In recent years, New York City has not only proven singularly incapable of executing innovative large-scale architectural designs, but has also set about obliterating some of its most significant mid-twentieth century buildings.
Three years ago, New York’s Museum of Arts and Design was given the green light by the Landmarks Preservation Commission to redesign 2 Columbus Circle, an iconic 1960s building by Edward Durell Stone. The old 12-story structure had represented a unique path for modernist architecture, its design language softened by the incorporation of historically-derived ornamental details but still grounded in modern urban reality. A strikingly unadorned central surface on the front facade expressed simultaneously the building’s program as a container for artwork and its civic function as an urban icon, with a slight inflection along the traffic circle’s curve showing subtle deference to the public realm. The renovation by Brad Cloepfil unveiled earlier this year has been widely panned (see my previous comment).
Today, the same Landmarks Preservation Commission (whose name is beginning to sound as Orwellian as Bush’s Environmental Protection Agency) authorized St. Vincent’s Hospital to demolish its iconic O’Toole building on Seventh Ave between 12th and 13th Sts, designed in the 1960s by Albert Ledner, to make way for a new hospital tower. St. Vincent’s had first applied to the Commission last May, arguing that its proposal at the time was the only possible way for the hospital to continue its charitable mission. After the Commission demurred, however, St. Vincent’s returned to the drawing board and produced a revised scheme within two weeks. In a gross breach of the public trust, the Commission has decided to allow the erasure of a vital piece of the city’s architectural fabric.
The building is an opaque white ceramic box floating above the street, its envelope serrated at the top where two overhangs are cantilevered out from the main volume. The scalloped edges are an effect of the viewer’s shifting and incomplete street-level perspective; in the ideal elevation view of the facade, they align to form complete circular “portholes.” The detailing of the facade reflects a forward-thinking concern for shading, energy efficiency, and natural ventilation. Ledner, who had worked for Frank Lloyd Wright, is also the designer of a number of structures in New Orleans and of New York’s Maritime Hotel on 9th Ave between 16th and 17th Sts.
Here’s the story from the New York Times’ City Room blog. DOCOMOMO, which advocates for the preservation of modernist architecture, has created an informative PDF backgrounder on the building.