In New York, the boom never stops, though the noise has died down.
The country’s tallest city is in the process of breaking three of its own, long-standing building-height records — three, and nearly all at once — yet few are cheering. Rather than marveling at new feats of engineering, or beauty, people obsess over safety and the shadows that will be cast on their neighborhoods. Times have changed.
In another America, there would be a patriotic frenzy coast-to-coast over , which opened last month on the site of the World Trade Center towers that were downed by terrorists in 2001. Rising a symbolic 1,776 feet, the skyscraper, designed by David Childs of , tops any other structure on the continent.
Just a decade or so ago, envy would be widespread over glassy, glamorous , the 90-story condo building designed by that debuted on the edge of Central Park this fall, smashing the record for residential high-rises. That benchmark will shatter again when architect 432 Park Avenue condos — 146 feet taller then the Empire State Building — opens next year.
Modern, man-made monoliths produced by brand-name architects, that’s what made Manhattan the 20th century’s urban idol.
But the 21st century has different priorities, better ones, actually, and these stiff spikes are embarrassingly out of synch.
These days, we are more down-to-earth. We crave humble, recycled, hand-made. We want to keep it local, to be able to see the farm from the table where our dinner is served. There is a whole “tiny house” movement afoot.
We respect technology that is personal, invisible, practical. We aren’t focused on fast elevators rocketing to $90 million penthouses in the sky; we want connectivity, community. We want to text our friends, Tweet our business and get directions to the restaurant where we are meeting pals.
These new buildings are about exclusivity, separation. They are gangly safehouses for a few, built to keep things out: the stink of homeless people, the honking of taxi drivers, the latest terror, be it or ebola. They aim to hover above, at a time when New York’s newest mayor, , was elected by looking down, running on a platform that blasted income equality as “the issue of our time.”
In Washington, D.C, and St. Louis, the focus is on creating parks where all are welcome. In Los Angeles, the attention is on museums. In Denver, patient-centered hospitals and innovative public-housing projects are getting all the attention.
But Manhattan keeps going up, and the three tall buildings are an awkward fit even there. The two residential towers, in Midtown where restrictions are relatively lax, spike in a way that is neither graceful nor generous.
One World Trade Center stands as if its sole purpose is to remain standing, no matter what. It is hunkered in the ground on a 20-story, windowless base, sturdy enough to resist truck bombs. Finally, on the 21th floor it begins to have a personality, with its exterior corners chamfering in to form eight isosceles triangles along its sides.
The structure gets nimble for a while, and begins to soar adventurously as only a skyscraper can. Then it flattens abruptly, like a stump lopped at its 104th floor. A pointed communications tower caps it in a desperate reach for its emblematic top inch.
The building is an energy efficient, worker-friendly, $3 billion piece of downtown real estate and, of course, more than that. It is a symbol of resiliency, a message that America can not be broken. No doubt hundreds of thousands of tourists will ride up to its observation deck when it opens next year. They will remember the hurt forever associated with the site where 2,606 people perished, but they will also feel relieved, elevated, undefeated. That’s well worth the $32 that a ticket to the top will cost.
With such strong emotions in the mix, it feels un-American not to like the place, weak, even traitorous. It’s easy to revel in the idea that we have regrouped as a fighting force, retaken this ground.
That feeling is real, especially when one stands at the bottom and stares up, watching the gleaming glass interrupt and reflect the passing clouds. It is mighty, spectacular, emotional.
Yet there is an accompanying feeling of vulnerability, a sense that this isn’t so secure a place, but a target, and anyone could get close enough to do it harm. You look over your shoulder. You worry about the workers. The battle is won but the war is on, and a building can seem like an outdated piece of artillery, a lumbering tank in a time when combat has gone digital.
A building isn’t a symbol, like a flag. It must work as shelter, protect its inhabitants. Can this one? Can we even ask such a question and not appear unpatriotic, or paranoid?
Perhaps, as a country, we do need a skyscraper on this spot to feel whole again. Tenants have signed up; it’s still prestigious to house your business in the king of buildings. , publisher of magazines like “Vogue” and Vanity Fair” took floors 20-44. Anna Wintour, the most fashionable woman in the known universe, will have an office on .
The challenge of design is to make it all make sense. To some degree Childs’ scheme does. If building One World Trade Center, or occupying it, are bouts of bravery, the structure serves the cause. Its bunkered-down flatness is tough and unrelenting. There, the symbolism works.
But as a real-life example of those qualities Americans brag about — our ingenuity, innovation, daring, exploration, flair — this place misses. It is defensive, logical, unoriginal.
The Twin Towers were nearly a miracle, built with a cutting-edge structural system of tubes that allowed for open floor plans. Aside from premiering as the tallest building in the world, it recast the contemporary office interior far and wide.
Nothing about this new building is likely to be so influential, save its use of concrete and enhanced evacuation infrastructure. As for downtown flair, that seems left to foreign designers, like , the Swiss firm behind 56 Leonard, a wild, 60-story tower of irregularly stacked boxes now going up in Tribeca. Innovation and wonder are hardly dead.
But mere height is now ho-hum. The rest of the world has passed us by there, too. The in Dubai, at 2,722 feet, will always look down on us.
Back in New York, the two residential towers don’t have the pressure of representing a country’s might, though they do have to fend off criticism of their wastefulness. Reports have modest units going for tens of millions.
Plus, there is widespread belief that they will sell to the sort of international billionaires who spend little actual time in any one residence. Neighbors have already dubbed them ghost towers.
Neither is so striking or innovative, though that’s not necessarily the designers’ fault. Real estate is expensive in New York, meaning they sit on relatively small footprints. They are toothpicks by default, necessarily lanky on the way up, inevitably abrupt where their vertical downslide meets the street. Their spindliness is redeemed only by the fact that the shadows they cast on the relatively low surrounding properties (and into Central Park) are not so wide.
has worked with this limitation aggressively. His building is inspired by a waterfall topping out in a slim, curved column that gushes wider as it irregularly descends toward the street, where rippled steel bands on the bottom floors greet the sidewalk. One57 competes well for interest; its roof line varies, its glass walls are different shades, and it looks distinct from all angles.
Viñoly has gone the other way, fully embracing the lankiness of the situation. His building is a relentless match stick with its four walls set at right angles. Each floor, at least those above the base, has six identical square windows. You can see it from miles around and from every direction it appears nearly identical. Truth is, there’s not much more to say about it than that.
New Yorkers get to pick their poison. Vinoly’s nod to modernism, eschewing ornamentation, embracing repetitiveness. Or de Portzamparc’s post-modern leanings, fashioning new materials into abstract expressionist shapes and inviting viewers to see what they will in it.
Those of course, are the movements that defined the 20th century, when we were so wowed by our ability to go high that everything up there looked fun. Those glory days gave us the Chrysler Building and .
In 2014, the new structures feel like yesterday’s news. As with One World Trade Center, they’re not interesting enough to keep the momentum going, to balance their overbearing weight on the bedrock and the psyche of the people who live and work around them, to account for the energy they use, the views they block.
New Yorkers, and the rest of us, are perfectly happy to look the other way as wealthy people and developers have their follies. We love the grand gesture; it’s so American. But only if these acts give us something back in terms of beauty or prestige, only if they make the city a more interesting place.
Design is a selfish act when it ends in buildings that are little more than fancy addresses for their inhabitants. The one thing that belongs to everyone, in any city, is the skyline, and New York’s skyline has the unique role of belonging to us all; 9/11 made that clear. It has nothing to do with symbols and everything to do with spirit and social conscience.
We don’t want the city to be taller. We want it to be better. We want it to define us as a whole in interesting ways, to shape our collective identity.
Ray Mark Rinaldi: 303-954-1540, rrinaldi@denverpost.com or twitter.com/rayrinaldi
