Paleo Retiree writes:
Walking around the hipster downtown neighborhood of the Lower East Side the other evening, I ran across a construction site. Here’s a pic of what’s going up:
For context’s sake — and, where architecture and urbanism go, context is almost always a hugely important factor — here’s a sampling of what much of downtown NYC looks and feels like:
The new building really suits its surroundings, doesn’t it?
A couple of questions.
1) Although modernism once marketed itself as innovative and exciting, what could be more tired than the design at the top of this posting? It isn’t as though there aren’t already thousands of “cube-like buildings punctuated by nothing but expanses of featureless glass” in the world, after all. One a-strong-attack-is-the-best-defense ploy the establishment architecture world started employing some years back is the notion of “classic modernism.” It may well be that early modernism’s monomaniacal emphasis on planes, edges and abstraction has been widely recognized to be a problem. (One reason we’re seeing so many wobbly and bulbous buildings going up these days is that their curviness is supposed to be a corrective to earlier modernism’s rectilinearity.) Even so, we’re meant to agree that early modernism was a great thing worthy of memorializing and reviving — hence “classic modernism.” How best to respond to this clever ploy? Would it avail anything at all to point out that many of us were never OK with modernism in the first place?
2) Why do people in neighborhoods like the LES not protest developments like this one? I understand that the aesthetics-averse and those who simply don’t register their environment might not be bugged by the construction of a new boring zilch-zero building. But the LES is full of people with hyper-acute sensibilities — people who, whatever their scenester/hipster annoyingnesses, hate blandness and have the taste to dig funky boutiques, locavore food, scrappy garage bands and vintage clothes. So why don’t they react to this piece of bland nothingness with contempt, anger and mockery? My guess is that a combo of not-noticing and resignation plays a role. But I think it’s also that hipsters and scenesters are defenseless before anything that appears to be progressive. And since modernism, despite all the evidence, still manages to associate itself with chic-ness, style and progressiveness, hipsters pretty much have to go along with this kind of thing despite what an obvious affront it is to a neighborhood they adore.
Your reaction to this small-scale project? I’m going to going to go out on a big dangerous limb here and assert that it looks like a Banana Republic outlet.
Blowhard, Esq.
Callowman
Sherbrooke
Eddie Pensier
Enzo Nakamura
Epaminondas
Fabrizio del Wrongo
Fenster
Brundle Guy
Glynn Marshes
Paleo Retiree
Atypical Neurotic
Question Lady
Sax von Stroheim
Sir Barken Hyena
The Mistaken
Uncouth Reflections 
Cheap, cheap crappy building. THIS will be the new blight. What’s going in there, a bank?
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That’s my take. A bank.
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SoCal has a long, storied, shameful history of throwing up crap buildings so something like that wouldn’t raise a single eyebrow here. It baffles me, though, why people who live in wonderful neighborhoods like those found in NYC would put up with such a thing. I guess people have the feeling that when it comes to buildings, so much time, money, and powerful special interests are involved that there’s not much the average person can do about what The Powers That Be foist upon us.
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Sad.
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I don’t get the impression that the hipsters feel attached to or rooted in their environments. Any old array of funky boutiques, vegan dog food stores, and indie mumbling bands would turn them on. For them, most of that stuff is interchangeable, not distinct things with their own identities.
A sense of belonging to a community is a particular thing — you feel rooted in a specific environment. No matter how similar the buildings, parks, and people appeared in another place, and how enjoyable that other place might therefore feel, it still wouldn’t be *your* place and you wouldn’t feel rooted there because those things are not fungible.
Hipsters don’t feel that way about where they live. The buildings, stores, bands, etc. are more like theatrical backdrops for the always unfolding dramatic awesomeness of their spotlighted lives. So, as long as the props don’t change *too* much in tone, drab new buildings won’t disturb the overall image they want to project to their fellow status-striving observers.
You can’t feel that a taboo is being broken, or something untouchable being desecrated, if your emotional response to place is one of titillation and fleeting endorphin rushes. Wanting to take a stand against perversion requires you to feel like the environment is this living superorganic thing that you and your neighbors are all a part of, as though some mad scientist were trying to amputate your leg and graft a goat leg in its place — just because. Just cuz he thinks goat legs are titillating to look at, and you wouldn’t stand in the way of a more diverse-looking body, would you?
The liberal mind, which suffers from a blunted sense of purity / taboo, is ultimately hopeless to beat back the forces of corruption, degradation, and perversion.
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Personally, I like classic modernism, but there’s a time and a place for everything. This is not the time, and that is not the place.
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Its stark contrast with the ‘hoods normal architecture is actually a nice touch.
Peter
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Toronto has more construction going on right now than any city in North America. Most of it is in the cause of putting up badly-made condo towers with glass walls that often warp and shrink and then fall onto terrified pedestrians. And so MANY pedestrians–downtown is horribly congested, with thousands of (mostly young) people moving into those monstrosities. Modernism has to be done superbly, with great materials. Otherwise, it is a cheap and featureless blight (thanks for that word, Hitter.) Still, City Council wants the high property taxes these buildings will provide them. And so it goes.
My downtown neighbourhood is under siege. It’s a very old one (the St. Lawrence Market-Flatiron District, if you know Toronto) and it’s being overtaken by a plague of these technocrat towers. One of the sweetest things about living here used to be that nothing was taller than the Flatiron Bulding–it’s only about eight stories tall, a glorious terra cotta creation with a Victorian tower and gargoyles, etc. Just gorgeous. And, for the people who’ve been here for years, it’s a friend and a soul among us.
I guess my senses have been dulled by the drilling that’s gone on below the bedroom window each summer and winter for the last four years. But yesterday I was walking toward my apartment when I found myself at just the right angle to see, looming large in the distance, the worst building (I’m convinced) in Canadian history. It looks like a Henry Moore sculpture of a pregnant woman, sliced in half, so the poor woman’s back is razor-straight (and of course, her head’s cut off). Her stomach is supported by spindly legs. This bulging thing stands almost as tall as the CN tower and is about 2/3 finished. Its silhouette also lunges up behind the Flatiron Building, killing most of its poetry (and, I imagine, the poetry found in any neighbourhood that offers a view of it). I felt physically ill.
Toronto has very few distinguished buildings. The 2007 addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (the “exploding crystal”) looks more like an exploding garage, and (of course!) defeats every effort to effectly display ROM’s treasures inside it. Frank Gehry, who has done good things and bad things, is about to erect a building that supposedly looks like a tall ship or something, right in the middle of the theatre district. I wish to God it DID look like a tall ship; I love them. But to me, it looks like pieces of cement toilet paper, blown about. And the scale is all wrong; it will dwarf the historic Royal Alexandra, for instance. It will also bulldoze historic buildings.
In contrast, my building is located where the tall ships actually used to dock in Toronto. And the way the neighbourhood used to be, you could easily imagine those ships, because the community, and its architecture, reflected and honoured our history, both in spirit and scale. I am willing to bet that my imagination did much better with the tall ships than Gehry will.
But these days, my neighbourhood has been turned over to the glitterati, or wannabe glitterati. God help us.
Even New York, which (at least in contrast to Toronto) feels like sort an infinite city of sorts, should treasure and guard the history and meaning of a community. An occasional great, new building, placed very carefully, can be a stimulus. But I get the feeling that New York, like Toronto, is caught in the architectural equivalent of “The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
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Why is there so much construction in Toronto? Is it immigration? Gold and oil? I’m guessing this is a branch of TD Bank. It’s probably a bank, and TD spends a ton of the branches. Why anybody still needs a bank branch is a puzzle. ATMs and internet is about all anybody needs, unless you’re Donald Trump.
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I wish I could tell you WHY there’s so much construction. Who wants to live downtown so much? And I agree that there are far too many bank buildings, but I don’t see any huge ones gong up these days. We’re still coping with the TD Centre, First Canadian Place, and all the stuff. In my neighbourhood places like pizza stores tend to get converted into small TDs, so it does go on a small scale. Really, really dull.
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I have no figures to cite, but the housing stock in the LES seems made up of more walk-up rentals and public housing, vs. somewhere like the West village where there’s a lot of co-ops and brownstones. Thus there’s a lot of young people and poor people who aren’t necessarily engaged at a community level like you see in the West Village (I think the NYP today has a picture of Susan Sarandon protesting NYU expansion, so there you go). Also, the condos they are building in the LES are more likely being snapped up by 30-something MBAs who work 80 hour weeks, or rich Europeans who want a NY crash pad. Again, these are people who wouldn’t really care about what the buildings look like. So even though your garden variety hipster in the LES might pay lip service to local architectural woes, ultimately he isn’t very invested in the ‘hood in the first place, and has a lot of other things on his mind anyway (like where to get good Vietnamese sandwiches or something). It’s really a much different place than the West Village.
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