Nouvel Richness on Mercer Street
The history of a building is like the life of a man. Just as death represents the loss of all the memories and moods that make each of us irreplaceable, so, with equal poignancy, the demolition of a building, even the humblest, entails the irretrievable extinction of all that ever happened within the ambit of its walls.
By the same token, however, the sudden appearance of a building feels almost as miraculous as a human birth. Where there was nothing, now there is something very big indeed, a place in which generations of men and women will change and evolve and pass their lives.
This is the feeling I had standing in front of the new building that Jean Nouvel designed for developer Andre Balazs at 40 Mercer St. No building perished in order for this new one to be built. Rather it usurped the space of that ever rarer species in Manhattan, the parking lot. In the past, these urban eyesores were everywhere, a standing reproach to any neighborhood that could sustain them. Here was proof that there was space to spare, that more revenue could be generated by parking cars than by building homes. But now, with the vertiginous ascent of real estate values in Manhattan and beyond, the time will soon come when these lots no longer exist in the five boroughs.
Such meditations on mortality might seem odd in the context of Jean Nouvel's newest and nearly completed residential project. There is an unapologetic neomodernism to its design, the sort that parades, almost defiantly, the relentless logic of its modular rigor. Some critics will try to sell you on the idea that this very modularity is a higher form of contextualism, that it echoes a similar geometric regularity in the cast-iron buildings that surround it. That's a nice thought, but the effect of the new building is precisely what you would expect from a modernist slab set into the context of the beaux-arts tradition: a jarring blast of gleaming, opulent, but unadorned structural integrity that stops you short when you come upon it, so suddenly, as you head north from Canal Street.
As architecture goes, it is a very good building, just as you might expect from the man who gave us the Fondation Cartier and the Insitut du Monde Arabe, as well as the new and intermittently excellent Musée du Quai Branly, all three in Paris. Conceived before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the building was originally supposed to be a hotel. But after the radical shift in the economy of Lower Manhattan, not to mention the premium on residential real estate, the decision was made to develop the site as condominiums. In the process, the design, but not the overall spirit of the place, was changed, and two floors were added to make a seven-story slab atop a five-story base, with views on Mercer, Grand, and Broadway.
In fairness to Mr. Nouvel, who has always been one of the more sensitive and inventive of the neomodernists, it should be said that various formal devices ensure an overall effect that is neither forbidding nor banal. Although the façade consists almost entirely of a curtain wall, its units are broad, horizontal, and nearly tripartite along Mercer and Grand streets — almost like the fabled Chicago windows of Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham at the turn of the last century — but become suddenly smaller and more traditional along Broadway. Then the massing of the base is unexpectedly interrupted two-thirds of the distance from Broadway to Mercer along Grand Street, almost as though it were considering splitting into two autonomous structures. Despite the somber darkness of the metal frame, whose Miesian I-beams have impeccable modernist credentials, some gracenotes of colors flourish in the oddest, most unexpected places: the transparent magenta canopy facing Mercer Street, for instance, as well as the paler red cladding at the interstitial area toward Broadway and, at the very summit, a blast of translucent, International Klein Blue glass that forms a balcony.
The weakest part of the project is the northern façade, facing what will soon become a concrete courtyard and the entrance to an underground garage. The problem here is not the largely windowless expanse of metal cladding, but the drably unimaginative ranks of balconies that recall the sort of default midcentury modernism which, in so many other respects, Mr. Nouvel's new building far surpasses.
One would like to be able to say the same of a recently announced project that Mr. Nouvel has designed for 19th Street and 11th Avenue. This will rise up near Frank Gehry's new IAC Building (the Sails) with which — should it ever be built — it will seem entirely incompatible. The effect of their juxtaposition promises to be a little like Laurel and Hardy, if not Abbott and Costello, the one squat and misshapen, the other tall and — well, also misshapen. Rising as a fairly conventional 23-story tower on a base and containing condominiums, of course, its main claim to fame is the "1,647 completely different colorless windowpanes organized within enormous steel-framed ‘megapanels' that range from 11 to 16 feet tall and as wide as 37 feet across" (according to cityrealty.com). To judge from the widely published rendering, however, its rough and harried surface will have all the appeal of chapped skin. It is not at all uncommon for projects, in the course of their gestation, to change significantly from their initial renderings. We must hope that this will be the case here as well, and that Mr. Nouvel will reconsider this latest design.
