A Sense of Place

...the buildings fight each other as much as they fight the street and the rest of the city...

...Reviewed by Eric D. Goldstein Unlike most guide books, this one succeeds in making a place come alive, in uncovering for the reader/sightseer layers of meaning that would otherwise elude him...

...More important, New York's immense stock of superior older buildings-its greatest architectural asset -seems to have a brighter future today than it did a decade ago...

...they move and push, and the structure holds, frames, enforces...

...It is this act of composition-making, in fact, that might be said to be the essential element of New York's eclectic architecture...

...Fortunately, the photographs by David W. Dunlap are not copious enough to let the reader presume he can fully appreciate the text without inspecting at first hand the structures under consideration...

...To love 77;e City Observed, you may have to love New York City...

...The styles thus lost their ideological meaning?the architects were free agents, so to speak, able to use a Gothic detail not for its ecclesiastical significance but purely for its formal appeal...

...Almost nothing pays attention to anything else...

...This is definitely a guide for the pedestrian, and maps and a geographical ordering of the entries cater to his use...

...To stand underneath the gray steel towers, looking straight up at the web of metalwork as the sound of automobiles becomes a distant whir, is to celebrate structure as you can nowhere else in New York...

...Goldberger decries the aggressively anti-urban quality of many products of the last three decades...

...In a regrettably brief introduction, Goldberger takes on the Manhattan cityscape as a whole...

...It was an indulgent, almost hedonistic kind of an attitude, but its freedom from ideology could permit the best architects to let their essential quest be directed toward the making of compositions, the arranging of parts...

...The publishers have plans for similar volumes on other American metropolises...

...A few recent structures show a "mature sense of what makes a city civilized...

...The old Manhattan Police Headquarters, a 1909 French Renaissance structure, "stands for police work as drama, whereas the new Police Headquarters [1973) is a symbol (more accurate surely) of police work as bureaucracy...

...Cass Gilbert's 1913 Woolworth Building is "the Mozart of skyscrapers, a lyrical tower that weds Gothic ornament to exquisite massing and scale...

...It is what New York is to San Francisco, a thing slightly less graceful but vastly less precious, a thing not quite as beautiful but much more strong...

...The City Observed takes you from Bowling Green to Fort Tryon Park, into automats and low-income housing projects, through back alleys and subway stations...

...Like the best critics of dance and modern art, he writes lucidly about the values and meanings of creations in an abstract medium...

...You feel the soaring cables, their curving lines sharp against the sky...

...Goldberger does not hide behind jargon...

...Clearly, though, Goldberger's synthesis of architectural, urban and social history and criticism makes for a fresh, rewarding city guide...

...What was important [to the architects and their clients] was to be masters of history-to confirm the power of their city and their culture by picking something Gothic here, something Georgian there, something classical as well...

...The George Washington Bridge [1931] does not have "the delicate poetry of, say, the Golden Gate Bridge-it is something broader, solider...

...Water Street, in the financial district, he declares, "should be viewed not as architecture but as an object lesson in real estate speculation gone wild...

...It is by no means axiomatic among architects that buildings have an obligation to practice good urbanism...

...Basically a collection of notes on roughly 800 Manhattan buildings by New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger, it enlightens because the author considers each structure in the context of the esthetic and sociological totality of the streets, neighborhood and city around it...

...It is typically American, and typically New York, in its use of history-Gothic details were chosen for their picturesque quality, for the ease with which they could be applied to the basically vertical form of the skyscraper, and not for any deeper association they might have...

...Still, the author is cautiously optimistic...

...one hopes that, unlike the imitators of Rockefeller Center and the Seagram Building, the sequels will prove worthy of their prototype...