New Life on East Side

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.

The New York Sun

Two new buildings have recently altered the look of the Upper East Side, but only one of them for the better.

The new structure at 1510 Second Ave., occupying the southeast corner of 79th Street, represents an almost-unheard-of development in contemporary Manhattan. Rather than a bank replacing something else — as God would seem to have ordained for every available lot on the Upper East Side — here you have the nearly unique instance of something else replacing a bank (though one will, apparently, be moving into the ground floor): It is a nearly completed condominium tower designed by the firm of H. Thomas O’Hara, which can claim, among many new developments around the borough, the Impala, One Kenmore Square, and 21 E. 96th St.

One good thing about this new building is that it fills a gap in the progress of East 79th Street. For years, this key corner of Manhattan lacked a real identity, and was experienced more as an absence, an insufficiency, than as anything substantive or distinctive. While most of the street’s pre-war buildings are of a pleasingly uniform height, suddenly, at Second Avenue, a jarring hole appeared — and it has now been filled. As of this writing, the curtain wall is complete and the sheer modernist skin, with accents of ever-so-contemporary fritted glass, looks placidly elegant.

An 18-story affair, the condominium tower rises up as a cantilever over an indented base, with a slight setback beginning at the 13th floor. Though it is in some ways accomplished, the greatest problem with the building is that it is also somewhat boring. There is always a risk of that when an architect invokes the minimalist modularity of the International style in its more recent variations. In the present instance, the setback qualifies the structure without enlivening it, and it may be that, from an aesthetic point of view — never mind the dictates of the building code — this project would be better if it rose as a uniform mass. Furthermore, the building is rather discordant with its neighbors, even if it is decidedly more acceptable than is the gray slab directly across the street, which possesses all the loveliness of architecture in the former East Germany.

A decidedly more winsome building recently arose farther uptown. The area from Fifth Avenue to Park from about 100th Street to 110th is an inscrutable anomaly among the streetscapes of Manhattan:Though it possesses some very noteworthy buildings along Fifth Avenue, such as the Museum of the City of New York and the Museo del Barrio — not to mention Mount Sinai — it lacks coherence and, as you head east toward Madison Avenue, becomes rather dull.

It is in this context that we should be grateful for the new and improved Reece School, which reopened not too long ago at 25 E. 104th St. Though perhaps somewhat out of the way, the new building is worth a visit, if only on account of the lively and colorful façade. The structure is the creation of the ever-elegant New York firm of Platt Byard Dovell White. Founded in 1965, the firm specializes in a generally modernist vocabulary of right angles, enlivened by a flair for color, and qualified by such vernacular touches as brick facings. Perhaps their most acclaimed work to date in New York is the New 42 Studios, at 229 W. 42nd St., Completed in 2000. That building’s lavish use of brise-soleil across the façade predates by some seven years the use of that motif in the new and nearby New York Times Building. But what most impressed New Yorkers about the New 42 Studios was its bold introduction of color into the architecture, by using changing lights to illuminate the façade at night.

In many respects, the Reece School resembles the New 42 Studios, except that its colors are formed from tinted glass rather than from lighting. The transparent purples, yellows, and pinks of its surface recall that crisp plasticine construction paper that — in my day, at least — children were given in art class, with instructions to be creative. There is something pleasantly appropriate about that association in the context of an elementary school.

Behind the crazy-quilt pattern of colored glass, the façade is strictly rectilinear, rising five stories (not counting the rooftop space). The glass is set into a clean metal armature that protrudes in a modest cantilever from the bulk of the building. On the sides and at the ground floor, it makes way for a beige glazed brick cladding that appears to invoke — in an almost historicist way — the public school architecture of the postwar years. Though that association may not sound especially appetizing, somehow it works very nicely and evocatively as an element in the façade of this urban school.

For New Yorkers who care about architecture, the Reece School should confirm how worthy an outfit Platt Byard Dovell White really is. They may not have the highest profile in the city, but one can say of them — as of few other firms — that they are consistently interesting, and always good.


The New York Sun

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