Two Old Hands Veer Toward the Modern

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The New York Sun

Unless I miss my guess, Slate Condominiums, which is approaching completion at 165 W. 18th St. in Chelsea, has the distinction of being the first building to manifest the influence of Raimund Abraham’s Austrian Cultural Forum, that icon of icons over at 11 E. 52nd St.

Completed in 2002, the Forum is one of the latest landmarks in Midtown, a 24-story structure squeezed into a lot intended for a town house. To the consternation of passersby, its hulking, gray metallic mass slopes sharply downward, the bastard child of an Easter Island totem and a Tyrolean skiramp. Not surprisingly, Mr. Abraham’s building doesn’t function very well, an inevitable consequence of the narrow space into which it has been so unceremoniously shoehorned. Furthermore, the details of the interior are paltry and the South Pacific symbolism of the façade is pointless. And yet, let me take this occasion to say that the overall look of the exterior is rather more skillfully turned out, more polished and refined than I appreciated when I reviewed it almost five years ago, in the first column I wrote for the then renascent New York Sun.

Half a decade on, the Forum has now begotten an unlikely spawn on the West Side, a 12-story condominium design by Karl Fischer nearing completion. In this case, the signature sloping façade has been turned on its side so that, mercifully, it snarls in the general direction of the Hudson River rather than at pedestrians. More important, perhaps, it is integrated into a wider building, comprising three lots. Girt at the sides with dark masonry, its busy façade is a somewhat tumultuous alternation of brick, curtain walls, and some promiscuous combination of the two. The façade, occupying a complicated set of planes, fractures toward the top into three emphatically horizontal balconies.

Mr. Fischer is a prolific architect whose fealty to any one style is wayward, to say the least. Most of his work to date, whether pending or completed, has been in Brooklyn, New Rochelle, and Montreal. Many of his commissions, according to the portfolio on his Web site, have been for private suburban homes so vernacular, so historicist in their vocabulary, as to verge on pastiche.

One of these, in a suburb of Montreal, suggests the idiom of Christopher Wren at Hampton Court, all the while invoking Dutch 17th-century gabled architecture.In the same city, he has constructed another private residence that looks for all the world like an early Renaissance palace from the Loire Valley. Indeed, most of his buildings, going back to the mid-1980s, illustrate the devoted historicism so fashionable at the time. How peculiar, then, that this latest effort is so unapologetically modern in sentiment.

Another example of a firm that has a negotiable relation to architectural history is Costas Kondyliis and Partners, which is responsible for scores of buildings in New York. At any given moment, this firm can veer from the Parisian classicism of Trump Place on the Hudson and the Grand Tier on Upper Broadway to the hardcore, black glass International style of the Trump World Tower overlooking the United Nations.

The firm’s latest undertaking is Atelier, at 627 W. 42nd St., a stone’s throw from the West Side Highway. This project has clearly been conceived in the Modernist camp. One is tempted to say of Atelier that they don’t make buildings like that any more, except, of course, that they just have. A 46-story residential slab that comprises no fewer than 478 units, this goliath of a tower slab recalls the sort of buildings that were far more common in the ’60s than thereafter. Designed in the idiom of the International style, it rises up with darkened glass at the edges, recessed from a center clad in pale brick facing. Crowning it is a broad white water tower that recalls buildings like the Mayfair at 72nd St. off Central Park West, a 1960s slab if ever there was one.

Atelier’s most defining feature, however, is what appear to be four fissures — really a mix of balconies and abbreviated coursings — that protrude in alternation to the east and west.Taken together these manage to generate some drama and even to look different from Midtown’s usual fare.

But then you ask yourself what they are doing there, what point the architects might possibly be trying to make. The best I can do is to speculate that the Deconstructivist style has become so ingrained in the architectural language of our time that it can no longer be ignored even by an essentially conservative firm like Costas Kondylis and Partners. Surely the inclusion of those fissures in the present project is proof, if proof were needed, that the Deconstructivist style, whatever its revolutionary goals were or pretended to be, has now been defanged to the point of being one more option in the pattern book of contemporary architecture.


The New York Sun

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