A Tale Of Two Buildings

While in Manhattan a few weeks ago, I decided at long last to visit the High Line.

So much has been written about it since Phase I opened in 2009, and so many friends and colleagues have recommended that I visit, that I determined it was time to go. Even on a gray and blustery February day I was not disappointed. It’s an experience unlike any other in the city. I highly recommend visiting, particularly in the next month when the flora will be in bloom.

The High Line is a triumph of imagination, common sense and civic action not typically found outside of Europe, where those virtues rule the day. The selection of materials and detailing is by any measure handsome, and the integration of the pedestrian walkway into, past and through the old elevated railway lines is wonderfully conceived and executed.

While there, I noticed two buildings nearby that I had long regarded as excellent examples of modern architecture. I decided to take a closer look than through the windows of a fast-moving taxi.

First, the IAC Headquarters Building, built in 2007 and designed by Frank Gehry for Barry Diller, this building is located at 550 West 18th Street, on the corner of 11th Avenue in Chelsea. I am generally a fan of Mr. Gehry’s work if only for the sheer exuberance of his creativity, which many call genius.

I have visited many of his buildings and found them all quite engaging. This building, while engaging, is quite different from the others, however. Sitting as it does at the end of West 18th & 19th streets and fronting on 11th Avenue and the West Side Highway, Mr. Gehry had three street elevations to address.

The selection of a unique white glass skin instead of his signature titanium is quite a departure for him. The glass is bent and shaped and tapered in large planes and delicately fitted together. The building looks as if it’s built of taut white sailcloth—stitched together and slightly inflated from within. The glass panels are further enhanced by having a graduated film applied or baked into the surface, which goes from opaque to translucent to clear, then back to translucent and opaque again. It has the feeling of fog rising. The building appears to have come to rest on the site, not sit on it, which is quite an achievement for a 10-story structure.

Mr. Gehry also employs a technique in his buildings that I find critical to good architecture. His buildings are multi-sided objects. No front, no sides, no rear, but an all-around composition.

One can go to the farthest point behind his Disney Hall in Los Angeles, well out of view from the street or entrance, and find magic in the building. The same is true here, where the design theme and materials wrap fully around the building and through the service court to the other side. This design concept follows very closely the examples set by many of my favorite architects: Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, Paul Rudolph, Herzog & de Meuron and the Japanese “master of the building as object,” Shin Takamatsu.

At the IAC headquarters, Mr. Gehry and Mr. Diller obviously made good collaborators.

Directly across the street from the IAC is Jean Nouvel’s recently completed apartment tower at 11th Avenue and 19th Street. I have also visited a number of Mr. Nouvel’s buildings, and like Mr. Gehry’s, found them rich architectural experiences. His detailed façades and unique use of glass are legendary in the profession, and “100-11th,” as the apartment house is known, carries this tradition to new extremes.

Thousands of individual glass panels in metal frames are juxtaposed to one another in an elaborate mosaic, conjuring Mondrian on performance drugs. Many are set into different planes off the building, and some are angled slightly to further enhance the faceted effect. With so much geometry at play it must have been a great challenge for the window fabricator and contractor to ensure a watertight envelope.

Some of the glazing appears to be slightly different in color tint or tone, but could it just be the architect’s clever use of the angled panels to reflect the color of the sky? The building’s scale is also broken down so there is no clear determination as to the building’s floor levels, at least during the day, and it’s difficult to tell how many “windows” make up a typical apartment.

While I did not visit the interior (I guess I could have feigned shopping for an apartment), I question how it must feel looking out through this all-enveloping grid of windows to the Hudson River and New Jersey beyond. I imagine it’s like looking through an oversized metal cage.

The building’s relationship to its corner site is not nearly as elegant as that found across the street, and it meets the sky with disinterest, just chopped off abruptly. When seen from a distance with the IAC next door, the difference is particularly jarring.

The biggest disappointment however was the discovery on the sides not facing the street that the highly wrought glass and metal façade stopped at the corners leaving the “back” and “sides” of the building to basically fend for themselves. The dark chocolate/brownish brick selected to cover these elevations, and what appears as a random mix of square and rectangular glass openings, is particularly tragic and unresolved.

Why go to such an extreme in the design, development, expense and execution of the street-facing façades, then inches away revert to a Soviet-era style building? The unadorned sides of the 20-plus story apartment tower are visible for many blocks throughout Chelsea, and the nearby High Line provides an uninterrupted view of the north and east sides of the building. Would it have been too much to ask for some, even a random, or tangential relationship to the street elevations?

Possibly just framing these window cutouts in metal frames could have helped. It would have had some reference to the street elevations, and might look as if some of the windows had come loose and gravitated to the other sides of the building. It’s hard to know what went on between architect and developer in this case but clearly the decision was made to put all the eggs in the street-facing baskets.

Unlike its neighbor across the street, the “100-11th” just pretends to be architecture. The IAC Building is the real thing.

Next time, “What Were They Thinking?”