Category: Architecture

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The official newspaper of Gil Roth

Recently, we began receiving the New York Sun, I think as an add-on to our Wall Street Journal subscription. I’m not entirely sure. I mean, I do know that the owner of our company canceled our office subscription to the New York Times a few years ago because he, um, disagreed with its political agenda.

Anyway, I was reading the Arts+ section of the Sun at the lunchtable today when I discovered that the section’s editor is actually . . . my alter ego!

How else can we explain the page 18 & 19 spread of today’s paper featuring this double-whammy:

Mysticism in Youth – Barbara Probst Solomon’s review of the early diaries of Jewish mystic & scholar Gershom Scholem

With Gasol, Lakers Now Look Unstoppable – John Hollinger’s weekly power rankings of the NBA

Toss in a front-page piece on Louis I. Kahn’s travel sketches, and the only conclusion to draw is that my lack of sleep is merely a cover for Tyler Durden-like plot to redefine arts & leisure in my own demented image.

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Well, it’s no Gherkin

I first noticed the Hearst Tower during ferry rides over to NYC about a year ago. Last April, I meandered by the building and snapped some pictures. I thought it was a neat-looking building, especially as it poked out of an existing structure like a giant f***-you:

Hearst Tower

Last November, when I was nearby for the black-tie event where I concluded that I really need to buy myself a tuxedo, I was happy that I’d get the opportunity to see the tower by night.

Boy, was I disappointed. The building was utterly lifeless against the cityscape. Without daylight reflecting off the panes, the structure seemed to flatten, resembling nothing but a standard glass office building, illuminated by fluorescents. I didn’t post — or even bother keeping — the pix I took of it. I was charitable enough to figure I was just missing something. Or maybe I caught it on a bad night.

Not according to Robert Campbell, a fellow at The American Institute of Architects and a critic for the Boston Globe. In Why I Hate the Hearst Tower, starts off by comparing the building to a missile silo, goes on to write,

[N]othing about the Hearst, as seen from outdoors, suggests the possibility of human habitation. It appears to be a cage for a single massive object. [. . .] One of the problems with Modernism, as a stylistic method, is that it tends to ignore the fact that buildings look like other things. And that’s how most people understand them. People say the abstract boxlike shapes of Modernist office towers look like the cartons the real towers came in. The world we live in is a world of resemblances.

and ultimately bashes the heck out of the idea of architecture without context:

[T]he message the Hearst broadcasts to me [is]: that it’s a prototype invented for no particular site or program which was, then, pulled out of its sketchbook and plopped down on this site. Its form not only communicates but insists that it ignores its solar orientation, its site, its Deco footrest, and its internal program of uses. “Put me anywhere, fill me with anything, I’m fine with that,” the tower seems to be telling us. It’s a throwback to Mies [van der Rohe]’s concept of universal space. And let’s remember that Mies’s concept, which worked well at Crown Hall in Chicago, created, in Berlin, an art museum that is as hopelessly impractical as it is handsome.

Give it a read.