Rendering of the Aqueduct racino
Ask any architect and he will be happy to tell you that architecture is about ideas. The idea that architecture is full of ideas is, for some reason, mightily pleasing to the present generation of practitioners. But there are few projects at this moment that — on the basis of the published renderings — incarnate more perfectly the spiritual forces behind them, than the Aqueduct racino (see image to the right), whose ground-breaking occurred yesterday. If one structure may be said to incarnate the corrosive vulgarity of New York State politics, it is not the sturdily boring New York State Capital in Albany, designed by Leopold Eidlitz and Henry Hobson Richardson, but rather this newly conceived racino in Queens, whose gaudy, fluorescent colors and demonstrative volumes cover up an essentially drab structure.
The process of accepting bids to build the new structure and operate the slot machines was as sleazy and corrupt — according to a scathing 300-page indictment released last week by Inspector General Joseph Fisch — as you might expect when Albany gets involved. Everyone from Governor David Paterson to Speaker Sheldon Silver was criticized. John Sampson, the Senate Democratic leader from Brooklyn; Malcolm Smith, the Senate president from Queens; and Angelo Aponte, the appointed Senate secretary, were cited for possible violations of the law.
According to Fisch, as quoted in the New York Times: “At each turn, our state leaders abdicated their public duty, failed to impose ethical restraints and focused on political gain at a cost of millions to New Yorkers… Shamefully, the public’s best interest was a matter of militant indifference to them.”
But now that the lucrative opportunity to build and run the place has been given to Genting New York, a subsidiary of a Malaysian company, the project appears to be moving quickly forward. It would not be accurate to say that anyone had great expectations for the newly designed Aqueduct racino, which is to house over 4,000 slot machines and to generate about $1.5 million for New York each day. If the renderings are to be believed — and bear in mind that renderings always look better than the finished result — Queens is about to receive an almost phantasmagoric blast of vulgarity.
The renderings that have been published are, surely, somewhat vague and arbitrary, but the exterior appears to be nothing more than a sequence of rectilinear curtain-walls fronted by spindly and insufficient columns that give it all the charm of a bus terminal. The interior is a parade of bizarre volumes, open loggias and second-story rotundas overlooking the slot-machines, that suggest to this observer — though in a different material — the Brutalist style that Albany favored until fairly recently.
Naturally there is the glitz — again according to the renderings — of crystal chandeliers and certain gold lamé surfaces put one in mind of Liberace, circa 1972. And yet, for all that, nowhere do you see the sheer architectural daring, the brilliant effrontery, the wit that ultimately redeems Las Vegas. No, this is New York and governed by Albany and Albany has just blessed a project that is at once meretriciously crass and utterly dull.
James Gardner, formerly the architecture critic of the New York Sun, writes on the visual arts for several publications.
