28 October 2001
Source:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/28/arts/design/28MUSC.html
The New York Times
October 28, 2001
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP New York Times architecture critic
HOW great is New York. Even amid uncertainty, a stroller in midtown can walk through the door of, say, the Royal Athena Galleries on East 57th Street and fall back into the mythology of the ancient Mediterranean world.
They call the merchandise here ancient art, but in fact it is ancient religion. Freud, who collected statuettes like those displayed at Royal Athena, called them "my dirty gods." The phrase was a double entendre. Some of the miniatures had been unearthed on archaeological digs and were stained by age and filth. For Freud, they also represented society's capacity to manage the most primitive human drives by incorporating them into daily cultural practice. Psychoanalysis aimed to be a new management system — a new religion, if you like — for modern, scientific times. Society had buffed up the little gods and called them classical antiquities. Freud showed how the tiny terrors keep popping up in our psyches.
It's shocking to be reminded how new modern times are. Power goes down, phones are cut out, elevators stop running, music stops and the rescue of a modern city begins to resemble the excavation of an ancient one. One half expects figures of Persephone, Osiris and Dionysus to be uncovered with the remains of the terrorists' victims. Actually, they're already here. Now called death, regeneration, separation and continuity, they're circulating inside grief-stricken minds.
Power, power, who's got the power. Since the terrorist attack, groups of architects and planners have been working on concepts for rebuilding Lower Manhattan and for other projects, like improved regional transportation, from which the financial district would benefit. But the groups have been operating in a void. At this writing, no city or state agency has been named to oversee a rebuilding effort. The groups hope to be ready when the politics are sorted out.
Even if their efforts come to nothing, they are already an important part of cultural history. The last six weeks have witnessed the rapid formation of an archaeological record: this is how some New York architects responded to a local and global crisis. If the desire to rebuild the financial district becomes a political reality, this record should be taken into account.
Less than two weeks after the disaster, a coalition was formed by three private professional organizations: the New York City Partnership, the Real Estate Board of New York and the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Now called the NYC Infrastructure Task Force, the coalition is directed by a committee that includes executives from leading real estate companies and corporate architecture firms familiar to readers of real estate news.
The Infrastructure Task Force can be reached at www.nycrebuild.org. It has been fascinating to follow the evolution of this Web site. Public relations filters have been in heavy use since the site went up. "Infrastructure" is an addition, and possibly a diversion. Nobody doesn't love infrastructure. There is also a new disclaimer: "It is not the intention of the task force to propose specific designs." Perhaps the intention is to be seated at the table later, when design commissions are passed around?
The composition of the group's executive committee is a drastically shortened version of the list that appeared only a week ago. At that time, the committee was a Who's Who of major real estate developers and corporate architecture firms. The architecture firms included Fox & Fowle, Hellmuth, Okata & Kassabaum, Skidmore Owings & Merrill, and Kohn Pederson Fox. Even in its pared-down form, the committee recalls an Egyptian tomb painting. It is a hierarchical power structure whose members anticipate the arrival of the Ka or other magical intervention — some turn of political and economic events — that will throw the switch and allow the current to flow.
JEAN GARDNER, a historian and theorist at Parsons School of Design, has lately been urging students and colleagues to go back to the history of medieval Florence, when the city's population had been decimated by plague. Survivors didn't know where to turn for authority. They had to make things up as they went along. They were very good at making things up. Before long, they made up the Renaissance.
"They" were mainly two groups of people: artists and politicians. I urge upon readers Lauro Martines's book "Power and the Imagination." If you can't obtain the book, just keep the title in mind. The interaction between these two groups establishes a good framework for evaluating the Infrastructure Task Force.
The original Web site revealed that the imagination has no place in this power structure. The group's executive committee, for example, broke down into two groups: developers and architects. Superficially, these groups might be taken to represent, respectively, power and the imagination. If you set our imagineers next to Florence's, however, the New York lineup was pure stand-up tragedy.
Florence team: Brunelleschi (the Duomo, Spedale degli Innocenti; Santo Spirito), Vasari (the Uffizi), Michelozzo (San Marco); Michelangelo (Laurentian Library), Alberti (Palazzo Rucellai), etc., etc.
New York team: Skidmore Owings & Merrill (Worldwide Plaza); Fox & Fowle (Conde Nast Building); Kohn Pedersen Fox (U.S. Courthouse, Foley Square ); Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum (Federal Office Building, Foley Square), etc., etc.
It would be cruel to tax the New York team with a 21st-century renaissance.
Initially, the task force Web site spoke of the need for "the city's architecture and planning community to speak with one voice." This has been rephrased. The revised goal of the task force is to "establish the framework that will allow planning, design and construction to move forward while allowing concerned constituencies to have a voice." (An early, unposted Statement of Purpose recommends "pragmatic implementation strategies that engage concerned parties before they coalesce into opposition.") These are political, not cultural, concepts. People of creative temperament don't think this way.
There is no such thing as an architecture and planning community in New York. There are some leading architecture schools here. There are museums that regularly present architecture exhibitions; nonprofit groups that sponsor shows, lectures and panels; hundreds of small architecture studios where good work is being done; and major outlets of the design press. Not least, there is a large public audience for contemporary architecture that has grown in size and sophistication in recent years. The architectural culture centered in New York has begun to rival that of many other cities around the world.
Yet the corporate firms who want to speak for the city's architecture and planning community are not part of that culture. They belong to corporate culture. In business terms, they are "professional service producers." With an average 300 to 450 employees, a corporate firm typically provides planning, design and construction documents, and in some cases engineering and interiors, for large-scale office buildings. None of these firms can claim credit for enlarging the public's interest in contemporary design. At best their work is out of touch. Architecture has moved light years away from the retrogressive focus-group sensibility embraced by corporate firms.
The Sept. 11 attack threw into stark relief the chasm that exists between contemporary architecture and the corporate firms listed at the top of the task force hierarchy. Over here, we've got this messy, fragmented, all-over-the-place architectural culture. Over there, we've got these folks who want to speak, in one voice, for New York's architecture and planning community. Over here, Imagination. Over there, Power. Never in the city's history have these forces been so far apart. This is the crisis the city's architects now face.
In the past, it was possible to defend retrogressive architecture by asserting that the public found it pleasing. Architects should try harder to accommodate popular taste, it was believed. People were bored with International-style glass boxes. This line of thinking was exhausted some time ago. There is a growing public appetite for work with the energy to lead popular taste, not meekly follow it. Last summer, people were not breaking down doors to get into the Congress for the New Urbanism's weekend gathering in New York. They were lining up to see the show on Frank Gehry's work at the Guggenheim Museum. They were aroused by work that, like Wright's, or Brunelleschi's, found a way out of the box.
Why should this public, which takes pride in New York's image as the world's cultural beacon, be compelled to settle for cast-stone boxes? Because developers are comfortable with them? Because politicians, who depend on developers' financial support, are comfortable with them? Because corporate architects, who are dependent on developers' good graces, have fooled themselves into thinking that their work is not inferior to products of the imagination but simply different from them? Over here, developers, politicians, corporate architects and their clients. Over there, the public. That's another way to state the crisis.
We mustn't let fundamentalists scare us away from the metaphysics of urban space. They're not the only people who are entitled to talk about protective forces, angels, saints, benign interventions, duendes, dirty gods and clean ones. These entities are our neighbors. They're familiar faces to all of us who live down in Lower Manhattan.
The best thing about the financial district is that the New York Stock Exchange is housed in a pagan temple. Look up. The skyline is as packed as Freud's cabinet with ancient religious icons. There, atop the J. P. Morgan building, at 23 Wall Street, is a reproduction of the Mausoleum in Halicarnassus (what is now Bodrum in southwest Turkey), one of the Wonders of the Ancient World. The Cities Service building, at 70 Pine Street, bears aloft a quartz crystal cube. A gold pyramid caps the summit of 40 Wall, the former Bank of the Manhattan Company. A Roman brazier once flamed atop the Standard Oil Building, at 26 Broadway. The Gothic arches of the Brooklyn Bridge rival those of Chartres. If we want to talk about rebuilding downtown, let's start by putting the golden Spirit of Communication back atop the old AT&T Building, at 195 Broadway.
There are totems down here on the street, too: Palm Pilots, laptops, reflections in shop windows, ticker-tape parades, press conferences on City Hall steps, eyeglass frames at Lenscrafters, factory-fresh digital cameras, still in the box, designer suits at Century 21. Why come here if not in search of glamour, glory and gold? There is nothing shameful about such fantasies. In ancient times, temples were built to them. The contemporary imagination can barely function without them.
In certain fields, like product design and advertising, corporations can be as imaginative as you like. Corporate architecture, however, is seldom one of those areas. This has not always been the case. In 1954, Gordon Bunshaft and Henry Dreyfuss stuck a safe in the window of Manufacturer's Bank. The result was one of the most striking images in 20th-century architecture: a glass temple dedicated not to money but to the desire for whatever lies just out of reach. It has been a long time, however, since corporate architects were capable of such brilliant gestures.
This is what we're reminded of when we look at the lineup of firms on the Infrastructure Task Force Web site. It's a class portrait of architects who've put corporate marketing strategy where imagination ought to be. They are at most a production system waiting for the idea people to show up.
Just thinking about architecture in relation to the events of Sept. 11 is a major imaginative challenge. People died on that site. Even if their bodies are removed to Staten Island, this is where 6,000 people lost their lives. Corporate culture has no way of dealing with this. In corporate culture, no one ever dies. Everyone is young and glowing. The older we get, the younger we look. The fear of death is thus forestalled. Yet here is death.
Corporate America has encountered similar problems in the past: product recalls; class action suits; structural failures; hazardous wastes. It will find ways to deal with this, too. Time and space will be found to organize a competition to design a memorial. The making of memorials, in fact, has lately become an industry itself. Consultants will be enlisted from Hiroshima, Vienna and Oklahoma City. The memorial and new office towers will be artfully combined. There will be something for everyone. Everything will have been thought about, except thought itself.
There is something comforting, therapeutic, perhaps even divine about the determination to carry on. Only maniacs want the economy to fall apart. Only nut cases want cities to crumble, modernity to shrivel up, dreams to die. Even with the smoke still heavy in the air, it's desirable to live inside the world's most powerful economic engine. That desire is intrinsically healthy.
But the terrorist attack did not just create a crisis; it also exposed one. There is a cultural contradiction between the aims of corporate architects and the needs of the city they claim to represent. Here is money, here is death. Carrying on can be traumatic, even violent, as well as healing. The imagination thrives on such contradictions. The inclination of the status quo is to deny their existence, or to trivialize them into problems of design.
The Florentines embraced the contradictions of their day. The result was humanism. Through learning, the powerful undertook to support the imaginative. Arts formerly considered satanic were allowed free expression. Creativity was back. Life was affirmed. Princes didn't pretend to be artists. They hired artists. And artists didn't have to wear suits. To paraphrase Iris Murdoch, artists had the dirty, Orphic job of venturing down into the dark, hellish regions where ideas and images are formed. They came back with flawless beauty.
A sophisticated local and international audience is prepared to see how a great modern city could possibly wrap its imagination around money and death, ice cream and fate, success and terror. That audience is willing to wait. There is no rush to satisfy its expectations, certainly not while the world is still at war. The city is not a video game. Eros and Thanatos are in the air, along with heroism, connection to others, sacrifice, self-deception, grandiosity, paranoia and greed. At this early date, why should we think that any of these drives are ready to be contained?
(c) The New York Times