W. R. Grace Building
THIS IS Internationalism’s last gasp; the brilliant minimalist opticality of Gordon Bunshaft’s Marine Midland becomes a gimmicky optical illusion in the ski-shaped, 47-story, white-travertine and bronzed-glass W. R. Grace Building. Bunshaft seems to have
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h i s i s Internationalism’s last gasp; the brilliant minimalist opticality of Gordon Bunshaft’s Marine Midland becomes a gimmicky optical illusion in the ski-shaped, 47-story, white-travertine and bronzed-glass W. R. Grace Building. Bunshaft seems to have explored Mies’s reductionist aesthetic as far as it would go and in the end only found a structure devoid of symbolic value. The Grace Building literally seems to be stretching to find some new meaning that might be provided by postmodernism. Bunshaft arrived at the building’s shape by covering the setbacks required by the Zoning Code with a smooth, curved wall instead of angular steps. “We got the idea that instead of going up straight on the property line and then setting back . . . we would keep reducing the floors as we went up, on a curved line from the second floor,” he told his biographer, Carol Hershelle Krinsky in 1988. “I don’t think a building is very handsome with a big podium 86 feet high and then a tower set way back,” he continued, somewhat defensively, considering that the headquarters for the giant chemical company stands on 42nd Street among some of the best examples of the setback style. “That is ugly and we still feel it is ugly. If we had a similar job today, we would probably do it somewhat like we did then.” Bunshaft also designed the similarly sloped, 49-story, 725-foot-tall 9 West 57th Street, completed a year later as a real-estate venture. The Grace Building’s tapering façade, organized into seven rectangular, bronzed-glass window bays divided by travertine-covered piers, is always good for a double-take the first time someone sees it, but eventually passersby start to ignore it altogether—there is simply not enough going on here, beyond the fact that the illusion of concavity produced by towering vertical elements is exaggerated. Classical architects employed entasis, a rounded swelling in the center of their columns, to counteract this illusion, which is caused by the curvature of the human
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eyeball. The façade also makes use of the “phantom square” optical illusion, in which grayish squares seem to appear at the intersections of the white lines. The interior blinds are set in special tracks so that they do not hang vertically and spoil the sweeping effect. Rather than reinterpreting and refining classicism as Mies did, Bunshaft is reduced to making visual puns. The building is classically organized—the piers are arranged like columns on a stylobate above a projecting second-floor travertine ledge that acts as a rain gutter—but the variations are symbolically empty. The sloping piers pierce the ledge to provide an openglass ground floor. In better buildings, the effect is of weightlessness, of volumes floating on air, but here the curved legs are kitschy, like the cute slanted feet on a 1950s davenport. The Grace Building is not a building for the ages, but its location on the border of Bryant Park and its idiosyncratic design solution make i
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