CONTRADICTIONS @ 51 ASTOR PLACE
51 Astor Place, sitting at the exact center of its namesake, the presumptive crown jewel of its neighborhood, is at first glance what we have come to expect from the typical mid-rise construction in Manhattan. Sporting a dark glass façade, encasing a solid monolith and the perfunctory public lobby it appears under whelming, considering it fetches a king’s ransom of $120 per square foot. Yet these were not the only characteristics that defined 51 Astor place. Deeper observation of the building, its site and the dialogue it engendered with its surrounding environment induces a constant state of confusion. The more the building reveals of itself, the murkier the intentions of its architect become, a strangely inverted relationship that makes 51 Astor place one of Manhattan’s most enigmatic buildings.
The North-West side of the building is a solid, black, non-reflective monolith, characteristic of office buildings, bland and simple. The monolith displays minimal interest in its surrounding context, a sign reading “51 ASTOR PLACE” announces, in a matter-of-fact manner, the location of the entrance. A thin uncompromising line, striking the monolith at a 45 degree angle announces the end to this nonchalant attitude to its context. Thrusting us into a tectonic of formal interplay on the South-East side of the building; characterized by sharp angles, grey mullioned hyper-reflective facades and incremental vertical setbacks. Its facade stretches out like a canvas, reflecting the scene surrounding it. Light and engaging, it initiates a symmetrical relationship with the city, its reflective facade disappearing into a backdrop of mid-rise constructions and blue skies.
This puzzling change in track, style and form, coupled with the stark contrast present between the two halves of the building, is uncharacteristic of Maki & Associates. The transition, merciless and crude in execution raises questions about the architect’s intentions. Is the building the product of compromise between architect and client, both aiming to achieve the ideal combination of iconicity, functionality and square footage? Or was this perhaps a reflection of the architect’s attempt to engage in meaningful dialogue with the surrounding neighborhood? Attempting perhaps to justify its own presence? It is my opinion that the latter had a larger effect on the composition of the building, with Cooper Union and St. Marks Place wooing the architect into a form of dialogue, the architect responding in kind. While this may explain the somewhat “Frankenstein” like amalgamation of styles and forms, it does not explain the crudeness or indeed the abruptness with which this change in style is executed.
This confusion, experienced from observing the building, was indeed compounded by the observations on the plaza located on the South-West portion of the site. On such a prime piece of real-estate, the existence of the plaza itself is somewhat contentious. As a large portion of the site is emphatically surrendered to the public, wasting valuable potential income. This was yet another paradox to add to the growing list of contradictions on display.
Unassuming in nature and with the restraint of minimalist design, the plaza charts a route across the site with an imperceptible slope and an array of wood benches, quietly absorbing the foot traffic passing through Astor place. Employing svelte lighting fixtures and peripheral vegetation, the plaza is successful in transmuting the vector nature of the sidewalk into a wide open space, removing obstructions at eye-level, effectively facilitating the transition of people into the site.
Progressing along the length of the plaza, moving South to North, the street furniture undergoes a peculiar transformation. The wood benches offering seating to the public grow progressively smaller in size. This might seem like a logical compromise given the triangular nature of the plaza. However careful examination of this progression provides insight to the extent of skill on display. By incrementally decreasing the seating spots available and facing the benches in opposite directions the architect is successful in responding to the myriad of relationships that will occupy these benches. Transforming benches that seat 6 individuals to benches that seat 2, the architect offers a multiplicity of atmospheres to the public, ranging from the casual to the intimate, the hurried to the relaxed and the formal to the informal. Fumihiko Maki did not just surrender square footage to the passerby; he also surrendered the identity of the plaza to them, imbuing the space with chameleon like qualities, allowing it to conform to the needs of all walks of life. Here the plaza seats all, the tired tourist in a state of dérive, the office colleagues congregating for lunch, lovers looking for an intimate setting and the drifting homeless man trying to organize his belongings.
The eloquence with which this relationship between the plaza and the street was forged and skill with which Maki orchestrates the atmospheres that would occupy the plaza at any given time, stand in stark contrast to his attitude towards the relationships governing the building itself. This confusing approach to the integral elements that make up 51 Astor Place fuels the relentless paradox that Maki posits over and over again through his design of the building.
These contradictions manifest themselves in the performative aspects of the building as well. If we were to explode the elements that constitute the building mass, (the black monolith, the hyper-reflective formally complex facades and the plaza), they can be reconstituted as IBM HQ, a concoction of office and exhibition spaces (St. John University offices and Christies) and an outdoor seating space respectively. The containers for these functions are designed almost separately with no attempt made to unify their forms, airbrush their discrepancies or make allegorical allusions to their functions. When brought together these elements are in a natural state of contradiction. Indeed, the crux of these contradictions takes its literal and physical form at the 45 degree line that strikes the solid black monolith, launches us into the formally complex facades and is the tipping point where sidewalk merges with the plaza.
51 Astor place makes no attempts to cover up its contradictions, instead it brazenly displays them, stating its deliberate intent in creating this disparity. The defining features of 51 Astor place are its relentless flirtation with juxtaposition and the intriguing dialogue it engenders with the city. This intentional display of contradiction, crystallized by the thin line that divides the elements composing the building alludes to a certain, principled, code of ethics that Maki subscribes to. Conforming to neither the rigid axioms sacred to modernists or the commercial tropes peddled by contemporary architecture; Maki forges a third path, one that stands in clear defiance of these two schools of thought. His stance however provokes a number of questions. In an architectural scene where our pluralist attitude has blurred all subjective boundaries and diluted the value of critique in the architectural discourse, is there any value in taking a stance against the contemporary sentiments influencing architectural design? Can Maki’s critique perhaps been seen as a push to reclaim the agency of the architect over architectural discourse?
51 Astor place embodies this stance, a building designed to question the pluralist state of architecture. A provocation, challenging the range of ideas influencing architectural design, from modernist disciplines to “anything goes” architecture. This is a rare instance and indeed an opportunity that Maki has taken to make his stance, a refreshingly bold and provocative critique on the current state of architectural design.
