Gene Kaufman...kough...kough, hack....hack...

[stache]

I should know, I escaped from there as a young adult.

[ablarc]

Last week I received a PM from Fred Bernstien author of the above NYTimes article about Gene Kaufman.

That means he must have read Wired New York's thread on Gene.

But I've been very busy and could not respond right away.

Yeah ... all those posts you had to write for Silver Towers.

I was going to get to it this weekend.

That's what they all say.

And I thought, great, finally some critical coverage of Kaufman's work in the Times! If he was interested in quoting me, obviously somewhere in the article Kaufman's taste would be called into question.

Obviously.

So I am surprised and very disappointed to see this article. Practically a Valentine to Kaufman.

Schadenfreude frustrated.

"What a fearful thing is it that any language should have a word expressive of the pleasure which men feel at the calamities of others; for the existence of the word bears testimony to the existence of the thing."
--http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/schadenfreude

So what changed Mr. Bernstien's mind? Why this piece of fluff?

The milk of human kindness? An eleemosynary fit?

Penetration to the harsh reality that architects inhabit?

I'm especially sensitive to this issue, because like Kaufman I'm an architect and I do a lot of junk. I do the junk because my clients and the building laws they operate under demand the junk. It's absolutely non-negotiable; if I didn't provide it, they would just get someone else to do it, I would go out of business, my family would lose the roof over their head, and I would move into a box on Broome Street.

As any art historian will tell you, Verocchio needed Lorenzo de Medici to do art.

99% of what is built commercially is junk; outside New York, it's 99.99%. Is there anything non-residential at all built in say, Charlotte that isn't junk? All those evil, stupid architects ... and I'm one of them.

I dream of beauty. She comes to me in the drowsy minutes ... , a dream more romantic than scarlet pagodas by a silver sea.

For years the fairy child had come to him. Where others saw but Georgie Babbitt, she discerned gallant youth. She waited for him, in the darkness beyond mysterious groves. When at last he could slip away from the crowded house he darted to her ... She was so slim, so white, so eager! She cried that he was gay and valiant, that she would wait for him, that they would sail--

Unaware, oblivious, stupid ... he was the engine driver on the train to Auschwitz.

He who had been a boy very credulous of life was no longer greatly interested in the possible and improbable adventures of each new day.

He escaped from reality till the alarm-clock rang, at seven-twenty.

And reaching for his laptop, he went to see what Fabrizio had had to say that morning.





If I had it to do over, I'd probably go into fashion design.




Italicized words by Sinclair Lewis.

[stache]

You produce junk yet you spend a great deal of effort telling others what's wrong with out taste level. Physician, heal thyself.

[ablarc]

Cheap shot.

[lofter1]

But what happened to the line which is not crossed?

Before Chang / Kaufman came along hardly any developer / architect saw fit to construct this kind of crap in Manhattan.

But once Chang & Kaufman, with their priorites necessarily adjusted so that they could look themselves in the mirror and fill their pockets with coin, said "Do it" then others quickly followed suit.

Seemingly the "what should not be done" line has been moved and all the pros moved along with it.

Such is human nature?

Or just the inevitable decline when a culture gets too fat and convinces itself that there are all sorts of little unnecessaries which are required for ongoing existence?

[Fabrizio]

Ablarc: I really WAS going to get to it this weekend (if not Monday morning).

The Silver Towers... WaterSide Plaza...Cher... are NOTHING compared to Gene Kaufman. He deserves a special effort.

And Ablarc, we all do junk now and then... but he covers his junk with mint green tiles.

BTW: Does anyone else think he looks like Linda Hunt without bangs?


Gene Kaufman.

[pianoman11686]

I'm certainly not condoning Kaufman's designs when I say this, but...

If we're to stay level-headed about this, we have to remember how lucky (some of us) are to live in a place like Manhattan. Ablarc's right: there really is an amazing amount of crap everywhere you go. The built environment, in general, is ugly. (If you don't believe me, come out to Durham for a weekend. I'll show you around.)

So it should not be surprising that, out of the hundreds of hotels Manhattan has, 30 or 40 of them will be tacky, cheap, completely devoid-of-architectural-merit crap that will hopefully be demolished and replaced with something better in 20 years. Just look at the hotel chains that are running them. This is what their hotels look like:









For the most part, they're all built on the cheap. So if you're trying to build a 30-story version of one of the above in one of the most expensive places to build in the world, what do you expect?

In a sick and twisted way (because all too often that's life), a lot of this is New York's own fault for becoming such a big tourist attraction. No longer do Americans fear visiting. They come in droves, with their whole families. And they stay in these Comfort Inns thinking they got a great deal on a hotel room in "expensive" New York. Then they do all their sightseeing of "beautiful" New York, see a Broadway show, and cap it off with drinks at Applebee's, or Red Lobster. You know the rest...

I guess that's the penalty you pay for living in a place like New York.

(But Kaufman is still a klown.)

[Alonzo-ny]

He is the human version of his buildings.

[MidtownGuy]

So if you're trying to build a 30-story version of one of the above in one of the most expensive places to build in the world, what do you expect?

Obviously we'd expect better, since the profit on one of these will also be a lot higher than one of those above which AREN't situated in an expensive and desirable place..
They want to enter a highly lucrative market whose appeal is based on the very architecture of the place they are building in. So you allow them to despoil it with bad architecture. Think things through. Doesn't make a lot of sense, what you are saying.

[ablarc]

But what happened to the line which is not crossed?

It's been crossed oodles of times. Just look around you.

You're singling out Kaufman's brand because it's the latest twist and it's identifiable. At least the guy tries, which is more than you can say of O'Hara.

What everyone's overlooking is that it's not the architect who sets the ground rules of design. Ever. And the building is a winner or not at the moment the ground rules are established. When these are stated by a Medici, you get a masterpiece.

Do you really think there are as many talentless architects at the helm of firms as there are lousy buildings? 98% or more of new buildings are lousy. There aren't nearly that many lousy architects. Lousy buildings may be drawn up by frustrated, self-deluding or compromising architects, to be sure, but they're generally designed by iron rules that are wholly controlled by others. Not a thing the architect can do about it --and not something they're anxious to admit.

First real inkling of this I got years ago working for a big, prestigious firm. I was asked to design an art school for a state university. The budget was stated. I designed my heart out, and I knew how to keep from wasting money. When I was done, everyone said, "Nice job!" When the contractor's bids came in, the lowest was 8% below budget.

Then the state's ombundsman took a look. "The building may have come in under-budget, but it's too nice," he declared, "the taxpayers will think we're splurging on their money." So they took out the skylights, they removed the slate sculpture court, they replaced the belgian block with bark chips, they dumbed-down the details, they eliminated the curved glass and the cut-stone sills, the sunken court, the reflecting pool and the entire delight of the building's relationship to the ground plane. They even replaced the parquet with carpet. When they were through value-engineering, they had chiseled the bid down another four percent. They were now 12% below budget.

They now had a building that you would hate. You'd damn the architect for it, and so would I if I didn't know how it had come to be.

I know how Kaufman's buildings come to be, since I design hotels for some of the same chains.

The folks who review hotel plans are "professionals." They can spot in a jiffy whether the architect knows what they "know" --and he's gone in the same jiffy if he's drawn anything outside their ironbound and desiccated parameters.

What he brings to the table, he said, is the ability to maximize the number of hotel rooms on a given site. Recently, he said, a client showed him another architect’s plans for a hotel in Lower Manhattan; Mr. Kaufman was able to alter the plans to squeeze in 25 percent more rooms. In the current market, a mid-range Manhattan hotel room — typically 250 square feet — is worth $400,000 to $500,000 to the developer, he said.

This passage resonates with any architect who has ever designed a mid-level chain hotel. I know exactly what it means, I could do the same myself.

Or I could play the role of the first architect --but please note that he's been replaced. (He never survives; in fact, he gets stiffed.)

You can't do a chain hotel without following the formula; it's the outcome of decades of fine-tuning. You may not like it, I certainly don't like it, it's probably not even the best way to make the most money --but it's believed in by so many layers of management hierarchy that there's exactly zero chance of getting anything outside the parameters beyond conceptual design

Here's proof-positive, Kaufman has mastered the formula(s):

any architects would be happy to design a single hotel in Manhattan; his firm, Gene Kaufman Architect, is designing 36 of them. Nearly all are for national brands that are trying to establish beachheads in the city.

Sure. By the standards of his masters, he's the expert in his business. By the standards of an urbanist, he's a defiler and a pig. You can assess his buildings wearing either hat, and you'll come up with opposite grades.

But Kaufman didn't invent the setback from the streetwall; his masters did when after years of study they had finished drawing up the standards for cracking the Manhattan market. On its crowded, narrow, menacing sidewalks, bewildered Raleigh travelers would alight sheltered against the Big City's Mean Streets, welcomed by the forecourt, secure from the luggage-snatcher known to lurk on every block.

The guy wearing one hat hates everything the other guy likes.

Kaufman didn't invent the sheer wall of repetitive windows either, the masters did. They're not boutique operators, they buy their night tables and pastel prints in bulk for bog-identical rooms, each square inch exhaustively researched by technicians sworn to the art of making money. That's what they're in business to do. They know exactly 12 feet clear is the only optimized dimension for a hotel room because it's perfect for the furniture, while carpet comes in twelve-foot widths, and all you have to do is roll it out at that dimension. No laborious cutting, no waste, no fitting. Can you imagine how much money they save on every room in carpet installation alone when they hire a "pro"? And if the pro turns out to be a phony and says 13, why they just show him the road.

Market researched, cost-effectiveness researched, customer-satisfaction researched. You're not the customer, lofter, and neither am I. You don't like the result, and neither do I. But there aren't many of us, and you know there are quite a few standard Americans. When I come to New York I stay at the Cosmo or the Beacon or Second Home on Second Avenue: quirky, non-standard, unformulaic --and in the eyes of MidAmerica, overpriced for what you get.

The chains, which are striving to maintain customer loyalty, want to be able to offer hotels in as many locations as possible. Building several small hotels in different neighborhoods, instead of a single large hotel, helps them achieve that.

Even the business strategy is "scientific."

Bill Ryall, a partner in Ryall Porter Architects in Manhattan, said that in a city filled with talented architects, “it is a sadly missed opportunity that most of these new hotels are designed by just one architect.”

Sad for Mr. Ryall, who would surely love to do a hotel, sad for other architects "talented" or otherwise, sad perhaps for the urban fabric --though I become less convinced of that the more of these hotels I see (I'll explain later.)

But certainly not sad for the hotel chains. "Whew, it's hard to find an architect who knows what he's doing!" they exclaim, "they're all such prima donnas, you can't tell them what to do. So we end up just firing them until eventually we find one like Kaufman who's willing and able to do it right. When you find one like that, you hang on to him for dear life." Like this:

McSam is developing some 30 hotels in Manhattan, Mr. Wisinski said, and Mr. Kaufman is the architect “for 90 percent of them.”

...Mr. Wisinski said he and his colleagues at McSam were pleased with Mr. Kaufman’s designs. “We look at all of them like our children,” [meaning they partnered to produce them] he said. “I know some people would like us to build the Plaza. But we’re not. We’re building mid-price-point lodging facilities.”

And that is how you do it.

Before Chang / Kaufman came along hardly any developer / architect saw fit to construct this kind of crap in Manhattan.

That's right, before they came along I wondered for years about this phenomenon. Being from Suburbia where the chains hail from, I could see the chain operators had timidly bought the prevailing wisdom that the chain formula wouldn't fly in New York --where, the wisdom went, you had to either emulate the Mandarin or upgrade a tired old fleabag or pull an Ian Schrager. The midlevel, the great unwashed midAmerican budget majority, was left to the tender mercies of the Pickwick, the Pennsylvania, the New Yorker or some other roach hotel. As these were upgraded into today's Excelsior and Paramount and Gramercy Park, the supply of affordable, clean hotels almost completely dried up.

Enter Chang. He could see what (forgive me) had been obvious to me for years: that there was an enormous untapped market in New York for standard American motel rooms at over triple standard American prices: a glittering profit opportunity just begging to be scooped up.

Mr. Kaufman’s first hotel, in 2003, was a Hampton Inn on West 24th Street in Chelsea. Until five years ago, the chain had more than 1,000 hotels nationwide, but not a single location in Manhattan. The 24th Street property is now one of the highest-performing Hampton Inns in the country... Since then, Mr. Kaufman has designed four more Hampton Inns in Manhattan.

You're in business to make money. Lots of it. That's what you strive for when you're a business.

“If you get one more room for floor, and you have 20 or 30 floors,” he said, you may be adding $10 million or $15 million in value.

I know what this means from personal experience. How can you ask a businessman to walk away from that kind of money?

But maximizing the number of rooms, he said, involves more than just making them smaller. He said buildings could be organized in ways that eliminate “uninhabitable space.”

Meticulous and scientific: that is the kind of study that goes into these prototypes

"The prototype hotel, for almost any chain, is a low-rise building with a parking lot and swimming pool,” he said. “We have to adapt that to Manhattan, but still meet all their standards.”

"The chains control every detail", he said...

Mr. Kaufman found his niche in 1999, when Sam Chang, the founder of McSam, asked him to design a hotel for a narrow site on Pearl Street in the financial district. As Mr. Kaufman recalled it, “Sam said, ‘I’m doing you a big favor,’ and he was right” — by allowing Mr. Kaufman to get in on the ground floor of a hotel boom that almost no one was predicting.

But he described his buildings as positive additions to the urban fabric. Many of the sites, including two-thirds of the 39th Street property, were previously parking lots, he pointed out.

Better than a parking lot.

When it comes to getting things built the way he envisions them, he said, “people don’t know how difficult that is.”

Amen brother, at least you haven't thrown in the towel completely.

But once Chang & Kaufman, with their priorities necessarily adjusted so that they could look themselves in the mirror and fill their pockets with coin, said "Do it" then others quickly followed suit.

Sure, it had become obvious. But you can't e v e r expect businessmen to leave money lying on the table. That's not what they do, just like tigers aren't vegetarians. Kaufman makes them money. What do you want them to do? If you want business to be charitable, you have to move to Cuba.

"OK," I hear you saying, "but couldn't they tell him not to make his hotels so bloody awful?" Seems axiomatic that you can do something low priced and good-looking as cheaply as low-priced and ugly. Right?

I used to think this too, but I've come to find out that it's just not true. When you've made a building as economical as possible and still good-looking, you can take still more cost out of it by doing things to it that make it less good-looking (remember the example of the art school I designed). “There is hardly anything in the world that some man cannot make a little worse and ... a little cheaper, and the people who consider price only are this man's lawful prey.”

Usually it's the clients themselves, simultaneously predator and prey. I've had clients significantly hurt the appearance of their building to save about the cost of a meal for two at the Olive Garden. You can't say, "I won't allow it", they'll do it anyway. What do you want? Blow it up, like Howard Roark?

Chang hotels don't hold the street wall. That's a business decision Kaufman can't reverse because it makes good sense to Chang; he'd just hire another architect.

Chang hotels are cheaply clad. They're usually stucco or cheap brick or flimsy metal or bargain-basement tile. Why should Chang strive for something better, since he can breezily declare what the bulk of the public and even many WNY forumers are alredy convinced of: "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." Kaufman doesn't pick the materials; Chang finds odd lot bargains in the warehouses of bankrupt distributors.

Chang hotels have boring repetitive window patterns --reflecting boring repetitive rooms, economies of construction and furniture purchase, and the fact that a guest only occupies one room. Variety isn't desired, and won't be allowed. Kaufman can't change this.

In a Chang hotel, the proportions of window openings are bad. These windows are the bare minimum after code requirements, HVAC systems, blind configurations, furniture arrangements, material costs and chain standards have all been studied. Kaufman has no power to change this. He's told what the window will be.

The buildings shape is always a rectangle in plan and elevation. This gives you an economical configuration to build and pack with twelve-foot wide units --themselves boxes. A box of boxes. The height is determined by the FAR provision of the zoning code. Kaufman has no control over any of this.

Kaufman's job is to draw up Chang's decisions and get him a building permit. He's good at meeting the building department's rules, which govern all remaining decisions.

Gene Kaufman? You think he designs these buildings? Ha!

Sometimes, if Chang has bought two small batches of different-colored brick, Kaufman gets to suggest a pattern for laying them.

Give the man a break.

I stopped hating these buildings when I traded in my urbanist-connoisseur hat for my architect-professional hat and asked myself what I would do to make one of these buildings look better. And you know what? Given what I know the ironclad rules are: I found I couldn't think of one thing.

There's plenty equally bad going up. Personally I think most of Kondylis' joyless buildings are more boring. And because they're not as tightly-controlled by rules, they're often arbitrarily stupid.

Kaufman has the personality of a klutz. This combines with the primitive look of his buildings to lead people to the conclusion that he's stupid. Cornell's architecture program is too hard for stupidos. And Kaufman's buildings are really designed by raw economics in collaboration with Chang. That's why they look so dopey. So, since we're all endowed with good taste, we superciliously pour out our snobbery upon him.

I think the hateful remarks unseemly.

Seemingly the "what should not be done" line has been moved and all the pros moved along with it.

That line was never there, lofter; you're deluding yourself.

I know what line you're postulating, incidentally, and in the end I'm not even sure I'd label it "shouldn't be done."


* * *

If you doubt the truth of what I say, lofter, ask in a congregation of architects when they're a little drunk, but be sure you ask someone in middle management. The guys at the bottom are still in the dark, and the guys at the top have motives for keeping you in it.

Such is human nature?

Obviously. "Nothing human is foreign to me."

Or just the inevitable decline when a culture gets too fat and convinces itself that there are all sorts of little unnecessaries which are required for ongoing existence?

Yes, no, maybe, whatever...

A fuzzy question deserves a reply in kind.

[pianoman11686]

Obviously we'd expect better, since the profit on one of these will also be a lot higher than one of those above which AREN't situated in an expensive and desirable place..

Maybe you'd expect more. I wouldn't, because I know the Capital Budgeting department of Hilton, Choice, or InterContinental hotels would never think to budget a project in New York differently from a project in Plato, TX or Worcester, MA.

Same type of customer, same level of service, same bed linens and shampoos in the rooms. The rates are higher than in those cities, but so are the operating costs. The same ratios are used throughout.

They want to enter a highly lucrative market whose appeal is based on the very architecture of the place they are building in. So you allow them to despoil it with bad architecture. Think things through. Doesn't make a lot of sense, what you are saying.

I don't know, Midtown. Think things through yourself.

Are most tourists to New York visiting because they're architecture lovers? Sure, they'll take pictures of pretty buildings, and ride to the top of the Empire State Building. But these are items to be checked off a long list of things to do and places to see, not unlike a grocery list. Tourists get their itineraries from websites like Expedia and cheap guides in Barnes and Noble. New York isn't treated any differently from Orlando: there are things you just must see if you go there.

I fully agree with you that these hotels are ugly. But that doesn't mean they're "despoiling" the entire built environment. Most of the new hotels have gone up on the lowly West Side, and on parking lots. And even though it seems like a lot have opened recently, they only make up a minuscule percentage of the total hotel stock in New York. That says nothing of the total building stock, which hasn't changed that much.

There's reason to be angered and disgusted by these buildings. But there's no reason to get doomsday about it, or start making new rules. In a few years, no more of these hotels will be planned or built. Chang even said it a few months ago: the market's close to saturation (and in no small measure thanks to him).

[pianoman11686]

Wow, great post BTW ablarc. Thanks for sharing (even if the truth is hard to swallow sometimes).

[lofter1]

Very well written, ablarc ^

A long & in depth explanation (justification?) for what Kaufman hath wrought.

None of which dispels the collective belief that GA is a hack who builds only crud.

Can anyone offer any evidence that Gene Kaufman, Architect has ever built a good looking building in Manhattan?

[ablarc]

^ Can you offer evidence that he has ever actually designed a building in Manhattan?

As I attempted to explain, the buildings you decry were designed by Chang and sinister researchers. He is merely the stenographer of their decisions and the supplier of building-department-approvable documents.

[pianoman11686]

Sometimes, if Chang has bought two small batches of different-colored brick, Kaufman gets to suggest a pattern for laying them.

Aha! So that probably explains why Kaufman chose to clad a part of this hotel in Skittles: