a sheltering, lithic building, yet at the same time form an open cage of space. The facades are sculptural because the bays vary from open glass panels to completely recessed stone frames. The transitional points on the facades between a regular grid and sharp zigzags change, depending upon which angle they are viewed from, so that the buildings always have a kinetic sense of energy. Backgrounded against the low-set landmarked neighborhood of SoHo, few skyscraper complexes have so much open sky around them, and the flow of space is almost palpable. The buildings are set on a pinwheel plan, and seem to spin forward in place.

Pei wanted to provide a sense of home in the comfort…Like LeCorbusier’s cast concrete collective housing unit, Unite d’Habitation (1947-53) in Marseilles, the building interacts naturally with the environment: the deeply overhanging soffits function like a brise-soleil, and the windows slide open for natural air circulation…Pei also used the deep window sockets to provide a sense of privacy and shelter, the way Frank Lloyd Wright did."

When compared to earlier Pei works, such as Kips Bay Plaza, it becomes clear that University Village/ Silver Towers pinpoints a critical moment in Pei’s architectural career, where the interaction of geometric shapes, the relationship of overall layout to component parts and the surrounding cityscape, and the creation of sublimely elegant and yet dynamic surfaces replaced abstraction and repetition as the primary characteristics of his designs. The project must also be noted for its genesis in the urban renewal schemes of Robert Moses; University Village/ Silver Towers is very much a child of Moses’ “superblock” redevelopments, and yet, perhaps somewhat uniquely among them, is deferential and in many ways tied to the fabric of the cityscape around it. Unlike Washington Square Village to the north, the design for this project allowed Wooster and Greene Streets to visually continue and flow through it. In fact, the plan creates one of the quintessential modernist spaces in New York; open and two-dimensional, but with the urban fabric around it clearly acknowledged and interwoven, as the surrounding streets flow through it as pedestrian walkways. The central plaza and circulation space are defined and brought to life not by the traditional creation of a contained outdoor room, but by the subtle interplay of the surrounding geometric forms, by the flow of intersecting paths around a circular central space, and by the addition of a striking piece of modern cubist sculpture, with multiple perspectives, as a focal point. The use of Picasso’s Portrait of Sylvette is perhaps one of New York’s most prominent and striking uses of modernist outdoor sculpture, and arguably its most successful use in a residential context in New York City. Thus, though a product of the urban renewal/superblock visions of the 1950’s and early 60’s, this design points towards the much more sensitive designs of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, which sought to relate (even through abstraction) to their urban contexts, rather than deny them.

Additionally, University Village/Silver Towers not only serves as an exceptional example of thoughtful and urbane post-war superblock urban renewal schemes, but as a superlative example of university planning and design in this era, as well as of designs for publicly supported housing. Thus it forms a unique intersection of three powerful forces shaping American architecture during this era, the products of which are all too rarely regarded as making positive contributions to the urban fabric and design. And in spite of the design serving several masters, it was a uniquely organic whole that projected a clear and innovative design sensibility, a rarity for large commissions serving multiple functions and purposes. The design coincided with NYU’s commission of Marcel Breuer to design new dormitories for their University Heights campus, marking perhaps the high point of NYU’s architectural ambitions, as well as marking the beginning of an unusually creative period in the design of some publicly assisted housing in New York, which included University Village/Silver Towers’ highly regarded contemporaries Chatham Green (Gruzen and Partners, 1965) and Riverbend (Davis, Brody, and Associates, 1967); not since the earliest days of publicly assisted housing in New York in the 1930’s had
such innovation and design quality been apparent, and this design probably marks the high-water mark for the now-defunct Mitchell-Lama housing program which so transformed New York’s cityscape, as well as its housing market.

The careful planning of the grounds, the meticulous articulation of the facades, the exquisite formulation of the concrete skins of the buildings, and the subtle interplay of forms on the superblock site all merit recognition and preservation, and all risk adulteration or loss. University Village/Silver Towers is truly in the best of the modern tradition where all of the design elements, not just the buildings, come together to form an integral whole, and the loss of any one element would have an extremely detrimental effect. That is why we suggest inclusion not only of the three main buildings, but the landscaping, outdoor furniture, and outdoor sculpture for designation. Designation of the entire site will ensure that future work done to maintain and restore the landscaping, outdoor furniture, pathways, and facades of the buildings maintains the spirit and careful details Pei, Freed, Moore, and Amberg created. Additionally, as New York’s only outdoor public artwork from a design by what is considered to be the 20th century’s pre-eminent artist, the Portrait of Sylvette sculpture should absolutely be included in any designation. Its crooked black lines and sandy concrete texture both mimic and contrast with the design elements of the tower and the surrounding landscaping, paving, and furniture. This sundial-like element successfully acts to animate and serve as a focal point for the central space; with its irregular shape and seemingly hand-drawn lines, it gives an appropriate contrast to the elegant geometric forms which otherwise define the towers and outdoor spaces. Even the lampposts, designed particularly for this site, relate conspicuously to the overall design scheme; in their placement along the pathways and in the relationship of their color and shape to the towers, they are integral to the site’s success and a part of the visual experience of walking through it.

Notably, the two adjoining buildings on the superblock should also be included in a designation. While neither were designed by Pei and each were built separately, the Pei design clearly envisioned the remainder of the superblock as low and horizontal, neutral and deferential to the main composition of the three towers and the spaces that flow through and around them. The supermarket building and sports and recreation center, while not individually distinguished, support this design in their basic placement and their horizontal orientation, and thus should be included in the designation and treated as “non-contributing” structures, allowing for changes so long as they do not negatively impact upon the overall design scheme and the relationship of the main structures.

I have attached several recent photos of the site, including those showing the siting relationship between the three main towers and the surrounding landscape and low-lying structures, and the various design elements described above. I hope that you will recognize the value in preserving all, and agree to hear this site for designation. It should be noted that the Board of 505 LaGuardia Place strongly supports this designation proposal, and will be sending you a letter to this effect.

Sincerely,
Andrew Berman
Executive Director

[Citytect]

No I wouldn't. In fact many have questioned the brilliance of the Seagram Building and the Lever House, it lead to a little movement called Post-Modernism, maybe you've heard of it?

That's a little disingenuous. The questioning of two very well designed Modern buildings did not lead to Post-Modernism.

[Stern]

It was a questioning of modernism in general, Lever House and the Seagram Building are two of the greatest examples of the modernist period.

[Fabrizio]

The quote you objected to is this:

"If you all can not see the brilliance in that facade, then sorry... I can only question your ability to understand architecture."

I am very sure that the most important architects of the postmodern style (Graves, Stern, Eiseman, Pelli, Burgee, Venturi etc) are well aware of the brilliance of the Seagrams and Lever House.

Yikes!

[stache]

You're beating a dead horse.

[Fabrizio]

Citytect:

Thanksfor posting that. You mention:

"Admittedly, I'm a supporter of landmarking the towers, but I think it's very informative and convincing."

Why do you support landmarking them?

[infoshare]

Only an "ardent modernist ideologue" would say that this building is worthy of landmark status: now, lever house and the seagrams building - they IMHO are landmarks.

Case closed - I think?

[Fabrizio]

It should be remembered that the Seagrams and Lever House are office buildings... making the case for Silver Towers even more interesting.

As far as I know the only apartment house built after WWII in NYC that has been given Landmark status is Manhattan House:

http://www.friends-ues.org/images/Manhattan.jpg

Any one know...are there any others?

[pianoman11686]

btw: That lousy street-view photo isn't even all that "recent". Note that the blurry lettering on the supermarket storefront should spell "Morton Williams" which has been the name of the store for 4+ years, but it's still showing the previous name -- "Amalgamated Supermarkets" -- from years ago. :p

What difference does it make what the sign says?

Sorry, I didn't realize Google was using 4+ year-old photos (if that is in fact the truth). The point being, a one-story garbage supermarket is not something you can find a "not unflattering" photo of online. I knew about the Street View feature, so I figured I'd give it a try.

So here I am, dumbfounded. Educate me, show me, explain to me how that facade is below-par.

( And I am not talking about personal taste. This building has nothing to do with my personal taste.)

I'm looking for help here: let's see some modern apartment building facades that can top that as far as design and construction.

If this is "commie block" public housing etc...if it is so poor... well there must be plenty better. Let's see it. I'm waiting.

This is where you're wrong. We're not debating whether the facade of these buildings is subpar, or even above average. We're debating whether these buildings are landmark-worthy. That's quite a distinction, not to be handed out just because something is better than public housing.

I've seen someone post on this forum that about 3% of New York's buildings are landmarked. If you're willing to argue that these buildings are better than 97% of the structures in New York, then go ahead. I'm not ready to do that, and neither are many others here.

Personally, I think it's incredibly dismissive to assume the educated forumers here don't evaluate critical opinions with due regard. Most of us are here because of architecture. Some of us (myself not included) are immersed in the field professionally. I think it's telling that, despite all of that, there is still much disagreement on the merits of this design. That in itself shouldn't be taken lightly.

[infoshare]

It should be remembered that the Seagrams and Lever House are office buildings... making the case for Silver Towers even more interesting.



Well, the thing is that there just in no Right or Wrong about this: you have your views, and I have mine - on such matters of aesthetic opinion the best anyone can do is agree to disagree. Then flip a coin. :D

[pianoman11686]

Notably, the two adjoining buildings on the superblock should also be included in a designation. While neither were designed by Pei and each were built separately, the Pei design clearly envisioned the remainder of the superblock as low and horizontal, neutral and deferential to the main composition of the three towers and the spaces that flow through and around them. The supermarket building and sports and recreation center, while not individually distinguished, support this design in their basic placement and their horizontal orientation, and thus should be included in the designation and treated as “non-contributing” structures, allowing for changes so long as they do not negatively impact upon the overall design scheme and the relationship of the main structures.

What hogwash.

Pei "clearly envisioned" it? How does Berman know this? Did he conduct an interview prior to writing this letter?

Citytect and others: it should be recognized that Berman has been conducting a vocal campaign against the expansion of NYU for years now. The matter of constructing a new science center on the site of the supermarket (which I maintain is absolute garbage and deserves to be redeveloped) was brought up more than 4 years ago. At that point, Berman trotted out some old, rent-stabilized residents from one of the towers who cried about how convenient the supermarket is and how dangerous the fumes from the science center would be to their health.

Give me a break. Anyone who doesn't see how this is an anti-development, NIMBY play is blinded by the dual reputations of Pei and Picasso. To be honest, I wouldn't even mind so much if the 3 towers were preserved alone. But to include the entire site - disastrous urban planning and all - is ridiculous and illogical. As someone mentioned a few pages ago, this is a sorry abuse of landmarking.

[Fabrizio]

This is where you're wrong. We're not debating whether the facade of these buildings is subpar, or even above average.

"These towers in the park are a scourge on the city landscape"

"the fascade is cold and monotnous."

"it's absolutely horrible. It's a cross between Brasilia and a prison."

"Yes I can see this is quality architecture: that is, it has qualities that I find unattractive"

"And not only that but looking at how much better archtiecture has gotten since the 60's emphasizes their mediocrity."

etc.

[Stern]

If these buildings are so great how come there's no mention of there fraternal twins at Kips Bay Plaza? These buildings have won awards too, like at the Silver Towers these awards were not time tested rather they were given after the buildings completion in an era of slum clearance, highways, and unadorned slab architecture. Living across from them I can attest that they are blight on the city both in planning and architecture. The east side of Second Avenue between 23rd Street and 34th Street dominated by public housing is the most desolate, cold, and unattractive stretch of 2nd Avenue in the City, comparing it to the walkups and interesting shops of the Village and Upper East Side and the skyscrapers of midtown. Architecture and planning are indelibly intertwine.

Here's the siteplan:
http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/032-5705-2.jpg

Between 23rd Street and 34th the east side of Manhattan past 2nd is essentially cut off from the city, I’d wager few here have crossed ways with these parts, for one there are no sidewalks in places, and where there are there is no retail, just the occasional building entrance to these towers in the park, NYU and Bellevue Hospitals. As you can see there is a nice sized park, but never you mind because unless you live here you will never have access to it. Its a playground for the rich or in this case the lucky few who live here, the rest are forced to look in through the fence that surrounds this project.

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/Pict0042.jpg

A simple black fence, and what a view behind it. Luckily I don't have to walk this way with any sort of regularity, because its views like this that even on the nicest days makes the city an unlivable depressing place. You don’t have access but would you really want to when the view is of parked cars and a seemingly endless wall of concrete, with no differentiation to speak of except for a hodgepodge of blinds.

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/Pict0053.jpg

Here's the view that residents enjoy, if it wasn't for the fence and total seclusion from the City no doubt this empty and barren passage would lend itself to crime. It certainly doesn’t lend itself anything communal.

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/GRP032-01.jpg

The aforementioned park. This is no Gramercy park; I don’t feel nearly as jealous that I cannot enjoy this space because I see that monstrosity sitting it in.

If this too is great architecture, I don't want to see bad architecture.

Here's some relevant reading for you, it mentions another architect you might have heard of and very well know could also have done no wrong:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/27/magazine/27wwln_essay.html

[lofter1]

Having jumped in here rather late today it seems that a number folks who have failed to come up with a valid architectural / historical argument in opposition to Silver Towers (beyond, "They're ugly!") are eagerly dumping on Fabrizio, and going beyond a criticism of his reasoning for the Landmarking of Silver Towers and instead attacking him personally. Odd that Fabrizio is the one who is being called out for supposedly doing the same, when in fact he was bringing into question certain judgmental capabilities -- and not launching personal attacks.

But back to Silver Towers:

The question we have before us as NYers is what is the best way to deal with this superblock where the Silver Towers now stand.

I suggest looking at the Landmarking issue for this site in a cold-blooded way. Certainly the Silver Towers do meet specific criteria which would allow them to pass muster required by LPC (influential, important architect, unique structure, emblematic of a time). Can the Landmarking process in this case be used to the betterment of NYC? I can argue both ways for these buildings.

One argument is that Landmarking the three Towers and the land at the center of the block where they stand is worthwile. It would preserve Pei's creation while letting the east and west edges of the superblock be developed to the max.

Another argument is to Landmark the entire superblock -- but this to me wreaks of anti-development / anti-NYU balderdash and has no basis in logic, art or business.

A third argument is not to landmark any of the superblock and let re-development take place as NYU sees fit. Unfortunately NYU over the past few years has shown NO indication whatsoever of having much of an artistic eye. Nor does NYU display much common sense or concern for the common good. Given the boldness of the Silver Tower development, it seems that chances are slim that we'd end up with anything very satisfying if the option were to allow NYU to develop something new which would both integrate into the existing Towers while creating new and connected structures.

A fourth and perhaps the best option would be to do a Moses -- clear this superblock and rethink the entire plot. NYU needs to develop & grow -- so they say and so the City seems to agree.

This final choice ^ is my strongest argument against Landmarking. But the problem here is that the artistically challenged NYU gang would be the ones who are in charge of the design.

I'm aware this choice is not based on "artistic" reasoning -- but is a cold-blooded assessment and compromise. And by taking that position it seems I've argued myself into the corner of "Do Not Landmark" (otherwise how could I advocate razing the entire block?).

It's a conumdrum.

[lizbeth li]

ARticles like these cited above always seem much too generalized (And the NYTimes mostly stinks). High rises themselves are not necessarily a problem, they can be luxury along some Gold Coast also, and inner city poverty blew up in diverse architecture in Harlem and Watts and many other places in the 60's -- as well as barricades in Paris and large avenues precisely to limit oddly shaped streets prone to insurgency and revolution. Anyways, there is some truth in anything often, but the problems of race and poverty and religion and drugs make the architectural problems really unimportant I would guess. Now if a million people are crammed together with no sunlight and no upkeep on the apartments and rampant crime and no police presence, you will have riots, certainly, even in the Taj Mahal.

[Stern]

Actually there was no rioting in Paris in the poor innercity.

[Fabrizio]

Silver Towers (and Kips Bay) and it's concept of towers-in-the-park can not be compared to Le Corbusier's.

There will be no rioting at these developments any time soon. They, like Stuyvesant Town / Peter Cooper Village, the developments behind Lincoln Center etc. are solidly upper middle class and successful. The only rioting might be over trying to find an apartment in one.

http://www.kipsbaytowers.com/

http://www.petercoopernyc.com/

[lofter1]

Actually the "rioting" was widespread in France ...

Paris 1968 (http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/paris_1968.html)

[Stern]

I was referring to the recent riots in 2005 which were limited to Paris’ tower in the park suburbs.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005_civil_unrest_in_France

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e7/Paris_riots_satellite.jpg

[lizbeth li]

Sorry, I was referring (and not being cute) to Baron Hausmann and the widening of streets in Paris, the laying down of Boulevards after the riots of 1848. There is an account of these by Baudelaire somewhere, he's drinking absinthe in a cafe while the riots are going on all around him and he doesn't give a **** about them or the politics, which is a perfect expression of anarchism. You could argue systematic dehumanized brutal architecture breeds anarchy, but you could also argue that weird streets and odd chaotic buildings also breeds anarchy. I am suspicious of all the money city planners of all stripes have made promising peace and getting their hands into the pot.

[Fabrizio]

Muschamp in the Times:

"Ms. Hadid has reached back even further in time but, again, to Le Corbusier. She proposes nothing less than our old friend and favorite postmodern enemy, the Towers in the Park. Entitled the Radiant City, the concept was presented by Le Corbusier in 1931. In the postwar years, it became the leading paradigm for urban renewal projects in the United States, where it became synonymous with the modern movement's ambition to engineer society."

"It does not require a long memory to recall why both Corbusian models eventually came under attack. With both, the architect asserted a uniform control that all but eliminated urban diversity. They eliminated conventional streets and with them continuity with the surrounding urban fabric. They also eliminated the ''eyes on the street,'' the neighborhood self-policing that results from active street life. These powerful objections, raised by Jane Jacobs in 1960, went far toward discrediting modern architecture in the United States."

"Times change. So do urban scale, the meaning of modernity and the relationship of cities to their past, including modernisms gone by. Not all towers-in-a-park designs were failures. A few, like Waterside on the East River and Silver Towers in Greenwich Village, contributed to the rich diversity of the cityscape."

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C03E4D7153EF932A25750C0A9629C8B 63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2

[pianoman11686]

Waterside Plaza? Please. That place actually sucks. When you first pull up, it feels like you're entering the world's worst bus terminal. And as for how it's integrated into the city: it might as well be on its own island in the East River.

[Fabrizio]

Waterside Plaza:

Waterside Added to the Watch List of NYC Landmarks


Waterside Plaza is included in the Municipal Art Society's Watch List of Future Landmarks. The Watch List, which is called 30 UNDER 30, is composed of thirty buildings built in the last thirty years. Because of their age, they not yet eligible for landmark status. According to the Society, today's buildings - which will be considered "historic" by future generations - must be monitored, or watched, now so that they will survive long enough to tell the story of the late 20th century.


When it opened it drew rave reviews. Paul Goldenberger, then the architecture critic for the New York Times, praised the "visually exciting form" of the towers and said the complex "ennobles both the city and its riverfront." In 2001, architecture critic Herbert Muschamp described Waterside as a "great urban composition" that is "picturesque and historically informed."


"People tend to overlook Waterside Plaza," said Muschap. The architects, Davis, Brody & Associates, successfully aspired to the stark geometric power of Louis Kahn's work, he said, "but the complex also recalls the towers of San Gimignano, the walled medieval town in Tuscany. In place of walls, it has the East River and the F.D.R. Drive, in a more stark geometric design artistically faithful to the urban concept. It is picturesque and historically informed" he said. "And if you drive along the F.D.R., the curve beneath the towers is awesome".

The Municipal Art Society jury reviewed more than 150 buildings that were nominated to the Watch List by Society members, design professionals, and the public. They used a set of established criteria to judge the buildings based on their artistic, technological, historical, and canonic merits, and weighed the influence they had on design and culture in the city and worldwide. Landscapes, interiors, and master plans were not considered, but may be the subject of additional Watch List surveys conducted in the future.

http://www.watersideplaza.com/watersideplaza/Streamline?p=viewPage.jsp&id=101&did=109

---

IMHO: The towers are beautiful... but this kind of brutalism is not a taste that's easy or enjoyed by all. A couple of them would have been great, but the base and plaza are pretty awfull. Silver Towers are IMHO in a different class. The complex is smaller, almost delicate and the towers are exceptionally stylish.

[stache]

This is getting very old.

[Fabrizio]

Agreed.

An intellectual conversation that's flowing beautifully discussing rare architectural points. A wonderful opportunity to learn about our modern epoch.

Let's lock it.

--

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=juOQhTuzDQ0

[lofter1]

Let's lock it.

Awwww, ya big lug.

We don' wanna read nuttin'.

Why doncha just post more sad pics of long-gone buildings. And shuddup!

;)

[pianoman11686]

I've spent a few nights at Waterside Plaza. I briefly considered renting out an apartment there (through a connection) next year, at a dirt cheap price. The apartment itself was dreadful. And the outdoor environment was, how should I say this? Unwelcoming at best.

I won't say the same things about Silver Towers, because I'm simply not as familiar with the complex. But praising Waterside Plaza really is beyond me. What is good about this?

http://www.nyc-architecture.com/GRP/grp035-631.jpg

http://housingprototypes.org/images/Waters03m.jpg

http://housingprototypes.org/images/Waters01m.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2255/1802844740_cfde3e2b5f.jpg?v=1193807867

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/204/469563836_64b60014fa.jpg?v=0

Just goes to show you: sometimes the "experts" really are just blowing smoke into the wind.

[antinimby]

Yikes, I wouldn't wish that upon my worst enemy cities.

[stache]

Way too much information, Fabs -

[ablarc]

This thread is now dominated by the very phenomenon it was conceived to warn against, and that makes me sad.

Here I find architecture enthusiasts howling hatred for the major monuments of forty-years-past. These now are found to offend because they're out of synch with today's preferences --just like those dirty, obsolete, dysfunctional, unprogressive, ill-conceived, and --yes-- ugly old Beaux-Arts monstrosities the architecturally progressive cognoscenti wanted down in the mid-Sixties. "Ugly": that was the chief epithet for Penn Station in the Sixties. And it was the knowledgable who used it; the public didn't give a damn (never really does).

But what would you expect? History is like a pendulum; it's always swinging away from the recent past --until it reaches an apogee of reaction. In architecture, it generally takes about forty years to discover all the blunders of the last wave of theory and resolve to never repeat those errors. But this is no reason to hatefully destroy the works of art that sparked enthusiasm for those experimental and wrong-headed theories; they remain works of arts.

Today's theories will also be found wrong, and today's architecture will also be hated. In about forty years.

If Wired New York had existed in the 1960's, its members would quite certainly have favored the replacement of ugly and obsolete Penn Station, Singer, Savoy Plaza and Astor with progressive and right-thinking new architecture --such as is produced by Nouvel, Foster and Calatrava, those aging young Turks. I have no doubt whatever about this, and the present outpouring makes me even more certain. It was the progressives and enthusiasts spouting the latest wisdom that cheered the bringing-down of New York's Beaux-Arts past. And forty years later, their spiritual descendants now propose to abrogate New York's Modernism.

When I started this thread, it was to warn against this very eventuality, and it's ironic that the thread is the chosen venue for its reappearance. It shows the truth of Santayana's dictum.

In truth, Penn Station was no more loved by most architecture enthusiasts than Pei's towers are by their spiritual descendants today; we've concocted a mythology about how much those places were loved. Penn Station was perceived as dirty, dysfunctional and obsolete. Most architecture entusiasts found it comically --even immorally-- unoriginal. The word they used for it was "ugly." The term was used in both a visual and a moral sense.

Strange to contemplate the truth of this; OF COURSE: today we would know what to do with these places if they still existed. The wisdom of an additional hlf-century of hindsight means the Beaux-Arts is safe and back in fashion. Modernism is today's Beaux-Arts; it teeters on the brink of extinction by the (semi)knowledgable.

Revisionist historians --many unborn or in diapers at the time-- have outfitted us with rose-colored glasses to reassure us that we'll never repeat such atrocities. But the rose-colored glasses are also blinders.

An example from Wikipedia:

A point made in the defense of the demolition of the old Penn Station at the time was that the cost of maintaining the old structure had become prohibitively expensive. The citizens of New York City were unwilling to shoulder the costs of maintaining and cleaning their beloved station. The question of whether it made sense to preserve a building, intended to be a cost-effective and functional piece of the city's infrastructure, simply as a "monument" to the past was raised in defense of the plans to demolish it.

Being there, I walked by this monstrous act of vandalism daily on my routine. Young and naive and ignorant of architectural theories, though fresh from a year in Paris and in love with beautiful buildings, I couldn't understand why no one was upset, why there were no demonstrations, why such a weighty and impressive (though admittedly dirty) old thing was being destroyed in this way. I guess I understood most folks hated these old "monstrosities" so redolent of backwardness in a forward-looking age, but I didn't share their view.

"All it needs is a cleaning," I thought hopefully, "after they take it all apart, they'll steam clean it and put it back together again." People I mentioned this to thought I was crazy: "That ugly ol' pile: good riddance, we can replace it with something clean and modern." I looked in the papers and they mostly saw it as a sign of progress.

At the same time, I watched them take down the Singer Building, the Savoy Plaza, the Astor Hotel and the skin of the old Times Building --much of the creme of New York's Beaux-Arts architecture. Thank God they didn't get around to Grand Central, Woolworth and Metropolitan Life.

Though a few preservationists existed, they were thought to be crackpots like me.

As time passed, preservationism gathered steam and Beaux-Arts architecture regained popularity. To my amusement, more and more folks came out of the woodwork to claim retroactively to have been appalled at Penn Station’s destruction. Where were they when it was happening? Times and tastes had changed, that’s all, and folks always want to be on the popular side.

Even Vincent Scully was a bit of a Johnny-come-lately. Echoing Modernism’s prevailing view, he saw Penn Station as unoriginal pastiche. His repentance came with the “scurry in like a rat” comment. But the truth is, Beaux-Arts and Deco buildings weren’t even thought to be architecture by the Modernists; they were just buildings. You looked in vain for them in that day’s definitive tome of architectural history, Siegfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture.

Now I’m seeing the exact same phenomenon repeated with Boston City Hall and the works of Rudolph, Sert, Pei, Stone...

An eerie sense of deja vu ...

Still unprogressive.

Still a crackpot ...

.

[pianoman11686]

As usual, great points ablarc. Much of what you say is probably irrefutable. But I'll take a stab at it...

While it's tempting to treat Modernism with the same respect afforded to Beaux-Arts, what if there was a way to categorically distinguish the merits of the two? Some, like Leon Krier and Nathan Glazer, have made convincing arguments to this effect. Unsurprisingly, they find Modernism to be largely devoid of architectural merit - precisely the type of merit that one feels should justify legislated, perpetual preservation. In other words: landmarking.

Perhaps you and others like Fabrizio are correct in identifying this particular example as an exemplary work of the Modernist movement. But for those of us who abhor the movement en tout, that distinction alone may not suffice in placing it in the company of our most revered structures.

What, then, of the coincidence in timing? Tough to argue with, if in fact true. But I've thought about the 40-year rule, and I'm not so sure it applies to Modernism. By most accounts I've read, Modernism began to be hated during the 70s. And we've wandered aimlessly for at least three decades searching for the next, dominant paradigm. Maybe that's why some deplore the current state of architecture (especially, of the starchitect variety) as a cacophony.

Whether Silver Towers (and others like it) expressly merit landmarking will probably never be settled in this thread. But I personally think this discussion about the broader implications of Modernism is unquestionably interesting, and worth having. Maybe on another thread, though. ;)

[infoshare]

....... will probably never be settled in this thread. But I personally think this discussion about the broader implications of Modernism is unquestionably interesting, and worth having. Maybe on another thread, though. ;)

In this thread? Or anywhere else for that matter!

As I stated earlier on this thread: this matter can be simply (and appropriately) settled - "flip a coin".

Of course the first step should be to gather the 10 most knowledgeable architecture critics in the country and have them make a final determination.

The end result of this august panel of experts would likely be the same that you see here on this thread, pretty much a split decision: and it is at that point where only a coin toss will settle the matter.

This is ART not Science, it all comes down to a simple matter of personal opinion. The larger question now is - who gets to be the official coin tosser.:confused:

p.s. I am glad you clearly understand (http://www.wirednewyork.com/forum/showpost.php?p=215502&postcount=240) that almost all efforts in NYC to landmark buildings is primarily about anti-development and NIMBYism

[ablarc]

Some, like Leon Krier and Nathan Glazer ... find Modernism to be largely devoid of architectural merit ...
Though Krier's easily the smartest architect I've conversed with, he's an extremist with a social agenda that goes way beyond architecture and extends to luddite de-industrialization. He doesn't like anything about modern times; why, he even has his suits made.

Perhaps you and others like Fabrizio are correct in identifying this particular example as an exemplary work of the Modernist movement.
Oh, it's that alright --for all the reasons he so eloquently gives.

But for those of us who abhor the movement en tout, that distinction alone may not suffice in placing it in the company of our most revered structures.
OK, so recuse yourself.

By most accounts I've read, Modernism began to be hated during the 70s.
Deploring Modernism in the Seventies made you a crackpot in most architects' eyes (still does, actually in architecture schools). Its biggest sins are in the realm of urbanism, and imo its greatest achievement is the modern house --Fallingwater, Villa Savoie, Farnsworth House. The public loathes modern houses and generally would rather have its buildings fancy than plain.

And we've wandered aimlessly for at least three decades searching for the next, dominant paradigm.
Because Postmodernism had no legs, it didn't go far enough: it was just tradition grafted onto Modernism. This allowed it to get urbanism right, however.

Maybe that's why some deplore the current state of architecture (especially, of the starchitect variety) as a cacophony.
Modernism's hardiest philosophical contribution has been ironclad, dogmatic insistence on endless originality. Almost everyone on this forum has bought into it, and its the cause of both the cacophony and the dissatisfaction.

This is Modernism's most negative ongoing legacy. Discard it and order will return to the environment --at least as much as you see in photos from before Modernism's arrival on these shores. You can see there were skyscrapers, rowhouses and tenements --and best of all, there was harmony.

When we give up this nonsense, we'll go back to doing buildings as they should be done --relieved of the need to reinvent the wheel on every project. As it is, can you really be surprised architects regularly come up with square wheels --and even maybe some triangles? (Aren't round wheels unoriginal?)

Give architects a break; let them try their hand at doing a traditional building now and then, and don't accuse them of unoriginality when they do. You might like the result. And what do you really care what Lord Foster decrees?

(A reminder: there wasn't much originality to Penn Station either, and the architects didn't writhe in guilt. I'm pretty sure Foster hated it when he was at Yale, and I bet he's among those who now decry its destruction.)

.

[Citytect]

Citytect:

Thanks for posting that. You mention:

"Admittedly, I'm a supporter of landmarking the towers, but I think it's very informative and convincing."

Why do you support landmarking them?

I agree with you, Fabrizio, and think what ablarc brings up about the architectural blind spot, so to speak, is very evident in this discussion.

I'm only going to say is that Silver Towers are among the best examples of this breed of Modern architecture anywhere. There are few other buildings in the world of this particular style on par with these towers. The execution is flawless.

But I'm not going to get into this discussion any further. It's already been reduced to back and forth about personal tastes and has become uncivil.

[infoshare]

Give architects a break; let them try their hand at doing a traditional building now and then, and don't accuse them of unoriginality when they do. You might like the result. And what do you really care what Lord Foster decrees?

.

Even when Gothic become the predominate "style" of the day in Architecture there was an outcry of a similar sort at the time: "Gothic was too MODERN". Many architects/artisans of the time called for a return to the TRUE & SIMPLE Romanesque style (http://historylink101.com/lessons/art_history_lessons/ma/romanesque_architecture.htm).

As it was then, it is now, there is room for everyone, and every style: whatever STYLE we happen to be calling it these days.

p.s. I will try to dig up the quote (if requested) - i recall reading about that subject in an art history class. Go figure, Gothic being too "progressive" - a need to return to the good old days of the Romanesque Style. (LOL)

[Stern]

Ablarc if you'll read my posts my complaint is with the urban planning of these developments not so much the architecture. Because I feel architecture and planning is intertwine that's why I do not believe these buildings are landmark worthy. I do think that what makes a city great is a wide array of architectural styles. But there's more to a city than architecture, I think reconfiguring this superblock by running a street through it and making it denser with retail or park space fronting one of the streets would vastly improve this project. If its landmarked none of that can ever happen. For example this part of the village isn't nearly as vibrant as the neighborhoods surrounding it, the same is true for 2nd Ave. between 23rd and 31st, the LES where the public housing is, Chelsea where the public housing is, East Harlem which is dominated by public housing cannot compare to the vibrancy of West or Central Harlem where public housing is much less. There are many great examples of modern architecture in the City, its just that the planning is ominously bad and backwards with many of them. If you'll remember I was one of the biggest opponents of the 2 Columbus Circle redevelopment, a modernist gem in both planning and architecture.

[alonzo-ny]

I echo Stern's point. The buildings themselves are not the problem it is the tower in the park urban plan I dont like. Ive been around there and the green space never felt to me like a park go in and feel welcome.

[ZippyTheChimp]

Would we have landmarked the World Trade Center?

[lofter1]

When I first moved to NYC the ST site was much more open -- it did not have the terrible 6' black fences that now enclose the lawn and gardens. Those really need to go.

I fear it would be a huge mistake to enclose the edges / perimeter of the site with lowrise & retail. It would run the risk of becoming a version of the original plaza down at the WTC-- enclosed and cut off.

Something that does work as the site now exists: when you are "inside" the site you do not feel cut off from the rest of the City.



I think reconfiguring this superblock by running a street through it and making it denser with retail or park space fronting one of the streets would vastly improve this project.

There is an existing street -- right on the path of the former Wooster Street -- that runs right through the site from north <> south. It is not open to vehicular traffic from Houston Street. The entrance to the site is from this same ex-Wooster Street where it intersects with Bleecker.

However to allow that seemingly de-mapped street to become a vehicular street once again would really serve no purpose as Wooster north of that runs through Washington Square Village and then becomes the Bobst Plaza next to the NYU Library.

What would help would be to enhance the pedestrian nature of that Wooster Street path -- all the way from Houston Street to Washington Square.

There is nowhere else on the sight to run roads -- the other de-mapped road on the superblock is Greene Street -- and the path of that would run flush up against the east side of the easternmost tower.

As for park space: There is green space running the full lenght of the site along Bleecker. The symmetrical grove of trees is a nice touch, but the entire green area should be reconsidered, somewhat along the line