Eurotrashville skyline
Mar. 19th, 2006 11:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
The other day I compared New York's skyline disparagingly to Shanghai's, saying New York threw a 20th century shape against the sky and Shanghai a 21st century one. I may have been a little sweeping; New York does have some exciting developments in store. There's Libeskind's Liberty Tower, of course (I'm not a fan, but I feel sorry for Libeskind, who's had his design chopped around horribly by the developer). But there's also an amazing building going up at 80 South Street, a residential tower by the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava. And there's the new New Museum on the Bowery, due to open next year, designed by Japanese architects SANAA (firm Click Opera favourites for their Moriyama House).Do you notice something these redefiners of the famous New York skyline have in common? That's right. Unlike the guys who designed the Chrysler and Empire State buildings, they're not Americans. New York's 21st century skyline is in the hands of "Eurotrash" and Japanese. If you add this to the radical alterations made by the 9/11 hijackers (some of whom were, grotesquely, town planners), the question arises: Is the famous New York skyline becoming post-American?
Actually, I don't know if that question interests me much. Skyscrapers, like those other "American" symbols freeways and the hamburger, were invented in Germany. The Modern movement was international, New York is an international city. "European" artists like Marcel Duchamp spent most of their time here rather than back in Paris, and their contribution belongs just as much to the history of American art as it does to old Europe. Nationality, blah blah blah. What does interest me, though, is good architecture, wherever it comes from. And Calatrava's tower looks like great architecture; dramatic, innovative, futuristic, elegant, exciting.According to the New York Times, Calatrava's tower is "an offset stack of 45-foot glass cubes, a dozen in all, each intended to house only one or two families. Resembling some of Mr. Calatrava's sculptures, but on a titanic scale of 835 feet, the tower would rise over the East River at South and Fletcher Streets, near the South Street Seaport and the Brooklyn Bridge. The developer, Frank J. Sciame... asked for help in remodeling his Upper East Side townhouse. Mr. Sciame, a contractor and a developer, said he was impressed by Mr. Calatrava's sculptures and by his Turning Torso apartment tower, under construction in Malmo, Sweden. He invited Mr. Calatrava to the South Street site, where the architect found a place to explore the torso theme on a colossal scale."
Curbed takes up the story: "Calatrava's unusual design is modeled after a sculpture he created about 20 years ago that now sits in his living room, according to Ayesha I. Khan, the building's director of sales. Redesigned for the waterfront site, each cube of the "Townhouses in the Sky" will be four stories high and encompass approximately 10,000 square feet. The first two cubes -- which create an eight-story, 60,000-square-foot base for the building -- are envisioned as the home of a major cultural or institutional user. The remaining ten will be residential units of four-story townhouses... clinging to a central core and fastened by spindles on either side."
These "townhouses in the sky" don't come cheap: they start at $29 million and max out at about $50 million. There are no plans for a public observation deck. So, personally, although I welcome the drama of the Calatrava project, I'm more excited by SANAA's New Museum, a space I'll actually be using. This shares something with 80 South Street and the Malmo building (there's also going to be a Miami one, apparently); a certain interest in stacking volumes askew:"Each of the building's seven floors is represented as a distinct rectangular box," reports the aristocratic Herbert Muschamp in the Times. "These are stacked atop one
another, in an off-axis composition, like a chest of partly open drawers. This arrangement allows variety in the size and proportions of each floor. It also creates setbacks that are used for open-air terraces and for skylights to naturally illuminate the galleries below. At night, the building's metallic exterior will be washed with artificial lighting from within." It sounds just like something you might see on Omote Sando!What's more, the groundbreaking ceremony for the building last October struck a particularly un-American note, as Lower Manhattan Info reports:
"To cap off the ceremonial part of the groundbreaking -- before patrons and the general public were invited to take a shovelful of earth and symbolically move it -- a traditional and stirring Japanese Shinto ritual known as a Jichinsai was performed by the Reverend Mitsutaka Inui of the International Shinto Foundation. On the stage was a Shinto altar, replete with foliage, ceramics, and fruits. For ten minutes, the Reverend Inui sprinkled confetti bits of blessed rice papers to the four corners of the site as he sanctified the space. With the priest dressed in ceremonial white robes and a traditional black hat at its center, the silent, striking ceremony was accompanied by the quiet murmur of traffic traveling over wet roadways, as a kind of white noise behind the on-stage drama."Shinto ceremonies for New York construction projects? Now that's what I call post-American!
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 05:35 pm (UTC)Yes, it's a small architectural elite who gets these projects. But what are the other options:
--Mass-scale developers/corporate/engineering firms who don't exactly push the formal boundaries of the built domain.
--Smaller boutique firms who lack the technical experience and project management capability to build on such a large scale, and who will be paired with aforementioend developers that will probably steamroll them anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 05:10 pm (UTC)1) Burj Dubai, UAE; Skidmore and Merrill, New York
2) Gaungzhou TV Tower, Shaghai; IBA Amsterdam and Arup London
3) Busan Lotte Tower, Busan, SK; Baum Architects, San Franciso and PDI, Minneapolis
4) Shaghai World Financial Center; KPF (New York, London, and Shaghai)
5) Abraj Al Bait Towers, Mecca; Dar Group (London, Cairo, and Beirut)
Two and a half out of five ain't bad. What you've shown is that architecture is now international, and perhaps that the best projects are not in New York. But while the New York skyline becomes post-American, the skylines of Seoul, Shaghai and (ironically) Dubia become American.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 05:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 05:36 pm (UTC)This image is positively terrifying to me. How could someone live here?
My fear of heights is so extreme (I once turned down a great job offer because the firm was located on the 29th floor of its office building and that location terrified me beyond belief) that even if I were able to afford a penthouse or stacked townhouse, there is no way I would get one. I am pretty much a 10 stories and below kind of gal. It has nothing to do with WTC paranoia, either. Just an extreme, extreme fear of heights. I know I am not alone because my friend, an interior designer who did one of the apartments in the new Time Warner Center on Columbus Circle, found herself crawling on the floor, unable to stand, clutching the walls and backing away from the floor-to-ceiling windows in the apartment she designed when she had to measure it!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 07:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 05:41 pm (UTC)I don't know, I get the creeping sense that this whole un-American/post-American theme stems from some certain internal prejudices of how this country's culture actually is.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 06:11 pm (UTC)It's just not limited to that.
Of course you could make a fairly good case that a powow is real American culture, gringos aren't.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 06:53 pm (UTC)See, there's just too much to this place to sum up easily without experiencing it first hand.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 08:20 pm (UTC)on the flip-side, there is a sweet, widespread midwestern romance of what we think is Japanese. Results 1 - 10 of about 2,500,000 for minneapolis sushi (http://www.google.com/search?q=minneapolis+sushi&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official), for example. All the same, I don't suppose there are a great many people who have needed to adopt Japanese customs for their jobs here.
I don't like being broadly brushed as a brash and ignorant peasant either. But all of our highly globabl American culture is pretty well refuted by the current conservative swing of our national and international politics. That can't be denied.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 04:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 03:11 pm (UTC)You *can meet boys in kilts in towns in Mississippi, I've met them. They're either blacksmiths or they're pretty quiet about it, in my experience, largely because of the self-enforcing homogenous, intollerant, sometimes violent conservative stereotype that's widely available.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 02:34 am (UTC)I'm reminded of my own tendency to view the past through the lens of media- I catch myself thinking people were simpler in the 1950s because of the millions of bad movies in the 50's. It's easy to paint people with a broad brush, and I think that perhaps that wish to do so has to do with defining an identity in opposition to something that is problematic to negotiate. I am certainly sympathetic to that- I'm Canadian, but grew up here, and I love thinking about myself in terms of Canadian and American stereotypes- it's fun and interesting to analyze national characters, but it's easier for me to do in Canada because I know few people there, so it's more of a blank canvas....I just don't know that it would be useful when I'm dealing with actual post humans.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 04:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 03:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 06:39 pm (UTC)Despite the fact that he's Spanish, Calatrava's tower seems to me to be almost perfectly American: flashy, technologically hubristic, elitist, unnecessary, phallic, vertiginous. It would be a bad neighbor in any urban American context.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 08:30 pm (UTC)EC1
Date: 2006-03-19 08:18 pm (UTC)skyscrapers
Date: 2006-03-19 08:19 pm (UTC)V for Vendetta
Date: 2006-03-19 08:43 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 09:09 pm (UTC)I love Clatrava's work, and saw the Met exhibit a couple months ago. I saw the model for this tower there, but to me it looks uninvitingly precarious, like a stack of washing machines. I can just imagine it swaying like a treetop, and I'd be surprised if it has a tuned mass damper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuned_mass_damper).
I share your sympathy for Leibiskind. From what I've read, he's really been treated poorly.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 10:11 pm (UTC)None of these guys have any kind of facility for doing high-rises. In the few examples of Libeskind's work succeeding, it's been with smaller-scale, symbolic public spaces, such as the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Most of his stuff is just novelty architecture, to the nth degree. You can already hear the punters on the sidewalk: "hey, look at them crazy angles! How'd they make that thing?!"
Architecture, above a certain scale, should follow some basic good sense, a quality I've never noticed in Libeskind. Doing a 1/3 mile tall building (ooh--it's 1776 feet tall--what a coincidence!) is beyond the skills of most architects, and frankly, beyond any good sense. Wrong guy, wrong project. But very American, I'm sorry to admit.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 11:07 pm (UTC)I admit that I'm often right there alongside the punters. I'm a complete sucker for exhuberant, novelty architecture, although I like to think that I can appreciate a subtle solution to a less-than glamorous project.
You may know better than I: which architects, in your estimation, are now designing "successful" high-rises?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 12:32 am (UTC)I also have aesthetic objections to them, and this is one of the reasons I don't much care for Manhattan; those corridors of high-rises offend me. I prefer buildings to edify and embrace humans, not minimize them. Most new projects harm the skyline, cause terrible wind effects at their bases, cast appalling shadows and kill neighborhoods. And ironically, I say this as a guy who worked as Project Engineer on a high-rise building here in SF a half-dozen years ago.
So, taking all this into consideration, about the only architect I've seen turn out anything like a decent high-rise lately would probably be Norman Foster. I respect his commitment to leading-edge technology, and his (for the most part) eschewing novelty forms for their own sake. Some of Cesar Pelli's buildings are inoffensive; he's got a pretty good eye.
If it's at all descriptive about what contemporary architecture I most admire, I'd point to Peter Zumthor's work.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 02:00 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 02:01 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 08:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 05:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-19 11:53 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 03:28 am (UTC)guess it's good to see stuff happening in NYC , last time i was there it felt as parochial as salzburg.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 03:40 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 04:05 am (UTC)I may play Tonic in late May, let's see.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 04:20 am (UTC)Point: is post american truly a term to be used for this subject, or has the idea of american just been forgotten and now seen as new with the influx of international influence and work on american soil?
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 07:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 04:50 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 08:01 am (UTC)There's a walkthrough of Discovery Channel's "Extreme Engineering" feature of it here. (http://dsc.discovery.com/convergence/engineering/skycity/interactive/interactive.html)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-03-20 09:03 am (UTC)