All About Context

New York has long had an insular architectural culture in which, with rare exceptions, New York buildings were designed by New York architects. One of our earliest professional architects, Joseph François Mangin, who designed, among much else, the exterior of City Hall, came from France. But he wasn’t a visiting French architect; he was an immigrant. The same was true of the romantic Englishmen who defined the high Victorian age in New York: Calvert Vaux, Jacob Wrey Mould, and Frederick Clarke Withers.The visitors, as distinct from the immigrants, have been rare. The Dane who designed Copenhagen’s Tivoli Gardens, Georg Carstensen, came to New York to design our Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1853. A couple of Beaux Arts Frenchmen made their way over on brief sojourns.René Sergent worked with Horace Trumbauer on the since demolished Duveen Gallery on Fifth Avenue, and Paul Duboy worked on the Ansonia Hotel on Broadway and the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument on Riverside Drive. An Englishman, J. Armstrong Stenhouse, collaborated with C.P.H. Gilbert on Otto Kahn’s mansion on 91st Street at Fifth Avenue.In the age of heroic Modernism, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed one building for New York (the Seagram), Walter Gropius designed one façade (the former Pan Am Building), Le Corbusier designed nothing, and Alvar Aalto designed one interior.The last decade has seen a sea change. New York, the capital of globalization, has for the last decade invited globe-trotting “starchitects” to do their bit for the city’s skyline. Such works include Raimund Abraham’s Austrian Cultural Foundation (11 W. 52nd St. at Fifth Avenue), 1992; Aldo Rossi’s Scholastic Building (557 Broadway, between Prince and Spring streets), 1995; Christian de Portzamparc’s LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton) Building (57th Street at Madison Avenue), 1999; Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower (Eighth Avenue at 56th Street), 2005; Renzo Piano’s Morgan Library & Museum (Madison Avenue at 35th Street), 2006; Jean Nouvel’s 40 Mercer St. apartments, 2007, and the forthcoming Fulton Street Transit Center by Nicholas Grimshaw. Most telling of all is that the World Trade Center site is now slated to be rebuilt by two Englishmen, Foster and Richard Rogers, a Spaniard, Santiago Calatrava, and a Japanese, Fumihiko Maki.The globe-trotting architects have what we might call a globalist agenda. They don’t pay much attention to the contexts of their works. Most of their buildings would be as suited to the skylines of Hong Kong or Dubai as to that of New York. This is different from the New Yorker Robert A.M. Stern’s apartment building at 15 Central Park West, which is all about context, and about which the New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger smartly said it could only have been built in New York.Of the buildings designed by foreign architects noted above, one strikes me as less of a globalist object building and as more of a New York building than the others, and that is Christian de Portzamparc’s LVMH Building. At first glance, it may look Frank Gehryesque, like his IAC Building at 555 W. 18th St. That is, it billows and bulges, like a sail in the wind. This is the sort of thing architects do a lot of these days — because they can. Between computer-based design tools and innovations in glass manufacture, architects no longer feel constrained by the grid. The problem, as I see it, is that the new freedom has caused architects to slink back into the giddy recesses of their own imaginations, and to ignore context. But on closer look, I don’t think that’s what Mr. Portzamparc did.The first time I saw Mr. Portzamparc’s building I thought of Ely Jacques Kahn’s Bricken Casino Building on Broadway at 39th Street. Completed in 1931, that garment center building by one of the most imaginative Art Deco architects has a complexly massed stepped-back form, giving off the impression of a bias-cut gown, which Madeleine Vionnet had introduced in 1927. The LVMH Building first of all rises in setbacks, with a base of two glass parts that angle out from each other.Above these rises a glass tower, on the right half of which a glass wedge, itself composed of two distinct triangular sections, veils the glass plane behind it. The dress metaphor is unmistakable, and if it’s a little more Comme des Garçons than Vionnet, I can’t believe Mr. Portzamparc didn’t look at Kahn’s building. Mr. Portzamparc’s “skinsmanship,” too, especially the way the glass has a kind of crinkly affect, owes something, perhaps, to New York’s other great Art Deco master, Ralph Walker, who in buildings such as One Wall Street worked out the possibilities of making skyscraper “curtain walls” look like fabric.I’ll be frank: The LVMH Building is the only one of the “starchitect” buildings in New York I really like. And it would not succeed as it does if it were not snuggled between two masonry buildings. As for sheer elegance I am not quite sure it matches Ely Jacques Kahn — or Walker & Gillette’s marvelous Fuller Building across Madison Avenue. But it does suggest how some of the dreams of our 1930s-era architects may be fulfilled by new technology.

All About Context

All About Context

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