Matt Yglesias

13 Responses to “Aesthetics-Enabling Regulation”

1. JohnH Says:
   January 27th, 2009 at 1:55 pm

   It’s a useful reminder. Just to temper it, though, first Rauchway hasn’t made a new discovery. The notion of the stepback skyscraper’s flourishing in Manhattan as a result of the 1916 regulation isn’t news. It’d be covered in any history of architecture, which would note that the law on “floor area ratio” was a reaction to the 1915 Equitable Tower.

   Second, he’s biased in his choice of exemplar, probably out of a love of the fantastic. Books are more likely to credit the influence of such architects as Raymond Hood, with his 1924 American Radiator Building.

   Third, the law wasn’t the only influence on the stepback design, although probably the most important one. It also resulted in part from structural needs and, more, as the historical result of stripping away decoration from predecessors that tried to gussy up the modern large building with references to the more ancient grandeur of ziggurats and Gothic detail. That includes unbuilt proposals by influential European architects, Gropius and Saarinen.

   Finally, it is a little misleading to take New York’s limits in isolatio, as the ideas were picked up in, say, Chicago precisely when the latter city eliminated height restrictions! Anyhow, all that doesn’t alter the sleazy growth cashing in on the boom of recent years.

2. James Gary Says:
   January 27th, 2009 at 4:48 pm

   I plugged Rem Koolhaas’s book Delirious New York in the other thread—but if you liked Rauchway’s post, you’ll loooove that book.

3. JRoth Says:
   January 27th, 2009 at 5:30 pm

   And to be clear, “now being undermined” should read, “started being undermined over 50 years ago.” Dumb boxes sitting behind windswept plazas have been a problem since the mid-50s.

4. brendan Says:
   January 27th, 2009 at 9:09 pm

   Yes, it was LeCorbusier’s ‘tower in a park’ concept that provided the model for much of the banal crap built since. true talents could still build beautifully (the Seagram Building is everyone’s favorite example, but the new 7 World Trade Center and others show it can still be done quite well.

   the distinction is that the ‘weddding cake’ buildings of the old law looked (and still look) pretty cool, especially a whole skyline of various versions of them, even when the design or execution is only okay.
   not so with a plain cubic prism. You REALLY have to be a genius to make that shit look decent. and most don’t.
   (surprise! only a few architects are real geniuses. this is of course a surprise only to architects, who are persuaded of a contrary opinion.)
   it’s a sadness. we do so few things really well, us humans, and then we by accident create beauty and what do we do? find a way to correct that outcome.
   oh well, we can take comfort in the fact that the recession means no one will be building any more boring boxes for a few years. nothing else either, of course, but on balance we might be better off. aesthetically, anyway.

5. AW Says:
   January 28th, 2009 at 12:28 pm

   I heard a story in the early eighties told me by a friend who studied architecture under Cesar Pelli at Yale. When Pelli was working for Eero Saarinen, Saarinen was working on CBS’s new headquarters building (The Black Rock) at the same time as the city had commissioned Saarinen to study the future development of Sixth Avenue, specifically the question whether it should be zoned for wedding-cake skyscrapers or set-back boxes with plazas. According to Pelli (as told to my friend, who told me), the architects in Saarinen’s office concluded that Sixth Avenue would be better served with stepback, wedding cake designs, but since Saarinen wanted to build The Black Rock as a straight box, he fudged the results, recommended to the city that boxes with plazas be built, and thus Sixth Avenue became the monotonous row of monoliths it is today, none of them approaching The Black Rock in beauty or elegance. I have no way of confirming this story, but it suggests that the history of skyscraper design in New York hasn’t just been a tale of laws, and greedy developers, but also of scheming architects.

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