Casting a Spell in SoHo
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.
SoHo has a new interior of which it can be proud: the recently completed Longchamp boutique at 132 Spring Street, between Wooster and Greene Streets.
This is the work of Thomas Heatherwick, who at 36 is one of the Young Turks of contemporary British architecture and design. There is often a strong element of engineering to his creations, as is evident in his most famous project to date, the Rolling Bridge, which curls up and away to let boats pass through London’s Grand Union Canal. Above all, however, Mr. Heatherwick is a form-maker, even a sculptor: He appears more interested in occupying than containing space. His forms consist of slippery curves, sharp angles, and even spikes. Their one constant is that they must be striking and unique.
Mr. Heatherwick’s penchant for engineering and form-making is emphatically present in the Longchamp flagship. This boutique does exactly what retail interiors are supposed to do: It stops you in your tracks.
What you see as you enter is a surging atrium accessed by a stairway that twists, pivots, and swirls like some length of salt-water toffee. With no real point other than to look fabulous, this vision – 55 tons worth of rust-colored, hot-rolled steel – billows and bounds up to the second floor in an elaborate sequence of walkways, landings and steps. Its wiry railings, or balustrades, are adorned with clear but warped glass whose apparent fragility contrasts with the industrialstrength massiveness of the stairs themselves.
It turns out that the store purveys expensive leather-goods from France, and it is not clear what the design has to do with what is being sold. It should also be said that the rest of the interior, adorned with bare brick and walls in off-white and pale yellow does not quite live up to the initial jolt of the entrance way. But by then the spell is cast.
***
Several months ago, an error of aesthetic judgment was accomplished through the mediation of an agency indistinguishable from myself. Or, to put it in less self-serving terms: I was wrong.
As I reassess my initial, shoot-fromthe-hip opinion of 325 Fifth Avenue, designed by the Stephen B. Jacobs Group, it is a distinct pleasure to discover and declare the error of my ways. In an article that appeared in the Sun on April 29, I found this residential tower to be “so devoid of interest as to be almost interesting.”
There is always some uncertainty as to when a building is ripe for review. Two months ago, as I looked at the nearly completed 325 Fifth Avenue, I was confident that I knew where the architect was heading in a building that felt all but complete. It seemed to me that the tall residential slab at 325 Fifth Avenue meant to go the way of the Mayfair on West 72nd Street, which represented the most crass intrusion of mid-cult modernism into the genteel skyline of the Upper West Side. The bristling array of cantilevered balconies that were then under construction at 325 Fifth Avenue persuaded me that that assessment was correct.
But a few subtle shifts in the treatment of the exterior made all the difference, as can now be seen. Mr. Jacobs has created a far better and more intelligent revision of the modernist residential slab than I had foreseen.
Now far closer to completion, the building is clearly distinguishable from its mid-century models. There is an ivory tone to the overall structure, inflected with the pale green infill of the window treatments. Best of all are the balconies, which appear to have been inspired in part by those of Richard Meier’s three buildings on or near Perry Street. They are uniform, regimented lengths of grayish-green translucent glass that accord very nicely with the window infill and which tend to come flush to the corners of the building. This chromatic subtlety shows that the architect is not merely creating by rote, that he is re-imagining things in some interesting way. That fact is also clear in the charming decision to isolate a row of far smaller balconies along the southern facade.
The larger lesson to be learned from this building, aside from the one that you (or at least I) shouldn’t rush to judgment, is that whenever modernism is reinterpreted in a postmodern key, it is apt to be improved in the process.The great alertness to the textures and sensory associations of materials that is exhibited in Mr. Jacobs’s building suggests, by its absence, what was the foremost failing of the modern movement.
