You Have Arrived--Flight 506

Terminal 6: The Sundrome (Pei, Cobb, Freed & Partners, 1971)

Sundrome is another fairly cool name for a terminal, although I'll admit I don't know exactly what it means. It was a project begun by the Port Authority in 1959 to house a number of different airlines. When it was finally completed over a decade later, it became the home of National Airlines. The latest tenant, of course, was jetBlue, but they've since abandoned the Sundrome for T5.


--All JFK photos ©2010, Ryan Witte, unless otherwise noted.
The building was the result of a competition. Wallace Harrison was on the jury, as was Pietro Belluschi, who coincidentally assisted Gropius on the Pan Am Building. Another of the competition entries was by Philip Johnson, the drawings for which I would love to see, if I knew where or how to find them. The winning entry ultimately came from the office of I. M. Pei. Luckily, his John Hancock Tower hadn't started raining broken glass onto the streets of Boston, or Pei might have been more cautious in his use of glass. For the Sundrome, he employed the first use in America of glass mullions between the windows. They give the building brilliant structural and visual clarity. It was evidently a huge influence on airport architecture all over the world.


As Pei explained, since there are no metal mullions, it's very clear that it's the columns supporting the building. There's also nothing to disrupt the total transparency of the facade. The Sundrome's vaguely classical sensibility finds intriguing counterpoint in entirely modern materials and construction methods.


On my first trip out, I had the displeasure of seeing the inside of this building in a shameful state of decrepitude. The thing that struck me most was the sickly color of the windows, which I attributed to decades of cigarette smoke. It was later pointed out to me that the sunlight would stream so blindingly through the windows in the afternoon hours that employees were forced to wear sunglasses. The windows had to be tinted. I think the point remains, however, that if my first guess was a coat of tobacco tar, there's something very wrong there.


We've recently learned that the Port Authority has authorized this building's demolition. I, for one, am appalled. It's a stunningly sleek structure by one of our greatest and most celebrated architects. Something must be done to save this building. I myself wrote a heartfelt op-ed piece that I sent to the New York Times, riding the tail of controversy over NYU's interventions at Pei's Silver Towers. They chose to ignore it.


--Photo courtesy E-Architect.
I think it would be a great travesty if it were allowed to be destroyed. The friend of mine with whom I visited JFK the first time and who knows the airport quite well remarked also that due to its size and layout, it would lend itself far better to expansion than some of the other terminals that are not at risk.

The Port Authority wants to tear this down. NYU wants to mess with the Silver Towers site. The Third Church of Christ, Scientist in DC fought long and hard to be rid of their Pei. I just don't get it. It's not like we're talking about Paul Rudolph here. Not that I wouldn't be just as disgusted if it were Rudolph, I just wouldn't be quite so surprised. Almost everything Rudolph has still standing is controversial in some way or another. He's an acquired taste.

Has no one ever even seen the National Gallery of Art building? It's an astonishingly beautiful structure. A coworker of mine recently saw the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston in person (sadly, I never have) and had a similar epiphany about that one (luckily the intervention there, by Rafael Viñoly, is receiving well-deserved accolades). This is the man entrusted with new construction at the Louvre, for crying out loud. I don't know that whole saga, but I can't imagine a project more likely to have to pass through a labyrinthine mire of hopelessly conservative committees and panels and bureaucracy. My point is, I find it difficult to believe that we're even having this conversation about I. M. Pei in the first place. What is the world coming to?

The final chapter.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Chance Encounters

A couple of Sundays back, I had one of my dreams fulfilled. I was taking a small group of the general public (as opposed to a school group, etc.) around Lincoln Center. One of my guests had specifically requested to see Alice Tully Hall, which was fine. Sunday afternoons really are often the best day to come, because we have almost everything available and wide open. I discovered later that he's an architect working on a new hall dedicated to chamber music for the Ordway Center for Performing Arts in St. Paul, Minnesota. I always love having architects on my tour and immediately switched over to include more of that information, although I fear I was boring the other guests to tears.


Anyhow, we walk into the front of Tully, I look up, and standing on the balcony right above my head is Liz Diller, Ricardo Scofidio, and their colleague, whose name I can't remember (not Charles Renfro). I turned to this architect on my tour and said "that's her, isn't it?"

--Photo courtesy Egodesign.
But we both knew it was. I couldn't believe my good fortune.

I explained the transformation of Sixty-Fifth Street and the new openness of the front of the hall, showed the portrait of Alice Tully and went through her biography (and that of her little white dog, Sophie), and up to the Patron's Lounge.

Diller and Scofidio were still out on the balcony, and saw me, so I smiled. My heart was beating a mile a minute.

What I usually talk about there is how great a choice DS+R were for the renovation of a performing arts complex. Here's one great example of why: in Mies van der Rohe's landmark Seagram Building are two restaurants, the Four Seasons and the Brasserie, both with original interiors by Philip Johnson, who also designed the Koch Theater at LC, of course. By some weird coincidence, Patina Restaurant Group also runs the Brasserie 8 1/2 in the Solow Building by Gordon Bunshaft, who designed the Library for the Performing Arts at LC. Connections, connections. The Brasserie was destroyed by fire in 1995 and now has a new interior design by DS+R. It looks like a very groovy, space age airport lounge or something.

--Photos courtesy AEWorldmap.

You walk in the front door of this restaurant, and a camera automatically takes a picture of your face, putting your face on a television monitor above the bar in the dining room. For every person who comes in after you, it bumps you down one screen until there are no screens left. It's all about seeing and being seen as a diner in this restaurant, and a lot of their work does this. It blurs the distinctions between "who is the performer?" and "who is the spectator?"

The grandstand at the front of Tully is the perfect example.

It doesn't look out at New York City, but rather looks into the cafe, into Lincoln Center. For someone sitting on the grandstand, the people having sandwiches in the cafe become a kind of natural performance. A lot of their interventions around Lincoln Center have played with this idea, and I think it's perfect.

Halfway through my spiel, they came back in from the balcony. I said "hello, I was just telling them about the Brasserie," but I don't think I finished that thought. I introduced myself and told her that it's been a dream of mine to meet her for so long. She introduced Ricardo Scofidio, and I was like "oh, I'm sorry, I didn't recognize you" and shook his hand also. I probably made a bit of a fool of myself, but I was a little starstruck. It was almost as awesome as getting to meet Robert Venturi, but for somewhat different reasons.

I asked her if the hyperbolic paraboloid roof of the restaurant across the street had been a nod to Eduardo Catalano, who had assisted Pietro Belluschi on the Juilliard building (and was also mostly responsible for the Laguardia School building right across Amsterdam Avenue).

--Photo courtesy NC State University.
She confirmed that, indeed, one reason was the Catalano House in Raleigh, North Carolina, but a number of other reasons, also. The shape makes the green roof appear like a softly rolling hill, it will also make for a dramatic curving wooden ceiling in the restaurant underneath. I pointed out that they sometimes drain the water out of the reflecting pool and will have a classical guitarist or someone playing music there in the summertime. The downward slope on the southwest corner will make for a great place for audiences to sit for impromptu performances.

By the way, I also recently asked one of the construction workers how they're ever going to mow the grass up there. He said it will be a groundskeeper with a hand-pushed lawnmower, who will be tethered to the top edge of the roof because some parts of the slope are rather steep. That should be interesting to see.

Ms. Diller also talked a little bit about Dan Kiley's landscape architecture. She said they found the public space somewhat cold and sparse, but in talking to the preservation people, there was this idea that grand public spaces like that should be desolate. I wasn't sure exactly why they'd say such a thing--maybe in the interests of a kind of aesthetic purity? But she said they agreed and disagreed with that concept for different reasons.

They had to leave after a few minutes, but it was so very gracious of them to stop and speak with my group like that, I was really grateful, and honestly my luck couldn't have been any better that day. Had the one gentleman not requested to see Tully, I might not have gone there at all.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Fly Like an Eagle

A very good friend of mine happens to be a virtual encyclopedia of the history of air travel.  Last week, she and I went on a bit of a field trip.

Our first stop was the Pan Am (MetLife) Building by Walter Gropius with Pietro Belluschi, completed in 1963.

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--Photo courtesy Postdlf.

I was really surprised to realize that I had never seen the inside of this building.  One of the most immediately iconic fixtures of the NYC skyline, by one of the absolute godfathers of Modernist architecture, a member of one of the greatest artists' communes of the 20th Century, the Bauhaus, and a controversial and an entirely problematic project from start to finish.

One thing I noticed going to the foot of it, as sleek and glassy as it might appear from afar, it's deeply textured up close.  You almost don't see the glass from the foot of it.

The reasons I wanted to go were that first of all, Belluschi designed both the Juilliard building and the Laguardia School (they're going to live forever), and also because the lobby at one point included a sculpture first titled The World, later changed to Flight, by Richard Lippold, who's responsible for the sculptures of Orpheus & Apollo that hang in the front of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center.  

--Richard Lippold, Flight (1962); photo courtesy this site.

Lippold, by the way, was a good friend of John Cage.  They were neighbors in the Village.  Lippold had an old hearse he used to transport his sculptures around, and he would give Cage rides in it.  Cage dedicated some important compositions to him.

We met up right under the clock in the center of the great hall of Warren & Wetmore's Grand Central Station, which is indubitably one of the most majestic spaces in all of New York.

Well, all I can say is, the lobby areas of Gropius' building had all kinds of 1960s fabulousness when the building was built, and I don't know when they were renovated or by whom, but they couldn't possibly be any more bland and boring now.  It's extremely disturbing, in fact.  They have some enormous paintings by Julian Schnabel that are mildly interesting, though I'm not sure how I feel about him, anyway.  Other than that, it looks like a bunch of stupid, artless, mind-numbingly boring investment bankers with not the slightest bit of creativity in their number-rattled little brains got hold of a building by an architectural genius and had their miserable, perverted way with it.

Next we went out to JFK Airport.  I loved the whole idea of this excursion because I don't think anyone really ever just goes to JFK to look at the airport.  But we did.  The other thing is, this is the first time I've ever taken the train to the airport.  The last time I made an international trip, the Air Train didn't even exist.  The only way we knew to get to JFK was by cab.  I'm actually really surprised it took them so long to build the stupid thing.  I will say that the ride is a lot faster and hassle-free than I ever would have expected; I think we took the E train, and it was probably not much more than a half-hour to get there.

But I have problems with it.  The trip to and fro is so UGLY.  I mean, the Air Train is new and very smooth, but it's extremely utilitarian, and it will age very badly.  They made absolutely NO effort to make this entrance into the greatest American city GRAND in any way.  I think it's unforgivable.  I really think NYC should roll out the red carpet, and they have done just the opposite.

On the ride out, I did get a great view of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill's still incredibly stunning First National City Bank (1959).  Not even the SOM website has images of this building, which is a shame because it's really beautiful.

--Photo courtesy Airliners.net.

The first major building we saw was the Pan American Terminal (1960) by Tibbets, Abbett, McCarthy, Stratton.  It's really stunning.  The canopy saucer was originally broad enough to provide cover for boarding planes by stair, and was intended to have parking on the roof.

  

--Photo courtesy Suleyman Yusuf.

This proved impossible, no doubt for unsurprising structural reasons. [Edit: I received a nice email from a reader who provided a much better explanation. The rooftop parking did exist on the 1973 extension building for this terminal. In fact, in the Google Maps view, you can see the vehicular ramps leading up to it. It was later closed for security reasons. It's possible that rooftop parking had been suggested also for the saucer, but I suspect not.]

It was also brought to my attention that the original American Airlines Terminal (1960) had a gorgeous mosaic by Hector Bernabó all across the front of it (which I'm fairly certain I remember), which has been disgracefully just ripped out with no concern whatsoever.

--Photo Yang Shen

Our most important destination was Eero Saarinen's TWA Terminal (1963).  My friend had heard that Jet Blue had finished it and that it was open.  Their terminal is open, but they haven't finished the TWA terminal yet, unfortunately.  It's unbelievably gorgeous, and wonderful to see in person, and the good news is that with all the new circulation routes, there are all these new ways to see the building from vantages that were never possible before.

It really does need help, though.  The two side wings, which by the way, very much look like airplane wings in the most awesome way, have stalactites hanging off them, likely from the eroded concrete.  We were talking about how for a very short time, it was being used as an art gallery.  I thought that was such a beautiful idea, but my friend said people completely abused the honor of being inside this masterpiece, did their best to wreck the building, and even busted through locked doors and started running around out on the tarmac.  I think it's a disgrace, to be honest.

--Image courtesy Naked Airport.

Then we went over to I. M. Pei's National Airlines Terminal (1971), now also run by Jet Blue.  Evidently, it caused a complete revolution in airport architecture, being the first terminal to present sheer walls of glass under a large span of interior space.  The building is a complete wreck.  I almost asked for a ladder to start cleaning the windows myself.  They are so disgusting and brown from decades of cigarette smoke and airplane fumes, you can practically smell it.  We were hoping that after completing their giant new terminal and renovating Saarinen's, they'd close Pei's and give it a complete overhaul.  They really have to.

--Photo courtesy SOM.

SOM also did the new International Arrivals Building, which is very nice, if not iconic in the slightest.  I have the utmost respect for SOM, but this building in the hands of Santiago Calatrava would have been a breathtaking masterpiece.

--Photo courtesy Daylife.

Then there's the British Overseas Airways Terminal (1970) by Gollins, Melvin, Ward & Partners, now British Airways.  This was the one I think I appreciated most, for the reason that I'd never noticed it before, but it really is beautiful.  Like a truncated pyramid flipped upside-down, it has a gorgeous geometric monumentality to it, and it reaches for the skies, like an airline terminal should.  Granted, it looks a little bit grimy after all these years, but its sharp lines are holding up remarkably well.  It just needs someone to give it a hug with some cleanser and some rags.

But really, you need to see the unbelievably stunning landscape architecture that graced this portal into the United States of the 1970s, with pinnacles of monumental architectural perfection like glimmering jewels on an expanse of suburban land.  It was so heavenly in its conception, so majestic an introduction to the City of New York.

Now?  Pathetic.  It's a complete disaster.  The skyline of the airport is like a garbage dump for forgotten architectural tours de force and artless engineering feats of practicality.  The colossal hangars, which are per se utterly impressive, look bland and utilitarian and ugly.  It's a vast wasteland of structures, disconnected, uncelebrated, dilapidated, unappreciated, and unworthy.

The biggest tragedy of JFK Airport is that, to make it what it should be, what it was always intended to be: a monumental, aesthetically stunning port of entry, would require literally billions and billions of dollars to repair and the vision of a Michaelangelo, Palladio, Lutyens, Wright, or Corbusier.  There's only one person who could accomplish something like that financially: the utterly psychotic Robert Moses.  There will never be another Moses, and heaven help us if there ever is.  He very nearly destroyed this city with his auto-centric insanity.  But in the absence of him, or the possibility for someone like him to ever exist again, JFK rots in pathetic indecision and aesthetic anarchy.  It surely will continue to, until such time as New York becomes a port of interstellar travel or something of that import, I fear.

©2008, Ryan Witte