A Civic Center, Aging Gracelessly
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.

Forty years after the fact, New York’s civic center around City Hall and Foley Square is still reeling from the disastrous construction of Federal Plaza. The two buildings that flank the plaza, the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building and the U.S. Court of International Trade, are now undergoing extensive renovations, the former acquiring a wholly new entrance pavilion along Broadway, while the glass curtain wall of the latter is being systematically replaced and restored to its original purity. Nevertheless, these enhancements are unlikely to improve matters very much.
If there were any doubts about the power of city planning to elevate or to abase the daily lives of our citizens, here is all the proof you need. Placing the Federal Plaza redundantly next to Foley Square served to create two neutered zones instead of a single energetic one. And the decision to recess the Federal Building from Lafayette Street fatally undermined the architectural coherence, and thoroughly depleted the architectural energy, of the built environment surrounding Foley Square. The results have fully borne out the prediction of the British urban planner Sir William Holford. On seeing the preliminary plans, he commented that, rather than creating a vibrant center of pedestrian activity, “The open space is merely an absence of buildings or what is left over between traffic lanes.” Far more emphatically, the art critic Robert Hughes declared the plaza and its surrounding architecture to be “one of the ugliest public spaces in America. Everything, from its coarse buildings — which look the way institutional disinfectant smells — to its dry, littered fountain, begs for prolonged shiatsu with a wrecker’s ball.”
Mr. Hughes wrote those words more than 20 years ago, and if you imagine that the buildings in question look any better now, nearly a generation later, then you sorely misunderstand the dysfunctional relationship between time and Modernist architecture. The Javits Federal Building, which was a dreary black and white structure at the time of his writing, has since become an even drearier black and gray structure. For unlike the monuments of earlier ages, those of modernism grow only more corrupt with the passing of years. By the very nature of the Modernist aesthetic, these buildings were conceived as being eternally contemporary. Any slippage from that status is apt to be fatal to their effect.
A photograph in Robert A.M. Stern’s book, “New York 1960,” taken shortly after the project’s completion, records the complex, jointly designed by Alfred Easton Poor, Kahn & Jacobs, and Eggers & Higgins, in the most flattering light possible. Gifted indeed was the photographer who shot it one fine morning, as the sun rose out of the chambers of the east and emblazoned the broad, jazzily checkered expanse of the newborn building. That very breadth, and the textured, almost artificial delicacy of its latticework windows, seem so fully to embody the hopes of the architects that I had to study the photograph to make sure that it was not retouched. For the reality on the ground is, and has always been, very different indeed. The dull massiveness of this Modernist slab is not relieved, but rather accentuated to the point of provocation, by the syncopated rhythms of the windows.
In an attempt to do what they can for the building complex, the feds are now nearly done creating a broad entrance pavilion along Broadway, its masonry walls clad in dark gray granite. The guiding principle of its design, by the firm of Lehman / Smith + McLeish, seems to be that, as far as New Yorkers are concerned, buildings end around the second story. Beyond that, the theory goes, we can’t be bothered to lift our gaze and thus to notice, in the present instance, how ill-suited the new, vaguely historicist one-story structure is to the 42-story modernist thing standing directly behind it.
And that conjecture may just turn out to be correct. On the other hand, the bizarre nature of the Federal Building’s window work ensures that nothing really could ever be made to harmonize with it, and probably wouldn’t make any difference if it did. Seen in theoretical isolation, this new pavilion is contextual, but unfortunately that context has nothing to do with the context of the original construction. With its sullen, massive sequence of bays, interspersed with large glass plates, it seems more suited to the building styles seen in the Valley of the Kings in ancient Luxor.
Surely the U.S. Court of International Trade is a slightly better building, if only because it is smaller, and so there is less of it. While the Federal Building and its western addition along Broadway rise up 42 stories, this darksome, curtain-walled cube along the southeast corner of Federal Plaza is only eight stories high and is joined to the Federal Building by a mid-air bridge. It is inspired — almost to the point of plagiarism — by the aesthetic of Gordon Bunshaft’s Manufacturers Hanover Bank on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street. And its window treatment recalls another of Bunshaft’s masterpieces, Lever House on Park Avenue and 53rd Street. Nevertheless, the design integrity represented by Bunshaft’s bank is vitiated here by the distinctly 1960s aesthetic of two pale masonry braces that climb up and around the height of the courthouse.
Unlike the Federal Building, however, the glass plates of its windows are such that each can be removed and replaced. That is what is happening at the courthouse, with the result that, when the work is finished, it will look as it did when new. That won’t improve its weak design, but it may partially mitigate the corrupting influence of time on modern architecture.
jgardner@nysun.com