Silver Towers (originally University Plaza)
BUILT AS housing for New York University faculty and graduate students, I. M. Pei’s Silver Towers has all the earmarks of a high-modernist superblock: demapped streets, slabs without relation to surrounding buildings, ample underground parking, and unused
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BLEECKER STREET, AND
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LAGUARDIA PLACE I . M . PEI ,
u i l t a s housing for New York University faculty and graduate students, I. M. Pei’s Silver Towers has all the earmarks of a high-modernist superblock: demapped streets, slabs without relation to surrounding buildings, ample underground parking, and unused greenswards. Though usually mentioned only in connection with its centerpiece Picasso sculpture, Silver Towers is a fine composition that creates a modernist dialogue between openness and enclosure. The sheer, 30-story, reinforced concrete and glass towers are an elegant synthesis of many strains of modernist design, and at the same time express Pei’s minimalist sculptural sensibility. A “slightly skeptical acolyte” of Walter Gropius, in the words of his biographer Michael Cannell, Pei clearly expresses the structure of Silver Towers, but improves on Gropius’s unlovely precast concrete façade for the Pan Am Building. The warm, buff-colored concrete façades of the three Silver Towers are organized into four by eight structural bays of deeply recessed plate-glass windows. The wedge-shaped
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piers and sloping windowsills soften what would otherwise be a cold, office-building-like grid. The articulated concrete frame with deepset windows gives the impression of a sheltering, lithic building, yet at the same time forms an open cage of space. The façades are sculptural because the bays vary from open glass panels to completely recessed stone frames. The transitional points on the façades between a regular grid and sharp zigzags change, depending upon which angle they are viewed from, so that the buildings always have a kinetic sense of energy. Backgrounded against the low-set, landmarked neighborhood of SoHo, few skyscraper complexes have so much open sky around them, and the flow of space is almost palpable. The buildings are set on a pinwheel plan, and seem to swim forward in space. Pei wanted to provide a sense of home comfort: the glassed-in, Miesian lobby is counterbalanced with a traditional wall of buff brick to provide a human scale. Like Le Corbusier’s cast concrete collective housing unit, Unité d’Habitation (1947–53) in Marseilles, the build-
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ing interacts naturally with environment: the deeply overhanging soffits function like a brisesoleil, and the windows slide open for natural air circulation. “There were no teachers to teach us the new architecture,” Pei recalls of his early education in Shanghai before he attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “so we turned to Corbu’s books, and these were responsible for half our education.” Le Corbusier’s influence can be seen even in Pei’s choice of round, horn-rim eyewear. Pei also used the deep window sockets to provide a sense of privacy and shelter, the way Frank Lloyd Wright did. “I know you,” Frank Lloyd Wright said upon meeting Pei. “You belong to Zeckendorf.” It took the slightly built, self-assured Pei a number of years to emerge from the shadow of his reputation as the inhouse architect for the megadevelo
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