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November 04, 2005
Small Architectural Tour
Jean-Marc gave us a quick architectural tour of lower Manhattan, closest to Tisch. The building of the city were put in the context of the ideas we are playing with in spatial design.
We started out with the long, narrow buildings right across the street from the school. The ones that look like they might be out of the Triplets of Bellville. When they were built, the city stopped at the church in Union Square, everything north of that was farm land. The buildings were constructed in an old world style, where builders were taxed by the number of window. More windows meant more potential retail revenue, you could show more stuff to sell. The settlers here wern't taxed by each window but the custom remained.
Every building looks different depending on where it's inhabitants immigrated from.
The buildings are an "irrigation system of money". The first few floors are plain and purely for function. Industrial containers for stores and factories. The buildings are most ornate at the top where the owners usually lived. In this way the owners could pay for their habitation upstairs through the commerce downstairs. With this system, the renter had a direct relationship with the land owner. In the city's current incarnation, a couple of large, anonymous banks own all the land.
Down broadway is a skyscraper built by Cass Gilbert. It wasn't possible to build a skyscraper until after the elevator invented and the one in lower Manhattan was built soon after that. I think the one we saw was the Woolworth Building. The skyscraper was initially developed as a gothic church to bind the stretch of broadway to the other church in Union square but after it was built they realized it was a testament to the church of capitalism and not christ.
The subways are built in a vault, you can see it in how broadway has an arc to it. In the early 20th century people realized that utilities should be underground. The street became an abstraction instead of the only place to be. Now there was a down and an up instead of just a "there".
A lot of the basements of the buildings on Broadway extend under the road.
The subway went underground and there is very little concrete separating us from the vault underneath. Since the subways were also a utility, they are lined with tile, like a bathroom.
Also, in a tight city like Manhattan, you are always saving on space. You can see that in the 8th street N/R stop, where one side of the entrance is a building so you don't need railings on both sides. You can use a building as railing.
If you take a right at the N/R, you can see a small building which is a prototype of a skyscraper. It's more even, flat, straight and is more of an engineering feat than the buildings around it. No other buildings on that street have such a flat facade.
We moved down to Astor place, where the opera house used to be. The large building to the right is the Cooper Union School which was picked up and moved from the Bowery to realign the architecture of the city.
The Bowery used to be much more dangerous only twenty years ago, cities change quickly. NYU gave away housing with ridiculous leases in the eighties because no one wanted to live in Manhattan and now these people can lived their indefinitely with ridiculously low rents.
The big note/clock on the wall is from when the Fischer store was there, the Virgin Megastore of its time. People would buy sheet music there. Now the sign is a national landmark.
The building across from Cooper Union looks like it belongs in an Italian piazza. It was a prototype but the style never took off. It was too ornate, too old world.
Along Lafayatte you can see the pre depression opulence and the post depression practicality. In the parking garage, design is done on the cheap accentuating the interplay of brick arrangements.
There is an interesting building, the Bayard-Condict Building on Great Jones St built by Louis Sullivan. Sullivan was a mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright's. One of the first skyscrapers, it surges and looks to only be stopped by its roof. It isn't industrial and it doesn't announce itself, it's almost a building as poem.
Posted by mb2811 at November 4, 2005 06:45 PM