BUT HEY YOU’RE ALRIGHT

There’s been a wave of resistance to the demolition of 270 Park, the Union Carbide Building, a 52-floor office tower from 1960 by SOM. Its current owner J P Morgan Chase plan to replace it with another tower 20 floors higher. Architectural critics believe that 270 is one of the city’s finest mid-century works. They also note, irrelevantly, that it was designed by associate partner Nathalie de Blois, an accomplished and undersung woman. They accuse the building’s current owner of profiteering, as they maximize the value of their midtown lot. And they call out Union Carbide, the building‘s original owner, for grossly negligent operations. It all makes for melodramatic press.

There’s no question that 270 Park is a handsome building. As with Lever House, another SOM tower completed eight years earlier, it’s broken into two different-sized volumes, with a dramatic street-level setback. Its facade has striking ornamental vertical mullions, echoing those at the Seagrams Tower, that stretch from the bottom of its “parlor” floor to its parapet. And its lustrous curtain wall panels – mirror black at the transoms and night blue at the windows – give it an unusual sense of gravity.

But 270 Park pales when compared to these two other iconic towers, just a few blocks north, that preside over Park Avenue like gods. The massing at 270 is sedate compared to the still-astounding floating slab at Lever House. And its mullions are clumsily overscaled compared to the slender stems at Seagrams. 720 Park can’t even compete favorably with 740 Park, its northern neighbor, a 1961 tower by Emery Roth, with a syncopated facade of cast concrete frames.

Why has the discussion about 720 focused on morals rather than pragmatics? Razing a structure this large is a colossal waste of materials. There’s talk of reusing pieces of its steel frame, but coordinating this will slow demolition and might not be cost-effective. If the building’s floor plates don’t suit the bank’s needs, why don’t they remake them, opening them vertically and adding ramps and mezzanines? And if the building’s footprint is too small, why not secure other adjacent buildings to make a midtown campus? Or find another lot on which to build a colossus?

I hope 270 Park remains. Not because it’s beautiful, but because it might make sense.

Photography by Ezra Stoller, Esto. Courtesy of SOM.

March 18, 2018 by Nalina Moses

In 1960 artist Robert Smithson noted, all too correctly, that contemporary buildings “rise into ruin before they are built.” Today, in addition to that, we can complain that new buildings rise into image before they are built. Massive, dense, and complex, they're built with truckloads of steel, glass and gravel, yet look like photographs. This is true of the New School University Building, that fills the half-block at the southeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Its facades are wrapped with horizontal bands of brass panels that cant in and out like accordion folds, and take on a plastic, purplish sheen in the sun. It has two stairwells pushing up against the facades, slicing through them diagonally, but their interiors remain hidden in shadow. The building’s shell has a bold contemporary presence on the street but feels illusory, empty, like a symbol for the building it was supposed to be.

But then I saw the building very late late one night, walking west on Fourteenth Street. Coming across it like this, in darkness and stillness, without expectation, the New School Building looked like a natural formation, like it was meant to be there, a cliff in Greenwich Village. The night sky softened the facade so that only its gently zig-zagging profile was legible. The staircases, lit brightly from within, thrummed, as if the structure supported an ecstatic inner life. The building, monstrous in daylight, now held the corner proudly, addressing both west and north, presiding over the neighborhood like a fortress, summoning visitors like a beacon. Unexpectedly, the building bested its own image.

Photograph by James Ewing, 2013.

October 16, 2013 by Nalina Moses