“As
for New York City, it is a place apart. There is not its match in any other
country in the world.”
Pearl S. Buck
Very few places inspire the whole world for its sheer scale,
vibrant pace, elegant surroundings, and impressive architecture as New York
City.
Every time one sets foot in New York, one realises that this
is the city that has it all: the most beautiful urban park in the world,
fantastic art galleries and museums, excellent restaurants and a fascinating
mix of nationalities and languages. However, what makes you love New York more
and more every time you visit is the inimitable, audacious architecture.
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| Central Park, New York City |
New York has always been a paradise for architects and
interior designers. This promised city has offered the possibility to grow and
excel in its creative heights for generations. If real estate moguls profit
from property prices, it is the communities of residents and visitors of this
fortunate city that benefit from being able to inhabit and experience such
outstanding architecture.
New York stands out not only because of its well-designed
office buildings and museums, but also in its landscaped parks and secluded
corners of Manhattan and outer boroughs, carefully respected and promoted by
the city’s residents for many years.
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| Central Park, New York City |
Central Park, one of the best examples of landscaped architecture
in the world, opened in 1859 and rightly became a National Historic Landmark in
1963. The designs by Frederick Law Olmsted (landscape architect) and Calvert
Vaux (architect) allowed for hundreds of acres to become an oasis of green
socialising space for decades, and currently attracts over 25 million annual
visitors. With its lakes and fountains, and innumerable depictions in films and
TV series, Central Park has become a dear and familiar space throughout the
world, framed by blocks of apartments and offices that surround it.
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| The High Line, New York City |
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| The High Line, New York City |
More recently, the High Line redevelopment has attracted
numerous visitors who enjoy the experience of the city it allows, as well as
great views of the Hudson River and New Jersey. Built on a section of the
former elevated freight railroad of the West Side Line along the lower west
side of Manhattan, this green space has drawn more attention to one of the most
charming parts of New York. The joint work of James Corner Field Operations
(landscape architects), Diller Scofidio + Renfro (architects), Piet Oudolf
(planting design), and Buro Happold (engineering design), the High Line has
quickly garnered a warm place in the hearts and minds of New Yorkers and
tourists. Its creative designs over an elevated structure stand for a modern reinterpretation
of the mythical hanging gardens, landscaped structures to appropriate and enjoy
nature in man-made settings.
These green spaces in a city renowned for its high rise
developments serve as a way to remind inhabitants and visitors to look both
down from the soil and up to the top floors of skyscrapers reaching for the
clouds.
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| The Rockefeller Center |
The Rockefeller Center, designed in the 1930s by architect
Raymond Hood and others, typifies this ambition to embrace space both
horizontally and vertically. The Center is a complex of 19 commercial buildings
covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st streets, and
it has also been declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987. This Art Deco
wandering maze of offices, shops, entertainment areas, and public transport
links is still listed as one of the largest private building project ever
undertaken in modern times.
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| The Chrysler Building |
A few blocks south stands the elegant Chrysler Building,
designed by William Van Alen, and also a magnificent example of Art Deco. Its
top floors covered in ribbed stainless-steel cladding represent Van Alen’s own
ambition to reach for the stars by depicting a radiating sunburst pattern with
triangular vaulted windows. The silvery metal used on these top floors decorated
with flying eagles allow for the building to stand out in midtown New York, as
a beacon of hopeful design.
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| Bank of America
tower at One Bryant
Park |
More recently, the angular elegance of the Bank of America
tower at One Bryant
Park, by Cook + Fox
Architects, became another example of New York’s intention to promote
architecture as the embodiment of creative hope. Renowned for its
environmentally friendly design features, One Bryant Park typifies a new
architecture of stylish design pushing forward the notion of the office
building as box. Its twisted angles allow for the building (currently the
second tallest in the city) to become different as one walks towards it,
particularly in its reflection of light and shade.
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| IAC Corporation Building |
Downtown, in Chelsea, the 2007 building designed by Frank
Gehry to house IAC Corporation dazzles and grows on one’s perception of it. On
a first view, the shocking white and grey tones stand out in the area and are
accentuated by a seemingly irregularity of its jutting structures. However, the
more one looks and the more one stands close by to see how the light of day
diffuses the awareness of space, the angularity of the building becomes extremely
dynamic. As the building stands facing the Hudson river on 11th
Avenue with 18th Street, it acquires an almost naval dimension, with
its 10-storey towers becoming sails ready to take the space outwards. The
interiors reflect this with office and meeting spaces allowing the possibility
of facing the river.
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| Guggenheim Museum |
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| Guggenheim Museum |
New York City also dazzles with buildings designed to host
art collections and exhibitions that have pushed forward architectural design
over the twentieth century. An example is the Guggenheim Museum, which opened
in October 1959 to a storm of criticism. Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs deserved
the dubious pejorative comments that they were obfuscating the art collection
and attracting visitors to the building for the architecture alone and not for
the art on display. However, visitors soon realised that it was precisely the
ingenious internal spiral construction of the building that allowed the
relationship between art and human gaze to become more intimate. In a way, the
opening of the Guggenheim half a century ago marked more than a bold step in
architecture; it was also the birth of a post-modern, contemporary, and
democratic appropriation of art by the individual.
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| Whitney Museum of
American Art |
A few years later, and a few blocks north, Bauhaus architect
Marcel Breuer saw his designs for the Whitney Museum of
American Art come to fruition. In 1966, and after decades of moving, the
impressive collection of the Whitney family was housed in this stunning
building. With its cantilevered spaces jutting onto Madison Avenue and its
small windows, the museum resembles a medieval fortress that protects its inner
cultural treasures. This image is only strengthened when watching visitors to
the cafe and shop on the basement level from a moat-like ground floor area that
connects the city to the building via a bridge.
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| Museum of Modern Art |
In more recent years, Yoshio Taniguchi’s complete
redevelopment of the Museum of Modern Art only confirmed its collection as
occupying the top ranks of artistic curatorial quality. Anyone who visits MoMA
for a few hours cannot leave the building and its collection behind without
feeling inebriated by the scale of the building and the intelligent layout of
the rooms and access areas.
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| The New Museum |
Downtown, in the Bowery, SANAA architects have recently offered
the quirky and graceful New Museum, the building that made this brilliant
architectural practice win the coveted Pritzker Price in 2010. With its
reflective cladding and alternating boxes, the New Museum literally shines on
the Bowery. Its bright interiors and the top floor Sky room, with its
South-facing balcony, stand out in an otherwise downtrodden (yet fashionable)
part of Manhattan, housing an impressive international and eclectic collection.
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| Cooper Union building |
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| Cooper Union building |
But it’s New York’s latest major addition to the education
scene that seduces the most. Morphosis’s Cooper Union building, designed to
house its new academic building, reinterprets the architectural landscape of
New York while questioning the assumption of space, lines, and overall design. By
literally cutting into the facade of the building, almost in a curious
reinterpretation of the city’s grid-like street layout, architect Thom Maine’s
clever design pushes form and space usage forward like very few buildings. Its
irregular internal staircases and external cladding are extremely seductive in
the way they break traditional notions of architecture and space, yet keeping a
very green agenda for the building. With its wink to the history of
architecture and the more recent post-modern definition of space, the building
stands for the playful elegant definition of what New York in itself is: an
audacious cradle of creative hope for generations of architects and those of us
who appreciate the urban space that surrounds us.
