The eastern façade of the new Goldman Sachs building at 200 West StreetWhat follows is, in part, a tale of two skyscrapers. We must hope that a firm as sober as Goldman Sachs doesn’t do things without a very good reason. And yet it is not clear exactly why the firm needed a new corporate headquarters at 200 West Street, near Battery Park, given that it had a perfectly decent skyscraper directly across the Hudson in Jersey City. Perhaps there was a purely aesthetic, or even emotional, reason. The New York Times reported in 2004 that plans to transfer traders to the 42-story, $1.3 billion tower in Jersey City “had to be scuttled after the proposal touched off an insurrection inside the bank.” Even among financial types, there is just something about Manhattan.
Of course, we should not discount the massive tax incentives that the city gave Goldman Sachs to remain on this side of the Hudson, among them the right to sell $1 billion in tax-free Liberty Bonds, and the award of $49 million in job grant funds and tax exemptions.
It also obviously takes time to plan and build a 43-story skyscraper like the one that has just arisen on West Street, which has been in the works since well before last year’s economic meltdown. A few years ago, you may recall, the Dow seemed unstoppable in its ascent. And yet, it is hard to believe that the Jersey City building was not big enough even for a large firm like Goldman Sachs. At 42 stories, the building, which is only a few years old, is the tallest structure in the state and one of the 50 tallest in the country.
Between the two buildings, I much prefer the slightly older one, designed by Cesar Pelli, who also designed the World Financial Center complex that stands directly across from it on the Manhattan side of the Hudson, scarcely a stone’s throw from the new building. Pelli was, and remains, one of the more inspired postmodernist architects in America. He is postmodern in the 1980s sense of the term: He sees a building as a vessel of cultural meaning, more than as a machine or as pure form. And so he has conceived the Jersey City Goldman Sachs building as a retro reenactment of the sort of broad-shouldered, zoot-suited edifice embodied in the Daily Planet building of Superman fame. Of course, Mr. Pelli’s Goldman Sachs building, like his buildings in general, functions much as any other contemporary structure does. But there is a leaven of reverie, a touch of poetry and classicism to it that creates a most welcome grace note to the skyline.
Very different indeed is the newer Goldman Sachs tower, 43 stories and 740 feet tall. Behold, a corporate headquarters straight out of central casting. There’s nothing especially wrong with it, but there’s nothing especially right with it either. The building is the creation of Henry Cobb, one of the principals of the unimpeachably white-shoe firm of Pei Cobb Freed & Partners. It looks exactly as you would expect a building to look in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan: functional, glitzy and expensive, but so thoroughly bereft of any trace of imagination that you could well believe that imagination was never even an option.
The eastern façade on West Street is, in the deconstructivist idiom of the moment, a slightly irregular and asymmetrical slab raised up on a base seven stories tall. The new Bank of America Building on 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue, designed by Cook + Fox, and 505 Fifth Avenue, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, are better examples of the style. The entire soaring surface of 200 West Street is one sustained curtain wall held in place by a fretwork of silvery braces. The various asymmetries are doubtless intended primarily to demonstrate that this is not yet another boring corporate building. But they fail to achieve their purpose, and make the once-radical idiom of deconstruction suddenly seem utterly tame and establishment.
Seen from the west, and especially from the south, the development fares slightly better. On these sides of the building, the slab curves gracefully in a clean and continuous parabola and the effect, if not especially original, feels confident and strong. The building also gives no sense of the irksome intrusion of value engineering, of cost-effectiveness and cut corners. The glass, the stainless steel and the skill of their joining are above reproach.
As for the elaborate canopy that runs across the entire western entrance to the building, it is doubtless effective in keeping out the elements, but its design is clumsy. In the cramped space between the new building and its neighbor to the west, the canopy’s frantic array of metal flanges feels more like a distraction than anything else.
Inside, the lobby on West Street shows what is so weak about the design of the building. It is a cavernous, double-height space that is somewhat disorienting in the wobbly, swerving irregularity of its volumes. The coerced asymmetry is clearly intended to preempt the charge of corporate drabness, but in fact its slate-gray surfaces only reinforce the impression, and matters are not helped by the art chosen to enliven the space. Granted, the two painters involved, Julie Mehretu and Franz Ackermann, are indisputably blue-chip and achingly contemporary. Despite their street cred in Chelsea and on London’s Cork Street, they are no match for the cavernous interiors of the new Goldman Sachs building. The Mehretu contribution, for all its massiveness, seems insubstantial and irrelevant in its present context. Worst of all, it is unable to rise above the despised status of “lobby art.”
Mr. Ackermann’s contribution, spread over the western entrance to the building, fares somewhat better. As large as Ms. Mehretu’s painting, it reads as a boisterous and exuberant splash of primary and secondary colors angled across two adjacent walls. Whatever its ultimate merits as an independent work of art, it does succeed in transforming the corporate dullness of the place, and so it stands as one of the rare successes of the new building.
Another success is a large and nearby cylindrical drum, clad in pale wood, that houses the building’s auditorium, a harmonious and well-lit space that manages to generate some sense of style.
But whatever the weaknesses and sundry mediocrities of the new Goldman Sachs design, all New Yorkers can find consolation in the firm’s commitment to Lower Manhattan, a commitment it manifested at the earliest stages of planning this new development, way back in 2002, when it mattered most.
