I stand in front of 434 Lafayette, ringing the buzzer to see if the owner will let me up to take a look at the resin walls from Ohio that MJ put in place. There is no answer and the silence sounds like it is telling me: private property, come back never. I turn around and look across the street at the mid-nineteenth century stone building where the Public Theater has operated since 1967. It is a towering red-and-brown-colored Neo-Romanesque structure that the Landmark Preservation Commission saved from demolition at its first hearing in 1965. It was the first order of business. Shortly thereafter, the theater company’s founder, Joseph Papp, persuaded the city to let him use the building for the theater. More recently, the Public spent $40 million on renovations. I head to the offices of the architecture firm working with the theater, seeking the person in charge of the historic undertaking:
Have you seen the new building? That’s mine. I’ve worked with that building for over ten years. If you look closely, it’s actually three identical buildings. It looks like it was all done at once. In fact, it was done over the course of fifty years. Those walls are a meter thick, solid brick. Anything that’s done now is a veneer of brick, behind it is something else. Nobody lays ten layers of brick anymore. Nobody can afford it. It’ll cost billions and billions.
Stephen Chu bites into a grilled chicken sandwich. He is wedged into a hobbit-sized booth at Corner Bistro on West Fourth Street and with every bite, he magically succeeds at keeping the sauce off of his sculpted goatee. He was originally accepted at Berkeley as pre-med but switched to architecture, seeking a middle ground between his artistic tendencies and his father’s demands for a practical degree—his father was an engineer and first generation immigrant from China.
I did their green room and their dressing rooms. I did their offices. I repaired their roof. This last job was actually the first job that someone could see. I restored the facade. The original scope of the work was to improve the face, the outside, for the public—lowercase p. The lobby turned out to be the most efficient thing to accomplish that.
The design that we ended up doing was extremely complex from the city agency perspective. We wanted to put a stoop on the building. I had to get the people at Landmarks to say okay before I could do anything. We spent months preparing a presentation, which I gave five years ago. To make the case, I based the entire scope of new work on history. So I started from day one, the beginning of that building. I said first of all the use has changed. It was the first New York City Public Library. And then the Hebrew Immigrant Aide Society gut the building and it became a dormitory with a big kitchen, like a halfway house to help immigrants before they moved on to permanent housing. In the ’60s, a developer wanted to tear it down and build something else. And Joe Papp came along. He and Giorgio Cavaglieri, who was a well-known architect of the time, completely gut it again and made it into what it is today, which is six theater venues and a library. So, many uses over many years.
And during the ’20s when they built the subway, they widened Lafayette and they tore the centerpiece stoop off. They shoved the stairs into the lobby. You went up the stairs and into the lobby, which wasn’t even a lobby anymore because you had these damn stairs in it! So we said we’re going back to the historical condition, putting a stoop back.
There’s a lot of cultures in New York City that have a whole history of hanging out on the stoops. Here’s an institution that’s already based in bringing theater and the arts to everybody. It makes perfect sense that that stoop should be there, a community amenity. If you go on a sunny day, you’ll see everyone’s there having lunch. Nowhere to do that before. And there was nowhere for people to line up when standing in line to get free tickets for Shakespeare in the Park. I made the case that the stoop would improve the bond with the community.
So Landmarks, in fact, commended me. The commissioner said this is an excellent presentation. We got our approval. The only thing they asked was that we make the handrails bronze.
He laughs.
Bronze handrails? No problem.
They spent millions of dollars restoring the facade. The canopy is glass, okay, so it’s modern but it’s what’s called revocable consent. The city can take it all off if they decide. They have that right. They can take the stoop off; they can take the canopy off. So I designed the whole thing carefully: the canopy is supported by two points and if you cut them off the whole thing is gone. And it hangs off the facade so you don’t do anything crazy to the building. Now, once you’re inside we modernized it, but it’s been gutted so many times. The arrangement we came up with was bringing back the original purpose of the building: prosody, opening the archways up, the balcony. All of these things would increase visibility and sense of space.
It’s interesting because civic or public works pop up more in gentrified areas. I think there’s actually lobbying, pushing political dollars. Not that there may not have been a need for it before. I think you can’t help but look at the pros and cons of gentrification and whom it’s for.
I’ve done work for NYU. I did the genomics building. I’ve worked on the biology building—that process was interesting. NYU’s in a tough situation. A university that’s really done well for themselves in recent years, they’ve gone up in desirability and the ratings. They have little room to grow. Any time they do work near Washington Square it becomes a huge community upheaval. The neighbors get very upset. And ultimately it causes a lot of reducing of scope of most of NYU’s efforts to expand.
I had to do several presentations to the community board. Sometimes they help us understand the neighborhood and what happens around it and the dynamics of the neighborhood during different times of day. We’re hired by an institution that, with or without us, will do something. It’s not that without us they just won’t do it. So if we have the opportunity to make it better, we will. That’s one of our main concerns, really.
I like to think that the architecture works with the environment. We don’t want to just plop something down that’s designed in a bubble and just dropped on the site. Noise, future plans, zoning changes are all extremely important factors. Because we’re talking about buildings that could last for fifty years. There’s a long lifespan in this environment. To be responsible you have to care about all those factors.
You know, it’s never good publicity for a university to be seen as somebody coming in and taking away old folks or people that have been living there their whole lives and moving them out and causing disruption. That’s never good publicity for anyone. So I think they would be thrilled if we could produce designs that the neighbors could appreciate and think add value to the infrastructure of their neighborhood.
I follow Stephen over to his office in the Meatpacking District. His firm occupies several floors of a modern building, all of them connected by a glass staircase at the center of the room. The open work areas are slick and modern, verging on futuristic—not unlike the countenance of Stephen and his colleagues. I feel like an antique visitor who has stepped out of a time machine. I am on the deck of a spaceship that is sailing through galaxies in search of tomorrow’s landscapes. Clustered desks, each with a pristine widescreen monitor, are covered with unfurled plans and unstained coffee cups. Stephen is only mid-career but his resume must be written in ten-point font—it’s crowded with civic and cultural projects from around the world. He beams with satisfaction as he shows me an image of Stanford University’s Bing Concert Hall, a project for which he served as lead designer.
For my own projects I enjoy sketching the possibilities much more than working on the one that I’m actually going to do. The dreamy side of it is always fun and there’s a lot of that in architecture.
A lot more clients are steering towards adaptive reuse instead of new construction. It’s more sustainable. So I’ve done a lot of work that’s adaptive reuse.
We did a little work on a restoration piece at Carnegie Hall. We restored Stern Auditorium and then we were hired to build a new theater below it so there’s Zankel Hall, and it has a very modern character. It’s interesting to see that within one block you restore this and down below you create a new thing, which in some ways has a relationship with what’s above. I think those are the projects that I like the most: there’s the existing and there’s the new and the new is not trying to copy the old, it has its own language. But there’s a dialogue with the existing and not just crashing the new on top of it, or drawing a line. The two want to work together. And I think the history of time plays itself out in architecture. Visually you can understand that’s what’s happening.
My own house is by no means historic and by no means has a significant facade. It’s on a worker’s housing block, built in the 1930s, intended for lower-income residents. It wasn’t the brownstone, it wasn’t the stately townhouse. It’s a three-story brick box.
He laughs.
With fake shutters attached to the brick, which I tore off immediately.
We’re in Ridgewood, Queens. I’ve been in the house for ten years now and my block has changed. There’s more of a sense of community. My neighbors own their own houses. They take care of them. There’s pride in that. I know all the neighbors on my block. Some of that is because I spent a year off work. And spent four months at the house every day, renovating. You tend to get to know your neighbors; a lot of them are around all day. So they’d want to come by, see, and we’d have a chat. It’s kind of nice. There’s a lot of kids on my block. Now I’ve got two kids. There’s a pretty nice feeling there where you know your neighbors, say hi every day, people watch out for you. If they see something weird going on they’ll let you know. I like that. In my neighborhood some of my neighbors are out on stoops twenty-four seven.
I rent out the top unit in my house. I just put two signs up and I got calls like crazy, people showing up and wanting to give me cash on the spot. I think the first person that came by is the person I ended up renting to. I had a good feeling, and they’ve been there for four years. They’re friends now. And I haven’t touched their rent because I’d rather have people I like and trust than get more money and deal with somebody who’s a pain in the butt. My doors are open to them so when I leave and go away they access my house. They take care of my cat. I take care of their cat. That kind of stuff makes a difference. It’s that kind of stuff that’s hard to find when your life is in the city.
I didn’t buy the house because it was a little Queens brick house. I bought it because it straddled residential and commercial warehouses. Ten years ago I was already thinking if anything’s going to change it will be the warehouses. I didn’t want to be in the middle of pure residential. I felt that was too static for me. I wanted to see the change, I wanted to see development out there. Because I’m an architect and building is what I do.
There are certain areas that are up for being rezoned and I got an email for a petition to block it. When I hear people say, “Oh, it’s changing the character,” I ask, “Is that a bad thing?” It’s an evolving process, it’s living, right? It’s like language. Language changes and so does use of language. So does land.