A rendering of the new building set to rise at 51 Astor Place.
For better or for worse, there are few places in Manhattan that have changed, or are changing, more radically than Astor Place.
A mere 10 years ago, this intersection of Saint Marks Place and the Bowery was, architecturally speaking, a fairly quiet place that had not seen any noteworthy activity in over a generation.
Change came in 2005 with Gwathmey Siegel’s winsome and silvery residential tower at 445 Lafayette Street, as well as, more recently, the Cooper Union academic building designed by Thom Mayne of the Los Angeles-based firm Morphosis.
There’s also the Cooper Square Hotel by Carlos Zapata Studio, which was built around an old tenement building and debuted in late 2008.
But all of that is small beer compared with what is about to rise in the very center of the area. Coming soon is a 13-story office building at 51 Astor Place, designed by Fumihiko Maki, winner of the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor, and developed by Edward Minskoff.
Minskoff has said that the speculative tower will have 400,000 rentable square feet and an entire square block of retail.
Whatever happens hereafter at 51 Astor Place, the total obliteration of the existing building — which is scheduled to come this fall — should prove to be an unqualified gift to this part of Manhattan. A rationalistic blight upon the neighborhood, it served as Cooper Union’s engineering building until a few months ago, when that department finally moved to Thom Mayne’s behemoth between 6th and 7th streets, on the Bowery.
The Mayne building is no beauty either — unless one is a hardcore devotee of Deconstructivist architecture. But at the very least, it aspires to be good.
As for the existing Rationalistic building at 51 Astor Place, one has the impression that, when it was designed back in the 1950s, ambition was not even an option. Instead it represented the stale butt end of the International Style — that vanguardist movement that had been inaugurated with such fervor in the capitals of Europe a generation or two earlier.
The existing 51 Astor reveals a total exhaustion of taste and judgment. It’s a wanly sallow box accented with a few darkened bay divisions that contain a weary sequence of insufficient windows. What did it say about an institution famous for its architecture school that it could do no better than this?
Maki, who is also the creative force behind the under-construction 4 World Trade Center, is surely far finer than the original architect of 51 Astor. Like his Japanese compatriots Shigeru Ban — who designed the Metal Shutter Houses in Chelsea — and Yoshio Taniguchi, whose most famous project to date is the renovated Museum of Modern Art, the 82-year-old Maki has been one of the leaders of the Neomodern trend.
That trend invokes the formal vocabulary and some of the materials of mid-century Modernism in reaction to the often tasteless excesses of Postmodern classicism. But it does so with far greater sensitivity than all but the finest architects could manage in earlier generations.
As is evident at 51 Astor Place, no less than at his World Trade Center tower, Maki favors a minimalist conception of Modernism with little ostensible detail to disturb the glacial surface of his boldly volumetric buildings.
Conceptually, 51 Astor Place reads as a cube from which whole chunks appear to have been sliced away, leaving a curiously voided structure. Though Maki is not a Postmodernist, but rather a Neomodernist, there is, in this quirky sense of volume, an element of Postmodernist irony to the otherwise severely chaste idiom he cultivates. A Modernist of the old school would have chosen something less bold and exhibitionistic, something more purely formal, but instead there is something theatrical in Maki’s project.
To some of us, this isn’t the finest use of geometry. But it does create a subtle visual dissonance — which is also evident at the World Trade Center site — one that at least shows the sort of initiative and vision usually in short supply in the five boroughs.
This Astor Place building promises to be a composite of three parts. To the east will stand a low-lying glazed box, which in size and shape largely recalls the existing structure. The real drama, however, is reserved for the two other sections to the west, which merge into a slab that is clad in dark granite masonry to the south and in glass to the north. The masonry part of the slab, which is taller, culminates in a chamfered top, while the glazed passage to the north slices into the granite zone with startling violence. There is something assuredly Deconstructivist here, something neurotic, violent and destabilized — all of which is considered a good thing, according to contemporary taste.
But it’s simply not in the character of Japanese Neomodernists like Maki to openly embrace so violent an idiom, as Thom Mayne has done down the street. Instead they tend to tame it and harmonize it with good manners.
It should be said that however fine the new Maki building may turn out, the white-brick building due north of it will qualify, if not ruin, much of its effect, since that white-brick building is every bit as banal as the earlier version of 51 Astor Place.
However, when completed, the new building will change Astor Place forever — and far more drastically than Gwathmey Siegel’s tower, or even the contributions of Mayne and Zapata.
Though there are offices nearby, this is the boldest architectural assertion for an office building in an area far better known for its row houses and head shops, dormitories and institutions of higher learning.
The Maki building will dwarf all the others and hardly harmonize the jumbled buildings around it. There is something decidedly unlovely in the mix of boldly Deconstructivist works like Mayne’s academic building with the Victorian Romanesque of Cooper Union itself, not to mention the pale Classicism of architect Daniel Burnham’s stately pile to the west, the former Wanamaker’s department store (which now houses a Kmart), as well the extraordinary colonnade of Lagrange Terrace on the Bowery, one of the oldest buildings in the city, from 1832.
Whether that effect was worth pursuing in the first place — beyond the fact that it’s clearly an upgrade on what’s currently there — must be answered by each critic and each pedestrian based on his or her own tastes.