NEW YORK: ARCHITECTURE — SILVIA TODHE

Somewhere between

Living & Dreaming,

there’s New York.

Even if you have never been to New York, you have been to New York— from superhero movies to Seinfeld, Friends, Sex in the City, or any number of Woody Allen movies, New York has been in your living room more times than you can recall. With over 800 languages spoken (making New York the most linguistically diverse city in the world), New York’s extraordinarily diverse population has earned its nickname as the ‘melting pot’.

Having welcomed millions arriving by sea, the Statue of Liberty, located on Liberty Island in New York Harbor, is not only a symbol of freedom and an American icon, but also just one example of the beautiful, diverse, and inspiring architecture in New York City. New York is most memorable for its Art Deco style, a brash, exuberant movement combining geometric motifs, dramatic historical allusions, and the integration of industrial craft.

Buildings should be artistic as well as practical; they should be admired and enjoyed, not just lived in, and worked in. After all, renaissance artists such as Raphael and Michelangelo worked as architects, too.

NEOCLASSICAL

STATUE OF LIBERTY

The statue depicts Libertas, the Roman goddess of liberty, with a torch in her right hand and a tabula ansata with a date of the declaration of Independence. Dedicated on the 28th of October of 1886, the copper statue was a gift from the French people to the USA intended to commemorate the lasting friendship between the peoples of the two nations.

Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi designed it in a neoclassical style, but Gustave Eiffel built the framework. The statue of liberty was inscribed as a UNESCO heritage site in 1984. UNESCO states that it’s a masterpiece of the human spirit, and it “endures as a highly potent symbol—inspiring contemplation, debate, and protest—of ideals such as liberty, peace, human rights, abolition of slavery, democracy, and opportunity.”

NEOCLASSICAL/ GREEK REVIVAL

Federal Hall (Alexander Jackson Davis)

Brooklyn Borough Hall (Calvin Pollard)

14 Wall Street (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon)

Inspired by Ancient Greek and Roman forms, Neoclassical buildings are known for their heavy massing, regimented geometries, and dramatic, temple-like columns. Neoclassicism flourished in New York in the early 19th century, as the times gravitated towards a more restrained form of architecture (& away from excessive styles like those of Baroque and Rococo). Mostly popular in civic and office architecture, but it can also be found in the austere mansions and townhouses in Upper East Side and townhouses like the Gramercy. A lighter (and later) version, Italianate, can be found in many of the city’s brownstones.

***Federal Hall (Alexander Jackson Davis)*** IMAGE SOURCE

COLONIAL/ NEO-COLONIAL

MORRELL SMITH (726 Madison Avenue)

DELANO & ALDRICH (1130 Fifth Avenue)

ITHIEL TOWN (St. Mark’s-in-the-Bowery)

Colonial Architecture—traditional, European-influenced structures built (or made to look like they were built) during the period between 1600 and 1800. In New York, these buildings can be found in lower Manhattan. Common features include stone, brick, or wood cladding; pitched roofs; and symmetrical designs. In the 1870s and 1930s, colonial architecture came back in style along with Georgian, Federalist, Cape Cod, and French variations.

***MORRELL SMITH (726 Madison Avenue) //*** IMAGE SOURCE

RENAISSANCE REVIVAL

Flatiron Building (Daniel Burnham)

Plaza Hotel (Henry J. Hardenbergh)

Carnegie Hall (William Tuthill)

This style embodies the grandeur of palaces and chateaux of Renaissance Italy and France. Increased in popularity among wealthy citizens of New York who aspired to emulate the ostentatious style of aristocratic Europeans. It became so favored that almost every Fifth Avenue home was entirely with Neo-Renaissance mansions. A heavier, more restrained version is Romanesque Revival, whose most famous example in New York is the south wing of the American Museum of Natural History.

GOTHIC REVIVAL

Trinity Church (Richard Upjohn)

St. Patrick’s Cathedral (James Renwick)

Belvedere Castle (Calvert Vaux)

In the mid-19th century, Gothic Revival became a trend in New York largely under the influence of the Romantic Movement (a reaction against machinery and mass production) and a reverence for all things medieval. The style features Gothic architecture’s tell-tale pointed arches, complex tracery, and familiar gables, dormers, and turrets, all carried out in stone or brick.

ART NOUVEAU

Little Singer Building (Ernest Flagg)

Decker Building (John H. Edelmann)

New Era Building (Buchman and Deisler)

Rejecting both the rigid formalism of classical revival styles and the mechanized repetition of the Industrial Revolution, Art Nouveau originated in France, but gained popularity in New York at the turn of the 20th century. Inspired by natural forms like plants and flowers, it features sinuous curves and intricate decoration, often cast from iron, stone, and glass. The style came to New York through the wide dissemination of graphic art (magazines, posters, etc.), and designs of famed practitioners like Louis Sullivan and Louis Comfort Tiffany.

Decker Building (John H. Edelmann) // IMAGE SOURCE

CAST IRON

Haughwout Building (J.P. Gaynor)

448 Broome Street (Frederick Clark Withers) 453 Broome Street, 47 Mercer Street, 429 Broadway

At the end of the 19th century, any building constructed with prefabricated cast iron came to be known as Cast Iron Architecture. First appearing in Europe and then used in London’d Crystal Palace and Paris’ the Eiffel Tower. But in New York, its use was focused almost exclusively in Soho—then an industrial neighborhood—where buildings took on eclectic facades (often combining classical forms and intricate ornament) that were lighter, cheaper, and more elegant than the usual granite, marble, and brick. The Soho Cast-Iron Historic District was created in 1973 and includes more than 500 buildings, making it the densest concentration of cast-iron architecture in the world.

Haughwout Building (J.P. Gaynor) // IMAGE SOURCE

BEAUX-ARTS

New York Public Library (Carrère and Hastings)

Grand Central Terminal (Warren & Wetmore)

Metropolitan Museum of Art (Richard Morris Hunt and McKim, Mead & White)

At the turn of the 20th century, Beaux-Arts started appearing in New York. This style is of ancient-looking historical revival. Beaux-Arts structures combine the grandeur and tradition of classicism with Renaissance-inspired—and technologically aided—lightness, uplift, and ornamentation. Innovations like steel-reinforced concrete and large sheets of glass allowed these buildings to be especially cavernous and impressive.

ART DECO

Empire State Building (Shreve, Lamb & Harmon)

Chrysler Building (William Van Alen)

Rockefeller Center (Raymond Hood, Harvey Wiley Corbett)

Buildings designed in this style often incorporated sleek, showy materials like colorful stone, chrome plating, plastic, stainless steel, and glass block. New York’s most iconic style is Art Deco, a brash, exuberant movement combining geometric motifs, dramatic historical allusions, and the integration of industrial craft. The movement’s name derives from Paris’s 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs, but in New York, the style’s emergence echoed the excesses of the Roaring ’20s.

INTERNATIONAL STYLE

UN Building (Harrison & Abramovitz, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, others)

Lever House (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill)

Museum of Modern Art (Edward Durell Stone and Philip Goodwin)

Emerging from the industrial-inspired functionalism of the Bauhaus in Germany, the International Style is characterized by simplified geometries, lack of ornamentation, and exposed structure. The term was coined by New York architects Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock in the catalogue for their 1932 MoMA exhibition on modern architecture, titled “The International Style: Architecture since 1922.” While the style was originally intended for the masses, by the time it took off in New York in the 1950s, it had been co-opted by some of the biggest corporations in the world— Seagrams, Lever Soap, Pan Am—which replaced simple, mass-produced materials with travertine and bronze, not to mention world-class art collections.

Lever House (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill) // IMAGE SOURCE

BRUTALISM

Met Breuer (Marcel Breuer)

Bronx Community College (Marcel Breuer)

University Village (I.M. Pei)

Meant to exhibit strength, power, and rawness, the structures themselves often function as ornament or sculpture. This style is all about cement, prized for its weightiness, malleability, and monumentality. Most Brutalist buildings exhibit simple, block-like forms; large scale; and structural innovations like cantilevers and floating masses.

Met Breuer (Marcel Breuer) // IMAGE SOURCE

NEW FORMALISM

Lincoln Center (Wallace Harrison, Eero Saarinen, and more)

2 Columbus Circle (Edward Durell Stone)

Lenox Health Greenwich Village (Albert Ledner)

New Formalist structures in New York were often intended to evoke the idea of the city as the new center of Western culture, with Acropolis-like raised podiums, deep overhangs, heavy grids, and Roman-style arches. The most noted practitioners were Edward Durell Stone, Philip Johnson (whose aesthetic changed several times over the course of his career), and Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center’s original Twin Towers.

Lincoln Center (Wallace Harrison, Eero Saarinen, and more) // IMAGE SOURCE

GOOGIE/ SPACE AGE

New York State Pavilion (Philip Johnson)

TWA Terminal (Eero Saarinen)

New York Hall of Science (Wallace Harrison)

Googie architecture had an overall futuristic essence with upswept roofs, dramatic angles, and high-tech materials like steel, glass, and neon. The Jetsons-esque style took New York by storm with the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens.

TWA Terminal (Eero Saarinen) // IMAGE SOURCE

HIGH-TECH

Citigroup Center (Hugh Stubbins)

Hearst Tower (Foster & Partners)

Javits Center (Pei Cobb Freed)

As modernism reached its apex, architects began to fetishize its technical innovations, from cantilevers to ventilation systems to curtain walls. In New York, the ultimate expression of this style is the 59-story Citigroup Center, with its chevron bracing system, sheer glass and metal facade, and behemoth upper mass, which floats over stilts in Midtown Manhattan.

POSTMODERNISM

AT&T Building (Philip Johnson and John Burgee)

Westin Times Square (Arquitectonica)

Scholastic Building (Aldo Rossi)

Battery Park City (Cesar Pelli, others)

Detested until its recent nostalgia-fueled comeback, postmodern architecture developed as a middle finger to the austerity and arrogance of modernism. The populist style included watered-down historical allusions; mismatched, often cartoonish elements; and bright colors.

DECONSTRUCTIVISM

8 Spruce Street (Frank Gehry)

Cooper Union New Academic Building/41 Cooper Square (Morphosis)

IAC Building (Frank Gehry)

When digital technology began to allow it, architects like Frank Gehry created buildings that looked like they were being mangled and ripped open. The term Deconstructivism came about a little later, with the 1988 MoMa exhibition “Deconstructivist Architecture.” Developer-driven New York took longer than many major cities to adopt the antiestablishment style.