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NYT Syndicate
I am as devoted to modern style as anyone. I type on an Eames chair, eat with Arne Jacobsen cutlery and rest tired eyes on the coloured squares of Josef Albers. But when I step out from my white-cube apartment, I find a different kind of pleasure that's equally thrilling: My New York neighbourhood is full of Victorian tenements covered in a riot of decoration, from carved heads and scallop shells to flower garlands and twisting columns that don't hold anything up. I dare anyone to resist their splendour.
I also dare anyone to find that particular joy on any of the newer streetscapes being built in New York or across the planet. It's true that Hudson Yards, almost finished on the Far West Side of Manhattan, has no shortage of eccentric buildings ” Shanghai on the Hudson, you might call it. Stairs that go nowhere make one structure look like an image by MC Escher; angled roofs and slanting facades turn office towers into steel-and-glass origami. But all this flamboyance has almost nothing to do with the kind of decoration that makes old tenements and brownstones such a pleasure.
Instead, it belongs to what I call architecture's new ornamentalism, a movement committed to visual play at the level of entire structures and whole facades, which appear to sway and swoop.
Buildings become giant baubles plopped into an otherwise dull cityscape, like extravagant 'Jetsons'-age sculptures. Several books that celebrate this trend take pains to say that it is absolutely not about"decoration" ”"mere" decoration, they mean, of the kind that almost no one can resist when they walk down a Victorian street.
In New York, however, in the middle of a landmark 19th-century district, there is one recent, rare example of a structure that dares to embrace its neighbours' surface ornateness and buck the trend toward bauble buildings.
"It was a real struggle to allow ourselves to use decoration," said Todd Poisson, a partner at BKSK Architects. Sitting in the firm's sleek, ornament-free offices in the Flatiron district, he was recalling the early stages of work on a building the firm recently designed at 529 Broadway in SoHo.
Sneaker fiends may know it as Nike's grand new home, but design fans should soon be recognising it as one of the most exciting and intelligent structures to be built for decades, anywhere. It is also one of the few that revives the old, pre-modernist joy that we find in the ornate.
The new building sits on the site of the long-demolished Prescott House, a wildly decorative hotel built in 1852, when masonry was still what held a building up and windows pierced it at their peril.
Next door stands an equally ornamented building from 1872 that used that moment's new cast-iron construction to make facades that were almost wall-to-wall window. (The building is now best known as the home of the Judd Foundation.)
Rather than ignore those precedents, BKSK decided to make the new structure into a visual essay on the varied flamboyance that had come to the street before it.
One end of the building's wide facade is built around the kind of narrow window openings that had been required by the Prescott's brick construction; they have elaborate terra-cotta surrounds that pay homage to the Prescott's ornate lintels and sills.
The other end of the same frontage has the much wider piercings that were the goal of SoHo's cast-iron architecture. And in the 16 rows of windows in between, BKSK lets us watch the facade's openings as they transform from the ones used in 1852 to the ones from two decades later.
But the most important thing to recognise in the decoration at 529 Broadway is that it isn't"wry or tongue-in-cheek," said Harry Kendall, a partner at BKSK. Architects had tried to revive ornamentalism once before, in the 1980s, with postmodernism.
"There's rote decoration ” but this is un-rote decoration," said Kendall, as he clicked through slides of his firm's Broadway building.
