WWD Scoop “Axis Point” March 2005
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In 1990, André Balazs renovated the decaying Chateau Marmont in Beverly Hills and turned it into the ne plus ultra of cool. After that came The Mercer Hotel in New York, Sunset Beach in Shelter Island and less expensive Standard Hotels in downtown L.A. and Hollywood. With a cheaper hotel, Q.T., in Times Square, which will fully open at the end of April, and Standards in South Beach and the Meatpacking District on the horizon, Balazs is making his first foray into the residential market. He’s linked up with architect Richard Gluckman- who has designed spaces doe art world luminaries like Larry Gagosian, Chuck Close and Ellsworth Kelly – to create One Kenmare Square, and 11-story undulating condominium tower at 210 Lafayette Street in New York that opens next fall and is selling now. Jacob Bernstein sat down with then to talk about the project’s development, gentrification in New York and the relationship between architecture and fashion.

WWD: What was the genesis of the project?
André Balazs: Before 9/11 it was intended to be a Standard hotel and then we decided to make it residential. It has one foot in SoHo and one in NoLita with incredible views. The idea was to create a residential opportunity that captured some of the qualities we strive to achieve in a hotel and at the same time was priced reasonably.

WWD: What was the hardest thing about switching it from hotel to residential?
Richard Gluckman: A hotel has a little more to do with fantasy. It can be tailored exactly to André’s ideas because you are only there for a short time. With a condo, it has to be in some ways less designed so he user can bring their own personality to it.

WWD: Richard, I read an interview where you said, “Art is not architecture, architecture is not art.” Explain.
RG: I think in the last few years there’s been a conflation of art and architecture. I’ve been trained by artists who deal with architectural, architectonic criteria. But they don’t identify their work as architecture. They maintain a distinction. They say some architecture is art diminishes the entire architecture realm and the entire art realm.

WWD: Is architecture becoming too much like fashion in its emphasis on the new?
AB: If you compare fashion to style, good design is like style, it’s not like fashion. But bad design, the whole thing is that it’s fashionable.
RG: The question is where the new element – whether it’s a dress or a building – comes in the chronology of style. If it’s Rem Koolhaas or Frank Gehry, who are initiators of architectural design, I’m not going to call it fashion. But as soon as they spawn a dozen imitators, it becomes fashion.

WWD: Isn’t the effect the same then? Aren’t the Richard Meier buildings on New York’s West Side Highway fashion?
RG: No. They’re good buildings, partly because they raised the bar for developers.
AB: Yes, it’s helped other architects in the city convince their clients, if you put a little more money into the architecture, you get a better product and make the money back.

WWD: Why do you think the buildings have had so many problems?
AB: Well, that may have to do with the developer or the contractor or even the project architect who engineered out Richard Meier’s original work. You don’t know, I don’t know.

WWD: So you don’t think its about hype n a way?
AB: The architect is not really responsible for the hype, he’s just doing his work. Good architecture can get tortured if it’s over-hyped, but that’s more a statement about our society than it is about the work.

WWD: Looking at recent developments at the West Side Highway and in NoLita, do you think any part of the city will be undeveloped 10 years from now?
RG: None of its undeveloped now.
AB: I think New York has become a four borough city in the last 10 years because of the incredible homogenization of Manhattan.

WWD: Does this bother you?
AB: This came up the other day. I was meeting with the Greenwich Village community group discussing the meat market. There’s a large area that’s owned by the city, and the question now is whether the flower market gets relocated there or whether the Dia Art Foundation takes the space. And someone asked me, ‘Which do you prefer?’ Frankly, my response is that I’d rather the meatpackers stay there exactly as it was, because if you lose that mercantile aspect, one of the big cultural aspects disappears and it becomes more shallow for its loss.

WWD: As a developer, so you feel responsible for it?
AB: Well. I think it’s horrible, but I think it happens.
RG: There’s always been this continuing upward growth ad homogenization. It’s not bad. It just means Brooklyn and the Bronx have become more interesting. It’s just pushing the horizon back.
AB: But it does flatten out the experience for a neighborhood, you know? If you walk through the Meatpacking District, there’s something about a working warehouse next to Stella McCartney’s shop.
RG: I don’t like stepping in blood, though. I don’t particularly like the stink of it. Paris has moved he meat market a couple of times and it hasn’t diminished the quality of life there.
AB: So you think it’s been over-romanticized?
RG: Yes, exactly.

WWD: What neighborhood would you least like to live in?
RG: Staten Island…I don’t know. Back n the Seventies, when artists were moving down to SoHo, people said, “How can you live there?” Then New York magazine did a piece suggesting Zip Code no longer mattered, that quality of space mattered and that it was being shown to us by artists downtown. So my point is, if you gave me a really great apartment anywhere on Third Avenue, I’d take it.
AB: I disagree. I moved into SoHo because I loved the neighborhood. I loved the grittiness. To me, that was its charm, and I lament its loss.
RG: Why wouldn’t you move to Brooklyn?
AB: I like parts of Brooklyn. It’s just far.
RG: No it’s not.

WWD: What’s your opinion on the proposed Calavatra tower at 80^th Street?
AB: I think it’s fabulous. The question is, do you want to spend that much money in that neighborhood? You saw it with the Richard Meirs buildings. Who really wants to live on the West Side Highway? It’s not in a neighborhood, there’s no noise all the time, everyone sees you in your underwear when you’re on the way to the bathroom.
RG: Yes, but the kind of people who can afford a $30 million house in the sky don’t participate in the neighborhood. They participate in the global neighborhood. They’re gonna have a place in Hong Kong, Monte Carlo and Biarritz.

WWD: What would you put at the West Side Railyards?
RG: I’d put a mixed use complex of cultural and residential components. And I’d rather have a baseball stadium than a football stadium. Put the Mets out there.
AB: I think it would be great if it were not just for spectators of a sport.

WWD: If you had to live in a store, which one would it be?
AB: Oh, that’ easy. Helmut Lang.
RG: The old Helmut Lang.

WWD: Why?
AB: Because it’s great, because Richard designed it. Because it’s Helmut’s store. Because it’s rough and sophisticated at the same time.