SoHo’s Storybook Starchitect

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

For the second time in six months, the hotelier and developer Andre Balazs has sent me a publicity brochure so audacious as to demand a response. In the rhetoric of real estate, nothing can match his prospectus for 40 Mercer Street, a luxury condo that has just begun to rise in SoHo, designed by the renowned French architect Jean Nouvel. The reason I draw your attention to this document of the zeitgeist it that it happens to represent nothing less than the quiddity of SoHo.


The brochure looks like a weighty 19th century board game, its expansive persimmon cover teaming with flowery adornments. When I opened its magnetized box, I found a large, thin volume whose dimensions and illustrations resembled those of a children’s book. Across its blue cloth binding was the image of a running lapdog and the words “Jacques et Jill.” As if that Eurotrash touch were not enough, you lifted the book out of its box not by pulling at the silver bell that was attached to its spine with an orange cord but by tugging at a flap that bore the words, “Tirez ici.”


The book, subtitled “A Soho Neighborhood Love Story,” is a dopey little tale about two lapdogs, and it seems a tad too comfortable in the presumption of its own adorability. We are introduced to Jacques’s master Jean, a black-clad aesthete with a shaved head. Those of us who are in the know – and you may be sure that such gladsome self-identification is the real point of the book – understand that this is Mr. Nouvel himself, who hereby becomes, unless I missed something, the first “starchitect” to appear in a children’s book.


Soon we learn that “Jean loves culture,” and to prove it we see a picture of old Baldilocks at Deitch Projects (once again, for those of us who are “in the know” about the gallery scene). Another scene shows two beanpole Ford models walking by a storefront emblazoned with the single word “Moss.” Kate? To make a short story even shorter, the volume abounds with many such local references: to Balthazar, the Hotel Mercer, Dean & DeLuca, etc.


Unlike the previous brochure I received from Mr. Balazs, which did what it could for an essentially mediocre structure by Richard Gluckman at 1 Kenmare Square, this one has the good sense to provide floor plans and the vital statistics of each apartment. It also publicizes a building that holds some promise. A handsomely rectilinear affair of glass and steel, it recalls, among other things, Mr. Nouvel’s Fondation Cartier on the Boulevard St. Michel in Paris.


Over a five-story base articulated by almost Miesian mullions and capped by a large landscaped terrace, the building will rise an additional eight stories in an austerely elegant setback that comes to a head in a sumptuous penthouse. (Typically, the living room in the rendering prominently features one of Jeff Koons’s silver rabbits.) As promising as Mr. Nouvel’s design may be, however, let it be said that its International Style vocabulary seems entirely out of place at the intersection of Mercer and Grand.


Which elicits the question: What has SoHo become, especially west of Broadway? I confess I had been feeling bad for the neighborhood lately. Time was, some 10 years ago, when I would trek down there frequently to cover the gallery scene. That has since moved en masse to Chelsea, but SoHo still acts as if it were the center of the art world. Beyond that, it is now the Eurotrash capital of North America. Surely Chelsea vies for that title, but its galleries suggest – however mendaciously – a certain intellectual aspiration that is mostly alien to the species in question.


In SoHo, there is little to trouble one’s head over. Everything looks, tastes, and is chic, and the only rift in the rainbow is the possibility that you may not catch a reference to Balthazar or Dean & DeLuca. If you happen to identify with this general description, Andre Balazs has an apartment he would like to sell you.


***


As of this writing, last-minute appeals are speeding through the legal system in a desperate attempt to stop the destruction of 2 Columbus Circle, Edward Durrell Stone’s parabolic Venetian palazzo just southeast of Time Warner Center. At the same time, a new exhibition has just opened at the Center for Architecture, featuring Brad Cloepfil’s latest design for the building. Though the shape and dimensions of Stone’s controversial structure will be preserved, the exterior cladding and most of the interior will be fundamentally reconceived.


There are good reasons to overhaul the existing building, most pertinently that it is largely unusable and impractical in its present form. That, however, is the only case that can be made for those who seem so eager to start anew. To argue, as Sherida Paulsen, former director of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, recently did, that the 1964 building is not important architecturally, that it is basically like any other building, is not so much a misdirected opinion as an error of fact. Nothing in the city, or anywhere else, looks quite like 2 Columbus Circle, and the idea of a palazzo surrounded, not by the waters of a lagoon, but by waves of traffic, has a potent enchantment to it.


It would also be nice if, in interviews, Mr. Cloepfil were not so cavalier in dismissing, even mocking New Yorkers who happen to care about their architectural heritage. Indeed, he might have made a stronger case if his own design were better. In a previous column I wrote in praise of one of his earlier renderings for the building, which had a suggestive diaphaneity about it. That, however, seems to have disappeared from the latest renderings, which strike me as less appealing than what they aspire to replace.


In full deconstructivist mode (we haven’t seen that before!) Mr. Cloepfil has conceived the space almost as a paper bag like the one children cut up at Halloween and place over a candle so that it looks real spooky. Irregular snippets are removed from the exterior in such a way as to expose, to “interrogate” its immateriality. It may work better in practice than in the renderings, but I have a sinking feeling that we are about to replace a Venetian palazzo with a paper bag.


jgardner@nysun.com


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