The immense success of the project—
as a publicity magnet and moneymaker,
if not necessarily as a living space—not
only helped attract other globe-trotting
starchitects to the city but also galvanized younger architects for whom profit
and commercial are no longer dirty words,
and for whom design and development
are no longer to be kept separate, like
church and state, but may be logically
brought together under one roof.
Architect Andy Bernheimer, who
moved to New York right out of school in
1994 and is now a principal at Della Valle
Bernheimer, recalls being impressed—
“There’s a high-profile architect doing
condominium work”—and, he says, the
end of the developer stigma, combined
with the real estate market’s escalation,
signaled a major shift.
“It made people think of architecture
as value added,” he says, “as opposed
to architecture being a pain in the
ass.” Meier has since gone on to build
a third tower on the West Side; in the
Meier tradition, Bernheimer’s firm
is designing and developing a residential building right up the road, in
West Chelsea.
Other big names in residential design now include Gehry, Bernard Ts-chumi, Robert A.M. Stern, Christian
de Portzamparc and Richard Rogers.
Nouvel, much in demand back home
in France as a designer of museums,
has detoured to Manhattan to help
André Balazs—another hotelier!—erect
a condo on Mercer Street, in SoHo.
“It’s amazing how much is going up
and the high design quality of it,” Genevro
says. “But there’s also a lot of not good
stuff—it’s not like we’ve reached a state
of nirvana.”
It may not even be safe to assume that
celebrated buildings like Meier’s will
stand the test of time —or of New York’s
ever-changing tastes. Consider this
acerbic observation, made by the founding director of the Museum of Modern
Art in 1932, just after the opening of the
Chrysler Building, and unearthed by
Michael Lewis: “We are asked to take
seriously the architectural taste of real
estate speculators, renting agents and
mortgage brokers,” he scoffed.
Take an architectural walking tour of
New York City at arrivemagazine.com
POLISHING THE
BIG APPLE
Funky streets and ugly infrastructure
have long been part of New York’s
charm—for some people, anyway—
but these days grit is giving way to
glory. Along with the glossy, celeb-rity-architect condos sprouting up
around town comes a push to prettify
public spaces—from the subways and
sidewalks on up. Credit a change in
the gestalt, or perhaps at City Hall. As
Amanda C. Burden, chair of the New
The Leon Levy Visitor Center
at the New York Botanical
Garden in the Bronx.
York City Planning Commission, puts
it, “Good design and economic development are closely intertwined.”
Like a photograph slowly emerging
in a print tray, a new look is developing bit by block in all five boroughs.
Subsidized houses in a poor Brooklyn
neighborhood sport hip recycled-aluminum facades; the 19th-century
botanical garden in the Bronx boasts
a $500 million overhaul. Coming
someday, maybe soon: a light-filled
glass-topped transit center on Fulton
Street in Manhattan; a new winter garden and acid-etched glass wall at the
Queens Museum of Art, in Flushing;
and, if the mayor’s plan takes hold,
an ambitious revamping of Staten
Island’s worn Stapleton waterfront.
On the sidewalks of New York,
look for sleek little cantilevered bus
shelters and tidy stainless-steel kiosks
and (soon) public toilets, designed by
Grimshaw Architects as part of
a “coordinated street furniture”
campaign. Such attention to detail
would have been almost inconceivable 10 years ago.
“It’s a good time in the city for
good design,” says Katie Schwab,
director of government relations at
Cemusa, a private company charged
with arranging the furniture.
The low-cost housing project in
Brooklyn was designed and built by
Della Valle Bernheimer, a youngish
firm that—in keeping with the times—
doesn’t mind rolling up its sleeves
and pouring concrete. “That was our
first endeavor in development, start to
finish,” says Andy Bernheimer, whose
firm has now trained its sights on
booming West Chelsea.
At the New York Botanical Garden
in the Bronx, meanwhile, the goal has
been nothing less than satisfying the
public’s drive to learn and its “quest
for beauty and a connection with
nature,” says the garden’s president,
Gregory Long. Toward that end, the
garden has a grand, new visitors-center complex (quite grand: it covers
three and a half acres) by Hardy Holz-man Pfeiffer, and “the most important
botanical and horticultural library in
the world,” brought up to date by the
Polshek Partnership architectural firm.
But the kingpin of chic public
works is probably the wastewater
treatment plant that Polshek is putting up in Brooklyn, the one with the
shiny 100-foot-high digester eggs
and plans for a nature walk along a
formerly stinky creek.
Plumbing systems, transit terminals, low-cost housing—during much
of the 20th century these things often
cropped up in a style you could call
ugly-functional. But in the new New
York, even the sewage authorities
seem to agree: If you’ve got an eye
for design, why not flaunt it?
