Trendiness Is Illuminated
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.

Allow me to express my gratitude to Andre Balazs, the fabulously trendy hotelier, for sending me a photograph of a naked lady. It was included in an oversized brochure for his newest venture, One Kenmare Square, an apartment building on Lafayette Street between Spring and Broome.
What the good woman had to do with residential real estate was at first a mystery to me, until a friend, himself a developer, explained: “If you buy one of the apartments, women will take off their clothes for you.” Whether that is the case or not, certainly the image of that statuesque woman (to invoke the house style of the New York Times) went far to palliate what would otherwise be one of the more disagreeable documents in the recent literature of real-estate promotion.
Rather than including anything as crassly mercantile as a floor plan or the vital statistics of the 53 units for sale, it consists of Herb Rittsian etudes in black-and-white: a man in a taxi, a hand bearing the words “I have choices,” and, of course, the naked lady. To these are added a sequence of large half-length portraits of Mr. Balazs himself and of Richard Gluckman, architect of the Kenmare, several Gagosian galleries, and the most recent Whitney expansion.
Because this document’s graphics are modeled on the late Tibor Kalman’s even more imbecilic efforts for Benetton’s Colors magazine, a lengthy text is included, consisting of a conversation between the two men. Though it illuminates approximately nothing, it has the virtue of distilling an attitude that is abroad, if not in the land, at least in a few crucial blocks of Chelsea, SoHo, and Nolita.
Consider these two quotations, from Messrs. Balazs and Gluckman respectively: “Balthazar [the restaurant] is closer to the front door of the Kenmare than most hotel restaurants are to the hotel rooms.” And: “If you go to Paris, maybe you want to stay in the Ritz because it’s on the Place Vendome. Locations are significant. [The Kenmare] has that kind of geographic significance.”
What these words suggest is an attempt to extend the mystique of the boutique hotel so far into the daily lives of a certain subset of the population that there is no daylight between them. Life becomes an ongoing pageant of trendiness, of celebrity by association, of assimilating one’s vitality to the pages of Details magazine.
As an avowed capitalist, I have absolutely no problem with Mr. Balazs’s efforts to batten upon the credulity of his insecure clientele. My fear is that he is starting to believe his own hype and that others, even more superficial than he, will attribute such heft to his worldview that the Kenmare will become yet one more temple to the God of Bling.
All of this might be tolerable if Mr. Gluckman’s building were any good. He has done some fine work in the past, but this most recent effort is almost obtusely drab: Its 11 stories of neo-Modern ribbon windows are interlaced with glazed brick in-fill. The only distinguishing characteristic is a slightly undulating facade, whose implicit drama is not nearly dramatic enough to countermand the banality of the rest of the building’s conception.
Though not yet complete, the Kenmare is already clashing with the century-old loft spaces that flank it. And despite what you will soon hear, there is nothing challenging or interesting about this confrontation, precisely because Mr. Gluckman’s design, even according to its own premises, is too compromised and timid for that ever to occur.
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The idea that Mr. Gluckman might wish to stick to creating art spaces is made plausible by the new Tony Shafrazi Gallery in Chelsea, which he and Mr. Shafrazi designed together. Though Mr. Gluckman is best known for antiseptic white cubes, here he revels in the Brutalist poetry of raw concrete, exposed brick, and minaret board.
Because this space formerly housed a taxi garage, the ramp at the entrance has been transformed into one of the most punishingly steep stair ways this side of the Ara Coeli in Rome. (For those lacking a sense of adventure, there is an elevator to the side.) The second or main floor has an abundance of right angles, skylights, and, as soon as the trees arrive from Florida, a diminutive bamboo garden.
Once you reach the top of the stairs and turn away from the reception desk, you see, separated from you by the stairwell, a small space marked by austere metal railings, that seems at first to be widowed and unreachable. Figuring out how to get to it is part of the adventure of this new gallery.
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There were, I’m sorry to say, two inaccuracies in my last column. I mentioned that Renzo Piano’s proposed expansion of the Whitney would have seven residential floors. This was based on a hasty misreading of the press release which stated, “Number of Floors Above Ground: 9 (16 residential).” What that meant, as I should have understood, was that the building would contain nine high-ceiling floors rising to a height that, in a residential building, would be 16 stories tall.
As regards the lead item in the column, I mentioned that the architect of the plaza outside the GM Building, now under construction, was Gensler Architects. They are indeed involved in the project, but, as one of their press representatives e-mailed me after publication, the main design firm involved is Moed de Armas & Shannon. I was impressed by her command of this information since, when I asked her, previous to publication, who the other firm was, she claimed to have no knowledge. And when I called the building’s owner, Billy Macklowe, of Macklowe Associates, for that information, his secretary told me that he would get back to me, which he may eventually do.
All that aside, what I was able to learn about the new configuration of the site, that it would be flat and have two reflecting pools a la Seagram Building, was accurate. What I could not learn was that, at its center, a large glass cube may or may not lead pedestrians down into a subterranean Apple Computer store. At all events, to judge from the rendering that was given to the New York Times two days later (which may well explain the stonewalling), the project, scheduled for completion in the fall, will be lovely.