NYC Apartment Building Article
Slate has a photographic tour and discussion about Manhattan apartment buildings through history. The main points are that the majority of recently built buildings aren’t particularly interesting — just brick-clad boxes with right-angled walls — compared to a lot of the older buildings, such as the Ansonia with the fairy-tale turrets. A few modern buildings seem to be reviving interesting architecture, though, such as the Perry Street buildings.
The article is for a national audience, so the great divide of NYC real estate — pre-war versus post-war — is simultaneously refered to only obliquely yet permeates the whole piece. Basically, pre-war construction methods allowed interesting architectural touches because the marginal costs of adding niceties in the trim were small compared to the cost of the building, whereas modern methods have made the trim relatively costly compared to putting up the building, so turrets and bay windows are eschewed. The size of pre-war girders also made high ceilings an emergent property of the construction. So, for run-of-the-mill residential buildings, you have what are basically rectangular boxes of reinforced concrete clad in glass or brick. Even the new Trump construction on Riverside Blvd is essentially slabs of concrete clad in glass, though there are some touches like bay windows and irregularly shaped rooms, as well as the Donald’s signature (somewhat tacky) luxury touches inside the building. The assumption is that people will be more pleased to have granite countertops, high-end appliances and concierages rather than architecturally interesting buildings and common spaces. It’s possibly not a bad assumption, but the hallways still have the feeling of a somewhat drab hotel.
The Slate article talks about existing buildings, so it missed the recent New York Times article on Santiago Calatrava’s proposal for 80 South Street, which is fundamentally a dozen suburban-sized houses stacked on top of each other. This is interesting design, and may signal a revival of great high-end architecture in a city with too many glass and brick boxes.