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Last week the New York City Preservation
Commission made a decision of breathtaking importance for the future of
architecture in New York. The 11-member commission unanimously approved a
design by the French architect Jean Nouvel for a new hotel in Soho, one of the
first of the city’s historic districts and one of its most preservation-minded
neighborhoods.
The design bears little resemblance to the derivative contextual aesthetic
promoted by preservation groups and local community boards in recent
decades. Mr. Nouvel’s design is good news, but the enthusiastic support it
drew from the Landmarks Commission and its commissioner, Jennifer J. Raab, is an
even bigger deal. This is the most seen from city government since – well,
since the landmarks law was passed in 1965.
The 180-room hotel, called the Broadway, is being developed by André Balazs, owner of the Mercer Hotel (also in Soho), and the Chateau Marmont and the Standard, citadels of chic in
Hollywood. His partner in the project is Hines, a Houston-based
development firm. The hotel will be built on a large site, no occupied by a
parking lot and a flea market, on Grand Street between Broadway and
Mercer. Mr. Nouvel’s Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris,
completed in 1994, captured a perfect picture of modern Left Bank life.
The Broadway will do the same for downtown Manhattan.
While the design is as distinctive as ay New York has seen in decades, it is
sensitive to its surroundings. The building is massed into a six-story
tower atop a six-story base. The tower’s height is determined by what
planners call the sky plane, the variable angle from which the sky remains
visible from the street. The base extends the full length of the Grand
Street block, with the tower set back to the north by 44 feet. The
facades, glass compositions of overlapping rectilinear geometry, reflect the
Manhattan street grid and its cosmopolitan life.
Just north of the building, a cut through the block between Mercer and Broadway
will reveal a garden set two levels below the street. Lushly planted, with
reeds whose frilly tops will reach above the sidewalk, the garden will adjoin a
two-story spa. An angled wall enlarges the outdoor space and lets hotel
guests peer down from their rooms. Another cut, on the Mercer Street side,
reveals a steel mesh fire escape. Other amenities: glass elevator cabs,
lobby, shops, luxury, the unending once-over.
Like the LVMH Tower on East 57th Street, designed by Mr. Nouvel’s
countryman Christian de Portzamparc, the hotel’s outstanding feature is its
innovative use of glass. This is not coincidence. In France glass
has kept its connotations of modernity. It represents openness, lightness,
technical innovation and a progressive view. Mr. Nouvel’s design, like Mr.
Portzamparc’s, showcases technical advances in glass production and the expanded
range of ideas they make possible. The facades are visually enriched –
ornamented, if you like – with applied and architectonic features that give the
glass uncommon depth and texture. The three street facades have steel
grids of mullions and spandrels. Glass fins, used for support as well as
for aesthetic effect, are set perpendicular to the walls. These amplify
the play of reflections across the surface.
The transparency is further modulated by different types of glass, and by
screening and fretting techniques that play against the strict geometry of the
steel grid. Applied scrims of plated color – red, blue and gray – also
distinguish the design from glass towers of 40 years ago.
Like other contemporary architects, Mr. Nouvel stresses the relationship between
inside ad outside. Here he defines the relationship with the interaction
of art and technology. The building’s exterior includes the world
immediately around it. The scale of the base and the proportions of the
grid mirror those or nearby loft buildings, which would also be reflected in the
glass. The transparency draws the outside inside, and vice versa.
The facades’ industrial look recalls the origins of SoHo’s architecture in
cast-iron construction, but the glass is fabricated on a scale of impossible a
century ago. The steel grid evokes the mass production of SoHo’s
ornamental facades and the steel mullions of the classic American towers of Mies
van der Rohe. Abstract imagery applied to the glass suggests SoHo’s
transformation from a district of light manufacturing t a center of
computer-age design.
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It would be obtuse to analyze the design in strictly formal or functional
terms. This hotel is made for “Moody’s Mood for Love” as performed by King
Pleasure, on a rainy weekday afternoon, downtown, in a room surrounded by
low-rise buildings. Think Edward Hopper crossed with Pedro
Almodovar. Not least, this design is about sex. That is its major
departure from the glass office towers of mid-20th-century New
York.
In those buildings, glass stood for Reason: economy, technology, prefabricated
construction. These meanings still hold in projects like the Rose Center
for Earth and Space, by James Stewart Polshek and partners. Elsewhere, but
especially in France, new techniques in glass have made possible a range of
erotic suggestions. Mr. Nouvel has pursued in projects including the
Cartier Foundation, the Galeries Lafayette in Berlin and the (unbuilt) Victoria
Building for Frankfurt. Modulating the visual texture of glass with
reflectivity, fretted patterns, screened-on images, blurring, veiling,
coloration, support systems and other techniques, these projects summon forth
states of narcissism, exhibitionism, voyeurism, veiling, vamping, elusiveness,
disconsolation, Hitchcock’s blonde.
Novelty holds erotic appeal. Modern architects of the heroic era could not
acknowledge this. They let movies say it for them, in sets for mysteries
and romantic comedies – “That Touch of Mink,” “The Best of Everything,” –
in which the gleam of the new denoted desire.
Mr. Nouvel’s vision has long been cinematic. He has used the New York City
fire escape before, most notably in the Arab World Institute in Paris, but in
the New York context the image derives more recognizably from the realm of “Rear
Window” and “West Side Story.” Grace Kelly has discovered that she is a
better photographer than Jimmy Stewart, and that romantic intrigues are more
photogenically combustible than wars and natural disasters. In an animated
dream sequence, she sees the walls shattered by an explosion of high-pressure
glamour, and the colored glass shards, transformed by the pressure into precious
stones, pave the streets with diamonds, rubies, sapphires. It’s that kind
of building.
The hotel’s northern side, which faces away from the street, is its most
explicitly cinematic feature. A screened coating will render the glass
gray, rhythmically punctuated by transparent rectangles with blurred
edges. These resemble film sprockets or movie stills from an emphatically
film noire genre.
Mr. Nouvel’s design s a supreme example of what we mean when we talk about an
architecture of ideas. It is an aesthetic of differences that depends on
an awareness of similarities, a design that demonstrates the extent to which
continuity depends on periodic rupture and separation.
The miracle is that the members of the Landmarks Commission understood it.
They got it completely. In fact, they overruled the opinion of the
community board’s preservation panel. I doubt that we could have counted
on the commission’s support even as recently as two years ago, certainly not to
this degree. Perhaps it took the arrival of the millennium for the city to
realize that it had produced almost no buildings of landmark stature in more
than 30 years and that a resistance to ideas was to blame.
I suspect the commission’s decision will have widespread repercussions, even
outside New York, by identifying several fundamental principles. It points
up the profound distinction architecture and architectural history. It
helps dispel the confusion between preservation and preservationism. And
it demonstrates that the architectural context for great cities like New York is
international as well as local. This is called
leadership.
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