Vladimir Kagan's Blog

Architecture RevisIted

In Search of Meaningful Architecture in New York

My Christmas present to all of my fans - wishing you a happy New Year!

Copyright Vladimir Kagan December 20, 2014

 

Four years ago I scoured New York in search of architectural satisfaction and could only find relics of a glorious past. Nothing in modern spoke to me nothing was visually gratifying. * This year I gave it another whirl, really determined to find redemption in modern. The exercise turned out to be feeble but all is not lost.

 

 

 

*See my Blog   A Tour through New York Streets July 8,2010

 

*For a more jaundiced review on the subject, read the New York Times’ recent editorial

How to Rebuild Architecture

By STEVEN BINGLER and MARTIN C. PEDERSEN DEC. 15, 2014

 

 

This is my review of some of the city’s newest and sometimes not so new buildings, some that appeal to me - others that don’t. (In Nantucket it was a walk through the Moors). In New York it’s whatever I could see from the passenger seat of my car - a worm’s eye view of the city.

This, in opinion,  is still one of New York's greatest - The Empire State Building construction started in 1929

 

Big spaces do not necessarily produce great works. The Freedom Tower (It has been renamed 1 World Trade) is tall and impressive. After much political back and forth- and the ineptitude of getting the project going, the design was finally watered down and Daniel Liebeskind’s original concept was redesigned by David Childs of the architecture juggernaut SOM. Conde Naste became the first tenant to move into the building in November 

(Tall towers scare me… they are too nice a target for mischief). The building is located at the far end of the Freedom Park. Its architectural statement has set the tone for the latest craze in modern architecture: Create a tall rectangular box,  then take a substantial diagonal karate-chop off it, - more than one is even better. And there you have the latest genre in 21^st Century Architecture. This has already set the trend for a number of new wannabes in the city.

 

The transportation hub was to be a monument of gracious architecture. Santiago Calvatava, the most imaginative architect that Spain has produced in recent years, took an open site and gave us a beautiful vision of a white dove in flight. The Port Authority bought the idea and made it the most expensive train station ever built; over $4 billion dollars! However, this glorious structure is buried amongst tall, inconsequential buildings virtually hidden from view.

 

Downtown Manhattan:  Enterprising real estate developers did not wait for the Freedom Tower to rise. They turned it into a residential neighborhood Downtown is now called "fidi" by the kids. The banks have all but moved elsewhere and Wall Street is more of a tourist stop then a place of serious business. Hundreds of buildings both residential and office have gone up since 9/11. The blighted neighborhood rapidly rebounded. Bravo for the entrepreneurs who had envisioned the future. But as my friend Ele said, “It’s like a bowl of M&Ms you don’t know which one to eat first.” – inconsequential architecture defines the neighborhood.

 
The new Karate chop wannabees

Cruisn' down the FDR Eastriver drive to the portal of Brooklyn:

and now we cross into Brooklyn on the venerable Brooklyn Bridge

 

Brooklyn's new skyline - driving up Flatbush Avenue

The new Barclay Center, a marvel of technology but short on aesthetics

Driving over the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge you come upon the new Barclay’s Sports Center; Barclays was designed by SHoP architects- 5 young kids with big ideas. They make their work about understanding the capabilities if technology - how 3d software in the computer can streamline physically making a building. Barclays could not have been made without a computer. Fascinating as it may be, it reminds me of a huge rust bucket, that’s what Cor-Ten steel does: it rusts. Non-the-less it makes an impressive statement as we drove up Flatbush Avenue and marveled at the rapid change in that Borough.

 

Much of my architectural journey followed the East River Drive, a beautiful way to ogle at the city. The NYU Hospital complex on the East River is a potpourri of elegant glass towers presumably well suited to their given purpose. One is hardly distinguishable from the other; glass towers with donor’s names in two-foot letter over the entrance doors, but because of crowded space, the buildings are barely distinguishable one from the other.

Every architect's favorite gimmick: use lots of mirror to reflect the other buildings often camouflaging their own creations


This is my hidden architectural treasure temporarily exposed by the big dig where once stood the Con-Ed Powerplant.

Ooop, a bird's eye view of Tudor City - we drove by too quickly to photo it from the car

There is a huge hole between First Avenue and the River where once stood the mammoth Con-Ed Power plant (long a blight on the neighborhood). The lot has been empty for years and is sprouting an urban forest with trees and grasses. For the time being you can see the heroic Tudor City, built in the 1920s by Fred French as the first high-rise residential complex including a hotel and other amenities. Prior to that the neighborhood was a derelict no-man’s land of hoodlums and squatters. First Avenue was home to dozens of slaughterhouses and the vast Con Ed Power generating plant. My first factory was located opposite this squalor on East 44^th Street. But the neighborhood was soon to change forever with the building of the United Nations. If you slow down long enough, there is one building on Second Avenue that has always fascinated me; a corn-cob rising some thirty or forty floors with a splendid view of the East River all the way up Long Island. This is not a new building… it has been there for at least thirty years. Normally you couldn’t see it obscured by the power plant, but now, for a little while it has its place in the sun.

 

The view from my apartment: lhe latest skyline interruption: 432 Park Avenue - 1,396 feet tall

And here come the wannabees!

New York is the city that never sleeps. But someone was asleep on the switch when they permitted the construction of a monolithic tower standing 1,396 feet tall: taller than the Freedom tower, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, 432 Park Avenue. Rafael Viñoly designed  a 10 x 10 structural grid of concrete. This makes a strong shell and strong core so there are no interior columns – I can’t wait to get my first comission to design one of the interiors!  The building is touted to be the tallest residential building in the Western Hemisphere. Imagine the joy of living in a hermetically sealed building with a power failure! Don’t be fooled by the address, it is plunked into the middle of the block on 54 Street between Park and Madison Avenue where once stood the gracious but jaded Drake Hotel. Seen from my apartment window or a drive down Park Avenue, or approaching the city from New Jersey or Long Island you are greeted by this singular erection on Viagra. For me It flaunts the last vestiges of New York’s civility. There was a time were when a building in the middle of a block had to conform in height with its neighboring structures. This gave a harmonious silhouette to the street scene. However with clever manipulation of building codes, anything goes. Now that the civility mold has been broken, expect more of these behemoths. The other day, I drove on East 60^th Street between Park and Madison to find a hole in the ground announcing the next super monstrosity. 60th Street is one of New York’s busiest cross streets– the last street feeding into Central Park and 59^th Street – no right turn is permitted on Madison Avenue, it is always chucker-block full with traffic spilling into grid-lock on Park Avenue. Now envision a hundred story residential building with tenants driving in and out of their luxury garage. (Where was the city’s planning board???)

 

A fifties "Wedding Cake" Architecture along Park Avenue

 

As students, we scoffed at the proliferation of the post-war wedding cake architecture, mostly built in white glazed brick. The Genre was virtually owned by Emory Roth and Sons – Architect. These building sprouted up all over New York – East Side and West side. - In retrospect they weren’t all bad. Designed to meet strict building codes for air and sunlight; the many setbacks provided terraces and penthouses for dozens of tenants. And yes, sunlight did filter down to the street. The windows were bad and often leaking, the ceilings were low, the little square parquet floors were rather heinous. Air conditioning often came as an afterthought and these buildings now sprout hundreds of dripping units. Still, they respected the building code for height. Cunning builders sometimes squeeze another floor out by dipping the lobby entrance below street level. However, none of these buildings towered above the others.      

 

Redemption: Today, some the most pleasing architecture are those buildings that have been shoehorned into tiny spaces. Where once stood a modest brownstone between two apartment buildings, new low-rise building have been neatly inserted into their place - decent modern without despoiling the neighborhood.

           

                                                  

Not all great buildings are residential - here are a few others that I really like


A storage facility in the Bronx - a renovated warehouse downtown NY

I can't reist the "old" - I guess that I am a nostalgic octeneratian after all

A wacky relic of the good old days

The last vestige of civility at the Battery - the old sailors home and church

How did this one get left behind in 2nd Avenue?

Is this cheating? I do love the marriage of these two Metropolitan Museum building under one glass roof

 

 

New York may be the city that never sleeps… it’s certainly true of its architecture - More and Upward!

 

 EPILOG

New York is not an easy place to be an architectural trendsetter. Her are five Architects and their buildings that have filled the bill:

 

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building 1957 was a trendsetter; build in Bronze, clean, monolithic and monumental. Asked why Bronze, Mr. van der Rohe replied “Because I like it!”

 

In 1952 The Lever House by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owing & Merrill started the glass trend. It sits airily on a square block on Park Avenue. Mercifully it is Land Marked and protected from greedy development.

 

Frank Lloyd Wright defied the skyscraper and gave us the poet Guggenheim Museum in 1959. I was proud to have met Wright during that period. He was much defiled by his contemporaries for degrading 5^th Avenue.

 

The TWA terminal by Eero Saarinen, 1962 is one of my favorite building in NYC. I would fly TWA whenever I could just to pay homage to this lyrical, totally impractical masterpiece. (Saved by Landmark designation)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today, I am hard pressed to find any new candidates for this short list! (No wonder Mid-Century design holds us in such awe today!)

 

Memories

 

 

Three Years Ago Today

Copyright Vladimir Kagan, December 13, 2014

 

Erica Wilson as we've all got to know her with her cowboy hat and feather! 

 

This is my daily reminder of  Erica. Her hat and the Erica Chaise in my bedroom

 

Three yeas is a lifetime – Three years is within living memory – Three years is a life changer –  It was three years ago that my darling wife Erica left me.

 

Life has its cruel ways: here today and gone tomorrow, not planned, just plucked out of my life. Even as I was holding her hand, still warm and blood coursing through her veins she was gone. I held on for twelve hours not believing the enormity – the life changing moment. Three years to this day, my life changed forever. I was cast adrift as her spirit soared into the heavens and I was left holding a cold hand. This was not the script I had written for myself. It is traditional that the wife outlives the husband.

It was not to be. Life is a gamble and God deals a wicked card. You are expected to accept and carry on. You are not alone – that is of little comfort.  But God also doles out an opiate that lets you survive. It is buried in memories, in flashbacks, good times dominate –others diminish. I was not perfect but she was. What lingers in the mind is the harmony we enjoyed for fifty-five years. Me, the scrooge who loved to kill Christmas and she, who lovingly bought presents for one and all, the more was better. Our bedroom became the warehouse for piles of accumulated gifts. Wrapping never happened until the night before Christmas. Scrooge was sucked-up into the process and like Ebenezer, his heart melted and willingly, happily joined into the festivities. This, of all times, is when she left me. The unwrapped presents accumulating in the room and dinner parties to accept and decline. Christmas cards to be written and addressed and now tell the world that I was now alone.

 

She is gone. She left the dining room table filled with ancient family photographs that we were meticulously pasting into photo-albums. Her father, Colonel Wilson in Mesopotamia, little Erica driving a goat car in Bermuda, Major Spragge her stepfather, looking dashing in his uniform as the A.D.C. to the governor of Bermuda – Mummy England, Erica’s elegant mother, looking smashing dressed for a queen’s tea party. And there were photos of little Vladi and his sister Tanya, looking shy and demure as tiny tots in traumatized Nazi Germany. There were photos of my family braving it out in very difficult times. Those albums remained on the table for weeks until we realized the task was more than we could face and so once again they were swept into storage boxes, awaiting a second spurt of nostalgic energy and there was more; two thousand pieces of Erica’s needlework to be sorted, cataloged, appraised and donated to select museums. This is still a work in progress, three years after her death. Erica was amazingly prolific. A quiet plodder who got things done. Sixteen hard cover books, thirty-six television shows shown over the entire English-speaking world by WGBH and the BBC. She wrote a newspaper column called: “Ask Erica” distributed by the Chicago Tribune Syndicate. She designed hundreds of custom needlework projects for her students and clients. She designed the kneelers and vestments for some of the most important churches in America. And she had time to cater to her very demanding husband, we both probably ignored our children, who had to fend for themselves a lot of the time, but at least no weekend went by without a family ski trip or sailing outing.

   

Colonel George Wilson in the first World War and Drorothy "Mummy England" to all

Erica's parents

  

 Erica with her Dad

 

The dashing Major Basel Spraqqe, ADC to the Govenor of Bermuda - Erica's Stepfather

 
And on the other side of the pond, my little sister Tanya and me being very pensive



Annecy and Ondine Kagan the two clones of Erica

Her’s were the days of writing letters in legible monastic handwriting. She never learned to type, the computer was complete anathema. We had stored all her family’s letters in ancient wooden boxes and on visiting storage bins in Europe, we found an equal number of Erica’s letters written to her mother. A perfect subject for the book “Conversations with Mummy”. Erica had always wanted to write a cookbook, of course, heavily laced with needlework illustrations, the title: “Really Dull English Cooking for When you are Pregnant or have the Flu”. These books still await a willing historian to take on the task.

 

Erica's long-hand notes in her inimitable handwriting

 

Drawings from Erica's hundreds of sketch books

It is difficult to carry on in her spirit. She wore big shoes; I’ve found no one to fill them. My children each carry a good slice her genes. Our son Illya inherited her amazing artistic strain. She painted beautifully, so does he. Erica would draw incessantly, as does Illya. They both have an overwhelming love of nature.  Of all of my progenies, Illya’s daughters, blond and slender, most resemble their grandmother. Jessica, the oldest of our children, has inherited Erica’s endless energy and in her career as a jewelry designer and maker, uses so many of the needle work skills that her Mother taught her. She is a devoted embroiderer and often lays aside her blowtorch to pick up a needle and thread. Vanessa worked closely with her mother in her shops and now lovingly runs Erica Wilson Nantucket, one of the Island’s most iconic retail locations. Vanessa carries on her mother’s tradition and teaches needlework classes to small children, guaranteeing a continuation of Erica’s legacy. Vanessa has been blessed with Erica’s caring and compassion. She is the mother hen of the family.

 

Erica, teaching little Jessica to do Crewel embroidery - a lesson that she has never forgotten

Erica teaching boys and girls on the beach in Nantucket
 
Vanessa, following in her Mother's foot steps, teaching a children's needlework class in Nantucket

Kids, horsing around in Vanessa's needlework class at the 1800 House in Nantucket

 

Erica was a marvel, she touches our lives daily. She had a saying for everything and she was stubborn: “You can agree with me or you can be wrong!” She strived to be tidy and admonished us all with ”A place for everything and everything in its place” – she inspired me daily with creative ideas “don’t sit on a table – its bad luck”, so I dutifully designed sofas with wide backs for sitting. She was a pesky; when a bug hit her there was no escape. She was a mosquito buzzing around my head relentlessly until I would finally acquiesce. My Fettuccini chair took ten years to put into production. It was only her persistence that made it happen. She was a frustrated furniture designer and sketched her ideas on paper table clothes, napkins or envelopes and then persisted until I adopted them into my designs. She was the inspiration for so much of what I did.

 

Erica may now be teaching needlework to the angels, but she has left her imprimatur here on Earth!

 

Yes, my darling Erica – I miss you – but you have never gone away.

 

 

Erica and I traveling the world in her ubiquitous straw hat

   

Our happiest moments were those spent together in the Swiss Alps. Why not Nantucket, you might ask... because Nantucket is where we worked while Switzerland is where we vacationed.