A New Icon Signifying Nothing

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The New York Sun

For better or worse, New York is about to get a new “iconic building,” if I may invoke the buzzword of the hour. And since New York has so few buildings that, like Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao, seek originality at any price, the arrival of Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower at 57th Street and Eighth Avenue, its exterior all but complete, compels our attention. But the new Hearst headquarters feels like a failed icon.


If there is one thing that iconic buildings are good at, it is looking iconic. Although many are formal and artistic failures, at least they successfully mark their territory and, through some bold use of computer generated, gravity-defying design, represent something truly new. Clearly, the Hearst Corporation was after something that would signal to the city and the world its aspirations to cutting-edginess. The problem is that, while the new building is unique, it is not especially bold by the standards of other iconic buildings, or even by the standards of what Mr. Foster has pulled off elsewhere in the world.


So what if his Swiss Re Building in the City of London leaks? This ovoid contraption for living, which has been compared to everything from a gherkin to a phallus, is so striking as it rises above the Thames that no one who has seen it will ever forget it. The same can be said for Mr. Foster’s London City Hall, a disequilibrated egg of a building so stunningly odd that, even as you stand next to it, you suspect it might be trick photography.


But the spontaneous memorability of those structures is lacking in the 46-story Hearst Tower. Its one attention grabbing feature is a support of stainless-steel diagonal grids along the northern and southern facades, which has been likened to an accordion. As a matter of personal taste, I don’t find these facets especially attractive. Their integrity is compromised by the flatness and ordinariness of the eastern and western facades of the building, where the diagrid pattern is reduced to flat inlays not substantially different from those used by Gordon Bunshaft back in 1974 at 9 W. 57th Street.


Furthermore, compared to Mr. Foster’s other buildings, this visual element isn’t all that striking, especially as it was also seen in the architect’s design for the two “kissing towers,” which were to rise above ground zero. And the realities of the New York skyline are such that there is no good angle from which to see the Hearst Tower. Its interaction with the other high-rises in the area, even more mediated than itself, is unlikely to produce any memorable contrasts.


The new tower rises above the eviscerated shell of the old Hearst Building, which was designed by Joseph Urban in 1928 in a style that combined a vague classicism with elements of Art Deco. Urban would go on to create some of New York’s more inventive modernist structures of the 1930s – like the auditorium of the New School – but here he was somewhat tame and traditional.


For decades, his six-story base cried out for a tower, and over the years several were planned; only now has something been erected. Yet to say Mr. Foster’s design does not work well with Urban’s is a pallid understatement. Not only is each structure undistinguished in itself, each has the unhappy effect of neutralizing the formal aspirations of the other.


Doubtless we were supposed to believe that the contrast of these two styles would produce a fascinating, jarring collision that is the essence of New York. That little piece of humbug is always reheated in circumstances such as this. But the two parts of the building inhabit parallel planes of architectural discourse that never meet or intersect.


Each is the victim of that compromise, that pulled punch so ingrained in the architectural reflexes of New Yorkers. Urban’s structure is not especially exuberant as classicism or Art Deco, while Mr. Foster’s is rather tame by the standards of Deconstructivism. If both had been more extreme in their fidelity to their chosen architectural terms, perhaps their clashing interaction might have produced something worth seeing. But that was not the case. The best that can be said for the saw-toothed profile of the Hearst Tower is that it will probably make little difference to the inhabitants. We will know more when the interior is completed in a few months.


This is what happens to iconic buildings when they arrive in New York, a place where almost everything architectural is of necessity compromised and defanged. Iconic buildings are so called because the are supposed to signal or represent something, the way Mr. Foster’s glassdomed reconstruction of the Reichstag in Berlin conveys light, transparency, and openness. What does the new Hearst Tower tell us about the Hearst Corporation? Nothing. When all is said and done, it is a study in tautology, as well as a sign of the times: an iconic building for a corporation that craves an iconic building because it looks iconic.


The New York Sun

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