Dis Connecticut--Part Three

Over lunch, we discussed our plans for the remainder of the day. I think by the time we finished up in Litchfield, it was already around two o'clock, perhaps later. I had actually made a list of a number of different sites we might see, too many, not knowing how long everything would take and wanting to make the most of the day. The original plan was to head west from here--to see what, I'll let be a surprise for later--and then head back south toward home. Since it was getting a bit late in the day, we decided to head south and see something different, instead. So after bombing out at the Daniel Libeskind house, we headed for Stamford. This worked out quite well because we ended up so much closer to home that, after we had dinner and exhausted ourselves, we wouldn't have such a long drive ahead of us. And what we saw there was absolutely magical.

First I wanted to show this picture I took at the New Milford Hospital. Not to make light of terminal illnesses, or offend anyone with loved ones who've passed, or to suggest that the hospital is not a perfectly good one, but I thought this was really funny...or at least an unfortunate coincidence: a hospital with a cemetery directly across the street. I also decided it really needed to be made into a macro.

Our destination was the First Presbyterian Church of Stamford (FPC) by Wallace Harrison, completed in 1958. Harrison said it was the most satisfying project he'd ever worked on.

The first thing you see, though, well before you ever see the church building itself, is the astonishing Maguire Memorial Carillon Tower, which was finished in 1968.

The sculptural presence of this tower on the property strikes me as a similar gesture to the water tower announcing the entrance to Saarinen's Bell Telephone Labs.

Even with creative math, looking at Harrison's biography, I'm unable to determine how tall this is. It's probably 255-feet tall (78m) but could be as high as 380-feet tall (116m), depending on how you want to read it. The problem is that Harrison's biographer, Victoria Newhouse, says the four corner posts rise 255 feet up and then she discusses the spire separately. Measuring the spire by eye from the top of 255-foot-high corner posts, it would be at least 125 feet above that. Sources online say 260 feet (79m), but I'm always wary of that. In any case, it's tall. The stainless steel pinnacle of the spire had to be lowered into place by helicopter, which evidently saved money over the scaffolding that would have been required to get it up there. 

It's named after Walter Maguire, a prominent member of the congregation who donated considerable money to the church, and was among the youngest to ever graduate from Yale Law School. He worked fairly closely with Harrison on the new church building.

For anyone who doesn't know, a carillon is basically a keyboard that mechanically rings bells in a bell tower like a piano. They can have as few as twenty-three bells. FPC's has fifty-six, the largest of which, called the bourdon, weighs 6830 pounds (3100kg). The eleven largest bells are in the lower space, the remaining bells in the upper, with the keyboard--properly called the console--in the enclosure between them. I was very excited to discover a video showing not only the interior of the console chamber, but a carilloneur playing this very carillon. Here's carilloneur Ellen Dickinson playing the Maguire Carillon:

Harrison's first tower would have been a tight web of structural beams rising in a cylinder. Then he was shown a photograph of a sculpture in brass and copper wire by Richard Lippold called Primordial Figure (1948). Inspired by the sculpture, he opened up his tower structurally to what we see today. I could find no images of it online, but the similarities to Lippold's sculpture are obvious, especially in the wooden frame of the tower's staircase.

There was one thing I found very interesting about the carillon tower's construction. From anywhere besides right next to it, veining in the corner posts make it appear to be made of marble, or perhaps that it's cracking or weathered. When I was right underneath it, I suddenly noticed that they are, in fact, made of concrete. The "veins" are actually lines made by fingertip while the concrete was still wet, no doubt specified for aesthetic reasons. I should have gotten my finger in the shot to show scale, but perhaps the texture in the concrete goes some way toward indicating the lines are the exact width and shape of a fingertip.

When we arrived, there was a band called The SuBourbons setting up on the grounds to do a little outdoor concert, but they hadn't started yet.

They played this song, and the camera shows the crowd (bigger than when we were there), so I thought it would be very funny if I were in this video, but this is from a year earlier on not as sunny of a day.

The church is shaped like a fish and so has been nicknamed "The Fish Church." FPC has embraced the nickname; in fact, it's their web address. Taking on a cross shape, but looking vaguely like some ancient symbol for Christianity that I can't quite pinpoint, the wonderfully sculptural entrance is at the crook between the body of the fish to the left and the tail to the right.

We went to see the inside of the church first before exploring around the outside. Walking out of the bright sunlight into this dark space was a little disappointing, because you couldn't really see much. Most of the lights were off and as you can see from the outside, it doesn't really have any normal windows. I decided to take a look at the sanctuary, anyway.

This is what I saw when I first walked into the space.

I just stood there in the doorway with my mouth gaping open. I think I literally could not breathe for about thirty seconds. My mom came in behind me and later said she "choked" when she first saw it. I'm a spiritual though not particularly religious person, but it's at times like these that you're tempted to believe God is right there in the room with you. I also believe that only the most truly talented architects in history were really able to do this, and far less so when it concerns church architecture after around 1915. Furthermore, the real magic of this is something you could never see on paper, certainly not in a blueprint. It transcends the reality of what it is, materially speaking.

The extreme difference in character between this project and so many of the other things Harrison did is truly remarkable. Certainly he had isolated sculptural moments--the auditorium at Rockefeller University, the Met's grand staircase, the "Egg" in Empire State Plaza, or the UN's General Assembly (which, granted, could just as easily be attributed to Corbusier or Niemeier)--but this church, in its entire conception, is something else altogether. The view from the altar end shown here, sunlit in a direction the camera much preferred, shows better the sight seen with eyes adjusted to the darkness. Also the shape of it, almost identical to the altar end, is seen more clearly to intentionally resemble two hands pressed together in prayer. Also quite apparent are the similarities between the character of light here and the inside of the Hall of Science at the 1964 World's Fair, also by Harrison & Abramovitz.

The sanctuary is different in practically every possible way from the surrounding building: cool grey and deep blue, sculptural, iconic, contemplative, enclosed, somber yet awe-inspiring, irregular yet coherent and orderly, and entirely sublime. The surrounding facilities, on the other hand, are restrained corridors, earthly in appearance and materials, domestically scaled, almost entirely walled with glass in warm wooden frames, punctuated by rusticated stone and the slate shingles.

Having explored more of the church facilities, better yet getting to know them as well as the ongoing congregation surely has, the sanctuary becomes even more an entirely different world. The sanctuary, like the inner contemplations in the souls of the pious, is a private, enclosed space. The surrounding facilities serving church practicalities are as transparent as the Protestant Reformation demanded of religious institutions and as visually accessible as the printing press made the dissemination and secular understanding of the bible, so fundamental to the principles of the Reformation.

At the end of this lovely coat rack corridor is a small wing that I'm ninety-nine percent certain contains the pastor's offices. I got a few shots of that façade from the outside, but the shadows were remarkably dim. And since it's likely never seen by anyone, it wasn't as meticulously maintained as the front.

The coat corridor, pastor's offices, and the end of the classroom wing enclose a small grassy courtyard. On the other side of the corridor leading to the classrooms is a much larger courtyard, open on its one long side. I'm not sure why there's a sunspot where it appears in the photo, since the sun is clearly shining in the opposite direction. So I'm going to say that that's the Holy Spirit, captured for the first time ever in a photograph.

Here's the entrance to the classrooms and likely the pastor's residence on the opposite side of the courtyard, wonderfully domesticated as well, in a decidedly late-1950s kind of way. Very nice detailing of the doors with cross-shaped windows.

Fortunately, this whole wing was bathed in sunlight as it was no doubt intended to be in the mornings. One of the most brilliant things about the siting of the church was its relationship to the sunlight.

It occurred to me that this building would be most glorious, most functionally successful in the morning hours, when most churches have at least one of their services, if not their most prominent ones. At this time of day, mid- to late-afternoon, the western façades for obvious reasons were the most illuminated and picturesque. This particular angle I think shows maybe more than any other how Harrison was borrowing forms very carefully from the medieval canon and making them not only entirely Modern but also, in their own distinctive way, suburban New England.

On a sunny Sunday morning, on the other hand, the entire entrance façade (facing east), the courtyard, classroom corridors, and pastor's residence all benefit from direct sunlight. Here's the entrance facade, as seen here cast in shadow in the afternoon hours, but of course no less sculpturally striking.

And the entrance proper, at the crux of the body and tail of the "fish." The use of slate tiles as a cladding material is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, it renders the entire enclosure a roof. In other words, there are no walls of any conventional material like masonry. A building's walls--especially in the modern era where they mostly serve to reveal--can no longer be read as protective in any strict sense. But going back into antiquity even, the roof was the primary protecting feature of a building where the elements were concerned. Walls merely served to structurally support it.

At the southern end of the fish, it all comes together perfectly. Applied as shingles on a façade simplified into a sort of forced-perspective of a traditional, gabled New England farm house or barn, the shingles look surprisingly contextual. Appropriately, while the rest of the building essentially opens up onto its own grounds, this façade is the one that would be visible from the main road. Who knows if those slotted window openings have any practical purpose on the interior, or if they ever did. On the inside, it appears not. But one might guess ventilation for a room with apparently no operable windows otherwise.

What I'm assuming is the pastor's residence, although connected to the rest of the building, very smartly reads as its own independent structure. Much like the mostly unseen wing containing the pastor's offices at the other end, it has this very Brady Bunch, late-'50s suburban domestic style to its architecture.

If I'm correct that that enormous, pointed front glass wall opens into a living/ dining space, it must be a truly spectacular interior, like some great futuristic hunting lodge. The use of seemingly randomly-located panes of colored glass is a very interesting detail. It hints subtly at the shocking use of stained glass in the sanctuary next door and also vaguely calls to mind Harrison's Mondrian-esque window mullion pattern on the front of the Metropolitan Opera.

I'd like to point out that the garden in front grows foodstuffs that the church dedicates to humanitarian purposes. I thought to call attention, because I think it's such a wonderful (and very Green) idea.

That concludes this excursion into Connecticut. I hope you enjoyed the journey as much as I did. The state has so much great Modern architecture, somewhat ironically, that there will be a few more stories from there in the future, to be sure. One of them, unfortunately, will not be the Daniel Libeskind House. My request was denied to see it. If the owners of the house or any friends of theirs are reading this, I would still really love to see it! 

 

Just a little post-script on this story, I got a picture of the now completed Trump Parc (2010) by Costas Kondylis with the Lessard Group. I recognized it immediately from the exposé I wrote about Donald Trump. We passed directly underneath it, so here's the photo I likely would have included in my story had I had it in my files at the time.

All text and images ©2011, Ryan Witte.

Trumped--Jack

To finish up this series on Trump today, my birthday, I'd like to run through the structures he has planned for the next few years.

Trump SoHo Hotel Condominium (2010)

New York City

Handel Architects

Handel Architects was another fortunate choice by Trump. It's a somewhat distinctive and interestingly, subtly detailed building.

Handel have done some extremely nice and recognizable work all around New York and should be commended for some of their recent work being LEED certified. But they've also worked in collaboration with some fantastic other architects, ones I mentioned in my opening post, in fact. They worked with UNStudio on the New Amsterdam Plein & Pavilion in Battery Park to celebrate the 400th anniversay of the Dutch robbing Native Americans of their land settling on the island of Manhattan. They worked with Herzog & de Meuron on the design of 40 Bond Street, one of the more gorgeous buildings to go up here in recent years. And they're working with Christian de Portzamparc on 400 Park Avenue South, a stunning structure due to be completed in 2012.

They also did four buildings for Millennium Partners with which I'm very familiar, since they're all around the neighborhood where I work: Lincoln West, the building that used to house the Tower Records; Lincoln Triangle, which has the Barnes & Noble on the first few floors; Lincoln Square where the big Sony Cineplex is; and the renovation of the Philips Club, the building just north of the Juilliard building which used to have a Balducci's on the ground floor (it's now some other upscale food market).

Closer to where I live, they designed the Aquatic Center in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, which I discussed before. In Long Island City, they're responsible for one of the big new apartment buildings creating a blight on the riverfront, The View at Queens West, which overlooks this:

--Photo ©2009, Ryan Witte.

I'm well aware that this exact same photo has been taken around four million different times, but I thought it came out remarkably nice, so I used this excuse to include it.

Trump Parc (2010)

Stamford, Connecticut

Costas Kondylis Design/ Lessard Group

This one is also not too awful, although a little bit on the bland side. Adding to the pressure for this to be a stunning work of architecture is that, at 350 feet, it's the tallest building in Stamford. But one might use words more like "restrained" or "reserved," which is certainly better and more appropriate for Connecticut than overblown and tacky, if it had to be one or the other extreme. One forum seems to indicate that the apartments are ridiculously overpriced for a part of the country that has impeccably tasteful traditional, vernacular residential architecture. They're allegedly having a lot of trouble selling them and have been forced to steadily lowering the prices.

Trump Towers (2012)

Atlanta

Preston Partnership

This is actually one of the more successful towers Preston Partnership has done. They're based in Atlanta and have done quite a bit of work in that part of the Southeast. They've been particularly successful with smaller shopping plazas where a quaint, traditionalist style is either zoned or requested. Their work in this vein, while occasionally a little bit awkward in its detailing, is for the most part visually dynamic and has a great, personable scale.

Ironically, though these Atlanta towers are quite interesting, they seem to have a bit more trouble with their higher-rise work. They seem to have some difficulty reconciling between a pedestrian, human scale of street presence with the linear majesty required by a tower. In some cases, the buildings look like they built a tower and then just stuck a bunch of much smaller, completely unrelated buildings around the base of it. In this case, they appear to have foregone any attempt at a friendly connection to the street, and I actually think it worked in their favor here.

Trump International Hotel and Tower (on hold)

New Orleans

Adache Group Architects/ Harry Baker Smith Architects (HSBA)

This might have been a mildly interesting building, were it not more or less a rip-off of SOM's tower for Trump in Chicago. Perhaps we should be grateful it's on hold. The latter is an infinitely superior building.

Adache's work is mostly concentrated around Florida, where they're based, with a few projects in the Caribbean. It's a lot of big hotels and resorts with the trappings of an expectedly clichéed, unimaginative sort of luxuriousness. Their massing tends toward the squat and unsophisticated. Their detailing--when not in a more studied, hence "safe" false traditionalism--is often overwrought and occasionally just downright bizarre. From the limited amount shown on their website, HSBA's best work would appear to have been in the 1970s. In recent years, it's gone from boring to unattractive to just plain ugly.

And that's all of it, as of now. In defense of Trump, in really exploring his developments, I've been surprised to have liked more of them than I initially expected. The point remains, however, that the sheer size of his projects demands a higher caliber of artistry. He should be patronizing world-class architects at every opportunity, nurturing their creative spirits, and pushing the envelope of sustainable design. All in all, it has been very interesting looking into his projects, I hope you've thought so, too.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Trumped--King

The beginning of the 1990s would seem to be a good place to start Part 2 in discussing Donald Trump. Perhaps his heyday, for a brief moment in time he was building relatively better buildings. Of course, to say that a Trump building is good architecture is extremely relative, sort of like saying that a black velvet painting is a good rendering of Elvis Presley. But during this time, he did put up a few things I can fault a bit less.

Trump Palace (1991)

New York City

Frank Williams & Partners Architects

I am perfectly willing to admit that this is not a terrible work of architecture, at all. In fact, it's got a sort of Machine Age robustness to it that I very much appreciate.

Its proportions and detailing are handled quite adeptly. It also contrasts its hard, blocky massing with an almost elegantly soft silhouette. I'm not sure I would find it to be a particularly delightful place to live, it's a bit too strong and lacks a certain human sensibility. For one thing, balconies 300 feet in the air with no buffer or anything are a complete waste of time...not to mention money. But as architecture goes, it's very well done.

Trump International Hotel and Tower (1997)

[formerly Gulf & Western Building (1971), Thomas E. Stanley]

New York City

Renovation by Philip Johnson

I pass by this building on my way to work, and I really do like it. I think it has a sort of starkly linear, glossy majesty to it. Certainly there is a lot about it that's derivative; the first thing that comes to my mind is Eero Saarinen's CBS Building with its similarly diagonally-oriented piers. This one is also kind of a cheap copy of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Building. But I think it has its own merits, and furthermore, no one would ever describe Johnson as being particularly original with a straight face. His strengths were elsewhere. I also really appreciate his self-referencing the 1964 World's Fair. Trump International is still a little bit on the banal side, to be sure, but definitely an improvement on what it looked like before.

--Photo courtesy Corbis.

There you can see it adjacent to Edward Durell Stone's 2 Columbus Circle, another of the "Ugliest" buildings decided upon by people who clearly have no clue what they're talking about. Why the New York Coliseum (at center) didn't make it onto any lists, I have no idea. I'd have had no argument with that.

Trump Place: 200 (1999), 180 (1999), & 160 Riverside Boulevard (2001)

New York City

Philip Johnson and Costas Kondylis

200:

--All Trump Place photos courtesy Wired.

180:

160:

Continued below...

Trump World Tower (2001)

New York City

(possibly Marta Rudzki for) Costas Kondylis Architects

One of the more controversial buildings he built, as many of you remember, World blocked numerous river views from adjacent (and no doubt pricey) apartments and cast a huge shadow over the rest. It may be the reason Trump mostly abandoned New York and began building in other cities where he'd get less community resistance. As I said before, I think Kondylis is a great match for Trump. I'm not convinced that, in 2001, we really needed another work of Minimalist architecture in New York. But as Minimalism goes, this building is glorious. From some angles in some lighting conditions, its façades look as if they could be made of one giant, solid sheet of glass. From others, the rigorous pattern of its window bays displays an unapologetic order unmatched in most other skyscrapers.

Trump International Hotel and Tower (2004)

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

Michael Graves with Oscar Garcia

The funny thing about this is that everywhere lists this as a Michael Graves building, which redeems Trump slightly. The website, however, describes it as "Michael Graves inspired architecture" by Oscar Garcia. For a brief moment, I put a very contemptuous smirk on my face at this clever deception. It is a Graves building, though. Graves has it on his website, as well. I'll commend Trump for hiring an illustrious architect, but Graves was clearly just going through the motions. It has a somewhat personably proportioned street presence, but the primary colors are obnoxious. And the "I'm a cruise ship now" porthole windows are way too corny and obvious, even for Michael Graves. Garcia has done some interesting and quite subtly sculptural work. He's been particularly successful at times with a vaguely Latin-esque and decidedly Floridian typology.

Trump Place: 140 (2003), 220 (2003), 120 (2004), & 240 Riverside Boulevard (2005)

New York City

Costas Kondylis Architects

140:

220:

120:

240:

Again, Kondylis comes through with some nice, solid work. There's nothing particularly striking about this group of buildings, and I definitely think they'd have been well served by a little bit more stylistic cohesion. Having said that, Kondylis and Johnson seem to have referenced the historical language of New York's skyscrapers quite wonderfully. In a very nicely pared-down form, with the exception maybe of 120 Riverside, they would seem to recall buildings from the first third of the twentieth century. I wouldn't be surprised if the historical references were Johnson's contribution, although he had more or less abandoned Postmodernism at this point. I do find it a little disturbing, however, that this is such an enormous parcel of riverside property. It seems unnecessarily greedy somehow, even for Trump.

Trump Tower at City Center (2005)

White Plains, New York

Costas Kondylis Architects

--Image courtesy 10 City Center.

Up in White Plains, it all starts to fall apart. Whatever happened to the grace Kondylis displayed in earlier works, I have no idea, but this shows none of it. Stodgy, awkward, uninspired, and painfully detailed, this is a real disappointment.

There are also various indications that Trump was somehow involved with the Acqualina Ocean Residences and Resort in Sunny Isles Beach, completed in 2005 with architecture by Robert M. Swedroe. It's about as tacky as Postmodernism gets but of course is described as having all kinds of "architectural splendor," disturbingly. It would appear Trump was only one of many developers involved with the project, so I'm not going to go into any more detail. More on Swedroe to come.

Trump Grande Ocean Resort and Residences: Trump International Sonesta Beach Resort (2005), Trump Palace (2007), and Trump Royale (2007)

Sunny Isles Beach, Florida

Sieger Suarez Architectural Partnership

Click these images: the files are huge and the photography is gorgeous.

That's the Palace on the left and the International Sonesta on the right. Here's the Sonesta:

This is the Palace, the Royale is its mirror image:

I thought I'd close out this installment here, because I think they're some of the best buildings Trump ever built. Certainly they wouldn't work in New York or many other places, but for their location, they're incredible. The practice of Charles Sieger and Jose Suarez is a mostly corporate firm that I'm not convinced I would trust to design a smaller, more intimate residence, but the architecture here is out of control. It's dynamic, sculptural, futuristic, and contextually appropriate. There's something ethereal about it that just screams Florida, and in a delightfully hip 1960s sort of way, but without being a throwback. The view of Sonesta from the beach:

The squared-off tower emerging like a chrysalis from the cocoon of the Sonesta's elliptical, terraced outer shell is particularly magical. That end seems to almost peel itself open in the most tantalizing way. The opposite façade presents a dramatic, sharp prow and a majestic but uncommon symmetry to the oceanfront.

The sort of overturned catamaran forms crowning the Palace and the Royale work so beautifully on a seaside site, but without being overly literal or blatantly symbolic. They're like giant, bright white futuristic machines. Machines that would perform what function, it'd be impossible to say, but they have the feel of enormous wind turbines or similar. The detailing of the window mullions creates a delightful texture from afar, and an almost Mondrianesque visual intrigue at closer range. In my humble opinion, they are a tour de force.

Unfortunately, this is the peak. Problems start to appear again in part three.

©2009, Ryan Witte