Jimmy Fallon's Skyline

A few weeks ago, the Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon made its big debut. I don't watch a lot of television, much less late at night, but think Jimmy Fallon is a really clever, energetic, creative entertainer, and nowadays its easy to watch a handful of clips on YouTube and feel like you're at least partly aware of what is going on.

The Tonight Show has an all-new set, which follows the standard desk-and-couches-on-a-soundstage format. What I immediately noticed was the backdrop, which is made up of a panoramic photo image of Mahattan, but in front of it what was especially notable is a collection of more than three dozen wood building models.

The buildings are arrayed randomly in the display—their arrangement doesn't correspond to their true relationships, and it doesn't appear as though the models are to scale with one another. This makes identification a bit difficult, and I am also not certain that all the models have been detailed with equal faith to their original appearance. There is a small, laser-cut Pan Am Building, visible second from left above; it is less-detailed and more diminutive than the finely detailed McKim frontage of the NYP Library and the Chrysler Building just over Jimmy's left shoulder, which seem to use a variety of materials and might even be from a model kit.

During Justin Timberlake's appearance, its easy to spot the AT&T Building, directly behind the microphone, 

with what might be the Daily News Building behind. 

The Woolworth Building is easy to spot behind Timberlake at far left. 

I am tempted to suggest that the Building to its right, behind Timberlake's head, 

is the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South.

There are some interesting choices here, besides the world-famous landmarks such as old as the Woolworth and Chrysler Buildings and as new as the One World Trade Center, there are secondary icons like Johnson's AT&T Building, Stubbin's Citicorp Center and Johnson’s Lipstick building. Some other notable inclusions include Piano’s New York Times Building, just behind Jimmy, and at the far left, normally not visible but clearly shown in these scenes of U2 and Will Smith, Foster’s Hearst Tower. Other recognizable but far less identifiable towers include post-modern art deco Trump Riverside, the bland corporate mid-rise of 4 World Financial Center, and the hipster Maritime Hotel.

The Chrysler Building shines behind Fallon's right shoulder, with the Lipstick Building in front. 

Behind Fallon's left shoulder, in the shadows at far right, is Piano's New York Times HQ, 

with a twin tower from Trump Riverside in front. 

There is a foreground layer of low-rise landmarks, too, including the Arch in Washington Square Park, the Pier 17 at the South Street Seaport, the Guggenheim, New York Public Library, the New York Stock Exchange, and the tripartite arrangement of Lincoln Center.

During U2's performance, 1 World Trade Center and the Hearst Tower are clearly seen behind the Edge. 

But still, I was only confident in labelled a little more than half of them: is that the Daily News Building just over Jimmy's right shoulder? Is that big, French-Empire Style manse behind the guests, with its green-copper roof, supposed to be the legendary Dakota apartments? Others, like the sample Tribeca warehouse and the prototypical SoHo cast iron façade, would be laborious to pinpoint to a specific real-life building. For all I know, a third of the models are just made-up, and not based on real buildings. I certainly suspect that is the case, even with the larger models such as those between the Chrysler and Citicorp to Fallon's left, at the far right of the background.

Kristen Wiig impersonating Jason Styles. Lincoln Center is clearly visible at left, 

with what appears to be a tiny Guggenheim Museum in front. 

Behind Kristen Wiig, on her right: A SoHo building, Pier 17, the Dakota? 

On her left: a TriBeCa warehouse, Lincoln Center at lower right, and the Maritime Hotel behind.

When Jerry Seinfeld visited the new show, while praising the show, he turned around admired the elaborate background:

”I love the set. I love the rich kid NY chess set. This is the upper east side kid's chess set. It's beautiful, but I would move the chrysler building to king 4...”

Here is a quick diagram I made of the display, with whatever buildings I could identify. Suggestions for changes or additions are welcome in the comments section: 

Säule, Schlucht, Erscheinung

Sixth Avenue at Rockefeller Center, looking south.  ©1978 Blake Andrews.

NEW YORK, CHICAGO, DUBAI, FLORIDA, SAN FRANCISCO, TORONTO, SÃO PAULO, LOS ANGELES. 

In the last post about Cleveland, I briefly mentioned in passing a unique urban phenomenon, the visual effect of rows of tall buildings arranged along a city street. I've noticed this for years, and mentioning it made me think about its varieties and ways to describe it. While I can't offer an academic analysis here, I'm going to try to briefly explore it a bit further. 

Manhattan, from Carmen Ereddarter's blog.

While others may have long since recognized this phenomenon as well, I am not sure if this urban distinction has undergone appellation. It seems to be born out of uniquely American urban conditions: the downtown cores of classic large American cities, where tall buildings are arranged in orthogonal grids, the blocks equally spaced apart, filling up the envelope of each property in a uniform fashion, so that the fronts of each block align. The buildings not necessarily skyscrapers, but are sufficiently tall as to suggest a wall along either side of the street, as a hedge-row on a country lane, interrupted only by cross-streets. The buildings develop a conversational relationship with one another; each block becomes a component of a larger arrangement. 

3rd Avenue, looking north. Photo from Kelly van der Kwast. 

I. Säule and Zeile

Manhattan would be both the most recognized and recorded, but also the largest and most expressive example of this: the island's density stretching along its numbered avenues for six or seven miles in straight lines. It is one of the most quintessential aspects of Manhattan's appearance, although I am not sure it has ever been specifically given a name, although Manhattan's deep density of full-block buildings has been described as canyons of buildings, which partially describes the phenomenon.

State Street in Chicago's Loop, looking north. 

But it is not limited to New York. Chicago’s Loop expresses this aspect as well, although Chicago's central business district, while quite large, is much smaller and less elongated than Manhattan. The Loop has a clear limit, giving way to warehouse districts and residential areas, whereas Manhattan's avenues vanish, and its cross-streets disappear into the waterfront. Visually, constructed canyons seem carved in each cardinal coordinate.

There are many other examples; as the effect momentarily occurs one street in a small downtown like Cleveland, there are probably countless individual examples in dozens of American cities with a sufficient building stock and suitably wide, straight streets, built up with adequately tall buildings—Washington and Paris are too low to the street to have the affect appear.

A near-appearance of the phenomenon on Commissioner's Street in Johannesburg.

It would be possible to capture this atmosphere in large, grid-array downtowns in Vancouver or Houston, and perhaps Sydney or Melbourne—any place where a forest of skyscrapers is arranged across a rigid orthogonal street pattern, from Beijing to Buenos Aires. Maybe not so much London, Paris, Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur, but here and there in Johannesburg, perhaps the Ginza ward of Tokyo.

Avenida Paulista, from Wikipedia. 

São Paulo expresses it at least on the mammoth Avenida Paulista, if not elsewhere in its vast forest of high-rise buildings, although the city does not have strict grid system. An interesting detail of Avenida Paulista is the pyramidal Edificio FIESP, photogenic for breaking up the slab-wall affect the regularly-intervaled façades.

Photo of Avenida Paulista and the FIESP Building, by Panoramio user Rmartinipoa.

Downtown San Francisco's financial district somewhat weakly presents this phenomenon, with the added effect of the canyon floor sweeping up the steep hillsides at the far end of each street, or looking out towards the Bay, aligning with the span of the Bay Bridge.

The Streets of San Francisco.

II. Schlange-Schlucht

More linear than the mile-long boulevards of Manhattan are places where dense clusters of high-value real estate are divided into roughly equal sites, but the conditions only yield a single row of high-rise buildings. This is a typically littoral condition: it recalls the heavily urbanized coast of Southern Florida, for example, and other locations where high-rise towers, mostly residential or hotels, march along a main street that follows the coastline, like Cancún. However, in the case of typically-curvacious resort-style architecture, there is not enough alignment for the full effect to register.

The near-effect seen in Sunny Isles, Florida. ©2014 Bauzeitgeist. 

The most distinct difference between this linear row and that of an American downtown is that the arrangement is only one block wide on either side. While not necessarily evident from a straight-on perspective down this one street, the edges of vision, and the visual understanding of the wider urban area, imply that the density discontinues after only one row of buildings.

The best example of this that I know of is Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai, which is both long, wide, and evenly spaced with high rises, some extremely tall, columns on either side. Although Dubai is a littoral city, Sheikh Zayed Road itself is away from the beachfront, and the single rows of skyscrapers stand with low-rise buildings behind, or nothing but dry lots of open desert. Dubai's mid-town does not spread across a gridded district of regular built density, but stretches on either side of a single major street.

Images of Sheikh Zayed Road in Dubai from Wikipedia and FlashyDubai.com. 

III. Hyper-Schlange Schlucht Straße

Related to the narrow hedge-row effect of Sheikh Zayed Road, a third variety of this phenomenon emphasizes the appearance of tall buildings fronting a significant thoroughfare in an otherwise low-rise environment, often in the case where a major street connects multiple centers of a sprawling metropolis. While the façade-wall effect is visible along the prospect itself, it is no longer set out along a grid of blocks. The hedge-row effect is more clearly understood from above, where the contrast in height is more evident.

Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles.  

The two large examples that come to mind are Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles and Yonge Street in Toronto.

If sprawling Los Angeles has a Broadway, it is Wilshire, which curves at several points along the low foothills as it stretches more than a dozen miles, from downtown Los Angeles through affluent West L.A. towards the Pacific Ocean, terminating in Santa Monica. L.A. is perhaps too famous for it’s sprawl, when it really a city of average density, and Wilshire provides one of it’s most distinct urban moments.

Whether by accident of real estate value or determined more didactically by zoning, either side of this thoroughfare is lined with mostly rectangular office blocks, passing through various clusters and campuses of high-rises at downtown LA and Century City, but otherwise distinct from the low-rise and often residential neighborhoods beyond the rows of columns. As with Sheikh Zayed Road, the contrast is most distinct from the air.

Yonge Street is supposedly the longest street in the world, but that's alway struck me as a rather technical description for the world street, as opposed to calling something a road, or a route, which can stretch from one side of a country to another. These are frequently lined with a high density and sufficient volume of bland boxes, which are forgettable alone orchestrate a remarkable visual affect.

Toronto looking north  from the CN Tower ©2011 Bauzeitgeist. 

However, the claim to the title is augmented by the extraordinary phenomenon of Yonge Stretching from the financial district of downtown Toronto for miles to the north. Like Wilshire, Yonge passes through and connects perpendicular clusters of mid-rise buildings where it crosses first Bloor Street and St. Clair, all the way to North York, a suburban district nearly ten miles from the lakefront. The astonishing Vancouverization of Toronto, which has accelerated with the real estate boom in the last ten years, is occurring mostly near the waterfront areas of downtown but is also thickening the effect of this corridor of high-rises, stretching to a length of any of Manhattan's avenues. It is quite convenient to observe this effect without having to board an airplane, as the observation deck of the CN Tower provides an excellent vantage point. 

Toronto looking north  from the CN Tower ©2011 Bauzeitgeist. 

Bewahrung, Erweckung

@Google.

CLEVELAND.

A more positive modern preservation story has appeared out of nowhere, in Cleveland, Ohio, after all hope had been lost.

Like Detroit and other rust belt cities, Cleveland is home to only about half as many people as fifty or sixty years ago; while its metropolitan area still holds about 2.5 million people, what was once the sixth largest city in the US in now something like its 45th most-populous municipality.

Photo courtesy of All Things Cleveland. 

In more prosperous days, Cleveland, an industrial capital, spurred the growth of many of the nation's largest banks, and boasting something of the Wall Street of Ohio, East Ninth Street: the only prospect in this midwestern metropolis where rows of business-houses formed colonnades along the boundaries of the boulevard, an effect more common in Manhattan or Chicago.

It was on the southern end of this arrangement that the celebrated architect Marcel Breuer's only built skyscraper was realized in 1971. And, more recently, where it was nearly razed.

The blogosphere and the architectural press covered the story in 2007, as the threat of demolition has hung over the Breuer building seven years ago. The tower, once the proud headquarters of a major bank, and the largest and most modern of one of half a dozen motley buildings that made up the Ameritrust's block-long headquarters complex, stood vacant, a victim of bank consolidation.

The County government took over the block and, in a typically-bizarre logic that is all too common with the reasoning that governs the destruction of many architecturally-significant landmarks, set about plans to pull down the Breuer skyscraper and replace it with one of several glassy, ersatz low-rise designs. One of the few outstanding modern features of downtown Cleveland would be lost, to make room for a suburban-style pavilion in a half-empty city.

But in the past year, this story has taken a remarkable turn, and it was a suburban element that came to the rescue. A construction and development firm from a distant county bought the complex from the county at a bargain price…and decided to painstakingly preserve the Breuer tower. Rather than level it, or strip it out of all recognition, the private company not only recognized the compelling power of the architecture, but has even publicly pledged to thoughtfully resurrect several of its signature features, such as Breuer's nave-like sunken lobby with its paneled-glass street wall, which were damaged during an earlier phase of asbestos removal.

While the plan features the typically-contemporary formula of upmarket hotel and condominiums, the programming seeks to utilize the building's unique aspects, such as the concept to transform the formally-off limits rooftop, home to Breuer's enigmatic oculus, a true sculpture of vacancy, into a roof deck. The ground-floor of the complex will also house a mid-market grocery in the middle of one of mid-America's urban food deserts. Between its public amenities and the population draws of its hotel and residences, the landmark will even be more positive for the city than ever before.

All the above photos except as noted ©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

The Banks

 LONDON.

Among the landmarks of London whose appearance from afar is considered precious, the Palace of Westminster, positioned particularly on a broad curve of the River Thames, is among the most sacrosanct. The views towards Parliament are protected by an act of Parliament.

It is therefore strange that either side of this critical, historic stretch of London's brown artery stretches an increasingly incongruous phalanx of large, tall buildings.

Partly, this is a result of the property and preservation paradox itself: water views are always valuable, and the wide vistas across the water, itself mostly free of buildings, make its edge a prime location for prominent buildings, beginning with Big Ben itself.

But, like in so many other rarified quarters of the capital, when post-war Britain needed to rebuild, and as later decades came, architectural statements needed to be made, bold new buildings of varying merit rose up on either side of the river.

It all started out rather well when peace came more than half a century ago: not least the brutalist Festival Hall, which is often considered one of London's best 20th century buildings, and deserves its own consideration aside from this overview. But perhaps this lovely, brave civic endeavor opened a pandora's box of contemporary construction, an outflow which is accelerating even now, all around it.

Charing Cross from the London Eye: 

Peering down on Thatcherist public monument from Blairite cool tourist icon.

 Directly opposite is exhibit A: Charing Cross, Terry Ferrell's high-pomo shopping shed train station, welded to the back of the dainty Victorian railway hotel, a monument to late Thatcherist love of American commercial argot in all things, especially civic infrastructure.

Since the Millennium, the mid-century leisure attraction has been overshadowed in all senses by the London Eye, which itself has become a jewel in the crown of London's indisputable architectural icons. It's nice, and playful, and neat, and family-friendly, and touristic, but it's not in the least respectful of its context, usurping the stately sweeps of parliament for its own ticket receipts.

South Bank, in the very near future. 

Of an earlier era, and what seems now almost quaintly more controversial at the time, was the Shell Centre, a stone-white office tower lovingly celebrated in this contemporary film below, when riding in elevators and working more than three stories above the ground was a marvel. It will soon by joined by more high-end speculative developments.

Among the oldest skyscrapers along the Westminster side of the Thames is the bulky Millbank Tower, built in 1973 near the site of the old Millbank Prison. Standing like a third tower of parliament, after Big Ben's Clock Tower and Victoria Tower, it is hard to photograph Britain's legislative house without this drab block in the background. It was once a home to Britain's Labour Party, somehow fittingly.

This monolith is now joined by the "riverside stunning development"of St. Georges Wharf, a green-glass Vancouver-upon-Vauxhall that manages to become increasingly obnoxious as it slowly metasticizes decade after decade.

The first mega-structure of the Lambeth shore was Terry Ferrel's second superstructure facing the mid-Thames. Known variously as the MI6 Building or SIS Building, it was built on spec until Thatcher let the spooks lease some floors. Aside from having its naming-rights occupants be a government agency whose existence wasn't acknowledged for decades afterwards, the building's realization is unbelievable in two aspects: firstly that a faux-copper-capped neo-art-deco ziggurat would be proposed anywhere, and that a government's clandestine intelligence division would occupy a bombastic Babylonian building on such a premiere site, a Legoland Lubyanka in Lambeth done up in Michael Graves Mesopotamian. It was famous even before it featured memorably in the otherwise forgettable 2012 James Bond episode Skyfall. The secret police have a celebrity building.

It might have been easier to just not build it in the first place…

Then its Canadian cousin arrived

What could possibly share space with such a ridiculous building, other than luxury flats? A decade after the secret government agency openly moved in to its bankside behemoth, a vapid, Vancouverish, over-fenstrated fortresses. Nominated for a Carbuncle Cup on completion in 2006, it goes to show how much bad architecture is produced every year that this shiny flock of seagulls lost to an even worse building. That this bizarre pair are in and of themselves unquestionably referential just illustrates how warped the contextual parameters of the Thames have become. London wasn't first to the finish line, yet it now enjoys a quintessential 'stunning riverside development.'

The royal heir did not arrive until 2013. It is again glassy and green, but instead of a sprawling palace, it is a tower. It's realization in this once-distant corner of the city is emblematic of how, in just a decade, all efforts to hold back skyscrapers from London's skyline and its neighborhoods have been exhausted under the foot-tread of property developments. Together with the 40-year old Millbank tower, they stand like pillars of Hercules, ominously blocking the source of the Thames, triumphant in their fight over what this city will ultimately look like.

But it is not a war without real-life casualties. In what seemed not only ironically-reminiscent of the kaboom from the Daniel Craig Bond flop, but also an epic allegory for this era of high oligarchy, a helicopter, whizzing across the grey early morning with important people in a rush, struck the tower crane as it was crowning this latest yuppiedrome. Flames and debris not set off by Hollywood effects specialists rained down on the morning joggers and bikers along the river. Two died. A baptism by fire by helicopter crash; buildings have been deemed cursed from far less.

If there's death to be mourned beyond this loss of human life in all this technological violence, perhaps this is yet another eulogy for part of Britain itself? For in all the hand-wringing about view corridors, what is meant to be preserved, what is wished distilled, is the concept of a country, a place not of property speculation but pastural charm, even in its great, grand capital. Of late, this heritage has extended to the honoring the technological past, the age of engineering which gave Britain its summiting might, and so much of its great architecture.

That this would be the alluding myth of an office building for lobbying speaks to the sorry condition of both building design and its society. Michael Hopkin's addition to the Parliament promenade, Portcullis House is not even necessarily a bad building, and it is certainly not the worst that one's eyes could meet, scanning the skyline from the panoramic viewpoint of the river's shores. But neither is it great, for such a great and celebrated spot; it's a minor player in an orchestra, drowned out by bigger instruments, which play an incongruous tune. If that song were a paean, what myths would it lyricize, for us to believe that the river passes by heroes, as it winds through this capital and out to the sea. 

Victor Victoriana

Above: Portland House & Westminster Cathedral over Green Park. ©2013 Bauzeitgeist. 

Below ©Google.

LONDON.

The increasing hideousness of the City of London's skyline is frequently decried just for the ugliness of the new architecture itself, but the loss of the capital's historic vistas, mentioned in terms of the now-carefully-studied "view corridors"–of St. Paul's in particular but also the Houses of Parliament in Westminster. The new glass-and-steel financial towers block the distant appearance of the cathedral's dome or the heroic Big Ben and Victoria Tower of Parliament. Paradoxically, the concern over these sight lines seem to overshadow the demerits of the new skyscrapers themselves, which it seems can be hideous as long as they are a referential distance  from London's more ancient landmarks.

A counterargument to this is that it ignores all the terrible office buildings that have been rising in prominent locations across London for decades. As mentioned in the last post, this is a different issue in leafier west London, away from the narrow jagged alleys of the medieval City. These more residential areas have had fewer demands for tall buildings, more restrictions on new construction, and are home to two of the capital's largest parks, the perimeters of which space out a handful of tall towers, most of which were realized decades ago.

Portland House over the top of Green Park. ©2003, 2013 Bauzeitgeist.

The West London district that most closely resembles the City of London is Victoria. Before ever visiting Britain, I heard the name, and assumed that only one of London's nicest areas would be named after a queen. But this is not the case. The grandeur evoked by its moniker seems grossly misapplied to the tangle of busy, dirty streets, in misnomers like the busy Buckingham Palace Road.

171 Victoria Street, HQ of John Lewis.

Victoria is sort of the District of Columbia of London, with a heavy dose of Madison Square Garden at its center. Home to a large portion of the British government, it features several busy thoroughfares lined with dull office blocks, home to a lot of the back-office bureaucracy and the UK lobbying industry. This sad zone stretches between Parliament and Buckingham Palace, forming a triangle with its namesake, the enormous Victoria Railway Station, an ugly procession of dusty sheds, which somehow managed to become even more revolting by a partial conversion to a low-ceilinged shopping mall, which itself continues on to a massive bus terminal, its steel frames covered in several decades worth of dust and pigeon poop. An analytical post could be dedicated to just this low-lying carbuncle itself, oozing across the southern threshold of one of the world's most expensive neighborhoods, minutes from bedrooms which go for a million-and-a-half pounds each, and a 15-minute walk from one of the most famous houses on the planet.

Victoria Coach Station, Buckingham Palace Road. ©2006 Bauzeitgeist.

The other side of this district hosts a handful of half-tall, boring office towers. What is most shocking to a visitor's sensibility is that this cluster of buildings, a sort of office park right in the center of Westminster, is within a few blocks of one of the greatest monuments of modern monarchical mythology, Buckingham Palace. The group of dull blocks spoil the background of the pristine royal fantasy, Green Park gets the backdrop of a suburban office park.

The most noticeable building to rise over the treetops of Green Park is Portland House, a building so bland it is hard to pick it out of a lineup. As if the area between the regal Mall and the train station wasn't turning out badly enough, somehow a shortened Pan Am building (with nearly identical octagon shape and depressing ground floor porticos) dropped down like a lead curtain; the Monster that ate the Green Park. In a classic Maupassantian moment, the property company boasts of the tower's "stunning views" while Portland House prominently detracts so many others from elsewhere in the city.

Portland House, visible with Big Ben, the Shard, Victoria Tower, One Canada Water, and the Westminster Cathedral.

©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

In a quintessential New-Ruins-of-Great-Britain move, the forecourt was done over ten years ago as a glass-domed mall, so the cubicles full of bureaucrats could have their basement gym and food court and shopping. The fourth floor is leased out to the Kazakh resource group that is currently taking over disgraced commodities firm ENRC.

The front of Buckingham Palace, with Cardinal Place and Victoria in the background. 

©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

If anything could ruin the scene from Buckingham Palace more than this, it would have to be the erstwhile Home Office, now the Ministry of Justice, which today, like all soulless structures, is most commonly referred to only by its street address, 102 Petty France. Perhaps only in England could such an enormous and over-bearing structure somehow end up referred by such a cute little name as Petty France, as if the façade's fenestration referenced a particular style of lace doily rather than a Brutalist blockbuster.

This is another realization of Sir Basil Spence, designer of the Household Calvary Barracks covered in the last post. Celebrated another of the most hated buildings in Britain, it caused a Lord to once remark that Spence ruined two London parks with his monstrosities: the Household Calvary wrecked the bucolic idyll of Hyde Park, while the Home Office destroyed the serenity of Green Park (Portland Place aside).

Whether to instills admiration, or admonishment, its mass make one of the most compelling attractions of the whole quarter, another helmeted, cement-paneled soldier rudely wrecking a precious royal vista. Its block-long body features  a double-row of giant goggled bay window galleries staring wide-eyed at the street, monitoring. The higher stacks feature more repetitive windows, its bulbous noggin blotting out even more light. This bureaucratic fortress remarkably resembles the J. Edgar Hoover Building, the FBI Headquarters in Washington, DC, and is therefore all the more fitting that the building's apparent nickname was Lubyanka, after the enormous palace headquarters of the KGB in Moscow.

(4) Previous photos of 102 Petty France ©2013 Bauzeitgeist.

Its tempting to conclude that this repulsiveness was somehow intentional, that the bloated absurdity of this building, while a fitting home to a bloated agency of bureaucracy, was in fact impugning the ridiculously over-large imperial manor sitting just a short walk away–that the narrow lane of Petty France was the closest that Spence could get to stage his protest.