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

SCRATCHINGS

To see Michelangelo’s drawings, on display now at The Met, is to see mastery. Even the tiniest, earliest studies for paintings and architecture projects – his scratchings – have an awesome sense of certainty. Michelangelo draws a lot, at different scales, and to different levels of finish, but he never draws incorrectly or unnecessarily. All his work, even his painting, is sculptural, about the expression of three-dimensional form. He seems to be continually pulling forms out of the air and pinning them down on the page.

Some drawings have a quick, off-the-cuff quality, as if noting an idea that might or might not be pursued. On a facade study for the Church of San Lorenzo, the left half is expressed with light ink strokes in shadow and ornament, while the right half remains in outline, as was the convention when presenting symmetrical designs. Simple shadows pop columns and frames forward dramatically. Figural sculptures along the roofline, depicted in rough streaks of ink, spring to life. They are recognizably human, and look as if they might jostle with one another or jump off the ledge. Even a drawing this diagrammatically conceived, non finito, has a rich physical and emotional presence.

Among many gifts, Michelangelo has a gift to see the reality of a thing in its smaller parts. Many drawings on display are fragments, sometimes surreal, depicting a single arm, thumb, claw, doorway, or base molding. Though most are studies for larger realized works, each is rendered with such sculptural richness so that it is, in itself, fully realized. The paper these fragments are drawn on, small squares of faded parchment, act as a film between this and the next world, upon which the figures leave a swift, bold impression.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564), with additions and restorations. Demonstration Drawing for the “First Design” of the Facade of San Lorenzo. Pen and brown ink, brush and two hues of brown wash, over underdrawing in leadpoint, compass work, ruling in leadpoint and stylus, black chalk, on six sheets of paper. Casa Buonarroti, Florence.

February 10, 2018 by Nalina Moses

PAPERWEIGHT

A small, fine exhibit at AnySpace, Drawings’ Conclusions, showcases architectural drawings from the 1990′s and 2000′s, when production was migrating, uneasily, from the drafting board to the computer screen. It was a tumultuous time. As an architecture graduate just entering the profession, I witnessed the drama firsthand. Seasoned architects set down their pencils and handed production responsibilities to computer-literate novices. Young architects who had mastered drafting software, and not much else, began taking the lead in office work. Architecture became further detached from any deep understanding of construction, and design became a game played on computers, an image-making unmoored from physical realities. We see the results of this shift in our cities now, where major new civic and commercial buildings have the hollow aspect of projections.

The drawings on display in the show are skillful and touching. Skillful technically, in their angelic pencil and ink linework, and also intellectually, in their clear expression of architectural ideas. There are no fantasies here. However surprising any drawing’s forms and geometries, it offers strong propositions about a building. Best of show goes to to Greg Lynn‘s computer-drafted line diagrams for the Slavin House. This small structure was conceived around a coiled frame that resembles a knit strand of yarn come undone. It’s drawings call out radii and lengths systematically, rationally, conventionally, exactly as required for fabrication.

The distended coil is just the kind of form can be generated easily, randomly, scalelessly, in seconds, in a drafting program like AutoCAD. But Lynn’s drawings remain stubbornly orthogonal. They were imagined in section and elevation, on the page, with pragmatic spatial thinking. They aren’t about the image of the building but about its geometries and profiles. Though these drawings generated by a computer, they have a stodgy solidity, a physical logic. It’s a logic that would disappear soon enough, as new architects began designing with no memory of pencil or paper, of steel frames, and of the cartesian grid.

February 03, 2018 by Nalina Moses

DEMOLITIONS

A retrospective at The Bronx Museum of the Arts (BMA) honors Gordon Matta-Clark, whose work falls, alluringly, somewhere between theater, sculpture, land art, performance art, and political protest. (The exhibit’s subtitle is Anarchitect.) It might be best understood, loosely, as architectural intervention. Though I’m enamored of his work, the exhibition didn’t hold my interest.

The show has been thoughtfully curated and handsomely mounted. But the physical artifacts from Matta-Clark’s projects are inert. A patch of floor cut with a machine saw from a wood frame house looks, simply, like a chunk of building debris. It doesn’t have the mythic aura or syntactic richness of one of Rachel Whiteread’s architectural casts. Even photos (like the ones from Conical Intersect in 1975, offering views through a giant cone carved through a Parisian house) and video (like the one from Day’s End in 1975, showing the artist on a harness, with a blow torch, cutting a three-quarters-moon shape through a warehouse wall) have little effect.

What’s most remarkable about Matta-Clark’s work is its sense of the prehistoric. In Day’s End, by simply removing a chunk of wall, the artist connects us – simply, powerfully, mysteriously, unsentimentally – with the cosmos. Light falls through the opening onto the rough concrete floor of the building like a blessing; the sky tumbles inside. Matta-Clark’s work carries memory of a time when we were tethered indelibly to the movements of sun and stars. It also carries memory of the primal power of architecture. The structures he operates on are, typically, unoccupied and abandoned. After his transformation they become shrines, havens, temples. Matta-Clark’s actions aren’t merely tactical or intellectual; they allow magic again into the everyday world.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Day’s End (Pier 52), 1975, choromgenic print, 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). ©Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark/licensed by Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York/London.

January 28, 2018 by Nalina Moses