With the rise of “starchitects” it’s become a well understood strategy for developers to seek out the starriest and attach their big names to any project that might be controversial because of its size or location. Actually, it’s a practice that long predates starchitecture. As far back as the late 1950s the developers of what would become the detested Pan Am building, the behemoth that forever blocked the view corridor down Park Avenue and all but squashes Grand Central Station, chose Walter Gropius as their architect. That got them the credibility of the Bauhaus — Gropius used to head it — for a project the money guys feared might not attract financing. And hey, it worked.
But today the New York Times reports that The New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission has rejected a plan by the Manhattan developer Aby Rosen to erect a 30-story tower atop the five-story former Parke-Bernet Galleries building on Manhattan’s heavily-monied Upper East Side. This despite the fact that the architect of the proposed glass tower was Lord Norman Foster, an architect so globe trotting he has a helicopter pad at home, and despite the fact that Foster’s new Hearst Tower, just across town, has gotten overwhelmingly positive reactions. (You can read my own overwhelmingly positive reaction in Time here.
But that’s across town. For the most part, the Commission members were respectful towards Foster’s design, but the verdict was clear — the thing was just too big for the mostly lower rise (and mostly wealthy) neighborhood. (Which, by the way, it is.) So is starchitecture losing its clout? Or is it just that the collective power of the East Siders is even cloutier? The writer, dandy and architectural traditionalist Tom Wolfe –“in a navy-and-white flannel houndstooth suit”, the Times tells us — was one of the locals who showed up at the Commission’s hearing to denounce the Rosen-Foster scheme. This was the Tom Wolfe, author not only of Bonfire of the Vanities but also of the anti-modernist manifesto From Bauhaus to Our House, a guy who designed the big ceiling moldings for his own apartment — moldings, a modernist taboo — a man who thought Walter Gropius was a villain and a knave even before he designed the Pan Am building. For the record, the artist Jeff Koons turned up to speak for Rosen, who’s also an art collector, but to no avail. Worse, Koons’ outfit didn’t even rate a mention in the Times.
The ever vigilant East Siders have also done in the Renzo Piano-designed addition that was planned for the Whitney Museum, very near the Parke-Bernet building, going at it so consistently that the Whitney finally threw up its hands and decided instead to build a Piano-designed satellite museum downtown, far from the truculent Upper Easties. But can neighborhoods with fewer hedge fund managers swing the same weight? Keep an eye on the ongoing struggles to scale back the Frank Gehry-designed Brooklyn Yards project, one that’s full of Gehry’s magnificent flourishes but way too big, and the Polshek Partnership-designed tower that the New York Historical Society wants to build behind its museum and library on Manhattan’s West Side. The neighbors are fighting both of those, but is there even one among them who has a navy-and-white flannel houndstooth suit?