Save the Whitney
Village Voice, JUNE 25, 1985
History seems poised to take its revenge on poor Marcel Breuer. The late architect, you may recall, was justly lambasted some years ago for designing a scheme to place an office tower on the roof of Grand Central Station. Opposition to that venture was the Agincourt of local preservationism, a victory after which the climate changed decisively. Now, the Whitney Museum, in apparent tit for Breuer’s historic tat, proposes to expand itself by building on top of his great gray granite original an architectural affront of such magnitude that the only conceivable explanation is whimsical redress of the dead man’s nearly forgotten gaffe. Poetic justice, however, will be symmetrically served only if the current scheme meets the fate of the former.
The Breuer Whitney is a masterpiece. With Edward Durrell Stone’s original Museum of Modem Art and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum, it completes a trinity of marvelous museums, a virtual recapitulation of the modern movement. All three of these institutions have lately felt the need to expand and all have been imperiled. At MOMA, the damage is already done: the original building has been reduced to its facade, its elevation hanging like a modernist painting on a gallery wall. Plans for the Guggenheim have not been revealed in detailed form. Perhaps the threatened intrusion will be held at bay by the totemic power of Wright’s original, the master of hubris hexing attempts at effacement from beyond the grave.
At the Whitney, there’s no doubt. The violence offered by Michael Graves’s proposed expansion is almost unbelievable. Adding to a masterpiece is always difficult, calling for discipline, sensitivity, restraint. Above all, though, it calls for respect. The Graves addition isn’t simply disrespectful, it’s hostile, an assault on virtually everything that makes the Breuer original particular. It’s a petulant, Oedipal piece of work, an attack on a modernist father by an upstart, intolerant child, blind or callow perhaps, but murderous. Yet for this the blame is not entirely the architect’s. Society asked him to do it. Graves, after all, is a designer with an idiom and could scarcely be expected to throttle his own voice at a moment of tremendous expansion in his career. Graves was simply a wrong choice. The degree of the error is what startles—somebody with influence must really have hated the Breuer building.
The strength of the Whitney’s architecture is not simply its singularity but its refined embodiment of the modernist spirit. Breuer may be presently out of vogue, but he’s indisputably one of the tops. A member of the core cadre at the Bauhaus, Breuer wound up in the U.S. after the school was shut down by the Nazis. Like the furniture for which he’s so universally renowned, his architecture is shapely, strong, and frank. It shows the craftsperson’s love of construction and materials, attentive always to an idea of integrity that modernism elevated to an ethic. For Breuer, pouring concrete and bending tubular steel were kindred, essential operations, the center of his art. His work was always, in some primary way, about its own materiality, an address to the solidification of concrete rather than the concretization of fashion.
The Whitney—like the Guggenheim—is an investigation of a boldly sculptural form, part of an architecture conceived as mass—not, as with Graves, as surface. Breuer’s take here extended well beyond the primary form of the object to the specific gravity of its constituents. The Whitney is an essay in architectural density, an extremely subtle and revelatory exploration of shades of gray, of texture, weight, and variation in stone and concrete. Breuer was scarcely alone in his fascination with this research. Le Corbusier’s post-war production was formally centered on heroic sculpting in concrete. Likewise, Paul Rudolph was—at the time Breuer did the Whitney—pouring out his own fabulous concrete period. Indeed, a worldwide fascination with the stuff had come to bear the soubriquet Brutalism, a somewhat unfortunate play on the French for raw concrete, beton brut, a term reflecting the traditionally worshipful Gallic mystification of the natural (eau sauvage).
The Whitney is miles from brutality, light years from those rough-cast shrines to abrasion that gave Brutalism its bad name. This is a building about sequence, conceived modernistically—according to a “free plan.” Virtually every moment is spatially imagined and dramatic. First comes the building’s startling presence on the street. Breuer recognized both the scale and the jumble of that reach of Madison Avenue and made a building at once distinct and deferential. The flip side of its ingenious in-stepping excavation of the below-grade sculpture court and inflection (the current word) toward its entrance, is the out-stepping of the mass as it rises until its upper most part presses against the street-wall, like Marcel Marceau limning a window. In a time before cornice heights became a matter of legislation (the Whitney lies in the present Madison Avenue Special Zoning District) Breuer made a building whose top almost precisely accords with current wisdom as to where that line should be.
Recognizing the party-wall character of the row, Breuer divided his Madison Avenue elevation into three parts: a thin concrete wall butted up against its neighbors; a narrow zigzagging band containing, among other things, the great stair; and the main stepping mass, housing the galleries, to which are affixed the winning “eyebrow” windows, apt symbols of museum-going. This division into three has the additional effect (in concert with the lovely bridge and the splatter of windows) of pulling one’s reading of the building off the symmetrical, reinforcing the strength of its corner.
Breuer’s covered bridge makes one of New York’s finest entries. Its angular form and cast concrete construction are reflected in the zigzag band containing the stair, a nice unity between the building’s two primary icons of movement. Bridging the sculpture-filled moat, one glimpses behind it the social life of the cafe, a lovely introduction, and arrives in the slate-floored lobby space, both day-lit and illuminated by a beautiful array of silvered bulbs in saucer-shaped reflectors. From the lobby, one is offered three swell circulation experiences, a happy dilemma of potential progression. The options are: to go down a monumentalized open stair to the cafe and courtyard visible beyond; to go up in the gigantic elevator, that wonderful ascending room; or to enter the staircase.
As the stairway is one of the great architectural problems, Breuer’s is one of the great solutions. On each floor the sequence begins with an orienting curved wall that sets up the experience in terms of direction, materials, and lighting. Then comes the stair itself, both complexly configured and perfectly, restfully modulated. Let me recall some fragments. The initial overlook to the street. The fine rail of metal and wood. The rhythm of compression and expansion of the space. The stone treads cantilevering out from the concrete armature, visible only from beneath. The investigation of adjacent values in materials, rough, smooth, dense, and less. The mysterious diffusion of light. The benches like altars. A helluva place.
Finally the galleries. Their high rooms use strong textures of floor and filing as datums against which to register shifts in wall. The periodic surprise of the variously sized eccentric windows offers counterpoint to overall orthogonality. This is the building of a designer working at the height of his powers, a complete work of art, not alterable. Too young to be an official landmark, it’s one in every other sense, an historic structure.
The Graves scheme leaves no aspect of the Whitney unvandalized. The overall strategy is to obliterate the building by rendering it subsidiary, turning it into no more than a subordinate part of a larger whole. At the level of massing, this is accomplished by adding a volume of similar size and height at the other end of the block, where it acts—along with the supressed original—like one of the bottom members of a human pyramid. On the backs of these two structures, Graves loads level after klutzy level of building, now a tier with little setbacks, now a tier with a cyclopean lunette, now a gross pergola, now a rustic cornice. It’s a strategy meant to dazzle us out of so much as noticing the buried Breuer, a relentless assault of mass, materials, shapes, and phony style. Between the two bottom volumes is perhaps Graves’s most inane and subversive invention, a stepped cylinder which has assumed one of those faux-naif monikers so beloved of architects: the hinge.
The hinge is pivotal. It centralizes the composition, erasing both the Breuer’s own asymmetry and its asymmetrical relationship to the rest of the block. It further rationalizes the spurious balance between the original and its hulking doppelganger by picking up the Breuer’s coursing and set-in lines and conveying them to its apish kith. To do this, it literally obliterates the two narrow vertical bands mentioned earlier and attaches itself to what remains, causing both sides of the composition to step down symmetrically from the middle of the block, a complete transformation of Breuer’s intent. Affixed to the old Whitney like a goiter, the device obscures and intrudes on the stair and irrevocably blemishes the front facade.
In plan, the hinge provides the opportunity for a circular form which Graves uses to achieve several juvenile rotations off the grid and to create a lumber of cylindrical spaces. Breuer’s original free plan has been overwhelmed by axial relations, banal symmetries, and facile scale tricks. The eyebrow windows no longer float in space, they’re at the ends of corridors or trapped in little rooms like pigs in pokes. There are major axes and minor axes, chambers and antechambers, portals and vestibules, the whole shitty beaux-arts apparatus against which modernism rebelled. No doubt there will be the usual fey pastels and precious neo-conservative details as well. Absolutely nothing is left untouched. The curved stair-entries will go, as will the window. The big elevator will no longer serve. The cafe will be yanked up to the roof. Graves even proposes to dump steps into the sculpture court. The man’s a kamikaze.
More promising may be the preservation route. While the Breuer enjoys only weak protection, the adjoining brownstones cannot be destroyed without permission from the Landmarks Commission. Their demolition is defended by Graves on the grounds that the new building will “enhance the urban characteristics of the surrounding neighborhood.” This, of course, is the old “we had to destroy it to save it” argument, of a class with the idea that we might as well tear down Paris since we’ve got a perfectly good facsimile down at Disney World.
Graves himself identifies the key physical characteristics of the nabe as being small-scale and “figurative.” This may or may not be true, but I can’t see how this analysis jibes with banging in the equivalent of 20 stories and wiping out a fine group of traditionally figured remnants. I’m no knee-jerk preservationist, but if the only way to get this awful addition subtracted is to save those brownstones, let’s save the hell out of them. Hands off the Whitney, Graves!
CHAPTER 3
WHAT’S WORTH PRESERVING
What makes a landmark? A landmark is defined as a building or other place of outstanding historical, aesthetic, or cultural importance, often declared as such by some civic authority. The first examples that spring to mind are obvious: libraries, museums, train stations, churches, state houses. The large-scale and beautiful institutions of urban and cultural life, most built over a hundred years ago. But what about the factories, built around the same time and equally imposing? What about the housing for the factory workers, the men and women who built the American economy? Or airports? The new building type of the second half of the twentieth century, so inspirational for architects but so quick to become obsolete. The idea of a landmark becomes fuzzier as we move closer to the present, but in most ways it becomes more interesting. What deserves to be preserved—and to what purpose—is more controversial when talking about a brutalist concrete parking garage of the 1960s than a neoclassical bank of the 1890s. Why should it be saved? What can be done with it? Is it even good architecture?
When writing about skyscrapers and museums, the critic is in effect suggesting future monuments, rendering judgment about where they rank on a historical scale. But when evaluating a potential landmark, the critic’s role is more active: he or she is called upon to judge a much wider slice of the urban environment, and his or her words have the potential to change the shape and growth of the city. In critiquing a landmark, or a potential one, the critic has to engage with the street-level realities of city making: the history of the building and its neighborhood, the present-day context, questions about private ownership and the public good. Politicians, community boards, local activists, and developers all have to participate in a public process of architectural critique. The quality of the design, the reputation of the architect, the continuing usefulness of the type all play a part in the evaluation of whether or not an old, historic building becomes a protected landmark. Architecture critics who may stand on the aesthetic sidelines of urban affairs by circumstance or choice often become activists.
Activist criticism has a long history, and several of the critics whose work you have read in previous chapters have stepped into the role of activist at particular times. Ada Louise Huxtable was at the forefront of protests over the demolition of McKim, Mead & White’s 1910 Pennsylvania Station in 1963, defining, for future critics, how one could be both a modernist interested in the future of architecture and a preservationist interested in the past. Lewis Mumford joined Jane Jacobs in her protest over plans to run a boulevard through Washington Square Park.
But some critics are outraged most of the time, and that anger structures their approach and suggests their theme. The principal difference between activist criticism and the pieces we have read so far is that the former makes an argument. While formal or experiential critiques describe, tour, demonstrate, and elaborate, the activist critique is structured like an editorial, stating its premise at the outset and proving—whether that a building should be torn down, that a building should be saved, or that an addition is a monstrosity—through historical background, visual data, and newsy reportage. Preservation and activist criticism go hand in hand, because a debate about whether to declare a building a landmark is one of the few times the critic can change the course of construction or destruction.
This chapter looks at two examples of activist criticism, one from the 1980s and one from the 2000s, and considers how to structure an effective argument for preservation. The first critic considered is Michael Sorkin, whose valiant defense of the Whitney Museum (a hard-to-love building that has been threatened by addition practically every decade) in New York City you have just read. Sorkin’s piece “Save the Whitney” is from 1985, and while its landmark debates are still relevant, the postmodern addition with which the Whitney was then endangered is now history itself. To bring Sorkin’s critique up to date, I offer New York magazine architecture (and classical music) critic Justin Davidson’s 2009 critique “St. Anywhere,” a defense of the eccentric architecture of yesterday and today and of its importance to the city fabric. Davidson, like Sorkin, uses his review of a single building to define his personal criteria for creating a landmark.
There are two historical essays on preservation that I have found useful in establishing a critical position in relation to preservation. The first is the 1903 essay “The Modern Cult of Monuments” by historian Alois Riegl, which defined a set of five “values” for conservation of art and architectural artifacts at the turn of the nineteenth century, when European cities began to evaluate the ruins in their midst. (The second is Huxtable’s take on preservation, “Lively Original Versus Dead Copy,” discussed on page 81.) The various meanings of Riegl’s terms have long been fodder for art historians, but in this loose interpretation the values he identifies help the critic analyze the merits of and define a position relative to a potential landmark. Before writing or engaging as an activist, the critic must understand what makes a landmark for him- or herself.
Riegl’s first category is historical value, indicating that something important happened there. Historical value is most often designated with the placement of a plaque—so-and-so was born here, this important treaty was signed here, on this spot such-and-such battle happened. Historical value is generally not a debate for architecture critics but rather for historians and curators.
The second category is more subjective: artistic value. Most of New York’s initially designated landmarks had artistic value, like the Astor Library (1854) (now the Public Theater), in that they were designed by famous architects, with expensive materials and extensive ornament, for ceremonial and public purpose. It is the question of artistic value and differences in evaluating taste over time, that often become battlegrounds in determining which modern structures to preserve.
The third category is age value: things impressive in their decrepitude. The ruined tuberculosis hospital at the south end of Roosevelt Island comes to mind, especially when seen in contrast to the twenty-plus years of generic residential towers built at the island’s north end. Industrial ruins are more prevalent in the United States than at the sites of the castles Riegl looked at, and a new crew of urban explorers spelunks (and then photographs) the remains of automobile factories, steel plants, and prisons. The most successful design exploitation of age value, in recent memory, is in parks, where industrial ruins become part of a new landscape.
The fourth category is use value: buildings that continue to work for their original purpose or that have managed to evolve with the times. Grand Central Terminal (1913) and the New York Public Library (1911) on Fifth Avenue are landmarks celebrated for their original and continuing role in urban life. Were the library to digitize every book, rendering a physical place to read them obsolete, its value might require re-evaluation.
The last of Riegl’s categories is newness value, which we can relate to the search for new skyscraper superlatives—the highest, the greenest, the latest in technology. These brand-new qualities can give a building historical status long after they have been normalized.
Applying Riegl’s set of values to some of the buildings mentioned in the introduction to this chapter leads to intriguing results: Penn Station originally had artistic value but lost it through years of unsympathetic renovation and the change in taste from Beaux Arts to modernism. Its use value as a contemporary train station was in question, since its tracks and concourses were underutilized in the 1960s and its owners wanted to sell its air rights to developers to build much taller towers. The Whitney Museum had newness value in its striking brutalist design, as well as artistic value for the same reason. But each time the museum’s board considered architects for an addition, they questioned its use value: was it big enough, in square footage and gallery dimensions, to contain the future of American art? Recently, the answer was a decisive No, leading to the museum’s decision to decamp for a new building on the High Line downtown.
Applying Riegl’s values to a potential landmark offers a rough guide to which aspects of the architecture might become the approach for a review. Does it have newness value? Then stress the pioneering aspects of the material or construction technique. Artistic value? Describe it as alluringly as possible, putting its best foot forward. Use value? Argue for it on its pragmatic merits. Even if Grand Central Terminal weren’t spectacular, it would be hard to create a better hub for subway and train, with public space and private commerce all provided under one roof.
To see Riegl’s categories at work, we can turn to Huxtable’s 1965 essay “Lively Original Versus Dead Copy.” In it Huxtable lays out her criteria for preservation in the modern era, some closely related to Riegl’s ideas:
Preservation is the job of finding ways to keep those original buildings that provide the city’s character and continuity and of incorporating them into the living mainstream. This is not easy. It is much simpler to move a few historical castoffs into quarantine, putting the curious little “enclave,” or cultural red herring, off limits to the speculative developer while he gets destructive carte blanche in the rest of the city.
She articulates a position about the lives of buildings that is very different than the attitudes of previous generations. The loftiest and best use of a building is not as a museum piece (historical value) but as part of a city that continues to grow (use value). While designating a landmark is good, making it part of the living, breathing city is better. Huxtable sees no point in villages like Colonial Williamsburg or in saving a facade and destroying everything behind it. (The 2009 renovation of Henry Miller’s Theater in New York City is an example of facadism, the latter approach. The historic front was preserved as a sort of perpetual stage set attached to a brand new “green” auditorium.) She would see no point in slavish reconstructions of decayed structures and no point in creating historic districts that cannot change. Buildings of different ages create a vibrant city (an argument Jane Jacobs would later expand and which is discussed in chapter 6), and all-new and all-old are equally destructive impulses. Huxtable’s critique offers an argument about preservation in general, while Riegl’s essay establishes a set of criteria for determining which buildings should be preserved.
When Sorkin began writing architecture criticism for the Village Voice in 1978, he was an anomaly in the field in that he did not write for a national publication. Influential architecture critics to date had written for major urban newspapers and magazines, and had gained authority from that institutional backing. The Village Voice was an insurgent newspaper (one that supported the community against authority and aimed to be an alternative to the Times for city news—a role filled today by proliferating blogs like Gothamist). Sorkin’s colloquial style and antiauthoritarian slant—the fact that he had an explicit leftist position at all—reflect the politics of the paper for which he was writing. He consistently questioned the work, the politics, and the behind-the-scenes machinations of architectural powers like Philip Johnson, the Museum of Modern Art, the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), and, famously, Paul Goldberger, then the Times daily critic. (Huxtable, whose work he admired, got a pass.)
Sorkin saw architecture as much as a game as an art form, a position bolstered by the fact that he began writing during a recession. Many of his Voice reviews, collected in the 1994 book Exquisite Corpse, discuss buildings unbuilt, exhibitions shown, controversies engaged, rather than specific three-dimensional works of architecture. Yet Sorkin was and is a practicing architect, and when he turned to the building form, he could be lyrical and highly specific about the experience and effects of being there. “Save the Whitney” showcases Sorkin’s cynicism and poetics. Sorkin enters the landmark debate with a strong, historically based position on the qualities of modern architecture and the ironies of Marcel Breuer’s career, slashing away at Michael Graves’s work and the board that commissioned him, and methodically describing why the Whitney deserves a second look.
He begins with irony: “History seems poised to take its revenge on poor Marcel Breuer.” His sarcastic tone is distinct from that of the other reviewers discussed in this book. That he will be making an argument is clear from his vocabulary: Agincourt, victory, tit for tat, fate, Oedipal, murderous. The preservation of the Whitney is a battle rather than an aesthetic stroll. As in Goldberger’s review of Hearst Tower, the buildings and the architects are players on the stage. But Goldberger’s take was aggrandizing, heroic, whereas Sorkin sees Breuer cut down to size and wants to reduce Graves in the same way. The affront to the building feels personal as well as political. Sorkin’s colloquial language puts little distance between the critic and the reader and, like Muschamp’s use of you in his Guggenheim Bilbao piece, is intended to make the situation seem imperative. Such violent language and an aggressive tone aren’t necessary for activism (some might argue that you catch more flies with honey), but they do draw attention to the fact that action is required.
Rather than his tone, what may be more generally adaptable by other critics is the fact that Sorkin devotes these opening paragraphs to a reappraisal of Breuer’s museum, some twenty years after its completion. Although praised at its opening by the country’s most influential critics, the building did not become beloved like Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim. Its dark color, its lowering brow, and its distinct aesthetic in a neighborhood of traditional architecture made it a confrontational presence on Madison Avenue. Sorkin puts the building in mid-1960s context, as part of a set of experiments in modernism and art display. (Even if you don’t like it, there is a reason it exists as is, and this helps to establish its artistic value.) If people prefer the Guggenheim, Sorkin suggests, that’s their right, but there is no value difference between the two. He goes on to propose that in hiring Graves, the Whitney’s board is distancing itself from its own building, aesthetically and functionally, refusing to acknowledge its historic importance. In Sorkin’s narrative Graves is merely a hired hand, one suggesting additions that obliterate the original’s spirit.
Sorkin is trying to wrest the job of critic back from the museum board and explain the building to a new generation more steeped in the historicist architectural language of postmodernism than the brutalist language of modernism: “First comes the building’s startling presence on the street. Breuer recognized both the scale and the jumble of that reach of Madison Avenue and made a building at once distinct and deferential.” After establishing the Whitney’s place in history, Sorkin shifts to describing its effectiveness in the present. The section of visual description shows Sorkin’s skill as a formalist critic, but it is all in the service of his argument. If the Whitney is undervalued artistically, an effective analysis of how it works and why it works well might convince some onlookers to become fans. Sorkin does not take up the museum’s rejection of the building as a place to show art (use value), because he considers that unworthy. Rather, he tries to make his reader see the building through his own eyes.
Sorkin’s initial move is to explain why the Whitney is, in fact, a contextual building rather than an exercise of ego like Breuer’s Grand Central Terminal tower (1968). He wants to prove that Breuer’s Whitney was not itself a provocation: The Whitney may be a “startling” presence, but Sorkin describes Breuer’s thought process from the inside out and points out all the ways the granite block fits in. Though it is taller than its neighbors, the base of the top section of the museum follows the cornice line of the adjacent brownstones—an inflection now de rigueur in any historic district. It also does not project in front of those buildings but rather carves out space behind the established street wall, achieving drama by shadow rather than sculptural form. The thin concrete wall Sorkin mentions in his analysis of the facade’s vertical organization is further proof of sensitivity. To butt the new building against a brownstone—similar in tone, but not in texture—would indeed have been brutal. Instead, Breuer neatly delineates old from new, allowing each to coexist on either side of the wall.
Sorkin’s final point is about emphasis: the Whitney is meant to be seen in the round. Like the Guggenheim, the Whitney makes the view as you come around the corner as important as the view from across the street, giving energy to a static block. Graves’s addition would refocus attention on just the front, forcing the museum-goer into a relationship that privileges Madison Avenue.
Moving to the inside of the museum, Sorkin explains how Breuer wanted the visitor to see art and then uses the building as a setup for the way in which Graves destroys that experience. The staircase, which reads as an off-center vertical band on the facade, is darker and less grand than those of the Beaux-Arts museums, but it is meant to serve as a place of reflection and delivery—“benches like altars,” “orienting curved wall”—when moving from floor to floor. It is an experience for the individual rather than as display, enhanced by the ability to look outside as you use the stairs. He has the least to say about the galleries because they are so simple: concrete floors, concrete grid ceilings, and between them white walls meant to showcase the large paintings of the 1960s American artists. Wide open spaces. The occasional window is a work of art itself.
The quality of the original firmly established, Sorkin turns to the addition proposal. Sorkin says at the outset that he doesn’t like Graves’s work and thinks his selection alone indicates a homicidal urge toward architecture on the part of the Whitney board. But he turns his critical eye toward the details of the architecture anyway, analyzing the interior and the exterior in terms of what they do to the neighborhood, the facade, the flow through the museum. This is clever, because it allows readers with different tastes to evaluate the future experience rather than just the clash of styles.
To design an addition to such a well-known, high-style building is a tricky thing. Too modest and you create a background building, the equivalent of urban wallpaper. Too assertive and you overwhelm the original. What is just right? Sorkin treats the Whitney and the Whitney 2.0 as two separate museums. He understands that once you add on to the Whitney (or to any other building), it becomes a different animal. This would be true of a new addition to an older building as well—think of Foster + Partners’ 2010 addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. What was different about the Whitney situation was that neither its reputation nor that of Graves’s work had yet solidified. Sorkin has to review 1960s modernist and 1980s postmodernism before they became history.
So, what’s wrong? First, not only does Graves fail to defer, but he subjugates Breuer. Later attempts to add on to the Whitney by Rem Koolhaas (2001) and Renzo Piano (2004) would take very different approaches to the problem of adding to a landmark. Koolhaas proposed a looming, comma-shape structure that lofted a Breueresque block up into the air, doubling the good or bad impression one already had of the 1966 building. Piano proposed a background building along the lines of Gwathmey Siegel’s rectangular white backdrop to the Guggenheim (1992), the bulk of which was set behind the adjacent brownstones. The latter was criticized as too respectful. Graves had no such problem. What makes Sorkin maddest is not just the size of the addition but the way it makes Breuer’s corner-defining, asymmetric composition into a frontal, almost symmetrical one. He has described that irregular composition in clear, visual language, so now he expects the reader to understand what the addition destroys. In order to make his argument, he first spent much of the review on re-education.
The final element of the activist critique is politics, which Sorkin brings in at the end. Despite his efforts (and those of other critics), Sorkin doesn’t think the Whitney has enough defenders based on its own merits. Those brownstones next door, which have historic value, could prove to be the nail in the scheme’s coffin. The brownstones are ordinary buildings, but they are old and are part of the neighborhood fabric. The creation of the “historic district” designation was intended to preserve precisely this kind of character-building architecture. The quotidian has more protection—and more potential defenders—than Breuer’s extraordinary structure, and Sorkin is willing to take what he can get. In his conclusion he transforms from a highly opinionated critic to an activist. The frank admission of where the real protection lies is part of his deflationary, colloquial strategy. He’s not arguing from on high but from the trenches. He wants his readers not just to nod along with him but to do something about it.
Blair Kamin, long-time, Pulitzer Prize–winning architecture critic for the Chicago Tribune, writes in the introduction to his 2003 book Why Architecture Matters: “Activist criticism is based on the idea that architecture affects everyone and therefore should be understandable to everyone. Activist criticism invites readers to be more than consumers who passively accept the buildings that are handed to them. It bids them, instead, to become citizens who take a leading role in shaping their surroundings.” Kamin, like Sorkin, challenges his readers to get involved in shaping their surroundings but understands that criticism needs to make the stakes clear. That’s why activist criticism needs to provide historical context, offer a visual and easily understandable argument for the value(s) represented by the building in question, and outline what can be done. Preservation provides a perfect opportunity for critics to do something. It is a referendum on the past and a chance to assess the future of a building, an institution, and even a neighborhood.
(A final irony: Sorkin was right. The brownstones trumped Breuer. While Graves’s addition, and the proposal by Koolhaas after it, foundered before they encountered the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission [LPC], Piano was forced to preserve them. Piano’s proposal was approved by the LPC in 2005 and the local community board in 2006—but not without modifications. He initially proposed demolishing two of the brownstones in order to create a broad entrance for the addition, set back from the street and the Breuer facade. To gain approval he had to rework the design to demolish just one row house. Piano and the Whitney board were never happy with this compromise, and in 2009 the museum chose not to fight but to move. They partly paid for their new downtown museum site by selling the brownstones.)
The Whitney falls into the category of odd duck. It is a building by a famous architect but without a critical or popular consensus on its worth. The Whitney has been saved, though its future contents are unknown, while Edward Durell Stone’s Gallery of Modern Art (1964) at 2 Columbus Circle, another odd duck, was stripped and reborn as a very different kind of museum. A building that could be the third member of the mid-1960s oddball triumvirate, was also saved from the wrecking ball in 2010 by the bad economy. In 2011, new owners found that they could reuse it after all. The O’Toole Building, longtime home of St. Vincent’s Hospital, was designed by architect Albert Ledner to be used as the headquarters of the National Maritime Union. Its scallop-edged projecting upper floors earned it the nickname “the overbite building,” but it never had the elegance or pedigree of its contemporaries. (Have you heard of Ledner?) When, in 2009, it looked like the end was nigh, Davidson published “St. Anywhere” in which he argued for adding a new value to Riegl’s list: eccentricity.
When St. Vincent’s hospital finally swings a wrecking ball at the O’Toole Building—the endearingly awkward, formerly white, three-layered stack with tear-off perforations and protruding upper floors on Seventh Avenue and West 12th Street—it will be for the greater good of Greenwich Village. The medical tower that rises in its place will serve the community and fortify the hospital’s tottering finances.
But this improvement comes at the cost of eccentricity....As block after Manhattan block acquired a high-gloss sameness, the “overbite building,” as it is known, has remained a folly, one of those defiantly impractical structures that somehow survived in this city’s rugged real-estate ecology. Until now....
Personality is endangered in New York architecture, though not totally extinct. Even as the mid-century misfits fade away—Edward Durrell Stone’s 2 Columbus Circle; now the O’Toole—an occasional new one arrives. Cooper Union’s still-unfinished academic center, designed by Morphosis, will never look demure. The white-glass schooner that Frank Gehry designed as headquarters for InterActiveCorp is hardly self-effacing, either. But imagine a few decades from now, if IAC should go the way of the National Maritime Union and the next owner chafes at the strangely shaped and odd-size offices; then Gehry’s flourish may turn into one more disposable trace of New York weirdness, scrapped to make way for something depressingly normal.
Davidson’s review, like Sorkin’s, is structured as an argument. While Sorkin’s argument was for the Whitney in particular, Davidson uses the O’Toole Building as an example to make a larger case for eccentricity as an urban value. If Sorkin’s theme was the Whitney’s architectural excellence, Davidson’s is redefining excellence. He doesn’t use sarcasm, but instead a calm, reportorial tone that ultimately reads as melancholy.
I include Davidson’s review for several reasons. First, to show that the battle for the preservation of modern architecture continues, and the question of landmark values is a recurring critical theme. Second, to show the potential for activist criticism to take on the theme of preservation at different scales. Both Sorkin and Davidson’s reviews have a building at center, but the specific piece of architecture is put to different use. And last, to point out the similarity in structure. Both are activist critiques and structured as such: they begin with irony, follow with history and visual appreciation, and end with politics.
Davidson opens with the admission that the destruction of the building will be for the greater good of the neighborhood, which badly needs a new hospital (use value), but not for the city as an interesting place (artistic value). As at the Whitney, these two values are opposed, and it is up to the reader, and ultimately the LPC, to decide which one should win out. The O’Toole Building is at a disadvantage, however, as Davidson’s brief history shows: it is no Whitney; and Ledner, no Breuer. As aforementioned, making landmarks of museums and other works by famous architects has always been easier than arguing for the preservation of lesser structures—lesser meaning less monumental, less pedigreed, less central. Davidson can’t go on at length about O’Toole’s artistic qualities but lets its nickname, “the overbite building,” do the talking.
Davidson then segues into his larger theme: “Personality is endangered in New York architecture, though not totally extinct.” Because his essay is as much about architecture in general as it is about O’Toole, he spends several paragraphs establishing the opposing visual characters of the “tastefully bland, well-tailored facility” that may correct the overbite, as well as new buildings that share its quirky personality. Eccentricity, like bad taste, is something most of us only know when we see it, and Davidson defines it through visual example, the same way Sorkin defined the difference between Breuer and Graves.
So what makes a landmark? Perhaps it has something to do with the buildings that are memorable. It can be the critic’s role to help save them, by offering a broad and convincing argument for their worth, and insight into the politics of preservation. But the critic is only a single voice and may or may not become a rallying cry for wider urban or neighborhood activism. To be a good critic is to make the best possible argument for why the oddballs should be saved or built in the first place; to be a good citizen is to know them when you see them.
Davidson ends on a downbeat, unlike Sorkin, bowing to the “depressingly normal” imperatives of politics, economics, and healthcare. But by making this argument, setting a controversial theme, backing it up with visual data, and making architecture, as Kamin writes, “understandable to everyone,” he has stepped out from behind the polite affect of formalist criticism and entered the urban fray. Whether to do so is largely a matter of personality, perhaps of historical circumstance, but it offers a possible role for critics on a larger stage than the newspaper.
CHECKLIST
1. Activist criticism works best when the critic feels strongly about the outcome. Identify a recent or ongoing preservation controversy in your area. Identify the stakeholders in the decision to preserve, modify, or replace. Who spoke in favor of the building and who against? What values, in Rieglian terms, were espoused by either side? Which value(s) would you have stressed and why? Are new values, like Davidson’s eccentricity, required to properly assess the building’s impact on the city?
2. Answer these questions in a piece of criticism by constructing an argument. Find your theme by asking questions like: Is this building important individually or as part of a larger urban example? Where does the greater public good lie, with preservation or demolition? State your point of view in your opening paragraph and then prove it through history, visual description, and political argument.
3. Other questions to consider: What is the history of building and how is that relevant to its current state? What are its good qualities? What are its drawbacks? Can you show (rather than tell) what makes it worth preserving? Who benefits from preservation or demolition? What are the real-world pressure points that could change the building’s fate?