Is NYC undergoing a skyline renaissance? Manhattan’s latest (and next) landmarks.
by Bill Millard

ONE OF THE FIRST THINGS a new arrival learns here is that when you’re looking up, try not to look too obvious. Like the oohing-and-aahing character in Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” (“New York, just like I pictured it! Skyscrapers and everything!”), anyone with a visible case of Newcomer’s Neck will immediately be viewed as a rube -- and an easy mark for our legendary street predators (now mostly legendary, but sometimes still predatory).

Wonder’s naïve out-of-towner, music fans will remember, ended up as the fall guy in a drug deal and did hard time. A real-life Midwesterner I know, spotted gazing skyward as he emerged from Penn Station, was quickly and quietly relieved of his wallet. Getting your first eyeful of the Empire State and the Chrysler and the Seagram and the rest can be breathtaking, but it carries definite risks.

Nowadays, though, even longtime New Yorkers are finding it harder to resist the lure of the quick vertical gawk. For a variety of reasons -- not just the obvious incentives of an unprecedented bubble economy in real estate, but the recent appearance of some thought-provoking new works, the increasing local visibility of globe-trotting “starchitects,” the massive public interest in the selection of a new design for the Ground Zero site, and the collective perception that the wound in our post-9/11 downtown skyline may not be the only one that needs healing -- New York is going through a building boom. We’re getting more striking new buildings than at any time since the Art Deco days.

Beyond the International Style
For a couple of decades, New York’s builders weren’t putting up much that would turn anybody’s head, except maybe an apartment broker’s. Almost every new piece of the skyline was another bland, boxy residential tower, basically a Mies knockoff without the elegance of a real Mies -- the urban equivalent of the McMansion, minus long driveway and spray-on stucco. With a handful of exceptions, like Philip Johnson’s parodically retro, Chippendale-roofed AT&T building, most NYC construction from the ‘70s to the ‘90s was driven not by the principles of Louis Sullivan (“form follows function”) or by anything resembling aesthetic concerns, but by the imperatives of the real-estate market (“form follows finance”). There might be ample luxury inside for the deep-pocketed buyers, but on the outside, the idea that visible, usable spaces and shapes affect the quality of public life usually got lip service or less. Developer Donald Trump’s brand-name high-rises -- the garish, undistinguished, almost universally unloved “Trump Tumors” -- were typical.

It’s easy to understand why developers favored the steely, glassy right angles of International Style modernism: it’s safe, it’s grown familiar enough to offend practically nobody, and in its modular use of materials, it’s a pretty economical style to build. Variations from the dominant boxy look, like a mildly postmodernist gesture back toward Art Deco in David Childs’s Worldwide Plaza complex or a series of infolding planes in Christian Portzamparc’s LVMH Tower, could occasionally breathe a little life into midtown. But New York’s position as a global center of innovative building design was lost to other cities for decades, architects and commentators agreed, until the new millennium, when new ideas began emerging from unexpected directions.

One that inspired awe even from Herbert Muschamp, the hard-to-please architecture critic of the New York Times, was the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. Opened in 2000, this James S. Polshek design used elements as stark and simple as anything in the Modernist vocabulary -- a huge sphere in a glass box, brightly lit from within -- and placed them fully in view of the public, an ideal icon for the openness and transparency of Enlightenment science. With an innovative method of suspending and connecting the glass plates of its curtain walls, the Rose Center made bulky structural elements unnecessary, inviting the eyes of passersby and bringing a fearless futurist optimism to the Upper West Side. The “cosmic cathedral” was the first visually challenging structure to appear in New York since the Unisphere from the 1964 World’s Fair (itself a companion to those Meet-the-Jetsons icons, the 1939 Fair’s Trylon and Perisphere).

Resilience after disaster
Paradoxically, the worst thing ever to happen on our skyline has also helped re-energize the city architecturally. The optimism of the late ‘90s may have evaporated with a series of crashes -- the inevitable collapse of the stock market boom, plus the not-at-all-inevitable crashes of a pair of planes into a pair of towers -- but not all of the city’s planners and builders responded by crawling back into the safe bunker of overfamiliar styles. The ones who did, in fact -- in the original plans for the World Trade Center site, termed “six cookie-cutter losers” by Ada Louise Huxtable in the Wall Street Journal -- were resoundingly rejected. It’s easy to forget, now that Daniel Libeskind’s original victorious design has fallen victim to infighting, profiteering, and political gamesmanship, but the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s decision to open up the re-evaluation process to public debate brought the city something that had been missing for decades: a spirited, open, and focused discussion about what shape an important part of the city should take.

Architecture as a public art form, occupying public space and serving a public purpose, not just narrow interests? What a concept! Of course, we’re still waiting to see what’ll happen on the site everyone’s obsessed with: the LMDC’s competition may never yield a successful result in the form of a completed, economically viable, terrorist-proof, and publicly accepted Freedom Tower (either the revised Childs/Libeskind hybrid design, which strikes many observers as too garrisonlike, or something else entirely). But this contest catalyzed an immense outpouring of attention toward New York’s built environment; it helped form a Zeitgeist in which any proposed new building faces fiercer scrutiny and higher expectations.

It’s unlikely to be sheer coincidence that so many of the structures that have been built, begun, announced, or planned during the past few years are serious head-turners. Not everything going up these days is spectacular, admittedly, but the years of torpid resignation to tepid ideas are gone. The stakes are larger now, and the competition to add something truly new to the environment is energetic.

Flashy, green, and delirious once more
One sign of a reinvigorated building climate is the return of the world-class starchitects. Considering the city’s tricky regulatory climate and fickle financial interests, getting a daring design approved, funded, and built has never been easy here, but in recent years we’ve seen new work by some of the architecture world’s biggest boldface names. Richard Meier’s pair of sleek Perry Street Towers on the Hudson waterfront, about to be joined by a third under construction, represent a striking addition to the expanding riverside park area near the West Village and Meatpacking District. Another downtown residence planned for the opposite riverfront, Santiago Calatrava’s 80 South Street townhouses along the East River, a stack of twelve luxury apartments in the form of cantilevered cubes, will defy gravity and astonish onlookers. (Don’t make a special trip to see this one just yet -- it’s scheduled to be built in early 2008.) Calatrava will also be represented at Ground Zero, if further political upheavals don’t get in the way, by the striking dove-winged transportation hub that will connect the city’s subways, the Port Authority Trans-Hudson (PATH) system, the Hudson River ferries, and possibly even an airport rail link.

Norman Foster’s high-rise addition to the Hearst Magazine Building on Eighth Avenue, the new Hearst Tower, is nearly as arresting. Technically a parabuilding, a new structure added to an existing one rather than an independent building, Foster’s tower uses a “diagrid” structural system, an exoskeleton of interlocking triangles, to help support weight and provide a visual alternative to boxiness. The original Hearst building by Joseph Urban was always intended to support a higher extension, but it was never built because of the 1929 stock-market crash. Foster’s futuristic addition isn’t what William Randolph Hearst would have had in mind: it clashes shamelessly with Urban’s six-story pedestal, and it’s one of the more polarizing projects in town (opponents have called it the “lava lamp” and the “geodesic sock puppet”), but its boldness -- along with Foster’s insistence on environmentally friendly design ideas like rainwater collection for cooling, energy-efficient lighting controls, and recycling of construction waste -- have earned it quite a few fans. Count this reporter among them.

Green design is one area where New York architects are establishing a local signature style. Manhattan is already one of the world’s environmentally friendliest places. (Skeptical about this? On this compact, dense island, residents conserve heat by living on top of each other, and most of us are car-free, so when you do the math to measure energy use per person, we live far lighter on the land than people who surround themselves with land.) New buildings aimed at augmenting these advantages -- like Foster’s tower, the Solaire in Tribeca, the Octagon on Roosevelt Island, the Condé Nast building in Times Square, and Renzo Piano’s planned New York Times headquarters -- are proving that sustainability doesn’t have to mean subsistence farming and mud huts. Energy-efficient architecture is a high priority for New York State, which gives hefty tax credits for green construction. Rocketing oil prices are only the most obvious sign that NYC’s green buildings represent the future of urban design.

Not everything built here scrapes the sky. The High Line, an abandoned West Side railway about to be converted to a low-key, multi-function public art park by a partnership working with the visionary design group Diller Scofidio & Renfro, promises to revitalize a little-used section of the city while keeping it free from overdevelopment. Locally based and globally renowned architect Stephen Holl has given Brooklyn an iconic new structure in the Pratt Institute’s Higgins Hall Center Wing, connecting two older buildings with a jarring yet harmonious section of translucent glass and Mondrian-like mullions. Piano’s planned additions to the Morgan Library and to the Whitney Museum will revitalize beloved Manhattan buildings in similar ways, but with understatement. A new entrance and plaza for the Brooklyn Museum of Art (another parabuilding, and another Polshek Partnership project) have ushered a classic 19th-century McKim, Mead & White monument into the space age. In SoHo, the new building planned for the New Museum of Contemporary Art will be a real risk-taker: a stacked-box experiment by Tokyo’s SANAA partnership, well suited to the nabe outside and the edgy works inside. A few blocks uptown at Cooper Square, 2005 Pritzker laureate Thom Mayne’s Morphosis firm will soon give Cooper Union a dramatic nine-story academic center, all slashing angles, ethereal screens, and moving parts. These smaller structures don’t leap out at you from the skyline, but they’re all worth tracking down (or they will be, once they’re realized).

Some of the newer buildings aren’t widely seen as enhancements. A playful new Westin Hotel, the work of Miami firm Arquitectonica, brought splashy color and slicing curves to Midtown a few years ago, but responses are mixed: some local commentators find it harmonizing improbably well with its site, others think it would be a better fit in some zero-gravitas Sunbelt burg instead of here, and more than a handful think it belongs on Mars. Another controversial new tower -- OK, “controversial” is an understatement; most of its neighbors hate it -- is the mixed-use luxury residence at Astor Place in the East Village, dubbed the “Sculpture for Living” by its developers. Here, the consensus is that architect Charles Gwathmey, one of the era’s undisputed giants, has inexplicably laid an egg, a corporate-mirror-glass lightweight overshadowed by older surrounding buildings (one of the city’s sharpest critics, the New Yorker’s Paul Goldberger, called it “an elf prancing among men”). The Astor tower, a stuttering melange of box, blob, and bank, adds nothing distinctive to a neighborhood that prizes distinctness; a historic public plaza like Astor Place, we East Villagers believe, deserves better.

The site almost got something better: an alarmingly original boutique hotel co-designed by two hot-dog starchitect firms, Rem Koolhaas’s Rotterdam-based OMA and the Swiss partnership of Jacques Herzog and Pierre deMeuron. The developer lost his nerve after 9/11 and scuttled the project (the same thing happened to a fluid Frank Gehry idea for the same site), but the proposed Astor Hotel would have brought the city exactly the kind of radical spatial thinking that it deserves and needs. (I can’t be objective about this: I’ve worked with OMA, and for me, they’re the home team. But I walk through Astor Place several times a day, and that tower isn’t getting any easier to look at.)

New York is a natural home for advanced ideas. A lot of lively ones appeared in Koolhaas’s 1978 book Delirious New York, which showed the city’s built environment as a rapidly evolving laboratory for new ways for humans to live, making unexpected virtues of density and congestion. That early 20th-century delirium gradually (maybe inevitably) gave way to decline, but it looks like we’re on the edge of another era marked by surprising, head-scrambling reshaping of civic space. Here’s hoping a lot of the decision-makers have their eyes, ears, and minds open for the kind of changes that keep everybody deliriously looking up.

Writer/editor/musician Bill Millard is editor-in-chief of the new East Village Guide. His articles on culture, architecture, and politics have appeared in Content, Icon, and other magazines; he also plays, sings, and writes with rock band Shanghai Love Motel.