General Motors Building
AFTER BEING summarily drummed out of the Internationalist ranks for his kitschy One Columbus Circle (1958, now slated for the wrecking ball possibly to make way for nothing more than another redundant plaza), Edward Durell Stone designed his first skyscra
- PDF / 566,201 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 684 x 864 pts Page_size
- 15 Downloads / 189 Views
FIFTH AVENUE
»
EDWARD DURELL STONE ; EMERY ROTH
&
SONS , ASSOCIATE ARCHITECTS ,
1
f t e r b e i n g summarily drummed out of the Internationalist ranks for his kitschy One Columbus Circle (1958, now slated for the wrecking ball possibly to make way for nothing more than another redundant plaza), Edward Durell Stone designed his first skyscraper, the New York headquarters and showroom for General Motors. The 50-story tower with stubby wings is an interesting, albeit failed attempt to transcend Internationalism’s “glass-boxitis,” as Philip Johnson called it. Stone was a lone voice in the wilderness when he defied the high-modernist orthodoxy of the late 1960s. “I am critical of the steel and glass monolithic structures, inspired by Mies,” he said, “particularly the type one finds along Park Avenue now, because I believe architecture should be more permanent in character.” Stone’s method of making the GM more “permanent” was to return to the skyscraper’s masonry origins in the Chicago School. The GM Building’s threesided, alternating bays of white marble and black glass recall the oriels of Chicago’s Manhattan Building (William Le Baron Jenney, 1891), one
A
2
1968
of the last great stone-supported tall buildings, and Daniel Burnham’s Flatiron Building. Perhaps to lend an air of modernity, Stone called his glass bays “vision panels,” and pointed out their energy efficiency. Because the bays provided views up and down the avenue, Stone said that they “give the occupant of each office a welcome sense of individuality.” Oddly, the paper-white slab resembles nothing so much as that icon of 1960s impersonality, the IBM punch card. Stone’s problem was that he singlehandedly tried to find a way out of the glass box that modernism built itself into, without postmodernism’s theoretical apparatus of discontinuity and pastiche. The GM is a failed offshoot because Stone tried to incorporate historicism into modernism’s unyielding mold, rather than to explore and celebrate the discontinuities, as later architects did. Stone wandered into increasingly idiosyncratic, filigreed masonry designs, and his career remains in critical neglect. Emery Roth & Sons, the associate architects on the GM Building, did more to change the face of Manhattan than any single builder. Between 1950 and 1970, the firm built a whopping 30 million square feet of office space, or half the total created in that period. They cared little for the building’s external wrapper. What they delivered was the belly of the beast: maximum open-plan floor space, high-speed elevators, and advanced climate control systems. Roth “econo-boxes” completely changed the character of Third Avenue in midtown after the El was ripped out in 1955. The GM’s moribund sunken plaza, deserted even in the best of weather, is often cited as an example of poor urban planning. “To achieve the most bulk possible under the new law, it will have an open plaza facing an existing plaza,” the critic Ada Louise Huxtable wrote about the siting across the avenue from Grand Army Plaza’s urbane
Data Loading...
