Munchin' in München

MUNICH.

Just a few days after departing Frankfurt, still in an inspired daze from the experiential overload the Deutsches Architekturmuseum's exhibit on building models, I was walking the streets of Munich, but still imagining miniature landscapes of ancient Pompeii or the visionary fantasy of Isozaki's metabolist metropolis.

One of the best models, as I mentioned in the post about the exhibit, was the square slice of mid-town Manhattan, bustling with traffic. This realistic rectangle of real estate was dominated firstly by the iconic Chrysler Building, but also by the MetLife building, the bulky brutalist block which has been featured on Bauzeitgeist before when reviewing an excellent book about the building.

Aside from my admiration for the old Pan Am Building, the much-hated "Monster that Ate Park Avenue," the area around Ground Center Station in New York is of particular fondness to me as it was the old location of the headquarters office for the company that I work for, and it was from my office window that I could look out at the MetLife, the Chrysler, and the station at about the same height as the viewer of the model at the Frankfurt museum.

It was therefore startling to encounter the familiar mass of the MetLife. A window of a jeweler in a fashionable street near the Frauenkirche featured a model of midtown, with the Metlife Building broadly featured, a cutout of the archways of the Grand Central at its feet. "MetLife" had been changed to MetLove, but otherwise the old Pan Am had been faithfully recreated--the Chrysler was not included in the scene. As surprised as I was to see a miniature of the building twice in a week in two different German cities, its remarkable that the much-derided building is here used as a recognizable symbol of New York.

Such careful imitations, even if intended for the utility of accurate depiction, nonetheless seem to yield to some begrudging admiration of the building. I thought about this curious near-irony when looking at the large model of the Grand Central Area at the museum in Frankfurt.

As much as the Pan Am has been long loathed, the dark-bronze Hyatt Hotel to the immediate east of Grand Central Station has been attacked by architects as being equally hideous: critics trot out the old box-the-nearby-masterpiece-came-in trope and decry the reflective-brown skin, which enclosed the old hotel when Trump rescued it from bankruptcy in 1980. 

Looking at the Hyatt from a helicopter height, however, even if its is really on a 2nd-floor gallery of a German museum, I could help but admire the care that the model maker had put into accurately assembling the mannequin, and how nice it looked amongst the other buildings of the area, and how little I had paid attention to the building in those days when I was in and out of an office tower across the street.

Sommerlesung: Insuring the City

©2008 Bauzeitgeist.

Occasionally, a visit to the bookstore, for those who happen to live in a place where such an errand is even possible, results in a discovery of a newly published book which is unexpected in a euphoric but somewhat devastating way. The existence of a volume on a subject so esoteric that the idea that you alone were interested in it was plausible, is a source of joy; that this insensible idea is dashed by the presence of the book on the shelf is a cause for surprise, and the small lament that you are no longer the lone expert on this particular topic (and therefore, with the discovery of this newly-published book, not the one to write the definitive account of the subject? Perhaps a cause for a small but powerful sadness).

©2008 Bauzeitgeist. 

Even if none of that makes any sense, never mind. Here is a book to read: Insuring the City: The Prudential Center and the Postwar Urban Landscape, by Elihu Rubin, published by Yale University Press earlier this year. The book tells the story of the Prudential Center, one of the largest office buildings and commercial developments ever realized in Boston or New England, chronicling the economic, commercial, social, urban, political and architectural thoughts and movements that brought about this unusual tower and the multi acre "Prudential Center" arranged at its ankles in the center of Boston's midtown Back Bay district. 

©2008 Bauzeitgeist.   

I lived in Boston for many years. It was my first city-- my first time living in a city as an adult. I lived only a few blocks from the Prudential, and in more than one apartment had a view of the silver-grey-green bulk which towered over the red brick and rooftops of the older townhouses of the area. I can't say I came to love the building, but was certainly always fascinated by it, its hideous metallic grille body, its weird, anthropomorphic capital, crowned with dozens of antennae, and embossed with a corporate label as if a slip of paper had passed through a massive typewriter. The building seems to so rudely destroy the historic charm of the Back Bay's mannered, leafy streets, and yet is itself somehow hopeful and silly, broadcasting its simplistic, vintage optimism.

 ©2008 Bauzeitgeist.

That the Prudential Center is so ignored, unloved and loathed a landmark  in the common estimation of both Boston's citizens and visitors, which was produced nearly 70 years ago by an unappreciated, no-name corporate architect, certainly makes it an unusual subject of a full publication of academic architectural enquiry. That an architectural historian has successfully brought to print a novel-sized volume on not only this building's history but a footnoted account of its creation and execution is equally too infrequent. 

 ©2007 Bauzeitgeist.

In five thoroughly researched chapters, Rubin details the architectural heritage of the Prudential Insurance Company of America, particularly its nationwide Home Office expansion program, which resulted in striking if rather conservative new office blocks in Newark, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Jacksonville, and Minneapolis. To see a major corporation undertake a multi city building program in the midst of America's urban abandonment, and to have this occur for specifically pro-urban reasons, underscores how different corporate citizenship was seventy years ago from today. For more on this, see the inevitable Atlantic Cities post on the topic, in a review the book from June, which includes a reply in the comments section from the author himself.

 ©2008 Bauzeitgeist. 

Rubin devotes two chapter to the social and political environment of Boston at mid-century, when a parochial backwardness thwarted the implementation of modern architecture in the historic city, which was followed by a corrupt political machine. The book passes briefly over the sudden, shocking arrival of modernist urban renewal in Boston by momentarily referencing the West End, Government Center, and the Central Artery, all of which involved expunging huge areas of the centuries-old core of the city and interrupting the historic street pattern. It would be interesting to juxtapose these more thoroughly, along with the subsequent Christian Science Center near the Prudential, to show them as one class of similar urban renewal upheavals. 

The Prudential from South Boston. ©2012 Bauzeitgeist.

The book stays on topic, detailing the state and local tax schemes which kept the Prudential project alive. The final chapter reflects on the intervening time since the initial construction, in which the towers in the park Prudential Center was first revitalized as an upscale shopping mall, a program which remains in place today to great success, and in the last ten years has resulted in smoothing out the edges of this originally-inward-looking  development. 

The Back Bay Skyline from the Charles River. ©2010 Bauzeitgeist.

If there is one complaint about the book, its that this ending is rather rushed: although the later 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s additions are mentioned in the last few pages, a more thorough architectural examination of the changes to the character and function of the whole center by these changes would have been welcome. These projects are nearing an end, as the last available spaces in the Prudential Center have been filled in or spoken for, but it is interesting to look at this three-decade maturing and how it reflected changing social attitudes toward city centers, as the modernist plan of multistory retail plazas and prospects, good in theory but dreary and windswept when opened, were internalized into a suburban style mall. A later era, just passed, saw the addition of new luxury condominium towers (there were always luxury apartment buildings on the site) which lastly culminated in the addition of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel & Residences in the mid-2000s, which was not only one of the most prominent developments in Boston during the recent real estate boom, but also created a traditional urban street facade along Boylston street where previously there had been a driveway. 

The Prudential Center shown in axonometric on a Transit Authority 

wayfinding placard at Back Bay Station. ©2010 Bauzeitgeist.

The only other complaint about the book, and the more significant one: the novel-sized publication contains only black and white photos, and most of these are tiny, and pushed to the edges of each page by lengthy blocks of text. Vast panoramas of the Boston skyline, and presentation drawings that are surely huge in their original form, are  miniscule. This is a shame; perhaps the publication could have done with a series of plates in the center. This would have had the additional effect of showing some affection to the building itself, which remains a prominent landmark in Boston, yet one that is universally unappreciated.

The Prudential in a wooden model of the city of Boston

by the Boston Redevelopment Authority. 

The Mandarin Oriental Hotel is the two mid rise blocks at the center of the picture, 

to the front and left of the Prudential Tower. ©2009 Bauzeitgeist. 

Insuring the City isn't a typical read for any audience: its neither a general interest publication, nor is it the sort of books architects usually buy. Its not theory, and its not a coffee table monograph. Its dozens of pages of text only interrupted by subheadings like "The Bond Market" or "The Pubic Authority Model" or "Toward a Tax Concession." But this is also what makes the book so worthwhile, so important, so relevant, and so recommendable, for if chapters about creating a special purpose vehicle for a major corporation to develop a multi acre urban site isn't the typical book that architects pick up (much less write), perhaps it should be. This, I believe, is exactly the sort of subjects that architects remain ignorant to their own professional detriment: this is the story of how major projects actually get done, in American cities as elsewhere, a tale which is usually the saga of clever developers and willing public officials than it is of architects taking a lead role. In what is left of the summer, I'd suggest this is exactly the sort of book that architects should be taking to the beach. 

Books of the Decade: The Pan Am Building

It had occurred to me earlier this month that an entire decade had come to a close. While I have read too many end-of-year posts (some of them excellent) to think adding one of my own would be worth anyone's time, I had started to develop a Top Ten Books of the Decade List, that is, the ten best books published since 2000, that have had the greatest influence on me or gave me the greatest enjoyment. But Instead of putting together a list in one post, or implying some sort of ranking, I've decided to produce an entry on each book, and therefore have more space to discuss each.

image courtesy MIT Press

One of my favorite books published since 2000 is The Pan Am Building and the Shattering of the Modernist Dream, by Meredith Clausen, who teaches architecture at the University of Washington.

Aside from having an awesome title, this 2003 volume, uniquely both a thoroughly-researched history, and in its proportions a bit akin to a image-rich coffee table book, is an important and very relevant architectural saga. Among architectural books, it is less common to encounter a cautionary tale of discredit than a glitzy promotional publication, and for this reason generally, as well as so many of the particular details of this case study, it is an excellent work and one of the best books I've read in the last several years.

The Pan Am, The Monster That Ate Park Avenue, was the largest commercial office building in the world when it was completed (rather than a more easily-understandable and publicly-embraced title such as tallest building), a triumph of square footage over civic virtue, of private interests over public welfare. Universally derided as a failure of architecture, and voted by the readers of New York Magazine in 1987 as New York's most hated building, it symbolizes so much that was squandered to hubris in its time, a challenge still relevant today.

Involving some of the most prominent and legendary individuals of mid-century American architecture. On the design side, the story involves two deans of modernist aesthetic and theory, Walter Gropius and Pietro Belluschi, whose employment as genuis-visionaries to the project can be seen as an early use of architectural Star-power in the marketing of corporate real estate.

In reaction stood two glass-ceiling-shattering leaders of a great era of architectural criticism: Ada Louise Huxtable and Jane Jacobs. Surrounding these well-known names are some of the major political and corporate forces of post-war New York, and the work was crowned with the symbol of America's global corporate might, Pan Am. The airline's association was not just a nameplate, as the building was realized with a heliport at its crown, with fantastically-bulbuous aerotaxis roaring off the brow the building, whisking businessmen to Pan Am's global air routes at Idlewild. The building managed to even offend the auditory sense.

In the chapters dealing with this cacophony of criticism its interesting to read concerns over city-center density prominent in the debate. Nowadays its less common to encounter fears of an American city becoming too crowded-- this in an of itself foretells the paradigm shift, as American cities were already beginning to thin out by the 1960s. The aesthetic debate did not so much address insipid material or program, but rather the insidious malevolence of shadow. The lack of light and air are repeatedly mourned, and in these chapters the early stages of historic preservation can be seen.

An important incident late in the building's tragic tale evinces how the modernist dream was not only blacked out in the cold, stifling shadows of its monuments, but were truly shattered. In the 1977 accident of a commuter helicopter landing on the roof, the torquing of helicopter blades killed five passengers waiting on the landing platform, and ricocheted off the building to kill and maim individuals on the sidewalk below. That a futuristic transport machine connecting to behemoth office block actually slashed a lone pedestrian to death is not only horrifying but an epigrammatic episode of modernism's vicissitudes. Perhaps this was a Pruitt-Igoe moment for commercial real-estate?

image courtesy Life

This was of course, not the first and not the last in a series of aviation disasters involving Manhattan Skyscrapers, and beyond seemingly presaging the death of Pan Am, one of America's proudest commercial symbols, in one particular aspect the impact of that falling debris continues to reverberate: we are a world largely without commuter helicopter services. over 30 years later, with something of a "where's my space age" lament that rotorcraft have yet to progress further into the realm of municipal mass transit.