Musings on a Faded Former Love

When New York was my home, I thought there was no other place in the world for me to live.

It was the metropolitan mecca, the capital of the 20th Century, a polyglot of people and places, endlessly engaging.

Now, when I visit New York, I wonder how anyone could live there, unless, of course, they are very, very rich. To me the city seems to have become more callous and cold, the charm of the neighborhoods where I once lived has faded, like past loves trying to hide their decay with too much makeup.

But however vain, architecturally, New York continues to excite, with planning and design a constant source of healthy discussion and debate among residents. This talk was a welcome balance to the self-congratulatory exercises that dominated the national convention of the American Institute of Architects, which I attended there last month.

I took a look at some of the construction projects I was involved in when I had worked there (as development director for the New York Educational Construction Fund) and was reminded how frightening permanent architecture is. You make a mistake, and it is there for everyone to see and experience long after you have departed.

Among the many design decisions I had a hand in and that now haunt me--and the projects--was the brick selected for a high school in downtown Manhattan. I could see now that it was too dark and has not aged well at all.

And then there was the mixed-use project at 34th Street and Park Avenue where we decided to skew the structure to solve a foundation problem and create a street level plaza. We thought it a brilliant solution at the time. The fact is that the plaza doesn’t work well and worse, the building looks terrible. Saying I’m sorry does not in any way alleviate the damage to the city’s streetscape and skyline.

I also took a prejudiced look at some select projects of a few enduring friends, Carmie Bee, Lance Brown and Lee Harris Pomeroy, who, many years ago, I had taught with at the School of Architecture of the City College of New York.

Now a partner in the firm of RKT&B;, Bee had had a hand in the collaboration with Charles Moore in the design of the first apartments to rise in the acclaimed Battery Park City development in Lower Manhattan. The design, marked by a lively facade of projecting balconies, a corner tower and an arched ornamented midway, is certainly the most attractive of the residential buildings there.

Bee also was a principal in the design of a 21-story apartment tower in west Greenwich Village called Memphis, after the pop look made famous by a group of Milan furniture stylists. Happily, the tower is relatively subdued, and is well sited on a commercial base and inventively detailed with curved balconies that seem to wrap the structure.

Less successful, I feel, is the play of light and dark brick. But for New York the apartments are generous and the views spectacular. Prof. Bee, in my critique, gets a B-plus.

Brown was always a problem solver supreme. When someone didn’t have enough money to renovate a restaurant, a store or an apartment but wanted to do it anyway, and with style, they would hire Brown, and he would somehow do it. The project of his I saw during the visit was an addition to the Rudolf Steiner School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

A turn-of-the-century McKim, Mead & White landmark in a historic district, the school’s design had to satisfy a host of reviews. And it also had to satisfy a host of problems, such as limiting the addition to a certain height on a tight rear yard site, while also meeting some of the existing school’s space and circulation needs.

It was a Chinese puzzle that Brown ingeniously solved by sinking and partially skylighting the addition, using its roof as a play space and detailing the package in a subtle classical tone to match the landmark.

Similarly challenging, but on a different scale, was the problem Pomeroy had to solve, which was to design a new 36-story mixed-use tower behind the landmark Saks Fifth Avenue department store. The solution by Pomeroy, in association with the firm of Abramovitz Kingsland Schiff, was a nine-story addition to Saks in an elegant neoclassical style, to match the store’s facade, which in turn, served as the base of a subdued, limestone-clad 26-story office tower for the Swiss Bank Corp. It is a refreshingly quiet, elegant scheme in a city not known for such gestures.

For both an architectural and familial treat, I went with my daughter to the Rainbow Room atop the RCA Building that has been gloriously renovated by Hugh Hardy of the firm of Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer Associates. The room and its adjoining lounges and suites have been sumptuously detailed and decorated to evoke the Art Deco splendor of the 1930s.

Here, in the clouds above Manhattan, dancing to live music on a revolving, patterned wood floor under a domed ceiling of glistening lights and a sparkling crystal chandelier, in a stage set of a space lined with mirrors and Aubergine silk, scanning a supper club menu featuring classic dishes, served by waiters in pastel tails, seeing and being seen, you get a sense of New York’s heavenly past, lovingly brought back to life, if only on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center for an evening. Then came paying the bill, descending to the street and reality.

BRIEFLY NOTED: Offering a fresh, and fascinating, view of architecture was “The Mystery of the Master Builders,” a one-hour segment of the NOVA science documentary series that appeared on public television station KCET and which I happened to see recently.

Hopefully, it will be repeated, for at last here was a television program that went beyond style and the personalities that dominate the design profession today to examine how some of the great works of architecture were created without the benefit of modern technology.

The narrator, Robert Marks, a Princeton professor of engineering and architecture, observed that such masterpieces as the Pantheon in Rome and the Gothic cathedrals of France were shaped by so-called master builders who, because they were intimately involved in the construction process, could alter their designs as structural problems emerged.

Part of the problem with many of today’s buildings is that this link between designer and builder has been broken, according to Marks. “Architects today have lost touch with the lesson the old buildings teach. The master builders did not simply design. They also built. It is that tie to bricks and stones that the modern architect has broken.”

Among the examples he cited was the enormous cost overruns of the Sydney Opera House and the windows popping out of the John Hancock building in Boston. Noting that the latter, designed by I.M. Pei, won a national honor award from the AIA, Marks commented “for a . . . portion of the profession, obviously, appearance was all.”