Faceless acrobats

Oliver Wainwright of the Guardian wrote about the Bridgewater Place in Leeds, a 32-story office and residential skyscraper completed in 2007, the tallest building in Yorkshire.  The critic addresses the problem of the violent wind tunnel it created on the street level and other examples of "killer towers."  The article prompted me this comment on contemporary skyscrapers. 

So many new buildings are not only horrendous to look at, and cheaply and dangerously constructed but also irresponsibly conceived.  They make us “wonder why modern buildings seem so out-of-sync with any nearby natural environment," as a friend wrote me.  They not only defy natural environment but built environment as well.  

It is easy to blame architects.  But buildings are paid for by their patrons; large corporations are commissioning tall and taller and more daring buildings in competition with one another. Killer towers are visible expressions of those corporate leaders in the notorious 1%,  dominating and oppressing and sneering at the small businesses crawling under their arrogantly towering bodies.  Not all towers are killers, of course, and not all new buildings are the product of corporate wealth and arrogance; but many are.  And with their money they hire architects from distant places instead of employing local architects, those who know the neighborhood firsthand and can produce designs that accommodate the surrounding physical environment.  Out of specific urban context, many new towers are also abstract without historical connections to the urban context. So, the towers all over the world from Turin to Timbuktu, Boston to Budapest, Shanghai to Shangri-La, all look the same.  

Time was when skyscraper were what distinguished New York from any other place.  Time was when Philadelphia adhered to the unwrit agreement that no new building will rise above the statue of William Penn, erected in 1894, by none other than Alexander Milne Calder, the father of the "mobile" Calder. It's also the corporate patrons who insist on the light, fragile, daring looks with the profile that seem to twist and twirl, swing and swirl, float and flirt, and architects, certainly also irresponsibly, answer the demands because they need the job.  Every city had its distinct character because a city is a layer of historical constructions, generation after generation, century after century, not just London, Paris, Rome, Prague, Stockholm, Katmandu, Rio de Janeiro, but Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, and New York. Local color is fading everywhere, certainly already in many city centers, presenting a forest of glass towers, potential killers casting ominous shadows on low-rise local buildings.  

It is easy to blame the architects; but they are not the chief villains.  The sad reality is the ethos of the heartless, greedy entrepreneurs.

American Folk Art Museum

The American Folk Art Museum, now destined to be demolished to make way for the MoMA expansion, was built in 2001 on the design of Todd Williams and Billie Tsien.  Most agree it is a beautiful building on the exterior; some are critical of its cramped interior.  Its major shortcoming is that it is not an adaptable building.  But that is its finest quality; it fulfills the museum’s needs meticulously.

Rising six stories on its small footprint of 40 feet x 100 feet, the interior, to a casual visitor, may look like a building housing stairs and passageways and little else. But the collection atypically consists of large and small objects that have to be shown together, those that require a distance to view and very small ones that require close views.  The skylit shafts in the center accommodate the former displayed to be seen from different directions and the latter arranged on the walls and small cases can be inspected conveniently along the stairs and passages.  The spatial perspective offer rich changes as we climb up and go around on each floor.  The building’s material is humble but warm and the architectural details betray craftsmanship, appropriate to the character of the exhibits.  The museum provides an ambulatory space with changing perspectives like some Italian hill town. It is imageable; it is a building as memorable as the objects it houses. In this regard it is unlike any other building anywhere; it is unique.

The economic reality of the patrician MoMA notwithstanding, it is a tragedy that it makes the poor folks succumb to it.