Some Stubby Postwar New York "Skyscrapers"

When Wall Street crashed in October 1929 marking the start of the Great Depression, a large amount of office space in New York City was either under construction or in such advanced a planning stage that construction happened anyway.

Depression-driven drastic scaling back of business activity combined with floor after floor of new office space reaching completion in the early 1930s resulted in a glut on the real estate leasing market. Famous sites such as the Empire State Building remained partly empty for years after they were built.

World War 2 prosperity and the fact that depressed times failed to recur saw more and more space being rented after the war.  The market soon reached the point that new office building construction could resume.

This first wave of postwar buildings was an odd-looking lot. For one thing, they were short by New York standard -- 21 to 25 above-ground floors. And their shapes determined by zoning regulations were not graceful, especially when compared to the Art Deco style skyscrapers of the late 1920s and early 30s.

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Look Building, 488 Madison Avenue (at 51st Street) - 1950
Designed by Emery Roth & Sons, 25 floors. This is perhaps the best known of that era's office construction. The building was named for its major tenant, Look Magazine, a photography-centered publication that competed against the better-known, more successful, Life Magazine. A noteworthy tenant was industrial designer Raymond Loewy. A recent tenant is the Municipal Art Society. The building attained landmark status in 2010, as this New York Times article reports.

Universal Pictures Building, 445 Park Avenue (between 56th & 57th streets) - 1947
Kahn & Jacobs architects, 22 floors. This is perhaps the first of the postwar breed. Setbacks begin above the tenth floor. The exterior features curtain walls and strip windows.

505 Park Avenue (at 59th Street) - 1949
Emery Roth & Sons architects, 21 floors. Again strip windows, but the corner facing the intersection is rounded off -- an echo of certain 1930s Moderne designs. The Look Building continued and elaborated on this motif.

260 Madison Avenue (by 38th Street) - 1953
Sylvan Bien architect, 21 floors. The trendsetting 1952 Lever House by Gordon Bunshaft (Park Avenue between 53rd & 54th streets, 24floors) was in place before 260 was completed, and Bien did borrow the sort of cladding used by Bunshaft. On the other hand, the wedding cake setback scheme of the buildings shown above was continued.

Some New York Skyscrapers

Here is Yr. Faithful Blogger on New York City's East 56th Street in early September.

I spent around ten years within striking distance of New York, but have hardly visited the place since the late 1980s. My wife wasn't a big fan, and it had lost much of its charm for me as well. As it turned out, we had a nice two-day stay -- especially because our hotel was at Park Avenue and E. 50th Street, a nicer neighborhood than, say, Times Square and the theatre district.

While poking around, I took some photos of buildings that interested me ... buildings put up since the years when I lived closer.

432 Park AvenueThe second-tallest building in the city, it contains 104 condominiums in 84 floors and was completed late 2015. Its Wikipedia entry is here.

At the time this post was drafted, the entry stated: "Designed by architect Rafael Viñoly around what is described as "the purest geometric form: the square" and inspired by a trash can designed by Josef Hoffmann..."

What foolishness. What sophistry. What a commentary on modernist aesthetic thinking.

Perhaps Viñoly was joking. Even so, the building is ugly, being poorly proportioned (much too thin for its great height) and boring to view (despite a few window pattern break zones). No wonder the Wikipedia entry states (as of this writing) that 432 has not been well received by average New Yorkers. Me? I hate it.

As for the photo, two modernist architecture classics frame the scene. The plaza and pool in the foreground are on the site of Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building. The building at the left is the Lever House, the first International Style building on Park Avenue.

383 Madison AvenueThis office building opened in 2002, and more information can be found here. I include it due to its non-rectangular cross section and the detailing at its top. Not first-rate skyscraper architecture, but better than most of the new New York high-rises.

One57Set atop a 210-room Hilton hotel, the tower contains 92 condos. It was completed in 2014. Its Wikipedia entry is here.

I happened to catch it on a clear day where its exterior coloring created an intriguing image, as this photo suggests.  Otherwise, it's just one of those attempts at making the shape of a building a huge piece of simplified sculpture.

One WorldWide PlazaPart of a three-building complex, the office tower was completed in 1989, as stated in its Wikipedia entry. The design harkens back to late-1920s skyscrapers. For me, that's a plus because the combination of solidity and ornamentation usually created a pleasing visual effect.

Architecture and Design at the 1964 New York World's Fair

World's fairs are usually showcases for architects and designers to strut their stuff. By the 1920s the stuff they wanted to show off was either the latest in modern (or Moderne) thinking or perhaps their prediction of the future. In America, the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress exposition featured plenty of modernistic pavilions to excite Great Depression crowds. And the famous 1939 New York World's Fair was explicitly themed The World of Tomorrow.

The Chicago fair opened after most of the pre-Depression Art Deco and Moderne office towers had come on line and little was being built. To a considerable degree the thrust of the trend towards architectural modernism had been halted. Its evolution had effectively ceased aside from doodles in architects' sketchbooks. The New York fair came later in the architectural drought at a time when the Depression was easing, but few large buildings aside from government structures were being built. At least it created an opportunity to look ahead while entertaining fair attendees.

By the early 1960s when the 1964-1965 fair was being planned, the "future" that the '39 fair attempted to predict had already happened in the form of a modernistic building boom in New York City and elsewhere. Rather than featuring Progress or The Future, this fair's weak theme was "Peace Through Understanding." As best I could tell, it was virtually invisible to fairgoers, there being no pavilions from major nations due to the fair's lack of BIE sanctioning.

Nevertheless, the fair's architects and designers did their best to show off, and a number of pavilions were future-oriented in what was on display. So the fair's architecture ranged from attempts at showing the future to whimsical structures to even traditional or historical recreations.

The fair was not a great success. And it did not excite me when I visited it in June of 1965 during the second and last year of its run. Information regarding it can be found here.

Below are some photos I took.

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To set the scene, this is the General Motors pavilion at the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress exposition. It seems more Moderne than Deco.

And there is GM's 1939 New York pavilion as seen from the rear. I suppose the style might be called Streamline Moderne.

Now it's 1965 and this is part of the Chrysler Corporation area. That's a whimsical V-8 motor sculpture at the left.

Here is the nondescript, government-issue bureaucratic architecture United States pavilion.

The theme symbol was the Unisphere. A giant cliché that might well have been selected by an unimaginative committee. It still exists.

More whimsy: The Tower of the Four Winds. Some of its elements moved when caught by a breeze or wind, in the spirit of Alexander Calder.

The Rheingold brewery opted for a traditional setting. Its beer had been very popular in New York for decades, but was starting to fade in the mid-1960s.

And there was the Belgian Village that hadn't been finished when the fair opened in 1964. It was best known for its Belgian waffles.

The New York State pavilion. Its best feature was observation towers, two of which can be seen at the left. The nice thing about the towers wasn't their design. Rather, once you were up one, there was a good view of the fairgrounds -- especially in the evening when the major pavilions were illuminated.

New York State observation towers as seen from farther away.

The IBM pavilion.

This is the AT&T Bell Telephone pavilion. It features a "floating" look that reminds me of Star Wars type spacecraft that appeared nearly 15 years after it was designed.

The General Electric pavilion.

The General Electric pavilion at night.

The Unisphere and pool at night.

Jugendstil in Ålesund

Yes, that's a large photo of Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm II in the window of a building in Ålesund, Norway. And nearby is Keiser Wilhelms gate (Emperor William's Lane), a street named after the man. Why would that be?

It seems that Ålesund in the early 20th century was a ramshackle small city comprised of mostly wooden buildings. Then, on 23 January 1904, it was mostly destroyed in a great fire.

Following that disaster, much of Europe pitched in to help rebuild the city. And the most important booster of the project was the Kaiser, whose efforts are still greatly appreciated, as this Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung article notes. Wilhelm had an imperial yacht and loved to take summer cruises, often in the Norwegian fjord country where he had become fond of Ålesund. Besides money and materials, Germany sent in architects to help rebuild the city in a more fire-resistant manner.

In 1904 the fashionable architectural style in Europe was Art Nouveau or Jugendstil, as it was called in Germany. Architectural Art Nouveau is largely a matter of ornamentation that varied in its degree of complexity or elaboration from place to place. At the elaborate extreme is Latvian Art Nouveau as seen in certain neighborhoods in Riga. German Jugendstil, on the other hand, was largely limited to small amounts of decoration, though certain details of building form were also involved. That said, it isn't surprising that Ålesund's Jugendstil architecture by German and Norwegian architects followed the German pattern.

Below are more photos of Ålesund I took on a dreary July morning before stores had opened.

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The gray-brown building at the left is a former pharmacy that's now a museum or center devoted to Ålesund Jugendstil.

A mix of classical and Jugendstil.

In this ensemble we see bits of ornamentation, but mostly Jugendstil building form details such as those curved windows.

Back to where I started. Kaiser Wilhelm's photo is at the right-hand side of this image (you can glimpse his head).

Architects' Homes: The "Harvard Five"

I find the houses architects design for themselves interesting. Presumably, the constraint of catering to the desires of a client are swept away so that the architect can express his own design philosophy and personality.

Other constraints remain, of course. The nature of the site, the cost of building the house and the needs of the architect's family can be factors. Then there is the possibility that the architect wishes the house to be a professional advertisement, to be featured in local newspapers or even architectural magazines.

The present post features personal houses designed by a group of architects called the Harvard Five. They were associated with Harvard University in one way or another and settled in New Canaan, Connecticut where their houses were built. They were born between 1902 and 1919 and the houses were built from 1949 to 1958, so we are dealing with a group having a fairly homogeneous background. The houses reflect avant-garde domestic design in the United States from 1945 to around 1955 when the designs were conceived.

Modernist and postmodern architects have done a good deal of damage, in my judgment. But the worst of it is in the form of large buildings and not so much houses, where modest size means less visual impact. The Harvard Five houses are situated on large lots, fairly isolated from neighbors.

Shared design characteristics include large expanses of window glass, a byproduct of 20th century heating technology that eliminated the need to build tall houses with small windows and compact rooms each with a fireplace. They have flat roofs (or nearly so), an architectural fad contradicting the "form follows function" concept (flat roofs shed water and snow less well than gabled roofs). None feature explicit ornamentation. All but one are single-story.

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Marcel Breuer House - 1949
Marcel Breuer (1902-1981) had Bauhaus associations that continued through the 1930s in the person of Walter Gropius. There seems to be a whiff or decorative intent in the angled paneling on some of the walls.

Landis Gores House - 1948
Landis Gores (1919-1991) was stricken with polio, yet managed to continue his career. The use of stonework on some of the walls is a nod to the New England environment and also helps to offset the stark, geometrical aspects of the design.

John M. Johansen House - 1958
John M. Johansen (1916-2012) used a formal (symmetrical) floor plan where four sub-structures were attached to this creek-spanning central unit near its corners. Roofs are flat aside from the part featured in the photo.

Philip Johnson House - 1953
This house by Philip Johnson (1906-2005) is by far the most famous and controversial.  Controversial due to its apparent lack of privacy. I consider it a case of an architectural theory pushed beyond the realm of common sense.

Eliot Noyes House - 1955
Eliot Noyes (1910-1977) is perhaps better known for his industrial design and corporate image work than for his architecture.  Like Gores, he used local stone in his house's construction. But he did this in a more rigid way, essentially blanking out two walls of the building in stark contrast to the glazing of the side facing the camera in this photo. Like Johnson's house, this strikes me as being an instance of being too clever, resulting in degraded livability.

Edward Durell Stone: In and Out and Maybe In Favor Again

Edward Durell Stone (1902-1978) had a successful career in terms of the number of projects with which he and his firm were associated. Scroll down this Wikipedia entry for a list of some of them. More biographical information can be found here.

Stone first made his mark designing modernist houses during the Depression years. His reputation was enhanced due to his work on the new headquarters of New York's Museum of Modern Art (since replaced). Modernism having become the official religion of professional architecture, Stone was riding high professionally.

Then came the mid-1950s when he began covering some of his buildings with geometrically pattered screens and even (gasp!!) adding such ornamental detail on the actual exteriors. The Architecture establishment was shocked at such regression, but by then Stone was famous enough that commissions kept coming.

By the 1970s his firm was back to designing more acceptably modernistic buildings.

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Conger-Goodyear House, Old Westbury Long Island - 1938
This Ezra Stoller photo shows one of his modernist houses.

Museum of Modern Art, New York City - 1939
Designed in association with Philip Goodwin, the MoMA building had a few curved details (the entry overhang and piercings in the roof), faint echoes of some of Frank Lloyd Wright's thoughts.

Stone House Façade, New York City - 1956
Stone's East Sixties house fronted by one of his new screens.

U.S. Embassy, New Delhi - 1954-59
This was the screened building that caught the world's attention and helped make Stone known to the public at large.

Home Savings / Perpetual Savings, Los Angeles - 1962
Photo of the architectural model.

2 Columbus Circle (Gallery of Modern Art), New York - 1964
Commissioned by Huntington Hartford, this was a museum featuring representational art that failed to compete agains the modernist art tide. The exterior was unusual, being largely blank with decorative openings around the edges. The non-rectangular openings towards the top were unconventional, but the decorative posts at the bottom were in synch with what Minoru Yamasaki was doing in Seattle at that time. I was in the building once, now dimly recalling that the interior layout seemed cramped and confusing. The building has been drastically renovated for other uses.

National Geographic Society, Washington D.C. - 1964
Here Stone reverted to classic Greek column elements: base, middle and cap (in the form of a bold cornice).

State University of New York, Albany - 1964-64
Here Stone and his design team ignored human factors. I spent more the four years in the Albany area in the early 1970s and visited the SUNY campus fairly often to use the library. In those days (and perhaps still) doors were opened by grasping squared metal bars -- an unpleasant experience if you weren't wearing gloves. I also recall that it was an inconvenient grouping to navigate, something related to the fact that most of the buildings were linked at ground level. That was to provide shelter during the frigid part of the school year, a worthy aim not well carried out. I rate the SUNY project a failure.

Standard Oil Building, Chicago - 1970-74
Finally back to a more purely modernist style late in Stone's career.

Early Examples of the Corner Window

The above photo was taken of a Seattle neighborhood in 1947. Look closely at the house on the left. At the far left side of it you will notice a corner window. Corner windows were fashionable features on houses of this style built in Washington State around 1940-1947. The 1947-vintage house I live in has a corner window. They were popular elsewhere at that time; I vaguely recall seeing a cartoon of a man sawing at a house to create a corner window and having the corner of the building collapse as a result.

I didn't do research to determine where the first corner window appeared. So far as those 1940s tract houses are concerned, I would say that their windows were inspired by some modernist houses built twenty or so years earlier. Some examples are shown below.

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Villa Henny by 't Hoff - 1915-19
The Villa Henny in the Huis ter Heide area of Utrecht, Netherlands (1915-19) was designed by Robert van 't Hoff (1887-1979). It is the earliest example of a house with a corner window that I could find on the Internet. The corner window is on the small wing attached to the right-hand face of the building.

Schindler House - 1922
Home of architect Rudolph Schindler (1887-1953), Schindler House is or was located in West Hollywood, California.

Schröder House by Rietveld - 1924
Of similar vintage is Schröder House, also in Utrecht, Netherlands. The architect was the well-known modernist Gerrit Rietveld (1888-1964). Corner windows can be seen at the right.

Del Rio - Gibbons House by Gibbons - 1930
I couldn't locate an appropriate contemporary exterior photo, but here is an interior view showing a corner window. The Del Rio - Gibbons House in Santa Monica, California was designed by Cedric Gibbons (1893-1960). He was the art director for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer movie studio and was soon to marry film star Dolores Del Rio, for whom he had the house built. They are seen in the photo.

High Cross House by Lescaze - 1932
High Cross House, Dartington, Devon, England had William Lescaze (1896-1969) as one of its architects. A corner window can be glimpsed at the left.

Villa Schminke by Scharoum - 1933
The Villa Schminke in Löbau, Saxony was designed by Hans Scharoun (1893-1972). The corner window is hard to spot in the photo because it is shaded. It's directly above the left-hand support post.

Mandel House by Stone - 1933-35
The final example (there could have been many more form the 1930s) is the Bedford Hills, New York Richard H. Mandel House by Edward Durell Stone (1902-1978) who had a varied, controversial career. Corner windows are at the first floor left and top floor right.