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Manhattan had long lost its crown as the world's skyscraper capital when Mohamed Atta smashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the first of the Twin Towers. Yet that dramatic, appalling moment triggered a defiant reaction. A slew of new towers is now appearing, on screens and on the ground.
Renzo Piano's diaphanously corporate New York Times Tower has just opened to rapturous reviews; Ground Zero is hosting towers by Foster, Rogers and Fumihiko Maki, and slick condo towers are springing up everywhere like minimalist fungus. But the latest proposal is by far the most surprising. French architect Jean Nouvel has proposed the most radical and striking skyscraper to trouble New York's low-drifting clouds in a generation.
The design for the tower, neighbouring the Museum of Modern Art, is a piercing, dangerous-looking spike, an anorexic contemporary version of the soaring twin spires of St Patrick's Cathedral, which dominated the city's skyline until the advent of skyscrapers in the early 20th century.
The proposal, at 53 W. 53rd St, commissioned by real estate firm Hines, comprises 75 storeys of accommodation and, at 350m, pierces the skyline at a height between the Empire State and Chrysler Buildings. It will embrace 5,000 square metres of extra accommodation for MoMA, which will expand into its lower floors, above retail provision, while the upper floors will house a seven-star hotel sharing services with the 120 or so (extremely) top-end condominiums above.
IT’S hard to pinpoint when the “starchitect” became an object of ridicule. The term is a favorite of churlish commentators, who use it to mock architects whose increasingly flamboyant buildings, in their minds, are more about fashion and money than function.
Often the attacks are a rehash of the old clichés. Cost overruns and leaky roofs are held up as evidence of yet another egomaniacal artist with little concern for the needs of us, the little people. (As a rule, if a roof leaks in a Frank Gehry building it’s headline news; if the building was designed by a hack commercial architect, the leak is ignored, at least as news.) John Silber, the former president of Boston University, has gotten into the game with “Architecture of the Absurd,” a glib little book that eviscerates contemporary architects for the extravagance of their designs.
The more serious criticism comes from those inside the profession who see a move into the mainstream as a sellout. The pact between high architects and developers, to them, is a Faustian bargain in which the architect is nothing more than a marketing tool, there to provide a cultural veneer for the big, bad developers whose only interest is in wringing as much profit as possible from their projects.
rip h and g
Except during earthquakes, or when being demolished to make way for something new, buildings don't move. This stubborn fact about architecture is something most documentary filmmakers feel they have to overcome. You probably have seen the result of this effort in television specials about famous architects and their work: sweaty pastiches of restless jump-cuts, pans and zooms, frequently interrupted by old portraits of the architect, all of it lumbering along under a running commentary intended to give yet more "drama" to the decidedly undramatic stuff of architecture.
Now for something entirely different: German avant-garde director Heinz Emigholz's new film Schindler's Houses