Another Ailey Masterpiece
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
If buildings could think or feel, then the red-brick turkeys of Hell’s Kitchen would now be asking themselves, in their affronted vanity, how it should be that a swan has alighted in their midst.
For the first time in its 46 years of existence, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater has a home of its own: the Joan Weill Center for Dance at 55th Street and Ninth Avenue. This shimmering cube of high-Modernist integrity, whose eight floors contain 77,000 square feet and 12 studio spaces, was designed by Natan Bibliowicz, formerly of Skidmore Owings & Merrill and now of Iu & Bibliowicz.
Mr. Bibliowicz’s previous work includes collaborations on the Virgin Megastore in Times Square and the Jewish Community Center at Amsterdam Avenue and 76th Street.
As for the center’s interior, it preserves the rectilinear austerity of the facade, and its offices and multiple studios, one of which can be transformed into a black-box theatre, are opulent only in the sense of being clearly well-designed and well-made.
Just to the west of the Joan Weill Center’s main cube is a bearing wall whose subtly inflected red brick plays well against the cube’s pale gray and off-white infill, while separating the main building from a four-story annex in the same style. At street level the angularity of the curtain wall is relieved by seven very round pillars as well as an undulating canvas canopy that I am not so sure about. This, together with similarly undulating lengths of canvas that crown each of the two structures, is intended to invoke “Revelations,” one of Ailey’s most famous dances.
The most impressive thing about the new center is the subtlety and deftness with which the massing of its two structures, each relative to the other, has been calibrated. This sort of relationship – which awakens associations of mother and child, man and wife, or what have you – is one of the most basic competences of the architect. Yet most of our contemporaries are so deficient in this regard that they seem not even to recognize it as an option.
How often do you see, when traveling in Italy, Germany, or France, a Medieval castle or church whose composite parts, which have accumulated haphazardly through several centuries, nevertheless display a basic, intuitive, and probably unlearnable tact in the way they have been amassed? This tact has all but deserted the modern practitioners of the art of architecture. But Mr. Bibliowicz has learned the lesson very well, and other architects would do well to study his building until they have learned it too.
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Far otherwise, alas, is the new Filene’s Basement that has just opened up at 4 Union Square. Not being well acquainted with this Boston-based conglomerate, I had naively imagined that Filene’s would be located in a basement somewhere. I was therefore surprised to find it housed in a rather ambitious six-story structure whose five wide bays stretch along the southern end of Union Square Park. But one has only to enter the site to appreciate the aptness of the name. Perhaps uniquely among built structures, this building seems to have a basement on each floor.
Whether the interior is uglier than the exterior or contrariwise, is the sort of metaphysical speculation in which I prefer not to engage. Like Saint Peter’s, this 250,000-square-foot building required the talents of one architect for the interior and another for the six story facade. But rather than secure the services of Michelangelo and Maderno, Filene’s got JJ Falk Design for the former and Brennan Beer Gorman for the latter.
If I understand the process correctly, this latest structure is essentially a new face on an old skeleton, the former Bradlee’s discount department store – which was, if anything, even more unsightly. The facade is covered in unimaginative granite facing, and its few vaguely beaux-arts flourishes represent the weariest, dreariest butt end of 1980s postmodern classicism.
As to the interior, if the point of the exposed walls and ceilings was to suggest a parallel to the price of the goods – thus inverting the practice of Madi son Avenue’s boutiques, whose sumptuosity evokes the luxurious craftsmanship of their wares – then and only then would I concede the aptness of the design.
Consider the entrances. As things now stand, the building has two entrances, one for the DSW shoes flagship at street level, the other for Filenes’s itself, which occupies floors four through six. In both cases, the opportunity to create a grand entrance has been missed so thoroughly that you could well believe you were entering by the back door. The entrance to Filenes proper is, despite its aedicular marquee, even less apt than that of DSW. It is nothing more than an escalator rising through a narrow space, which it would be too charitable to call an atrium.
The completion of Filene’s represents the terminal point in that process of redeeming the southern end of Union Square, which began in 1987 with the Zeckendorf Towers, whose silly pyramids once – strange as it is now seems – looked avantgarde. That building was the work of Davis Brody Bond, who seem to own the south side of the square; they also designed Union Square South (the building with the smoking hand sticking out of it) as well as two rather more skillful NYU dormitories further east.
If they had also designed Filene’s Basement, we would all have been a little better off.