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

Outdoor Living

Here's another young company from Toronto doing a lot of promising work, they go by the name of HERO Design Lab. First I want to show you these amazing prototypes they did in collaboration with NOTCOT that I definitely hope they put into production. They're called "Tiki and Gnomes":

The gnome is a video projector and the tikis are speaker stands that look sort of like very stylized trees. It's an outdoor theater set up, designed to be completely weatherproof and all that. This is such a fantastic idea, I can't believe there aren't more things like this on the market. All they need is a giant movie screen that unfolds from another gnome (or whatever) at the press of a button, and they're good to go.

From HERO alone, there's the DR-1 Drying Rack:

It folds practically flat, but has more than enough racks and bars to handle your entire laundry load.

It cuts down on the energy used by your dryer, which I think has obvious benefits. Clothes dryers consume more energy than practically any other household appliance aside from your water heater, between 1800 and 5000 watts. Beyond that, it's a good argument that clothes should be more fresh if dried out in a soft summer breeze. If it were me, I think I'd want it in the shade, however, to avoid the clothes fading.

The item that really caught my eye was the RC-1 Rain Collector. They offer it in yellow and white to match the Drying Rack, but personally I prefer it in brown and white:

You put it under the drain spout from your gutters and it holds 45 gallons. If you live somewhere other than New York City, I'd imagine for the most part rainwater would be relatively safe for just about anything but drinking it, but they suggest watering the garden, washing your car, and washing the dog, all perfectly good ideas.

And this seems a good excuse to talk about something else. I'm on a bit of a water kick lately. I have begun in earnest collecting the water that drips from my upstairs neighbors' air conditioner. It is essentially nothing more than distilled water, which theoretically should be quite pure. I actually have a dissolved solids meter to test it for impurities--I know, kind of a weird thing to have, but my mom gave it to me. I have to replace the batteries in it first, though. Evidently the water from air conditioners can be somewhat saline, but I've been watering plants with it and they seem to be fine.

I'm wondering, if every drop of water from every air conditioner in New York City--and for that matter, refrigerators as well--was collected over the entire summer, how much water do you suppose that would be? How much less water would have to be pumped down from upstate New York?

I got to thinking further on the subject, and it occurred to me that plumbing needs to become much more sophisticated. This isn't ancient Rome; we're a planet in crisis. I think we're a little too smart for the basic water in/ water out principle of plumbing. Not every source of water in a building needs to be 100% sanitary, just the ones where it may end up in your mouth. In many other cases, a good quality water heater that heats water to near the boiling point is going to take care of all the rest of the bacteria. There is absolutely no reason why 99% of the "waste water" we produce can't be used for flushing toilets. Toilet water just should not be taken from the purified water supply, period. In fact, I'm beginning to think that the only water that should go right into the sewer is from the toilet.

I also recently heard about Planet Ark's Aware laundry detergent, which is so natural and biodegrades so quickly that you can use, at the very least, water from the rinse cycle to water your garden. Of course, you couldn't really expect a homeowner to use this, for Aware to always remain on the market or always be readily available. Perhaps washer run-off could have a valve to switch depending on where the water should go.

I'm thinking more about distillation, too. I'm thinking an entire house can basically be a water collection and recycling system. For instance, say you have a cistern for gray water, necessarily at ground level due to gravity. Every drop of rain that hits the house, every pipe leads there, every drop of water. Then you have a solar system heating the water, the water vapor travels up a pipe or something to a condensation panel in the attic, dripping into another cistern, and clean, distilled water is stored up there, maybe with an added pump for increased water pressure. There's still the problem of bacteria, and not all impurities are removed by distillation, but I'll let someone else worry about that.

What's left at the bottom after the water distills off? Cleaning products, remnants of food, skin cells, saliva and hair, cosmetics? What's to be done with this disgusting sludge? I can't help but believe there would have to be a combination of different enzymes, bacteria, and maybe things like algae that could absorb most of those substances and convert them to some useful byproduct.

And for that matter, what about toilet water? Certainly no one would want to know that their drinking water once contained their own pee and poop. I have been to houses, however, with leaky septic tanks and on-property wells where brushing one's teeth was not quite as minty of an experience as I might have liked. But why can't houses, in the backyard, for instance, have some kind of natural, biological system to mostly purify that water so that it could just be safely drained into the surrounding landscape? Again, I'd think there'd be a combination of plant species that would absolutely thrive on the nasties in toilet water.

It might be a tougher sell for us greedy Americans than even global warming. But less than three percent of the water on earth is fresh water. Two of that three percent is inaccessible, being frozen into ice caps and glaciers, being in parts of the world where no one lives, or running right back into the oceans. The potentially potable water we have is less than one percent of all the water on the planet. The United Nations considers us to be in a "water crisis." Gas isn't the only thing we're guzzling.

©2009, Ryan Witte

Some Thoughts

I thought I'd take a brief pause to discuss my ongoing project.  Anyone who's glanced over my Amazon list may have guessed that I'm up to something, and it's true.  Basically, I want to go back to graduate school for my Masters, and I have my eyes set on CUNY.  In the meantime, I've decided to put together an outline for my thesis, because it's fairly specific what I want to pursue.

I'm going to explore the Semiotics of Architecture.  Though it's not a period or style for which I have any particular love (or the contrary), I've decided to focus on Colonial American residential architecture from before 1776.  I felt this would give me a good, tight, finite set of examples to examine.  This early stage of development in the U.S. also has the most basic, honest architecture, first by way of necessity on the part of European settlers needing to house themselves as quickly and efficiently as possible, and also because the American style would not have had much time to evolve on its own yet.

The first problem is that some of the thirteen, Maine for one--then part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts--had not really been settled into that early.  My next thought was to look at the first big wave of settlement in each region.  This is a bit more difficult because it would require careful analysis of the U.S. Census, which is often quite spotty from that long ago.  I intend to research that, anyway, to determine from what European countries the settlers were coming, predominantly, in the counties where their houses stand.  If I do broaden the time period, it could be that some of my sets end up as late as, say, the 1850s, which is definitely less pure.

The next problem is that the buildings that still stand may not be the most perfectly representative cross-section.  First of all, wooden structures are far more prone to fire and rapid aging than brick and stone.  A disproportionate number of these may now be lost.  Secondly, I'm most interested in the structures built by the common settler, not the exorbitantly wealthy or important members of society.  So this also reduces the chances of a building being historically protected, because typically they have little importance to preservationists outside of their sheer age.

These decisions will become easier, I suspect, when I see what and how much is still standing.  Here I have a problem as well, because again, looking at the houses of ordinary people, these are a bit less likely to be recorded in any sort of historic register or similar list I could hope to find.  Some of the best and unaltered examples may be little old farm houses on the side of some country road in Middle-of-Nowhere, West Virginia, long forgotten and about to collapse in a heap.  I'd never find them all, and a road trip like that could literally take an entire lifetime.  The prospect of visiting all of even the small number of houses on a list, for all thirteen colonies, is daunting enough.

My line of attack, though, is to go in order of latitude, from north to south down the Atlantic coast, recording everything.  Some elements may end up more telling than others, but angle of roof pitch, construction techniques, number and location of fireplaces, stoops and verandas, symmetricality or the lack thereof in facades and floorplans, shutters, cladding materials, dormers, moldings and their symbolism (organic/ floral or geometric/ abstract for instance, as in ornate mantelpieces or ceiling medallions), attached or detached kitchens, number, location, and orientation of staircases.  Absolutely everything.

Then for the location itself: climate, average temperatures, precipitation and average humidity, geology, quarries and clay deposits, altitude perhaps, local flora, especially amounts and types of lumber locally available, national origin of the majority of settlers in the region, average household incomes may become important, and so on.

Just a week or so back, I had a small epiphany, that all the information about the structure itself could potentially be organized into a tree, with branches like exterior--front facade--cladding--shingle--cedar, shingle--8" square, front facade--symmetrical, front facade--fenestration--shutters--pine--painted--black, and so on for every aspect of the building.  I'm not yet convinced that the location of items on the tree would be significant, I suspect that's the poetry of architecture itself.  But the content of it will be, for sure.  Of course I'd never have to construct an entire tree for one house.  The lower branches and where they diverge from region to region would be where my discussion would take place.

What I intend to find is that various combinations of branches and tree configurations will tell me all I need to know about the second paragraph, and in some cases narrow a structure's location down to colony, at least, in some cases maybe even county.

For example, lets say you have a combination like a roof pitch of 45°, wood-frame construction with maple siding, two chimneys and four fireplaces, and an asymmetrical floor-plan.  I intend to find that such a combination very likely would only have come together in a certain part of, say, southern Pennsylvania that has very specific climate conditions and snowfall, reasonable access to maple forest (why the wealth of the homeowner may be important), and so on.

Add in factors like specific construction practices and styles of ornamentation of particularly Dutch origin, and now we may be able to narrow it down to even the county, if only one county that fits all the other criteria had a large Dutch population.  Other elements may suggest being further from the coast or a large body of water, etc.

One of the first issues I considered is the fact that so much prior knowledge is required in order to read these different symbolic relationships.  My question, however, is whether or not a colonist riding past in his horse-drawn carriage in 1762 didn't have most of that knowledge.  Most recently though, I've been fascinated by what Umberto Eco is saying about dictionary versus encyclopedia, and the way we understand metaphors.

I actually don't think architectural symbolism is metaphoric, but the point is that in order to understand metaphors, we have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the words, outside of their basic definition.  As in "Mark is a robot."  You know this isn't literally true, so you have to understand what of all the things that make up "Mark" and "robot" the two might have in common to interpret what I mean.  I really like what this says about the depth of our understanding of the language.

So did the ordinary resident of a county know, when she walked into a house, that the owner must be in a certain economic class to be able to afford mahogany doors, since mahogany was not locally available?  Did he know that a veranda around the entire circumference of a house would cool the air on a muggy 100° day, and therefore "it must get hot here in the summer?"  Honestly, I believe they did, especially considering that most settlers at that time had been involved to some degree in the construction of their own homes.

It's also recently occurred to me that context is terribly important.  I realize that this system says one thing if you know where the structure stands, and something entirely different if you don't.  In other words, if I know where a structure stands, then it conveys to me information about the people who built it and some things about the region, as in "the builders used particularly Spanish construction techniques, therefore they likely settled here from Spain, therefore this region had Spanish settlers," which, by the way, in that early time period, may have only occurred in, say, the four southern-most colonies or wherever, but nonetheless a geographically limited region.

But if I'm only looking at an image of it, and don't know where it's located, then it conveys information that I have to interpret based on my knowledge of the world to determine where it is, as in "fireplaces in every room, therefore located in a colder climate, therefore in a northern colony."  In other words, I have to already know that Maine is far colder than Georgia.  The Spanish influences require me to know already what northern colonies had Spanish settlers in order to determine where it's located.  I think this may be a problem, and I'm not exactly sure how, yet.  I think the question may be, how deeply can I go into prior knowledge of the world before the signification is too obscure to be communicative?

It also brings into play the pictorial representation of the structure, as opposed to the real structure itself, which I fear may be an entirely different animal in some ways.

In any case, I needed to get some of these thoughts out of my head.  Updates as they develop.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Watching the Wheels

To conclude my posts on the BKLYN DESIGNS show, here are a couple new items from one of my favorite companies, Site Specific Design.  They were in my second year's coverage of the show and they're a really nice group of people.

Their series of Childhood Memories pieces are a lot of fun, many of them based on bugs, and I was really impressed by this new one, "Nephila":

I'd seen the newsletter about it, and actually thought it might be a free-standing piece.  At the show I saw that it hangs on the wall, and only the top portion is solid metal tubes.  From the squiggly metal tubes dangle a bunch of power cables that spaghetti around on the floor.  (Yes, I know "spaghetti" isn't a verb).  All of them have plugs or sockets at the end of them, but of course only one of them is live.

This table is a brand new piece they debuted at the show:

Click that.  They found these ENORMOUS antique drill press wheels by accident on ebay and were inspired by them to make this table.  The designer, I believe it was Rui Docouto, was explaining to me that they originally thought to strip the paint off them, but then realized that they had this really amazing rough golden hue to them, so they left them as is.  The great thing about this piece is that it has a very rustic, industrial kind of aesthetic to it, but if you look at the wooden tabletop, it's uncommonly thin.  It gives the piece a real sort of delicacy.  I thought it was lovely.  I also hope they're able to find more drill press wheels (or similar) so they can offer more pieces along these lines.

Marketing Director Nahid Rupani also told me about some plans concerning Brooklyn's design community in general that I was very impressed and excited about, but I'm not sure if that's a matter of public record just yet, so I'll leave you in suspense on that one.

Site Specific Design

718-486-6341

Also...

--Photo Hans Werlemann

This video of Rem Koolhaas' Maison á Bordeaux is absolutely breathtaking.  Go watch it.

©2008, Ryan Witte

Out of the Frying Pan...

I'm seriously conflicted as to how I feel about this.

On the one hand, the tri-state area doesn't really need as many of those uber-tacky 1950s-60s ranch houses as it has.  Still, I was a little bit uncomfortable to learn how very few of the Levittown houses have remained in their original state.

--Photo AP

Photo courtesy Redwood Coast.

On the other hand, everything is looked upon with disdain once its heyday is over.  I'm sure even the overwrought pomposity of a Victorian was seen as disgusting by someone or another.

At one time, somebody loved that little ranch house.  Selling their grimy old townhouse in Brooklyn where they grew up, they loved the clean, new, plastic, aluminum-sided illusion of suburban homeyness it provided them for the first time in their lives.  They had a lawn to plant flowers and barbecue!

There's also the argument that very few houses don't have good enough bones that they couldn't be rehabilitated to preserve their charm without having to tear them down.  And I'd be very surprised to learn many of those homeowners are recycling any of the materials from these teardowns.

--Photos Christine Fontana, Douglas Healey

But the point is, really, look at what they're putting up in its place! Every once in a while I see a McMansion that I actually do think is done well.  Oddly, a neighborhood development I had the opportunity to visit in Columbia, SC surprised me with the overall quality of its architecture.

But this one (above)?  That is some of the most pathetic, disgusting "architecture" I've seen (if you can even call it that--since I'd bet you 3.5 million dollars they got the floorplan out of one of those stupid floorplan books).  Do you really need all those damn gables?  I mean, really?  And just how many different sizes and types of window do you need on the front of one house?  Seriously, who buys these pieces of crap for 3.5 million dollars?  

I'm actually of the opinion that very few human beings don't have some innate aesthetic sense.  There are some qualities that are so primary: order, symmetry, proportion, that they must be ingrained.  The grandmother of a friend lives on a street where the neighbors complained about the exterior color of one of the houses, so in defiance, the owners painted it the most awful shade of blue, like a periwinkle, but way too dark.  These people aren't necessarily artists or designers, but everyone just knows it's ugly.  If the house in that photo had columns sized for the Parthenon slapped onto the front of it, people would just know they were way too large.

So why do people buy these things, and not only that, but pay SO much money for them?  Has the symbolism of that "suburban homeyness" become that valuable of a commodity?  Has the gaudy, overblown use of those symbols become that much of a measure of status?  Perhaps the specifically unsophisticated use of architectural forms has, itself, become codified.  In other words, wearing blue-jeans with your suit jacket, rather than the pretentious (alienating) "tuxedo" of a well-designed (especially if Modern) architectural marvel.

To be fair, the new home pictured lower down in the article is really quite nice, but I'm pessimistic that it's merely the exception to the rule:

--Photo Kirk Condyles

Perhaps the Green Movement, as it gains momentum and popularity, will have further-reaching affects on aesthetics.  For one thing, I don't think you can take a floorplan out of a book and really do much that's ecologically sound with it.  You need an architect to prescribe something unique to your individual household requirements and site.  We can only hope.

©2007, Ryan Witte