Consider it impertinence on anyone’s part after encountering such gratifying urban moments at The High Line, but something unsettles me when I try to look for freshness in architecture there. Inherent character aside, the design intervention clearly is buoyant but tactful: a reconfiguration of bench as bench, floor as floor, railing as railing, with their date of design stamped. Nothing changes the inherited urban condition. You could just as easily replace them with some other design.
A short distance away, sits Junya Ishigami’s Yohji Yamamoto store. Here, bafflingly antithetical to design strategies for a commercial shop space, he reduces shop space: making a Gordon Matta-Clark slice through the original one-storey brick building to allow a public passage that creates a new urban condition — a new shortcut between two streets in that triangular site. Bricks removed as a result from that cut had been reused to face the new side of the exposed passage. Now the Yohji shop has moved, and the passage gated off. Normalcy reigned again.
This simple but radical design gesture in refiguring the urban condition by Ishigami is not the first of its kind in New York. Back in 1958, Mies created a new kind of urban space in the Manhattan grid just by setting back the Seagram Building from the street front to form an open urban plaza. The tower itself, all abstract composition in steel and glass is, as it were, an expression of a modern way of building at that time. Together, tower and plaza presented a potent fresh experience and a fresh image then that became an enduring classic symbol of the powerful corporate world, and reiterated ad nauseum till this day without radically fresh imaginations.
Further downtown, what SANAA’s New Museum tries to do is also to provide a fresh idea for a Manhattan building. Eschewing the preciousness and immutability of brick and stone and their attendant classic design values, for the softness of aluminium mesh and abstract banal stacked volumes, its inside is a casual shed for the efficient display of art and easy commingling of the varieties of colourful cosmopolites found in New York.
