As of this writing, a momentous question stands before the Landmarks Preservation Commission: Should it give its blessing and its protection to Manhattan House, the white-brick monolith that occupies an entire city block between Second and Third avenues and 65th and 66th streets ? Unlike most buildings that come before the commission, Manhattan House is not a frilly beaux-arts affair heavy with vernacular charm. It is one of the most severe examples of modernism in the city. And the case could be made, for better or worse, that it is the single most influential structure ever conceived in New York. For Manhattan House, built in 1950, is the very first and probably the biggest of the white brick structures that accounted for so much of the borough’s residential architecture in the postwar period.

Developed by New York Life Insurance and designed by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it has the distinction of implementing Le Corbusier’s urbanisitic ideas fully two years before the master could do so in his first Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles, France. The plan was to create a vertical city within the city, indeed, almost a city unto itself. The problem with that equation is that such a building could assert its formal and functional autonomy only by denying, both in theory and in practice, any connection to the larger city in which it exists. A traffic median stands like a breaker between Manhattan House and 66th Street, while on 65th Street the hulking structure sullenly turns its back on the Upper East Side, concealing its landscaped terrace from the prying eyes of pedestrians.

It is hard to love this building, except for that spontaneous affection that humans have for anything that has been in one place for most of living memory. What it has lost in revolutionary newness, it has not gained back, and never will, in that patina of fuzzy sentiment that we associate with the Plaza and the New York Public Library. Its 19-story bulk, comprising 581 units, rises as pallisaded slab from a gray base along one of the longest avenue blocks in the city. The turret-like protuberances terminate, with the most inexorable rationality, in an uninflected roof.

Manhattan House must be seen in the flesh in order to be properly assessed. In photographs, even those most sympathetic to its cause, this monolith cannot help but look like every other white brick building to which it gave rise. Seen face to face, however, it strikes the impartial viewer first with its almost Pharaonic immensity, like some object lesson in mankind’s power, audacity, and even hubris. It takes a practiced eye, a certain deposit of faith and good will, to see how and to what degree this building is better than such pallid imitations as the nearby Imperial House, designed by Emory Roth & Sons in 1960, which takes up the entirety of the somewhat smaller block from Lexington to Third Avenue between 68th and 69th streets.

Manhattan House is, after all, the creation of the chief architect of SOM during its glory days, the man who brought us such iconic and hugely influential projects as Lever House and the Manufacturer’s Hanover Trust Bank on Fifth Avenue and 43rd Street. It is also worth remembering that he chose to live in an apartment near the top floor of Manhattan House. You can see Bunshaft’s habitual refinement in the smooth, silken texture of the glazed brick skin, so like and yet so unlike all the imitations within walking distance. Both the metal window surrounds and the cantilevered balconies that bristle from nearly every apartment have a crispness and a geometric authority that suggest the hand of a master. The spacious, open lobby as well, clad in burnished granite and floor -toceiling windows, epitomizes a particular brand of postwar elegance.

That, however, is the best that can be said for the building. Unlike other International Style projects by Bunshaft, the proliferation of brick, rather than clear glass, results in a facade that is unavoidably heavy and graceless. In the one apartment I have visited, low ceilings and narrow windows engendered a pervasive and particularly modernist gloom. But perhaps the most typical and dispiriting aspects of the project are those wayward insinuations of age that have entered into and subverted the geometric purity that was Bunshaft’s stock in trade. Here, as in other white brick buildings around the city, the cracks in the poorly landscaped median along 66th Street, as well as the fracturing and discoloration of some of the bricks, has resulted in a quality approaching sleaziness that attaches specifically to the artifacts of the modern movement. These, unlike the remnants of almost every other architectural style, can only be undermined, rather than enhanced, by the superventions of age.

Although there is no compelling reason at this time to alter the building dramtically, I would argue against landmark status for this specific instance of modernism. It is quite simply too big and too unlovely an architectural act to be preserved forever through the wayward logic of sentiment or through any awareness of its undeniable historical consequence. Indeed, the malign influence that it was destined to have on the subsequent history of architecture in New York suggests a spirit that ought to be exorcised rather than enshrined.

jgardner@nysun.com