Fixing the City’s Ugliest Facades

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The New York Sun

The thousands of white-brick buildings around New York City stand as a metaphor for Modernism itself. Both in theory and in the hopes of postwar developers, white brick represented the eternal now, a geometric functionalism so pure that all-devouring time could find no purchase there. But time has long since insinuated itself among these cracked bricks, feasting upon their pristineness and turning them the gray of soot and asphalt and the Lincoln Tunnel.


White brick, even if it had proved timeless, would still be inexcusably ugly. Like all Modernist structures, and unlike all earlier structures, these buildings become ever more degraded with the passing of the years. Time, the ally of Greek temples and Gothic cathedrals, is the mortal enemy of the Modern movement, which presumed, through its programmatic anti-contextualism, to keep time at bay.


I do not believe that there is any city in the world that comes close to New York in the prevalence of its whitebrick facades. They can be found in each of the five boroughs, and no avenue in Manhattan is free of their influence. White bricks adorn luxury buildings like those of Robert Bien along Fifth Avenue, middle-income residential high-rises on Second Avenue, and projects in the Bronx. But even the best of them – including Gordon Bunshaft’s landmark Manhattan House at Third Avenue and 65th Street – are inexcusably ugly. And no attempt to glaze the brick yellow or blue or varied patterns of gray and white can redeem that ugliness.


That glazed brick buildings are a sad chapter in the history of Gotham is hardly news, notwithstanding the efforts of revisionists to make a claim for them. What is interesting, however, is how various owners and co-op boards have recently undertaken to modify, if not abolish, the white brick on their facades.


The best and the worst of these interventions are near East 58th Street. The best is at the southwest corner of Lexington Avenue and 59th Street, where the brick is being replaced with a fairly elegant sheer-glass curtain wall that now rises up six floors and will eventually climb all the way to the top. This transition will win no awards for inventiveness, but it is a respectable attempt to make the best of a bad thing. It is of the present but promises to age better than the white brick that it replaces.


Surely the most bungled attempt at an intervention is the one at 58th Street and Third Avenue, which – amazingly – is called the Decoration & Design Building. The base of this sharply angled, 18-story ziggurat of strip windows and white brick is a limestone prosthesis of neo-baroque rustication whose arches, graced with capstones and mullioned lunettes, unbelievably invoke the baths of Diocletian in Rome. You would think that the architects or their designer clients would have enough visual sense to see how ridiculous the result is. Worse still is the cynicism of their apparent assumption that, this being New York, no one ever lifts his gaze beyond the second story of a building.


Only slightly better than this attempt is 1050 Fifth Avenue, at the northeast corner of 86th Street, where a vaguely classical limestone base has been slapped onto the facade in a paltry and insufficient attempt to integrate the building into its more genteel Upper East Side context.


What these buildings show is that there is a right way and a wrong way to go about the thankless task of concealing the fact that you inhabit a white brick building. Clearly the attempt should not even be made unless you are committed to changing the entire structure from the ground up, removing and replacing every single white brick. For not only is this material ugly in itself; it also refuses on principle to cooperate with any other material known to man.


One of the more successful interventions recently took place at 35 E. 85th Street, on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue. In a labor that continued for at least five years, the co-op board replaced every last white brick with red-brick cladding; various ornamental trims and surrounds relieve the tedium of the brick that reaches, through the block, all the way to 86th Street. Again, this building will win no awards for innovative design. But it now respects its architectural context and succeeds in looking pre-war (that Holy Grail of real estate agents), as though it had always been meant to look as it does today.


The same cannot be said for 27 E. 65th Street, exactly a mile to the south. One of the most garish examples of the white-brick phenomenon, it was actually covered once in blue brick. That sounds pleasant enough in theory, but in practice it was suffocatingly dreary in all but the finest weather. This facade has also been replaced by one of red brick, but without any of the contextual tricks and adornments that appear on the building at 85th Street. The result is scarcely better than what it supplants, despite the expenditure of several million dollars and several years of chaos at street level – all to rectify a mistake that should never have been allowed in the first place.


The New York Sun

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