Paul Goldberger Again!
Thanks adma -
this material iillustrates how practised one must be to defend Stern's architectural path from PoMo through MoTra.* Taken together - the last post on a Goldberger from 1982,** with this one from 2007 - we get what amounts to an intellectual high-wire act. Goldberger's own integrity is at stake here, as much as that of Stern's legacy in the profession. Here is a sampling of my reactions:
Ubiquitous as glass condo buildings have lately become—glass is the new white brick—New York’s wealthy, unlike their Mies van der Rohe-dwelling counterparts in Chicago, have always equated stone with substance.
This speaks volumes to that prior "sidebar" about the Modernist bias of Chicago known to many vs the greater prominence, not exclusivity, of PoMo elsewhere. In this case, elsewhere is NYC, at least amongst those who are seeking, or living in, highrise luxury. I shall hold off on projecting this to any of the Toronto scene. That I will leave for others to work out for themselves, since my own position should need no further restatement at this point.
Today, if you want such luxuries as high ceilings and a dining room, an old building is pretty much the only place to find them. Forget Richard Meier and Jean Nouvel and their sleek glass condominiums: for connoisseurs of Manhattan apartments, the real celebrity architects have always been Rosario Candela, J. E. R. Carpenter, and Emery Roth, who designed the best buildings put up between the wars. ... Such buildings still represent the apogee of New York residential design. Brokers often mention Candela in their ads, because people will pay a premium to live in one of his buildings... (But) Candela has been dead for more than fifty years, but he should get at least partial credit for ... a new apartment building, designed by Robert A. M. Stern.
If I didn't know better, I would say that this borders on satire, it has all the elements ... but alas, it is not satire at all. What Goldberger is doing relates to acceptance of "sentimentality" and nostalga by Stern's clients and customer base, when once he rejected any architect that would knowingly do the same. Remember, we were assured that the "mature" Stern in 1982, had avoided this mis-step of falling into the throws of "sentimentality". This is more an assertion than a reality in 2007, because the dividing line is no longer explicitly given in this piece.
A building like this leaves you two choices: you can resist it or you can yield to it. On one level, there’s something unsettling about the whole thing—is costume-drama luxury the best that our new century has to offer? And what are we to make of the feeding frenzy surrounding it, in an already hypertrophied real-estate market? ... But the building itself is deeply seductive. ... This time, the assertion is not so hollow. Rooms are laid out in sumptuous procession around formal central galleries, and New York probably hasn’t seen such exquisitely crafted marble trim in a residential lobby since the days of Cole Porter.
What strange imagery, some may say lurid, in the words used to describe a Stern building's appeal: "resist it...or yield to it" and it is "deeply seductive." Perhaps, without realising it, Goldberger is indirectly admitting that he, and undoubtedly others, are being led astray from the challenges of the present and future in that quest for the "sumptuous procession ...(and) exquisitely crafted marble trim" that are part of the "costume-drama luxury" of Stern's re-creations. But I do not desire to denigrate Goldberger's many layered reflections, on full display here. I believe he knows the line is thin, and getting thinner, as he descends into the lure and pitfalls of his friend's work. PoMo was the path that Stern deliberately cobbled to arrive at his current penchant for replicating the past down to nearly every detail (save where modern convenience can be appropriately hidden, and brought in
via the backdoor).
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* PoMo and MoTra - are abbreviations for two terms coined by Robert A. M. Stern: respectively,
Post-
Modernism and
Modern
Traditionalism.
**
Click Here to access P. Goldberger, "The Maturing of Robert Stern," New York Times, 4, April, 2007
