Fun with apartment design

With the possible exception of the Magic Kingdom — “The Happiest Place on Earth,” its slogan says — I am not sure that I have ever seen architecture as fundamentally, giddily, all-conqueringly happy as that of Karim Rashid, the designer of 653 West 187th Street, which will soon rise in the Inwood section of Manhattan.

This multicolored, seven-story residential slab, containing 59 apartment units, is being developed by HAP Investments, which has announced that the architect will also design for them a similarly audacious condo building in East Harlem, at 1655 Madison Avenue, between 110th and 111th Streets.

If you were to go today and visit the Inwood site, you would surely be struck by how out of place Rashid’s new design is likely to be once it is completed. That is intentional, of course, since the entire aesthetic mission of the building seems to declare its uniqueness — its refusal to fit into any context.

Of course, 653 West 187th Street is in Manhattan, but it’s a part of the island that looks nothing like what most people think of as “Manhattan.” Though the site of the project stands only a block east of Broadway (toward which it slopes downward in a steep descent), its low-lying housing stock often does not rise even to the level of row houses. Instead, you see a series of dilapidated three-story dwellings. The one that currently bears the address of the Rashid building has a hipped roof whose slate tiles are falling off, while a hole has been torn through its shingled side.

The neighborhood, at the border of Inwood and Washington Heights, is largely Hispanic and family-oriented. Most of its building stock, some of which is charming, dates to the beginning of the last century. This is the humble context into which the nattily new 653 West 187th Street will insinuate itself, positively preening with downtown attitude.

Judging from the renderings of the new project, to be completed in about two years, it actively aspires to an air of insubstantiality, as though made out of plastic. The façade, which is angled to accommodate the site’s steep slope, is a dazzling and spasmodic mix of purple and black glass panels, with colored stripes along the windowless sides. The most striking elements of the façade, however, are the windows, which are arrayed across the surface in a variety of shapes, resembling truncated Ls, Fs and Ts, like the inscrutable ciphers of some lost language. The structure as a whole is crowned by something completely different, a penthouse formed from a pure expanse of curtain wall, a reassertion of modernist propriety in the context of a post-modern joke.

Karim Rashid seems not to know what every other architect in the world appears to have learned: architecture is not supposed to be fun. Rather, it is the most dourly functional of all the arts, dutifully supplying shelter to the species and, in the process, adding a few bells and whistles that usually seek to enhance the prestige and dignity of a building’s exterior, and yet still without making it exactly fun. Banks seek to suggest weight and permanence. Cathedrals hope to supply spiritual uplift. Residences, whether single or composite, aspire to convey a sense of upper-middle-class gentility. But with the exception of zoos, fast food joints, bowling alleys and a few theaters, the creation of a sense of zip and pep is rarely the defining ambition of architecture.

This changed, to some degree and only briefly during the heyday of Postmodernism in the 1980s: When it was not re-creating austerely classical visions, it was busy learning from Las Vegas, to invoke a famous manifesto by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, who largely founded the movement. These days, however, most architects look upon those projects from a generation past as grown-ups look back upon the sins of their youth.

That is what is so striking about the boldness of Mr. Rashid, the very name of whose firm, Karim Rashid Vision, suggests the rather more enterprising and ebullient spirit in which he conceives his buildings. In fact, he conceives much besides: He is an all-purpose designer who has created everything from furniture and luggage to electric kettles and pepper mills, from shops to theaters and, as the present instance shows, residential architecture. In an online manifesto, he avers that “Every business should be completely concerned with beauty — it is after all a collective human need. I believe that we could be living in an entirely different world — one that is full of real contemporary inspiring objects, spaces, places, worlds, spirits and experiences.”

Such sentiments are not entirely alien to previous architectural discourse, but most of time such language has been limited to lifting up the human spirit — in the manner of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto — rather than to showing it a good time. That is where Karim Rashid comes in.

Like Philippe Starck, he has a totalizing conception of design. But unlike the operatic intimations of high-culture that define Starck’s work, most of Rashid’s designs, brilliantly colored and patently unnatural, have a retro feel to them, invoking as they do the bastardized popular idioms of the late 1960s. What Rashid seems to be trying to do is single-handedly revive the Mod strain of modern architecture and design. In general, mod architecture was modern architecture minus the drab, mid-century high seriousness that characterized the movement in the post-war years, after it had evolved from a revolutionary new idiom to the default language of an emerging corporate America. Though Mod architecture built the occasional home, and inspired such massive hotels as Morris Lapidus’s Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami, it was mostly reserved for things that were seen as being beneath the general dignity of mainstream modernism: restaurants, movie theaters, theme parks and the like. These are the arenas of Rashid’s activities, however, no less than the residential architecture that he is just now beginning to explore.

For it turns out that his myriad-minded activities amount to a single cosmic and incessant image of design that conquers everything in its path. Heretofore, he has been known for his interiors and his industrial designs. Indeed, he was described by Time Magazine as the “most famous industrial designer in all the Americas.”

Whether it will conquer Inwood, as well, is a most interesting question. It may well be that 653 West 187th Street is the first beachhead of gentrification in one of the rare regions of Manhattan that, to date, has largely resisted such progress.