April 1. Form, Finance, and Commercial Architecture
Workshop: Emily Holloway
Theory
Carol Willis, 1997. “Form Follows Finance: The Empire State Building,” chapter 7 in The Landscape of Modernity: New York, 1900-1940, ed. David Ward and Olivier Zunz. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, 1972. Learning from Las Vegas (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Dell Upton, 2009. “Signs Taken for Wonders,” chapter 7 in Relearning from Las Vegas, ed. Aron Vinegar and Michael J. Golec. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Approaches to the Case Study: Commercial Architecture
Max Page, 2001. “Fifth Avenue’s ‘Restless Renewals’,” chapter 2 in The Creative Destruction of Manhattan, 1900-1940. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Andrew S. Dolkart, 2011. “The Fabric of New York City’s Garment District. Architecture and Development in an Urban Cultural Landscape,” Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 18(1) (Spring):14-42.
Paul Groth, 1994. “Third and Howard: Skid Row and the Limits of Architecture,” chapter 1 in Streets: Critical Perspectives on Public Space, ed. Zeynep Celik, DFiane DFavro, and Richard Ingersoll. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gabrielle Esperdy, 2008. “The Architecture of Consumption,” chapter 4 in Modernizing Main Street: Architecture and Consumer Culture in the New Deal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Workshop
We will discuss how commercial real estate finance affects Hunters Point/LIC and your research site.
The statement “form follows finance” gives us quite a bit to chew on as we think about New York real estate. In today’s city, reuse is as central to urban economies as ground-up development that it might be equally as appropriate to say “use follows finance.” For instance, what are the economic logics that drove 424 Fifth Ave to be sold from Lorde and Taylor to WeWork? Department stores are spatial and symbolic anchors of New York’s early 20th economic boom. We can find the anchors of the digital and tech economy in the commercial inhabitations of spaces like WeWork as well as in the spaces left behind. For instance, Citigroup began the process of relocating it’s 3,000 employees from the floors of One Court Square in Long Island City that Amazon planned to take over. While Amazon abandoned its plans, Citigroup is continuing to move forward with its relocation, permanently leaving the building it has been an anchor tenant of since the 90s. Here we see both the rational logic and speculative imagination of capital impacting not the form of urban space per se, but certainly its use.
Consumerism, commercialisation, globalisation, standardisation and design, it was all a parallel movement that made and killed the Main Street. Back in the early 20th century, the governments encouraged lending through special schemes for shops (to create a sign of economic health), architects were hired to design (and modernise) commercial buildings, the technological developments paved ways for standardisation in manufacturing, and, advertising and marketing was beginning to replace the “sales of what was produced” with “sell the desire of what has not been owned yet” or “sell the image”. It went from the prosperity of the family, of the store (usually owned by the family), to the street, of the town and now global recognition. Keeping them new, looked after and modern was a civic pride and now it takes official historic preservation guidelines to keep them standing.
Sure this may sound a little bit nostalgic, but this week’s readings made me think of our previous discussions on the production of space, the symbiotic and reciprocating relationship between the urban space and it’s citizens and combined with last week’s readings on gentrification… After a short curiousity visit to the new Hudson Yards shopping centre on Friday, it got me thinking whether we need any more of the same shops? A few blocks to the east we have the shops of 5th ave and Broadway. A few blocks to the south there is the Westfield shopping centre. And few blocks up there is the Times Sq. This echoes Esperdy’s hint at modernisation overshadowing the economic situation. Constant exposure to spend through the luring design (there is a massive literature on the store designs, both interior and exterior, aiming at attracting customers, wanting them to spend time and more significantly, purchase) and making shopping centres the new socialising places. This is the new social fabric we are creating, living in and leaving behind for the next generations.
Ps. Apologies for the typos. I wrote this on my phone
I’m interested to hear from our architecturally-minded folks in class more about the “metaphorical relationships that [architectural symbolism] proposes between bodies and buildings” (Upton, 156). If we’re considering the grounding statement of this week’s readings “form follows finance,” where does that leave entire neighborhoods that, while perhaps not with individual structures constructed for their commercial value, are branded and engaged with for consumption? This question came up for me when thinking about “architecture of communication over space” (Venturi et al, 8) and “architectural nicknaming” (Upton, 156) as shortcuts in communicating the essence of neighborhood through design. I’m thinking specifically about the required design elements in a community I still work in, DC’s Chinatown. The small area is now often glibly referred to as a “ChinaBlock,” a withering residential presence of a historic enclave that only has Chinese characters and “Eastern” design elements remaining on its new buildings with western businesses. Traditional community organizations still have their offices in Chinatown, and some of the newer groups, like the one I work for, aims to engage storytelling as place-keeping and maintaining Chinatown as a “cultural touchstone,” despite the residential decline and superficial architectural facades. As with San Francisco’s Chinatown and its reconstruction in the early 20th century attempting to fit to the Western standards of the Chinese aesthetic, creating a tourist destination out of self-preservation in the face of discrimination and the legacy of Chinese Exclusion. These structures follow finance in that when all told together, the neighborhood has been enshrined in its commercial potential [but for whom?].
– Ali
Much of the previous readings that dealt with urban renewal and the displacement that came with them focused on the intentional displacement of poor/minority/immigrant communities, but I found the description in Page (2001) to be fascinating as an account of displacement of the absolute richest members of New York City along Fifth Avenue (of course, their mansions displaced the original 19th century brownstone residents to begin with). The forces of “creative destruction” in New York can seem unstoppable, at least prior to any kind of prohibitory regulation. So much of this displacement was ultimately rooted in speculative capitalism, such as the case of the Empire State Building (Willis, 1997), the transformation of the Tenderloin District into the Garment District (Dolkart, 2011), and the transformation of residential Fifth Avenue to a high-end shopping district (Page, 2001). Esperdy (2008) describes the streamlining of architecture and consumerism, introducing the notion of perceived obsolesce rooted in fashion. While men were the architects, women were the consumers who shopped in the stores.
I really liked the re-occurring theme of gender and architecture – especially in relation to the working-poor. The case study of the re-zoning of Fifth Avenue to remove the workers who would interfere with the women shoppers (Dolkart, 2011; Page, 2001) was a strong example from this week’s readings. Growth (1994) also presents a somewhat similar example with the elimination of San Francisco’s skid row – which was really a working community of single men who lacked the traditional family lifestyle.
The topic of signage in architecture is also a noteworthy topic from this week’s readings. Page (2001) describes how signage became regulated along Fifth Avenue in contrast to Broadway, preserving a certain high-class aesthetic. Venturi et al. (1982) describes the monumentality of signage in architecture, while Upton (2009) challenges this notion, mocking the idea of a sign “proclaiming ‘I AM A MONUMENT’ standing on an ordinary building rather than a monumental or heroic and original building” (p. 150) – a distinction that Venturi et al. would call the duck versus the decorated shed.
-Christopher Ryan
Architectural form is also a materialization of power.
The Romans dedicated arches and columns to the commemoration of victories in war. The Palace of Versailles was constructed in the course of incorporating France’s feudal nobility into Bourbon absolutism. Pretoria’s Union Buildings, it’s east and west wings symbolizing English and Afrikaans respectively, aimed to legitimate the Union of South Africa under the British crown after a bitter imperial war. The Palace of the Soviets in Moscow, on which construction began in 1937, was designed to be the tallest building in the world and so to signal the accomplishment of proletarian revolution in one country and its desirability across the globe. Its steel frame was dismantled for use in fortifications in World War II.
Joseph Stalin (as far as I can tell) never had a skyscraper named after him. Frank Woolworth had the tallest building in the world for seventeen years. The Empire State Building was, according to Carol Willis, “neither a symbol of corporate identity, nor an expression of an overarching ego.” (pp. 62) Being this type, Willis suggests (although not nearly so reductively), that it was formed by finance. I wonder about whether this is a (mild) form of commodity fetishism (I promise that I won’t use that word again). The equation, “form follows finance,” mistakes a relation between people for a relation between things.
Intimations of power, in fact, and how could they not be?, are thread through all of the readings. Venturi et al. provide a characteristically post-War attenuation of the authority, the authoritarianism of comprehensive reason. It is a stance always traceable to that War and saturated in its disenchantment of disenchantment (to add the reflex to Weber’s preferred modernist theme). Page and Esperdy locate things firmly in the dynamics of capitalism. What is evoked (and I’d be interested as to where this goes) is something like a political economy of architecture. Form, as with all things social, follows relations of social force.
– Ryan Brunette
Stalin did rename a city after himself 🙂
Well-spotted, yes, I should’ve put something along those lines in parentheses. Stalingrad changed name from Tsaritsyn (not the best name for a revolutionary socialist country) in 1925, before Stalin had emerged as dictator. There were lots of others places named after him later. It was and remains common practice to give place names to notable political leaders. Commissar George Washington had places named after him. Nelson Rockefeller has some rather large structures up in Albany. Stalin didn’t name any of the Seven Sisters, which he commissioned, after himself, that would’ve been unbecoming.
All that is neither here nor there, no clear balance can be judged one way or the other, the comparison with Woolworth (who I know very little about) is made for rhetorical effect: What the actually existing socialist countries did under the state, the United States under its business enterprises has not entirely escaped.
The Empire State Building and Caesar’s Palace are certainly not two structures that intuitively lend themselves to comparison. But an investigation of Willis’ and Venturi’s respective analyses of these buildings raises surprisingly interconnected questions. For starters, we have Willis’ (rather unnerving) assertion that the design of the Empire State Building, arguably one of the most iconic buildings in New York City, was entirely predicated on pre-depression era rental economics and financing trends. This claim invites an easy rebuttal—if there is an economically predetermined optimal design for a building, and if economics are ultimately the determining factor in building design decisions, then why and how is there diversity among the appearance of New York skyscrapers in this era? However we choose to answer this question, I still find the underlying economic assumptions to be useful to our understanding of the relationship between architecture and capitalism. The production of space, as Lefebvre argues, is a process by which society slowly constructs space that both conforms to social norms itself and demands the conformity of those who occupy it.
Thus, we can perhaps begin to see a parallel between The Empire State Building and Caesar’s Palace—both are products of and products for an intensely competitive and capitalist society. Caesar’s Palace exists in the wild west of free market competition between casinos. Who can attract the most attention, and therefore the largest number of customers? Who can best keep those customers within the walls of your casino? And while I agree with Upton’s critique—Architecture is not television, architecture is architecture—the status of architecture as a communicating symbol in Las Vegas is a unique extreme but perhaps also applicable to other bulidings that have become symbols in and of themselves. The Empire State is/was also capitalist space produced /by/ and /for/ capitalists. The relationship of the single human body to these structures somehow feels irrelevant, because they are built with the masses in mind.
Like Ruya, I went for an exploratory visit to Hudson Yards this weekend. Without launching into my reflexive reaction to that experience, it is remarkable what, if done right, can be accomplished within the bounds of zoning, engineering, and finance in New York. Willis and Dolkart both illustrated how these strictures influenced the final forms of their case studies. There has been much ink spilled over the architectural merits (or lack thereof) of Hudson Yards, and rightly so – it was, in essence, a publicly-financed project. The juxtaposition of forms and styles left even me, not an architectural savant or even a particularly design-conscious person, feeling alienated and overwhelmed. Willis notes that the Empire State building’s plans “were entirely financial, not architectural. The different schemes were described only in numbers– stories, cubic feet, operating costs and projected incomes, etc.” Hudson Yards, like Amazon HQ2, was shaped through a state economic development process that could legally circumvent local public review. Zoning and land use was written to best suit the needs of a predetermined district, rather than the other way around (to encourage or incentivize behavior through new use policies). It may be an interesting exercise to compare how neighborhoods fare differently under the two systems, side-by-side. LIC is also a special purpose district. These seem to be employed more often to pursue large-scale changes in neighborhood identity and “activate” spaces that may be considered obsolete. LIC became a special purpose district in 2001, long before Amazon was anything more than a small online book retailer. Citi Tower in Court Square, the tallest building in Queens (but not for much longer!) was built in 1990 – after a spot rezoning of the district but before the “special purpose” district title was bestowed. How effective was the earlier rezoning at “activating” real estate compared to the 2001 action? These questions are difficult to consider outside the context of financialization and the degree of sophistication of such tools.
In Form Follows Finance: The Empire State Building, Carol Willis argues that architecture is a matter of business and makes her case by tracing the forces that influenced decisions while building the Empire State Building. In particular, she states: “The Empire State offers one of the best expressions in form of the interplay between zoning and economics” where zoning laws determined the overall location and space of the building and market forces influenced its form and style (179). In planning the design for the building, the team of experts (architects, owners, engineers, rental agents, and elevator specialists) had to weigh the costs and benefits of adding additional floors to the skyscraper. Hence, it is clear that a building is not just the artistic product of an architect’s vision, but rather a politically, economically, and culturally informed space.
In The Fabric of New York City’s Garment District, Andrew Dolkart recounts the Save New York movement which led to the passing of the first comprehensive zoning law in the United States in July 1916. The Save New York movement sought to contain the garment district into restricted zoned areas as a way to keep factory workers off Fifth Avenue, where wealthy women shopped. While the leaders of the Save New York movement were hoping to push the garment industry out of Manhattan, the rezoning allowed the Garment District to concentrate its efforts into a restricted area. In addition, “the building boom of the 1920s transformed the relatively small area known as the Garment District into one of the most densely built up sections of the city” (37). Hence, as opposed to having factories sprawled across midtown, the zoning pushed the garment district to build up and led to the development of high-rise lofts.
It was great to read Max Page’s “Fifth Avenue’s “Restless Renewals” alongside Dolkart because it provided a more complete picture of the FAA’s efforts to develop and solidify Fifth Avenue as the place for the very wealthy. As we’ve discussed in previous classes, the buildings along Fifth Avenue were torn down on the basis of obsolescence. In addition, the FAA supported their efforts by appealing to class-based fears: invasion of “manufacturing lofts and their immigrant workers, increased traffic, beggars and peddlers” (56). In many ways, the FAA signals the first effort by a business association to shape the identity of a neighborhood as a way to exclude others. We see across New York City today, with Hudson Yards being the newest iteration.
– Rebecca Krisel
Since a few people mentioned going to Hudson Yards this week it’s worth bringing up the nicknames already being applied to parts of the development, just as described by Upton. Heatherwick’s Vessel, for example, is already called “the shawarma” in reference to the ubiquitous conical shaped middle-eastern meat. A “playful and ironic” name to be sure, and rooted in it New York City location. I certainly cannot imagine any other American city using shawarma to describe a building. The nickname has a better sense of place than the structure. Much of the country most likely does not know what shawarma is so the nickname has a certain insider, for New Yorkers only feel. Hudson Yards is filled with tourists, but do they know how to order street meat (“red sauce, white sauce, extra onions”)?
Regarding WeWork (as mentioned by Joanna in a previous post), Dolkart’s fascinating narrative about how New York’s garment district came to be—due to economic, social, and political pressures—made me think of its origins as a form of WeWork for Fordism. The garment cooperative were able to create new buildings that best suited their shared needs, first out of necessity and later to maximize their profits. A form of co-working for the sewing set, rather than the modern freelance creatives the current concept is based around.
Lastly, returning to Long Island City, the analysis of signage in Learning from Las Vegas can certainly be applied to our research site. The Pepsi-Cola sign and “Long Island City” emblazoned gantry, both in Gantry Plaza State Park, certainly herald the industrial-era history of the neighborhood. They are two of the most iconic pieces of signage in the city. But what exactly is the symbolism when the decoration (“Pepsi-Cola”) is taken off the shed (the old bottling plant) and used to decorate newly constructed high rise condominiums?
-Adam Sachs
This week’s readings provided new insight into architectural decision-making in the urban context. The particulars of the decisions in the building of the Empire State Building, as described by Willis, were dominated by economic interests. But they were triangulated with engineering limitations and cultural aims, as well, once the opportunity to build became defined by the corporation’s “bombast and hyperbole.” Yes, the form followed the finance, and the people controlling the process were businessmen who were, by default, catering to their economic interests. I think about our class on Le Corbusier and urban visions – what does it mean when the “visionaries” make decisions for the public, whose basis lies entirely in private interests? In considering the comparison to Las Vegas – are these types of decision-makers *ever* interested in what existed, spacially, before their capital allowed them to imagine space as their own?
Also – HA @ “the shawarma” hadn’t heard that.
The Vegas Strip as an Orchard Street for gambling-entertainment consumers.
Although the competitive nature of the superlarge, flashy (and flashing) signs of the various casinos give the surface impression of a vibrantly competitive marketplace, last week’s readings about Orchard Street and the shopping streets in Neukoelln also come to mind – the effect of a multitude of seemingly competitive casino complexes is to enhance the Strip overall as a one-stop destination for travelers who desire [insert whatever psychic thrill/pleasure it is that comes from gambling ever if most likely losing money at a (un)steady clip]* Quite a few of the casinos are owned by the same underlying company (MGM, for example). (The symbiotic ecosystem of a casino city is even better represented by Macau; for a long time ALL the casinos in the city was owned by one local company; then the monopoly was replaced by a small group of 3 and now 6 owners, including some foreign ones.)
* The Vegas Strip is increasingly about other thrills besides gambling; this part of Vegas also comes closest to being a 24/7 city (sorry, New York City is NOT a 24/7 city), a particularly attractive feature for international gambling visitors, many from Asia, who can defer jetlag.
The Duck, the Decorated Shed … and the undecorated shed.
Venturi, Brown & Izenour discuss commercial architecture as openly using the cheaper forms of symbolic, communicative decoration (in contrast to the hidden and more expensive version deployed in Modernist architecture, paying lip service to the industrial form and materiality but not really doing it). There is one mention in Leaving Las Vegas (LLV) of the industrial architect Albert Kahn (with two illustrations of one of his buildings); it is worth noting that Kahn designed for his most famous client Henry Ford (his clients also included every major carmaker and many other industrial leaders in the 1910s-40s), two quite UNDECORATED sheds: the imperatives of industry efficiency do not require decorative additives.
First, in 1908, Kahn designed the multistory Highland Park (where the revolutionary assembly line production process associated with Fordism was first perfected/executed in 1913). A few years later, he designed single-story Ford Rouge factory complex (started in 1917) that replaced Highland Park. Ford’s relentless innovation reduced his prior cutting-edge plant to obsolesence in a handful of years. Some features of the undecorated shell mattered (roof and wall windows for light), but what mattered more was the configuration inside. The LLV section discussing the interior of casinos, a sort of “streetscape” as it were given the enormity of the floor space, and how they efficiently circulate the gamblers, gives an insight into the mindset, the focus on circulation and flow that is a hallmark of Fordist production, in Vegas applied to Fordist-like desire-driven consumption and fantasy production.