UPDATE: I rode a bike from Lafayette Street to the Hudson River today. At the beginning of the ride I looked up Broadway and saw the top of the Chrysler Building. At Fifth Avenue the Empire State Building came into view. Seeing those two towers was like seeing old friends.
At Seventh Avenue, One World Trade Center hove into view. It was an alien intruder, photobombing Greenwich Village. There is a place for glass buildings in New York, and Two World Trade Center will be the best of the bunch at Ground Zero, but the behemoths already built make so many parts of New York suffer from their monotonous bulk.
A FRIEND WHO LIVES IN TRIBECA calls this “BIG Photobombs Tribeca.” Bjarke Ingels (the “BI” in “BIG”) calls it uniting “the streetscapes of Tribeca with the towers downtown.”
Since this is my second post in two days about this building, let me point out up front that I’m not saying BIG are bad architects. They’re obviously clever and frequently have interesting ideas. If this building were in Singapore or perhaps the Pudong section of Beijing, I might like it. I might even like it if it were part of Hudson Yards, but in the context of downtown New York, I think it’s an alien intruder.
The buildings in the front of the photo above have human scale, craft, and a simple beauty that comes from composition, rhythm, proportion, and ornament. The deep masonry walls have a play of light and shadow: the result is a firmness and solidity that effectively contain the space between the buildings and shape the street into a comfortable place to be. Together, the buildings make a public realm where we enjoy being and interacting.
