Mired in Meier--Part Five

I never did wrap up my series of posts on Richard Meier. The last chapter of that story was a talk he gave at the 92nd Street Y, which was fantastic. I often find it interesting just how charming these people can be. Not that I don't think architects should be charming. In fact, it should come as little surprise that those of them who make such a huge name for themselves should have something more than just raw talent: charm, charisma, great personal style, or some other elusive and attractive quality. But he really was charming.

One interesting observation came out about the Perry Street buildings in the talk. It was that they sort of marked something very new in the world of real estate. The fact that these were Meier-designed buildings was what made them a commodity. In fact, they pointed out that a good number of people purchased apartments in these buildings, never lived in them, and had no intention of ever living in them. Instead, they wanted them merely as one might invest in a painting by an important Modernist painter but never hang it on the wall.

He was also asked by an audience member (via index card) why his buildings were always white. The way the question was posed included the implication that the whiteness is somehow cold and inhospitable. His response was quite interesting. Essentially, white is the most architectural of any color choice. It responds to its context by not competing with it for dominance. In a natural setting, for instance, because his buildings are white, one is even more acutely aware of the greenery that surrounds them. It also means that one isn't distracted by the materials out of which the building is built but can better appreciate the more purely architectural expressions of volume, contour, and circulation.

The front page of Meier's website, as a matter of fact, alternately quotes him as saying in his Pritzker Prize acceptance speech, "White is the most wonderful color because within it you can see all the colors of the rainbow. The whiteness of white is never just white; it is almost always transformed by light and that which is changing: the sky, the clouds, the sun and the moon."

As he went on, I had to pat myself on the back just a little, because as I often do, I got it. In response to the idea that his buildings are less hospitable than they might be in different materials, he explained that the scale of his buildings is extremely carefully considered. The very consciously humane scaling of his buildings, as he sees it, will interact with people on a much deeper and more meaningful level than something as superficial as wooden paneling or an ergonomic doorknob. I'm tempted to say that, from my personal experience of his work, he's absolutely correct.

There was also one memorably amusing anecdote about his Neugeberger House (1998). It was to be built in a prestigious (possibly gated?) community in Naples, Florida, that had somewhat strict zoning requirements. When faced with the prospect of a Meier-designed building, they consented to giving him some amount of freedom but demanded that the house have a pitched roof. Meier said he just really didn't think he could bring himself to design a house with a pitched roof, so he gave them this:

Click for larger.
--Photo courtesy the architect's website.
I love that so very much: delightfully sneaky and completely hilarious. By the time they realized what he'd done, it was no doubt too late to change their minds, but he said he had a feeling the neighborhood community board were going to rewrite their ordinances to be much more specific after that.

By the way, 92Y have rescheduled the talk with Santiago Calatrava for October 4th. Mostly unrelated here, despite my recent letter to a suicide bomber, the following night will be Christopher Hitchens debating whether Islam is a religion of peace, which should be fascinating and heated, and very funny if Hitch has his way with it. Then a week later, on October 13th, Frank Gehry will be there. I honestly don't know how 92Y manages to get such incredible speakers, but my gratitude that they do manage it is overflowing.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Mired in Meier--Part Four

For this series of posts, I went down to see three of only five buildings Richard Meier has standing in New York that he built from the ground up, and the first he ever built in Manhattan. They're 173 and 176 Perry Street (2002):

Click images for larger views.

And immediately to the south, 165 Charles Street (2006):

--All 166, 173, & 176 Perry and 165 Charles exterior photos ©2010, Ryan Witte.

These buildings are actually quite interesting in terms of the Meier canon, because he really hasn't built all that many towers with these very New York proportions, with a small footprint and great deal of height. In fact, he seems to prefer to arrange spaces horizontally wherever possible, or at least make them wider than they are tall. On the one hand, if we're talking about pure aesthetics, a movie screen is the proportions it is for a reason. Human sight works horizontally, evolved to scan the horizon for predators, prey, and edible flora. In that sense, there is something inherently more pleasing about a structure that stretches out before us on the horizontal.

On the other hand--and you know what I'm going to say--even if a building isn't squeezed into the limited space of the island of Manhattan, building horizontally is as much irresponsible as the lack of (or bad) city planning that results in unchecked suburban sprawl. It uses and impacts far more land than is necessary. This is something we're trying to avoid these days. So I'm torn between the inescapable mechanics of human vision and the needs of the planet.

In any case, I approached from the south. The most recent of them, 165 Charles, is not unexpectedly different from the first two, but they still work beautifully as a trio. Meier's oeuvre is so well tailored it'd have been hard to imagine a building by him that would look wrong next to two of his others, but obviously this was intentional.

The buildings more or less tell the following story. First, narrow, solid concrete slabs--referred to as "bustles"--at the eastern end of the sites have had thin ribbon slots sliced out of them to form windows but very much maintain their solidity.

That's the service core or, in Meier parlance, the "private" zone. Then a larger glass box breaks through and surrounds the concrete slab on the north, south, and riverfront sides and becomes a new, open, transparent façade.

Keep in mind that it isn't a trick of the camera angle: the western façades remain parallel to the West Side Highway, and the various other volumes run either perpendicular to that or cant off to match the ENE angle of Perry Street. It becomes somewhat more obvious at the canted entrance to the Perry St Restaurant, incidentally run by one of the greatest living chefs, Jean-George Vongerichten.

But now there's two glass towers the same height, but of different widths, too flat and uniform to speak much to one another for any other reason but the same orientation to the highway. So to the riverfront façade of each is attached matching white steel frames with horizontal beams that draw the eye back and forth between the two towers.

At the very top of the trees there, you can see the triplex Joy Apartment in 176 Perry, designed by Meier himself. The strange looking object on the left is its impressive spiral staircase.

--Photo courtesy architect's website.

The river and its views, however, are pulling on the west façades, and therefore also on the steel frames. So the river pulls the frames out to the west, extruding part of the glass wall with them, with the rest of this exposed cavity filling in with exterior living space--i.e., balconies--which responds even more acutely to the natural and scenic qualities of the riverfront property.

Notice on the south façade of 176 Perry how a vertical white fin clearly partitions the main glass box from the section that's been extruded out from it:

Finally, the frames have only been forceful enough to extrude a central section of the glass box. But the junction of the two buildings, and also the negative space of Perry Street between them, needs to be emphasized more so that the buildings can read as a cohesive pair. So the steel frames have been shifted toward each other so they butt up against the adjacent corners of the two buildings.

This forms a screen of privacy and blocks the wind from the balconies on the northern tower and reveals more expansive views for the balconies on the south tower:

Above all, this sense of movement and contextual dynamism is, I believe, the sign of a true master.

The third and final building does many of the same things. Only here, it's the glass façade itself that has been pulled west by the river. In contrast to the horizontal beams in the frames of the other two, here the glass extrusion is contained by two thin vertical piers, emphasizing both the verticality of this façade, which would otherwise read as the widest, and at other moments, the ethereality of the glass wall.

This accomplishes a few different things. First of all, it necessarily has to read as a sheet of glass pulled off of the regular glass box. In one place where the curtain wall extends down below the rest of the building punctuates this further.

Secondly, it works wonderfully with the balconies, which now read much more as external rooms.

Furthermore, it blocks the winds off the river and the blazing sunlight on the balconies, but not the exceptional views.

But now this façade is too flat and uniform to initiate dialogue with the other two. So to draw a connection to the pair of buildings to the north, the glass façade is split into two perfectly symmetrical sections.

This isn't just a stylistic maneuver, though. The center line is actually the end of a spine that divides the building's interior in half for most of its floors, with one line of apartments on the north, and slightly larger ones on the south.

The symmetry becomes a bit too bland and orderly, however, so--in a truly exquisite detail--the slot aligning with the pier in the center is canted off to one side, made parallel with the south façade which matches the slight ENE angle of Charles Street.

Unlike the first two buildings, with their free open loft spaces, all the interiors of 165 Charles were designed by Meier.

I decided I may as well ask if there were anything inside the buildings that I could get in photographs, like a model apartment or something. I seriously doubted it, but it can't hurt to ask. The first guy, in 165 Charles, was downright rude. It wasn't at all that he couldn't allow photography, that's totally understandable. It was how he needed to be all authoritarian about it. I've discussed security guards before; I suspect doormen are cast from a similar mold. The hostess of the Perry St restaurant was very nice, but the interior was not by Meier, she informed me. The doorman at 173 Perry was very friendly and helpful, and while there was nothing of the interior that I could or necessarily would want to photograph, he told me about the square footages of the floors (1800 and 3750 square feet, 176 Perry being the larger of the two), and a little bit about the going prices.

I'd also like to quickly mention another building which is very close to being finished. It's 166 Perry Street by Asymptote, right next door.

While wholly distinctive unto itself, their building works so beautifully with Meier's, both in its interaction and its adjacency:

It also has what would appear to be gorgeous apartments, and what will be a very cool, space-age lobby.

--Renderings courtesy Asymptote.

On my way back to the subway, I managed to pass by Cooper Classics. I might not have gone in, as much as I love checking out old cars, except that they had a 1971 Ferrari Dino by Pininfarina, which I had only just mentioned in an email a few weeks earlier.

--Credit there in the photo.

It's one of the most beautiful cars ever designed, in my opinion, so I had to take a closer look. In their garage across the street, they also had an early prototype for the Porsche 356 that is the only one of its kind in existence.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Mired in Meier--Part Three

I'm forced to say of almost every great architect that sadly, they have none, one, or only very few buildings built in New York City. With so much being built here on a daily basis, it really is inexcusable. But the same goes for Richard Meier. Two of his projects, the Reading Room at the Guggenheim and the 66 Restaurant (where I have eaten, actually, and it's a great restaurant), are both (quite lovely, but) mere interiors. The same is true of a number of private residences he's designed, although quite beautiful, they're just interiors, and furthermore can't be seen by anyone except in limited photographs. Here's 66:

--Photos courtesy the architect's website.

One of the more tragic losses was the destruction of his Bronx Development Center (1977), destroyed in 2003.

It is still standing, but I say "destroyed" because some idiot developer completely ruined the building. It really was one of my favorite buildings of Meier's. I only wish I'd thought to go up and see it before it was so callously built over. Such is the story with so many things, I don't feel rushed to go to see them, thinking they'll be there when I do, until it's already too late.

Then there's the Twin Parks Northeast Housing complex (1974), also in the Bronx. I do love that project in a very simplistic sort of way, but I don't think it's his best work. If nothing else, it's not purely Richard Meier; while he may have done a great job with it, he clearly did not have the kind of expressive freedom there to do something really remarkable. And to be quite honest, it would be a complete pain in the ass for me to get to it (it's, like, a mile's walk from the closest subway station), and it's not in the greatest neighborhood. It's around the back side of the Bronx Zoo.

One thing I'll have to confess I'm glad didn't happen was his entry for the competition to renovate Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. I have a lot of fondness in my heart for Fisher and personally, I don't think it should be renovated at all. If someone has to do it, I suppose you couldn't choose better than Sir Norman Foster, but I think they should just leave well enough alone. As I've said elsewhere, it's perfect for its use, and the acoustics are just fine. That they aren't is just a myth perpetrated by ignorant columnists who don't know what they're talking about. But without question no one should ever dare touch the exterior of it. Meier's scheme did and would have completely defaced the whole look of Lincoln Center. This is why I've been so terribly pleased with the interventions of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. They're giving the complex a bit of a needed facelift, but above all, they've been very respectful and sensitive toward the soul and spirit of the architecture.

There is also, of course, the exquisite Meier on Prospect Park, which has only just recently been completed.

--Image courtesy Chelsea Partners.

Perhaps at some point I'll go take a closer look at that one for a later post. The only other free-standing buildings by Meier still in New York in the next post.

There is an exciting, and excitingly gargantuan project on the books for just south of the United Nations that I really hope gets put up (perhaps when the economy gets a little better), the East River Master Plan.

In my humble opinion, it would be a glorious and magical addition to the skyline as seen from over the East River.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Mired in Meier--Part Two

The next thing that happened was that the Cooper-Hewitt Museum put up a brief mini-exhibition to celebrate Richard Meier's seventy-fifth birthday and his fiftieth year in the field. I considered the timing of this to be an extraordinary coincidence, because it was announced not much more than a week after I found out about the model gallery and went to see it.

I relished the opportunity to discuss Meier with the visitors for the three weeks or so that this show was on display. While the drawings Meier had donated to the museum's collection were great, I mostly discussed the three models, because I felt that the trio of them really encompassed the full range of the architect's career. They were the Smith House (1967), the Getty Center (1997), and the Jubilee Church (2003).

Smith House displays so wonderfully how Meier separates his houses into two distinct zones: the public zone, which is a glass box, and the private zone, which is a solid box.

--This and Jubilee photo courtesy the architect's website.

That's obviously the public side, with the living and dining areas overlooking the water. You enter the Smith House from the opposite side and cut through the private areas in front containing the bedrooms, bathrooms, and so on. It's just so exquisitely rational.

The Getty project is the ideal example of how he organizes his sites using a number of overlapping grids, based on adjacent streets, neighboring structures, shorelines, and so on. The forms of the structure are then carved out of those overlapping grids.

At the Getty the grids are aligned according to a ridge that runs along the top of the hill, the adjacent San Diego Freeway, and the street grid of downtown Los Angeles off in the distance.

Lastly, the Jubilee Church shows how Meier has applied the diametric approach used so minimally and rationally in the Smith House in ways that become much more symbolic.

The church is divided in half on two axes, forming a cross. To the west, vehicular entrance; to the east, pedestrian entrance. To the south, the sacred (nave); to the north, the secular (classrooms). A pool surrounding the nave refers to the use of water in baptism, and the three concentric shells symbolize the holy trinity.

The curators really couldn't have chosen three more perfect examples of this man's work. They provided such a concise and precise illustration of his methods and expression. It's just a shame the exhibition was only there for such a short time.

The event that really broke the camel's back in my decision to discuss Richard Meier is that he's giving a talk at the 92nd Street Y on the evening of Monday, February 8th. I've been consistently impressed with the 92Y's programming and am very excited about this one. It should be a great finale to this series of posts.

©2010, Ryan Witte

Mired in Meier--Part One

I have long been a fan of Richard Meier, but lately I seem to be inundated with information concerning Meier and his career, so I felt it was about time for a series of posts about one of the greatest American architects of all time.

The first thing was that I'd heard that the warehouse space in Long Island City where the firm stores all their models is open to the public by appointment, on Fridays from mid-May until mid-October. I was flabbergasted that I'd never heard that before, and was terribly excited, so I made an appointment to go. I was by myself, and ended up being sandwiched between two huge groups of (presumably architectural) college students. The timing was excellent, because I basically had the whole place to myself. I was greeted by two terribly nice representatives from Meier's office, a woman I believe from the public relations department and a young guy who helps construct the models. They were both extremely helpful and I really enjoyed talking to them.

I told them the story about being in the Hague to see the Vermeer Retrospective. We were walking around the town, down this somewhat major avenue, and I looked down this side street. I stopped in my tracks and said to my friend, "that's a Richard Meier building." There was just no mistaking it, it was so obvious. So we decided to go take a look at it. It turned out to be the Hague City Hall and Central Library (1995), which was only just completed when we were there.

--Photos courtesy of the Richard Meier website.

It was remarkable to notice how extraordinary this building was in person. I'd seen tons of Meier's work in photographs, but there was just nothing to compare to being in the physical presence of one of his structures. The proportions and massing, the scale and development of forms as one walked around it on foot, it was all just delightful.

It's somewhat strange to imagine--as it's said of photographic reproductions of paintings--that nothing could beat seeing a building in person. Even if there's something in the photo to give a sense of scale, even if, presumably, the camera is being aimed from the vantage point of a normal human eye, it's true at least with great works of architecture. In fact, this was one of the main problems I had in studying the stunning photography of the Getty Center: there's not a single human being to be found in any of them, which makes the structures seem to float in some kind of limbo of scale. They're more purely about form, of course, but buildings aren't sculptures. They're meant to be occupied. I might even be inclined to suggest that architectural photography should employ human models.

I took some great photos of my own of the City Hall and Library, but I have yet to get all my thousands of film photos scanned into a computer. That may take a while.

Meier's model gallery is completely insane. My hosts told me that Meier considers the models indispensable to his design process. He uses them to work out every detail of his projects. The Getty Museum, for instance, demanded something like 115 different models. Of course much of his practice is finished off on computers, but he much prefers the hands-on physicality of a miniature model to work out his forms. He maintains ownership of every last model that has ever been created during his career. They told me he will gladly loan a model out to whoever commissioned the building, for whatever purpose or for however long, but his feeling is "the building belongs to you, the model belongs to me."

I was also asked to refrain from mentioning any of the smaller models specifically. Evidently not all of them are stored there year round or always on view. Instead they rotate those around depending on what they feel might be of interest to visitors at any given time. Likely some of the more important ones, things like the Smith House, that began his career, are more often kept on view than others. But the point is, she said, they don't want people coming to see particular things and discovering them nowhere to be found.

The most impressive things to see there and which will always be on view, are the models of the Getty Museum. They have the very first, rudimentary one where Meier was getting a handle on the site and how he would arrange the disparate programmatic elements on the hilltop. Then there's a series including a few more after that one, about the same size, which shows the development of the project into something more concrete.

--Photos by Scott Frances courtesy Metropolis (link above).

You can't possibly miss, however, as soon as you walk in the door, the largest model of the Getty. It's eleven by eighteen feet in size and is probably the biggest architectural model I have ever seen. The only thing comparable that I can think of at the moment that I have seen is the train set at the Carnegie Science Center, which I discussed here. It's so large, in fact, that in order to even get it into the room, they had to hoist it up by crane, remove the skylight in the ceiling, and lower it down into the gallery. It's also divided up into smaller sections that can be rolled apart so you can get a closer look at the details.

The great thing about the next largest model is that it shows the original landscaping that Meier designed for the site himself. The landscaping of the big central green was later given to a different landscape architect, Emmet Wemple, and allegedly Meier was not very pleased with the result. Dan Kiley, who refuses to stop making his way into posts here, consulted on the project, as well.

Then there are countless smaller models of individual details of the Getty complex, small sections of the various buildings. But another impressive model is a giant mock-up of one of the museum's exhibition rooms. This one is about the size of a small bathroom or walk-in closet. But it was created so that the curators could actually stick their heads inside of it and get a much better impression of both how the art work could and would be displayed, and also to get a feel for the quality of the light coming from a square skylight in the ceiling of each gallery.

I took in every last morsel I could, asked a ton of questions, and overall had a great time. Before I left, they gave me this really nice little spiral-bound booklet with information about the gallery and the models in it. Finally the next group of college students had arrived, and I figured I should bid farewell. I highly recommend anyone who's a fan of Richard Meier or architecture in general to make an appointment and go see this incredible resource this coming spring.

©2010, Ryan Witte

The Fall of a Giant

I realize that I'm one of only about three people in the entire city of New York who will even slightly miss this building.  It'd been called the ugliest building in Queens and possibly all of New York.  It was bitterly hated, which I think makes me even more sad about its demise.  It was kind of an unappreciated, underrated underdog.

It was the Queens Plaza Municipal Parking Garage (1975) by architects Rouse, Dubin & Ventura at the corner of Queens Plaza South and Jackson Avenue.  I was able to find practically no information at all about RD&V, presumably because everyone just wished this building would go away for the past twenty years.

Had I known it was slated for demolition, I absolutely would have gone down and taken some last pictures of it.  I didn't even see the demolition right when they first started; by the time I noticed, it was pretty much just a big pile of rubble.

Luckily, Google Maps is in many areas around five years old, so I was able to catch it there before they refreshed their views.  Unfortunately, these screen-grabs from Google's street views aren't that great.  I have no doubt that had I been able to go down there, with my own camera, on a beautiful bright sunny day, and spend an hour or more capturing it myself, that I'd have been able to make it very clear what I loved about this building, and that you'd have been able to see it, too.

I'm honestly not all that terribly broken up about it.  I know the building was wildly unpopular and the poor thing was looking extremely grim during its final days.  It never would've gotten renovated in a way that would have improved things much. There's going to be some big Tishman-Speyer monstrosity going up in its place. I can certainly admit that whatever goes up there will very likely be relatively better for the site and easier on the eye. I'd have been pleased if they'd gone with their first choice of architects, FXFowle, but evidently Tischman rejected their design. Who knows what they'll finally choose.

I think what disappoints me is that it was an extremely interesting and determined work of Brutalism.  Again, I get a lot of flack for my love of Brutalism, most everyone thinks it was fascist, unfriendly, and miserable.  But this building was so bold, uncompromising, futuristic, and monumental, all the elements that made Brutalism so wonderful.  It held nothing back, it had muscle; it was just a cool building.  And if you look carefully, it truly had great lines and massing, for the most part.

Because the style continues to be so unanimously despised, even in retrospect, I fear that over time, very few Brutalist works will be spared the wrecking ball.  This whole fascinating period in the late evolution of Modernist Architecture may ultimately be lost forever, with only a few token Pei and Rudolph structures left as a lonely reminder.

Furthermore, in finally taking a very close look at it, I see all kinds of opportunities.  Gut it, polish it up, reclad it in some really sleek, high-tech materials, add lush plantings and animated water features, replace a good amount of the overbearing concrete with huge expanses of glass and open other walls entirely, crack it open with glorious sun-drenched atriums.  You'd end up with a gorgeous foundation for the tower set to rise above the site.  If I had the time, energy, and the necessary blueprints, I'd do the drawings myself.  Even five years ago, I'd have known that never would've been possible.  No one would ever have humored the idea of saving this building, but I suppose I just always consider protecting our architectural heritage to be of great importance whenever it's reasonable to do so.

The proportions here are just stunning.  The turret on the left is perfectly placed to give the section to its right a pleasing length.  I just adore those powerful windows piercing through the second story like a space ship on steroids.  The rhythm of the bays is wonderfully poetic.  I also love how the internal structure is forthrightly expressed by the sort of pilasters in the concrete on the outer wall.  

The top two stories don't need to be parking garage, in fact they'd make great office space.  The open slots could be sealed off with some delicious silvery blue glass:

While I love the robustness of the rusticated concrete, it is oppressive here.  There's just too much of it.  It couldn't have been anything else at the time the building was built.  Now I envision rough rusticated Neutra-esque stonework for the base, maybe interspersed with smooth, bright pale, poured concrete, and aluminum tile cladding for the upper stories (think Richard Meier's Bronx Developmental Center), but very carefully composed to work with the existing volumes.

Look at the two intersecting cylinders at the corner:

The architects did this at a lot of key locations around the building.  There is no reason they couldn't both be curving walls of glass.  It's difficult to gauge the exact dimensions of the balcony, but with, say, a restaurant or café there on the third story, doors leading out to the terrace, and some concealing shrubbery around the perimeter (the adjacent elevated train notwithstanding), that's a great little outdoor space.

This one might work even better:

The terrace appears larger, and this is further away from the noisy elevated subway.  The moments at these corners are amazing, though.  The way all these different lines and curves converge is not only interesting and dynamic, but there's something really space-age about them, as well.

These huge spans of rough concrete wall, though beautiful sculpturally, are for sure problematic:

Imposing and downright dangerous, they'd have made Jane Jacobs start foaming at the mouth.  Something would have to be done with them.

Okay, so that metal gate hidden around that corner is a wreck, the recess is probably entirely saturated with pee, and at worst it's the most lovely hiding spot for a serial rapist.  But just replace the entire bay with glass, top to bottom, and make this corner a soaring, bright, shiny new entrance to a couple of storefronts or similar.  It could work beautifully.

All around the building, these thick slabs of concrete act as a type of storefront shelter:

They're absolutely horrid and should just be removed altogether.  But the proportions of this end wing are stunning, and I won't apologize for saying so:

Those awful planters also have to go, but the sidewalk could totally be planted with manicured trees and flower beds to great success.

The little pavilion at the end of this wing is another gorgeous moment:

The massing of the two sort of turrets that form it has the most impeccable sense of scale in relationship to the wing.  

It's a wonderful punctuation mark on this extending arm of the building.  It also has a sense of intimacy that creates a fascinating counterpoint to both the colossal main building volume and the fortress-like forms of its two turrets.

The grille seems to indicate that the right-hand portion is mainly mechanical.  But again, knock out that center section, replace it with gleaming, silvery glass, and you'd have a fantastic entrance lobby here.  The weeds on the roof are all I need to imagine the most magical landscaped gardens up there.

Though no doubt problematic where pedestrian safety is concerned, I love how the concave curve makes this corner on the left look so very sharp:

A circular fountain set into the corner with seating around it would easily solve any safety problems.

This stairwell is another great opportunity:

Replace the whole thing with a cylinder of glass, and cut a narrow, soaring, sunbathed atrium deep into the building.  Plantings and waterfalls cascading down one side, a grand, monumental staircase on the other.  I'm sorry, but that would be a truly majestic interior space.

Here again, the convergence of lines and curves at the corner is so well executed:

Back to where I started, more of those horrible sheltering concrete slabs:

I won't miss them.

I'll be happy to admit that the other end of this very long façade, the Jackson Avenue frontage, needs a lot of help:

At the middle of this long stretch to the left is a section of smooth pale concrete that advances about a foot out from the rest of the wall.  Obviously it was intended to break up the monotony.  While it's a refreshing break from the dark rusticated concrete, it's misplaced and awkward.  But the location of it is absolutely right.  What I want here is the main grand entrance to the tower rising above this existing base.  Silvery blue glass the full width of that section, starting at the foot of the building, bulging out at about the third floor, then sloping back in again to about 15 to 25 feet behind the front wall, and curving on up into a soaring glass tower.  Maybe a two- or three-story-high rectangular volume carved out of the curving glass to form the entrance.

Agree with me or not, I think anyone with a little imagination could find moments here that could work, if addressed with some finesse.  In any case, I think it's very unfortunate when a building gets such a horrible reputation as this one had.  People tend to just eagerly jump onto the bandwagon of hating, so they can no longer see what's actually there.  I will reiterate my disdain for Lewis Mumford: that miserable curmudgeon didn't like anything.  I have no idea why he even did what he did.  I'm in this business because I truly love architecture, and for me that love absolutely has to include a poor soul like this building.

Queens Plaza Municipal Parking Garage 

Rouse, Dubin & Ventura

1975-2008

R.I.P.

©2008, Ryan Witte