The Babble/On Project

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Minoru Threat

Even though our guide had a major grudge against Robert Moses, he also had plenty of venom for another guy responsible for the New York City skyline, architect Minoru Yamasaki. I only knew one thing about him, but it's a doozy -- he designed the World Trade Center. The story our guide painted was intriguing and tragic -- Yamasaki was a Japanese-American whose buildings were both modern and hapless. His buildings were full of design flaws -- a records building without a sprinkler system, a public housing project so poorly designed that it was torn down almost immediately, his magnum opus (the WTC) unloved and unfinished 20 years after he designed -- all perhaps contributing to his suicide in 1986, 3 years before the WTC was finally completed. This was practically Shakespearean.

So I looked him up that night, and I have to say that our "educator" was a bit misinformed. Yamasaki did not kill himself, but rather died from cancer in 1986. I couldn't find anything on-line about the fire in the records building, but our guide did sort of get it right about the housing project, the Pruitt-Ingoe Houses in St. Louis. It turns out that they were infamously unsuccessful, and were indeed demolished within ten years of going under construction. Apparently, many people point to their demolition as the beginning of post-modern architecture.

And while our guid told us the the WTC wasn't finished by the time Yamasaki died, that's not really true, either. It is true that Tower 7 didn't get finished until 1989, but Yamasaki's original plan was only the two main towers, which were completed in 1977. Still, the WTC really sucked as a pair of buildings, no matter how much a part of the skyline they became or how attached to them New Yorkers became. They were designed along the same modernist lines as the housing projects built by both Yamasaki and Moses -- dense towers with a giant lifeless plaza that nobody used. (It's no surprise that Moses and Yamasaki built this way, as they were both devotees of Grand Puba Modernist, Le Corbusier. The relationship between Corbu and Moses was explored in one of the best plays I've seen, Boozy. See it if you ever get a chance.)

Yamasaki criticized architects who felt they always had to follow the European model of strong, monumental architecture, saying that too many of them "look(ed) with derision upon attempts to build a friendly, more gentle kind of building. ... " Yet Yamasaki did exactly that with the WTC, creating something that seemed almost senselessly enormous and had a hard time attracting occupants even years after it was built.

Unsurprisingly, Yamasaki's story isn't quite the greek tragedy that the QMA guide led us to believe, though it is a very interesting story. He designed a lot of buildings, and while he seems to have had a couple of failures, it's probably unfair to separate him from the crazy modernist times he was living in. And the WTC ended up being one of the most famous buildings in the world while it was around, as much a part of the city fabric as the Empire State Building.

But of course there is a tragedy to this story, even if it isn't Yamasaki's suicide. I've seen bits and pieces about whether flaws in his design contributed to the collapse of the two towers on 9/11, but I haven't seen anything conclusive. It seems unfair to blame him, though, for something that nobody could've imagined happening when he designed it.

Still, it's hard to read Yamasaki's own words about the Twin Towers and not find his (our?) naivete a little hard to take:

"I feel this way about it. World trade means world peace and consequently the World Trade Center buildings in New York ... had a bigger purpose than just to provide room for tenants. The World Trade Center is a living symbol of man's dedication to world peace ... beyond the compelling need to make this a monument to world peace, the World Trade Center should, because of its importance, become a representation of man's belief in humanity, his need for individual dignity, his beliefs in the cooperation of men, and through cooperation, his ability to find greatness."

— Minoru Yamasaki

Saturday, October 28, 2006

Panorama-o-rama

As you all know (I'm assuming that my 2.3 readers already know me), I like to get out to weird parts of the city on a regular basis. So last weekend I went out with some friends to check out the Korean Harvest Festival at way out in Queens. It wahttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifs created out of a swampy dumping ground in the 1930s by Robert Moses, and odds are that even if you're unfamiliar with the park you've seen it on tv more than any other park in NYC, if not the world. That's because inside the park are both Shea Stadium (home of the NY Mets) and the USTA National Tennis Center (home of the US Open). Also, it was the site of the both the 1938 and 1964 World's Fairs. The '38 fair was the reason the park was built, but the one in '64 is the one that left the biggest mark on the park, providing among other things the Unisphere that was featured so prominently in the movie Men In Black.

It's a huge space -- 50% bigger than Central Park -- and is mostly open space used for festivals and athletics. One of my favorite festivals there is the Dragon Boat Festival held every summer, in which people race long dragon-headed boats with a drum-pounding coxswain. There's also chinese food of all sorts, martial arts competitions and lots of Chinese businesses competing for Chinese customers.

Well, the Korean Harvest Festival ended up being pretty fun, and it's alwasy a treat to go to a place in New York and find yourself the only white guy in sight. Still, we blitzed through it pretty quickly and found ourselves at the Unisphere, and decided (at AG's suggestion) to check out the Panorama in the Queens Museum. This ended up being the best idea of the day.

The Panorama is a scale model of the entire city of New York that's about the size of a basketball court. It was built for the '64 Fair and has been updated every ten years or so since then. While we were standing on a balcony admiring it, an educator for the museum asked if we had any questions, and we let him have it. The five of us talked for about an hour about the history and technical details of the panorama, and then about the nature of development in the City.

It turns out that our guide had a bit of an axe to grind with Robert Moses (who you may remember as the hero of the first paragraph), who was responsible for a wide-ranging campaign of "modernizing" the city during the height of his power. Moses is somebody that people have a real love/hate relationship, in that everyone loves the parks he built, but reviles him for his experiments in public housing (he basically created the housing project) and his attempts to make New York a car city. Brooklyn has a special hatred for him, as he contributed to both the ruin of Coney Island's amusement parks and the relocation of the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Moses is too big a subject for a blog entry, and his legacy is still being felt (at work, for example, we're spending a giant chunk of money to correct one of his awful decisions), but you should definitely check him out. He built a ton of Parks, destroyed the Bronx, built a ton of bridges and roads, nearly destroyed Greenwich Village until Jane Jacobs brought him down and changed the way we think about the word progress.

I bring him up though, because the housing projects he built in the city were starkly visible on the Panorama in a way that gave me pause. In the picture below of lower Manhattan, the projects are the red brick structures along the East River on the right side.



They're visible all over the city, and they're always an eyesore. And it's not just because poor folks live in them, it's more that they just don't make sense in the context of the city. Too many people living in a tiny area, with these senseless grassy areas that are unsafe and ill-served for either recreation or aesthetics. Plus, they just serve to make the whole complex even more isolated from shops and restaurants, making them drab and uninviting places to live.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Hadid She Ever!

I only knew a little about Zaha Hadid before I checked out her solo show at the Guggenheim the other day -- born in Baghdad, first woman to win the Pritzker Prize in 2004, not a lot that's been built, etc. -- so I was unprepared for what I saw.

Basically, what I saw was genius. People toss around 'genius' all the time when they just mean that someone is 'highly skilled', 'very intelligent' or even 'not entirely incompetent', and I'm guilty of this, too. But Zaha Hadid is an old school, card-carrying genius. Looking at her show, it struck me that it's true of her in the way it's true of Everest that it's a mountain.

I can see that you're skeptical, so let me try to explain myself.

About half of the show consisted of her paintings, which she doesn't really see as stand-alone works as much as a crucial part of the design process. They're somewhere between design plans and conceptual sketches, although they're way too mind-blowing too work off of and too beautiful to be just sketches.

If you look at this example of a study she did for a new building on Trafalgar Square in London, you'll have a hard time figuring out what's going on.



What you eventually realize is that she's imagined the space from multiple angles and at different times of the day and night, and incorporated all this information into one image. You'd basically have to be a cubist space alien or have a PhD in topology for this to make any sort of sense to you, but it seems to be almost intuitive to her, which I just can't imagine.

But even though they're incredibly complex, almost like theoretical physics, they're also incredibly beautiful. I don't even remember what this one was (and I sure as hell can't tell by looking at it), but it sure is pretty.


Near the top of the Goog they have some really gorgeous models that could be sculpture, and then finally a wall of photographs of her finished work, like the Contemporary Arts Center in Cinncinatti. You can check out some photos on their website, but I wanted to call attention to one detail. She wanted the lobby of the museum to act as a sort of public square, so she has the entrance set back underneath the second floor, pulling you in from the outside. She enhances this effect by continuing the sidewalk into the lobby in what she calles a sort of 'urban carpet' effect. But the real kicker is that the sidewalk just flows across the lobby and then becomes the back wall of the museum, as you can see in the photo below.

Maybe this doesn't seem as awesome to you as it does to me, but it just seems to be even more evidence that she just doesn't have any boundaries in her mind when it comes to thinking about space. I think that she builds a structure in her head, then turns it around, torques it, twists it, moves it through space and time, looking for ways to make it work better or be more interesting, or finding problems with it that you couldn't see otherwise.

I'm a smart guy, and I like to tell myself that there's no subject that I couldn't understand if I studied it for a while, even if I couldn't become an expert. And I think I could become an architect if I wanted to. But what Hadid does just seems like something that my brain wasn't built to do. Maybe that quality, not of being better than others, but of having an ability that nobody else has, is the real meaning of genius.