Putting on the Glitz
Miller, Ross
Manhattan was first glitzed in late 1979 when developer Harry Helmsley and architects Emery Roth & Sons began making over a block-long property on Madison Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets....
...His architecture exploits a rich provincial look...
...Macklowe's words: I am Metropolitan Tower...
...There is no order, only preference...
...Easily replicated, like Warhol's multiples, Portman's work has the appeal of the familiar...
...The main attraction is an elevator tower with bronzed glass cars, lit like monster Christmas ornaments, running up and down an outside track...
...Free at last," I say to myself...
...The initiation into these experiences does not demand hard-won knowledge, only a willingness to be momentarily stimulated, then pass on...
...The plan turns everything inside out...
...Louis completed in the late seventies reflect his cunning, as if he were doing the out-of-town tryouts of a show before it opened on Broadway...
...It had to live up to this dream picture, the dream drawn by the advertising people...
...Mastery here is not concerned with authenticity, but with proliferation...
...KPF, along with a venerable Chicago firm, Perkins & Will, just completed 900 North Michigan Avenue...
...In addition to over scaled Palladian detailing and other stale tricks of historicism, the firm has stimulated a new interest in Art Deco, setbacks, and other formerly distinguished urban strategies from the Golden Age of the New York skyscraper...
...It was almost a duty to have fun in such a place...
...Framing the square are twenty-two floors of "balcony-corridors" drawn as belts around the individual rooms...
...Frank Gehry, 1989 recipient of the Pritzker Prize (architecture's version of the Nobel) has revived memories of a smaller scale style of practice in America that produced Frank Lloyd Wright and 34 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money Louis Kahn, who also worked in the shadow of great corporate firms but created the conditions for an opposition architecture...
...The building's curved entrance evokes an unornamented version of Louis Sullivan's Carson, Pirie Scott Department Store while its massing suggests Mies's "Designs for a glass skyscraper" (1921) and Erich Mendelsohn's Schocken Stores (1928...
...Lapidus explains: You see, I try to understand people...
...Harry Macklowe, who describes himself as an "architectural designer," built Metropolitan Tower (completed in 1985) on a sensitive site neighboring Carnegie Hall, whose own air rights are now being "utilized...
...Glitz is the developer's friend...
...Contained as it was within an untainted white shell, Lapidus's glitz made the conspicuous consumption by a Depression generation, trained to accept austerity, appear to be a higher ethic...
...Prices are graded on the relative fame of the architect, not on the inherent quality of the work...
...The ripple effect has been widespread in art circles, high and low...
...or, to use a nineteenth-century word, "taste...
...Now in its third version and second architect, the building is still far from receiving approval...
...This conversion was symbolically completed when Johnson and John Burgee relocated their firm from the Seagram Building, where it had been located since the building opened in 1958, to one designed by them on Third Avenue and 53rd Street...
...In the late seventies he added the Bonaventure Hotel (Los Angeles) and Renaissance Center (Detroit) to the earlier Peachtree Center (Atlanta...
...Between soup and war, all experiences are leveled...
...A stiff flag on the moon, Portman's bright surfaces turn away from the historical city...
...Like New York's George Washington Bridge, McCormick Place revealed to Helmut Jahn the potential of an extroverted architecture that made visible its delight in pure display...
...Once an associate architect with Mies van der Rohe on the Seagram Building, Johnson turned his back on the same modern architecture he and HenryRussell Hitchcock zealously championed in 1932 in The International Style: Architecture since 1922...
...At Detroit's Renaissance Center and Los Angeles's Bonaventure Hotel, glitz is used on the sleek facades to advertise a demilitarized zone within the formerly dangerous and largely abandoned Central Business District...
...However, with all its sophistication the building can also be viewed as mocking the city...
...The Helmsleys brought it to the heart of the city...
...Architectural criticism has also forced alterations of plans at both the Guggenheim and Whitney Museums and scrapped proposals to build some large midblock towers in Manhattan...
...Portman's hyperkinetic plans provide a sense of excitement in measured doses as the glimmering details offer the reassurance of the known...
...In Johnson's work in the 1980s, the emphasis is on a building's surface and profile rather than the space it creates...
...No longer did the architect resist the developer or corporate client in order to educate him...
...A Portman lobby is a celebration of kitsch not for its ironic effect as Bette Midler might play it, but for its WINTER • 1990 • 29 CuNun in an Aga of Mom sentimental and•grandiose associations, like the costume jewelry in grandma's nightstand...
...Miami's folklore of the glitzy fifties and early sixties included little about the native population, which was more or less invisible, seen only in service roles...
...Rather, he became his willing instrument...
...Anyone can understand its meaning, its brash assertion of wealth...
...Even at its best, the essence of KPF architecture is not to be embarrassed by such transpositions but to embrace them...
...Glitz has dominated the architecture of the 1980s as the glorification of prosperity, exclusivity, and security has dominated public discourse...
...The mirroring of forms here is not dependent on historical distance, as with most postmodernism...
...The Hyatt formula he settled on is now widely used in all its variations...
...Posthumously awarded a retrospective at the Museum of Modem Art, Warhol's work holds no mystery...
...There is even a new architectural hero in the comics, Mr...
...If that's so, what was I to do...
...Helmsley persuaded the city that simple preservation of this historic building was unprofitable...
...A building with such an aggressive profile in the city on one of New York's primary commercial streets does not engage the reciprocal relationship between public and private but glorifies ownership...
...Symbiosis with Corporate America Philip Johnson was the first of the Ivy League establishment designers to understand how glitz could be used by "serious" architects to exhibit their good faith to clients uneasy with high art...
...The freedom to walk "outside" on a tenth floor balcony relieves both the claustrophobia of most large urban hotels and the anxiety of having to leave...
...In the spirit of the Helmsleys, a dark glass structure with a knife edge to the street, Metropolitan Tower violates, along with Edward Larrabee Barnes's IBM Building, the historic rightangled New York City grid...
...I am of the opinion we have no faiths...
...His One Liberty Place now dominates Philadelphia's skyline, where a special high-rise zoning district was created to allow his sixty-one-story tower to be built...
...There are other hopeful signs...
...Never sleeping, pale, ghost-like, he haunts the city trying to reverse the process he helped initiate...
...There are no rules, only facts...
...Later, he apprenticed at C. F. Murphy (now Murphy/Jahn) a firm that, along with the Chicago office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, solidified Chicago's reputation as postwar America's premier architectural city...
...The stance was all important and the context rarely questioned, as Reagan took on personas from the Gipper to liberator at Normandy...
...A purely backlot affair, his streets are free of the perceived and real dangers of their inner city locations...
...Like a false diamond, this architectural ice developed out of the collaboration of a pragmatic architect, Morris Lapidus, and the new Florida hotel money...
...A Manhattan-based firm, KPF specializes in a slick urbanism that can be read from a distance...
...The nickname, "lipstick," has stuck because it somehow helps, through renaming in a vernacular way, to humble an object that appears so haughty and divorced from its environment that even Vogue describes it as "shine without luster...
...Jahn's mimesis is sophisticated, never literal...
...For men and women fixated on the making of money, there is little interest in hassling the natural disorder of the street...
...The immigrant parents were lured to Art Deco Miami, their children to Miami Beach...
...The one-of-a-kind syndrome leads away from analysis into an orgy of pure display...
...The loaves and fishes act of multiplying the value of a one-of-a-kind object was perfected by Andy Warhol...
...In the past, Philadelphia limited building height to a symbolic 491 feet, which was reserved for founder William Penn's statue on top of City Hall...
...The existing city is shut out, replaced by a fantasy urbanism in a climate-controlled and secure mall...
...Portman first gained wide attention with work for the Hyatt Corporation (1967) in his hometown of Atlanta, then quickly expanded a local practice into a national and then international phenomenon...
...KPF built its critically acclaimed 333 Wacker Drive in 1983...
...Miami's variety of the modern is not built to instruct...
...Rather, Jahn codes into his work references to contemporary buildings at a very different scale as he does with the State of Illinois Building (1985), which inflates the sharp-cut conical shape of Thomas Beeby's modest lakeside observatory and hollows out the core for an audacious atrium structure or simply creates a double of an existing structure with his addition to the Chicago Board of Trade (1982...
...Glitz perfected reflects and shines but has no memory...
...Like an alchemist changing dross to gold, Andy Warhol reprocessed kitsch, the horribly awful and grandiose, into art...
...The result is that a greater awareness and interest in architecture has begun to develop nationwide...
...Where are we then as the decade comes to an end...
...Warhol's success was not lost on the architectural profession...
...The tallest...
...In each case, the architect was asked too quickly to arrive at a scheme...
...these glass boxes are opaque—one-way mirrors, framing beautiful views but allowing no way in...
...The most beautiful...
...Nice to think so...
...An insatiable consumer, KPF's architecture recycles urban imagery of the distant and recent past, laundering it clean...
...One WINTER • 1990.33 culture in an Age of Money One Liberty Place Liberty Place is a contemporary version of New York's Chrysler Building, a prime case of architectural cloning that cynically implies that nothing in this time is unique or authentic...
...He knew what he was doing...
...When he portrays serious subjects, like nuclear war, capital punishment, or the carnage of automobile crashes, he cannot go deep...
...He convinced developers and corporations that they could do business with him...
...His architecture is marketed and franchised...
...Order and control is the message as the city is exploited for its picturesque local color...
...Politics has most recently been concerned with maintaining an image...
...To begin with it had to be fabulous...
...This, of course, was the old glitz, the sort of thing "Saturday Night Live" comedians and strict modernist architects still ridicule...
...On the ground are kiosks and other diversions that keep the lobby space filled with activity...
...Jahn's recent work has included an unbuilt project for the world's tallest building for Donald Trump's grandiose Television City on Manhattan's Upper West Side and elaborate schemes throughout the world...
...Portman's first hotel in Atlanta is composed around a giant square space, 120 feet to a side...
...Even when he got it wrong at Bitburg, be recovered instantly...
...Ronald Reagan came into office "talking tough" about opposing the Evil Empire and glorified himself as Commander and Chief in Grenada, not Moscow...
...Designed for a constricted site at an elbow of the Chicago River, the building appears inventive in form and unusually sensitive to its difficult site...
...Architecture's adoption of surface over depth—elevation over section—in the 1980s is part of a larger social trend, celebrating a society afraid of engagement...
...A thirtyfourstory tower of glass and Swedish Imperial granite banding between floors, it is designed to stand out, to create its own context...
...Projects in Dallas, Houston, Minneapolis, and St...
...The architecture eases the transition from work in a high-rise glass tower to play and consumption in a glassed-in mall...
...Nonetheless there are some signs of change...
...The Lipstick Building revives that robberbaronial spirit...
...Even Howe and Lescaze's Philadelphia Saving Fund Society tower (1932), the city's finest modern building, respected this traditional limit...
...In this way, Johnson perfected a style that merged a glittering exterior and interior with a high-tech frame...
...He foreshadowed his plans, over a decade ago, in a lecture delivered at Columbia University...
...The work of America's most prolific designers in the 1980s—Helmut Jahn, William Pedersen, John Portman, Philip Johnson, and John Burgee —reveals how glitz has gone upscale, transformed from a developer's strategy into a serious urban architecture...
...By making the hotel complex the anchor for urban development planned and executed by the private sector, Portman was able to convince local governments to support a radical reorganization of neglected inner city areas...
...Through the use of mirrors, lights, and shiny metallic surfaces, Portman partially creates the sensation of a real outside...
...He skims...
...Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) has exploited the developer's appetite for glitter and chrome by providing it with an endless variety of containers...
...A sense of the inappropriateness and infantilized nature of his skin-deep manipulations can be seen in Chicago at the heart of the city's financial district...
...Streets in this fake town are safely locked inside glass...
...This transition has occurred at a time when architects have achieved celebrity status, finding themselves on the covers of Time and Newsweek...
...Both resorts sanction ostentation, for the architecture seems to license uninhibited display...
...But Establishment architecture's embrace of glitz made it the lingua franca of the 1980s, easing the formerly strained relationship between client and architect...
...His plan took the existing structure, restored its lavish interior, and converted it to an elaborate lobby and pass-through for a sleek bronzed-glass and anodized aluminum tower that housed the guts of a new hotel...
...A famous building has been imported from another place and skinned for its image...
...The ironic stance is inseparable from the work...
...Now the Xerox Building, it fuses high technology, a slick, enamelled aluminum-and-glass skin over a reinforced concrete structure, and a EuroAmerican image...
...But insensitivity to local tradition is part of glitz's international appeal...
...Because it creates its own context, integral to itself with little or no formal connection to the local streets, visitors to the city can avoid having to confront the world outside their hotel...
...Under their direction, a mansion designed by McKim, Mead and White (1882) after the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, was reborn as a luxury hotel...
...The sky and clouds reflect upon my face...
...Murphy's principal designers after 333 Wacker Drive 32 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money the war, Jacques Brownson and Gene Summers, established aestheticized Miesian principles...
...X. A master architect responsible for "Radiant City," X became so revolted by his work that he went underground...
...Particularity of place is not thought important as long as visitors find themselves safely in the eternal land of RICH...
...Large planters hold greenery that drapes itself over the sides...
...One is not confronted by the austere culture of high modernism...
...The result, in his own words, was a "potpourri of anything I could put my hands on...
...Far more typical are forays into glitz that mark Chicago's North Western Terminal Project (1983), New York's 750 Lexington Avenue (1989) and Los Angeles's Wilshire-Westwood (1988...
...The most gifted designer in the establishment axis is Helmut Jahn, who like Philip Johnson has roots in high modern architecture...
...Following Gehry's example, a series of younger architects— George Ranalli, Steven Holl, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien in New York, Ron Krueck in Chicago, Frank Israel, and Morphosis in Los Angeles—has moved away from glitz...
...Architectural historian Spiro Kostof calls this present state of urbanism the "one-of-each syndrome" and compares it to the turn-of-the-century battle of the skyscrapers, when press barons like the owners of the New York Times, Tribune, and Sun competed only "for the sake of prestige and image...
...or a modern word, "take...
...A fascination with shimmer and shine drives KPF to mistake reflection for what Montgomery Schuyler, the nineteenth-century American architecture critic, called the "thing itself...
...In his way, he transformed immigrant kitsch from a random collection of sentimental objects to a higher art version that assimilated into the larger culture...
...my whole architecture is based on people...
...Morris Lapidus discovered a formula that combined his wonder as a young boy from Russia at seeing Coney Island in 1903 with the upscale cultural values he learned at school...
...At the beginning of the decade, he was asked to design a speculative office building in Chicago on the corner of Monroe and Dearborn...
...There Johnson/Burgee in 1983, on a site diagonally across from Daniel Burnham and John Root's Rookery Building (1885-86), built a bloated version (forty stories to the original's twenty) of that historic firm's Masonic Temple...
...There he argued: The day of ideology is thankfully over...
...They've heard that on the former Firestone Estate the fabulous Fountainbleau is going to be built...
...To him the world is a flea market...
...And no matter in which direction I look, my city offers itself to me, an endless visual feast...
...But this Narcissus in the city, busy with its reflection in the river and its symbiotic mirroring of surrounding buildings, is in truth a clever copy in profile of an earlier building by Harrison and Abramovitz on the Connecticut River in Hartford...
...New York's Max Protetch Gallery does a brisk business in contemporary architectural drawings, often of projects that will never be built...
...In the way that personality displaces ideas as a subject for the media, architecture's current love of glitz has made a difficult profession more accessible to the public, transforming the artistic process, not just the product, into a commodity to be bought, sold, and traded...
...Had not elements of his work been adopted by establishment designers whose work appears regularly in the prestigious European, Asian, and American architectural journals, Portman's work would have remained a provincial anomaly...
...But Lapidus was serious and did not patronize his clients...
...Take a hotel and dress it up...
...When it came time for him to build on a large scale, he did not modestly sequester the glitz behind a modernist facade but saturated the entire building in it...
...In its prime the place inspired tales about the biggest sandwiches, pools, and showgirls...
...A Sullivanesque semicircular entrance attempts to break the oppressive impression of steel and glass at the North Western Terminal...
...Fast to learn the lessons of Miami, John Portman elaborated on the Lapidus formula...
...30 • DISSENT Culture In an Age of Money Suburbanized malls and atriums minimize the shock of living in the city within close proximity to different cultures and classes...
...On a sandy strip that displaced the decaying city across the water, arrivistes had an architecture of their own...
...Lapidus's Fountainbleau, Americana, and Eden Roc hotels are hybrids, employing the language of modern architecture with a Yiddish accent...
...Central Park is my garden...
...What's their background, their training...
...But isn't it fun...
...Assuming a general cultural amnesia, he builds with unchallenged freedom...
...It is not the only one of Helmut Jahn's buildings that has the look of a broad-shouldered robot hulking above the street...
...Born in Miami Beach Architectural glitz of the 1980s has its roots in the postwar development of Miami Beach...
...Resurfacing recently, he vows to "undo the damage he believes he had done . . . even if it kills him...
...The "Lipstick" Building is an oval structure on a typical New York right-angled lot...
...Historical quotation in oddly divergent materials replaces pure architectonic concerns...
...Along with the last remnant of its kitschy innocence, Johnson purged glitz of its suburban provincial qualities before he transported it to the major cities...
...A collector of things, he despiritualizes reality...
...There they provided the prime tenant, Bloomingdale's, with a cavernous atrium space, ornamented on the main floor with metallic details from the New York store...
...From videos to fast food the pace is manic and the style ironic...
...Where do these people get their culture...
...The result is that Helmut Jahn's work in the 1980s has defined the boundary between glitz and genuine innovation...
...They're going to come to Miami...
...make it a magnet to attract people back to town...
...In his United Airlines Terminal (1987) at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, Jahn ably transformed the well-worked vernacular style of the railroad shed into a finely integrated polychromatic mix of lights and color...
...I finally came to the conclusion that most of them get their culture not from school, not from their travels, but from the movies, the cinema...
...Working closely with Gene Summers, Jahn explored the ornamental properties of structure...
...I have none...
...Soaring proudly from the heart of New Metropolitan Tower York, I gaze with pleasure upon the bustling rivers, graceful bridges, glittering avenues...
...The mindnumbing reiteration of images from Brillo and Campbell's Soup to Marilyn and Mao is treated with no change of affect...
...Out-of-towners particularly enjoy these spaces...
...He led the charge on the new Times Square with the Marriott Marquis, a fifty-story bunker fitted with its own shimmering atrium and revolving restaurant safely barricaded away from the city...
...It often involves displacement of type and context, as in this case where an anonymous office commission symbiotically recalls two celebrated commercial projects...
...An outsider to architecture's primary axis— the Northeast, Chicago, California—Portman bridged the suburbs and the cities...
...Community opposition has forced developer Mortimer Zuckerman to scale down a gargantuan skyscraper project for Columbus Circle on Manhattan's West Side...
...Only the color related the old building to the new...
...It is an architecture for a new American generation born and raised in the suburbs...
...He was incapable of embarrassment...
...His implied narrative is: "Sure this is junk and I know it...
...Helmut Jahn's "Let them eat cake" Euro-glitz has none of the frantic insecurity of Trump Tower's six-story rose-colored atrium...
...Jahn's inspiration is mimetic, not nostalgic...
...unlike later work, his architecture was not ironic...
...Warhol's art initiates the viewer into a shared attitude that is marketed to look exclusive, like the Hard Rock Café, but admits everyone...
...It carries none of its original associations with workers' housing and European utopian planning...
...But the small gesture to scale is overwhelmed by the inevitable anthropomorphic reading the building encourages...
...The relationship between the two that had existed in the modern period was now reversed...
...To his credit, Portman, who began as a real estate developer, had the sense and energy to lead people back to the cities at a time when New York and other urban centers were in or near bankruptcy...
...Peachtree Plaza Apioneer back to a territory thought lost, Portman proved the inner city a good investment and helped define an architectural language agreeable to the market conditions of the 1980s, where everything seemed to be on sale...
...Glitzy Las Vegas serves a similar function for vacationing Midwesterners...
...Who are they...
...Aren't we all having a good time being in the know together...
...To date, the most radical success has been the farcical dismantling of the top of the seventy-two-story Cityspire, on Seventh Avenue between 55th and 56th Streets, because it hogged eleven more feet than the city permitted...
...Johnson's accomplishment was to void modern architecture of all political associations born in the days of utopian Weimar...
...Let us celebrate the death of the idee fixe...
...After emigrating from Germany, Jahn was educated at Mies's old school, the Illinois Institute of Technology...
...Miami Beach provided an upscale, unthreatening way to attract down south a new 28 • DISSENT Culture in an Age of Money Fontainbleau Hotel generation of prosperous Americans...
...He chooses instead to separate the aura from the soul and we are left with labels, masks, and trademarks...
...Like the English Club in prerevolutionary India or the American corporate settlements in the Middle East, the architecture of the 1980s is set off from existing buildings with little regard for context...
...q WINTER • 1990 • 35...
...There are no imperatives, only choice...
...Modernism promoted transparency...
...Where Will Glitz Go...
...Warhol celebrates surface...
...Structure was used as a prominent design element, exemplified by McCormick Place, on which Helmut Jahn worked when he first joined the firm...
...It has brought postmodernism's mirror, its appetite for imitating past styles, closer to the present...
...WINTER • 1990 . 31 Culture in an Age of Money Lipstick Building But it would take a new generation of architects to bring glitz to its peak in the 1980s...
...Portman's strategy was simple enough...
...The lobby at One Liberty Place, with its marble walls, hanging American flag, baby grand, and palm tree, is a money vault, tucked away from the dwarfed older city outside...
...By importing the kind of planning and design learned in developing the suburbs, Portman's architecture treats the city as a colonial conquest...
...Not surprisingly, Liberace was a favorite lounge act...
...But the United Airlines terminal has proven itself the exception rather than the rule for Jahn's work in the 1980s...
...Trump Tower Dominated by large corporate firms, American architecture has manifested this same kind of smugness...
...In their work and interest in teaching they are trying to take architecture out of the boardroom...
...In all instances, the Andy Warhol WINTER • 1990 • 27 Culture In an Age of Money artist refuses to get involved...
...On a decidedly grander scale, he created a classy New World cultural context for what the migratory New Yorkers and New Jerseyites already knew and liked...
...A Hyatt in Chicago offers essentially the same experience as one in San Francisco...
...Helmsley was a pioneer...
...The Phoenix Mutual Life Insurance Building (196064) is 333 Wacker Drive twenty years later...
...At a time when austere functional glass office buildings defined serious East Coast cities, glitz with its brash concern for effect was thought acceptable only for the provinces: Las Vegas, Miami Beach, and Houston...
Vol. 37 • January 1990 • No. 1
