Architecture of the Suburban Taskmaster
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With the opening, this past weekend, of a huge Home Depot in the Flatiron District, you might be excused for feeling that the dread shadow of suburbia was beginning to encroach upon Gotham. I am not sure what larger implications, if any, are to be drawn from the arrival of this massive retailer in one of the more august Victorian structures on West 23rd Street. Perhaps it is payback time for all those emissaries of urbanism, the Bloomies, the Pradas, and the Starbucks, that we have sent forth into the suburbs to tame the savage inhabitants of our hinterland.
As I was walking through that part of the city the other day, it occurred to me that in fact there were many more of these odd outposts of the burbs in some of the more grimily urban sections of our city. I refer specifically to two new hotels, both of them by a little-known architect named Gene Kaufman, that have just opened in the West 20s.
What engages my interest in these two new hotels, what constitutes their mysterium, is the fact that they are so utterly typical that most people will pay not the slightest attention to them. Indeed, to most people they aren’t really architecture at all, but something closer to midnight mushrooms that have appeared out of nowhere and are simply there. Even if they constitute much if not most of what certain tourists will see when they visit our fair city, the majority of New Yorkers will pass them a thousand times without giving them so much as a glance.
The newer of the two hotels is the Four Points Sheraton at 160 W. 25th Street. Although, at 18 stories, it towers above its neighbors, there is something so shy in the way it recedes 20 feet from the street that even if you are looking for it and know where it is, you might well miss it at first.
Though ultimately undistinguished, it is not a bad-looking building in its derivatively postmodern fashion. With resistless regularity, its flattened mass rises up in four bays divided by a gray stone infill that serves as the dominant feature of the facade. It may be that Mr. Kaufman felt it was an inspired flourish to append a kind of wispy dark blue oriel around the 16th floor. In its eccentric, angled protrusion from the main mass of the building, this was supposed, I imagine, to represent an impish dash of anarchy and to enliven the monolithic sameness of the rest of the building. In fact, it does neither. Most people, whether passers-by or guests of the hotel, do not get paid to look up at buildings and so will probably never even see this flourish. But it is reflected, to similar effect, in the angled entranceway, which is connected to the street by an incongruously long canopy of glass and steel.
Just as there are recurring formal tropes in the plays of Shakespeare and in the operas of Mozart, so it is interesting to observe distinct similarities between the Sheraton and another recent hotel by Mr. Kaufman: the nearby Hampton Inn at 108 W. 24th Street. It is two floors higher than the Sheraton, and, rather than being a monolith, it consists of two tones of gray. And yet, it is the same width as the Sheraton and rises in four similarly shaped and spaced bays of windows. It too is recessed from the street with a long canopy that protrudes from the building. But, in its concrete massiveness, this canopy has none of the postmodern lightness of the Sheraton’s, and the entranceway is marked by a similar heaviness. Here as well, two stories from the top, there is a kind of oriel, this time a glass-curtain wall, intended to relieve the uniform mass of the rest of the building. Here as well it is too little, too late.
A much better building than either, and one that goes far to redeem Mr. Kaufman, is the modest, but quite lovely 224 W. 18th Street. It is, in fact, striking to see how much better he becomes when he is let off the leash of his suburban taskmasters. This 12-story residential building is entirely urban, even urbane, in mood. With five bays of shallow punched-windows, punctuated by pale brick infill, the facade feels much lighter and more graceful than do the facades of the two hotels. The metal window frames and the cantilevered street-level canopy are handled with a skill and sensitivity one would never have suspected on the basis of this architect’s other work.
The real drama begins above the sixth floor, when the uniform mass of the base begins to fritter away in a tangle of railings, cantilevered balconies, and angled setbacks. These disrupt the smooth ascent of the building through four floors, until, at the very top, harmonious order is attained once again. This building, especially in the context of the architect’s hotels, is one of the more pleasant surprises in one of the least surprising sections of Manhattan.
As regards future projects by Mr. Kaufman, we may look forward, if that is the term, to a Holiday Inn at 15 W. 45th Street, in 2006, and yet another Hampton Inn, this time at Herald Square, where it is set to open next year.