Architect David R. Hall of Mt. Vernon, WA, says, "We're really going through a renaissance of modernism now, but a more humanized modernism." That means, among other things, accepting the use of ornament where necessary, thinking about what colors will look warm and inviting instead of machine-like, and taking greater account of customer preferences for light and space. Ultimately, the biggest change in attitude among architects in recent years, though, is the view that one should employ past styles as a sort of palette rather than ignoring them, referencing them ironically, or rigidly replicating them. In any case, precisely imitating the past isn't so easy. Interior designer Julia Busby, of the architecture firm Jova, Daniels & Busby, in addition to describing various successful designs from her firm, pointed out to me how her co-workers didn't quite match the look of Atlanta's old city hall when they built the new addition. "I think the intention was let's pick a color that will fade and age with the city hall, but again, city hall was stone and new city hall is stucco. It blends, but I think the glass got a little too green."
Is there, though, some relatively recent and recoverable style, natural and organic for New York City, that would simultaneously be rooted in the city's past and boldly evocative of an optimism about the future? Chicago managed to forge a distinctive style—and invent the skyscraper in the process—when it rebuilt after a devastating fire in the late nineteenth century, creating buildings that are fancy and ornate in an old-fashioned way while being intensely vertical engineering marvels at the same time. Is there a style that can do for New York what Louis Sullivan and Daniel Burnham did for Chicago when they raised it from the ashes?
The past century of architectural history is enough to make one cautious about grand pronouncements and city-sized planning, but as a New Yorker, I must say I wouldn't mind seeing something rise at Ground Zero that looked less like Krypton and a good deal more like Art Deco, the style that gave New York City three of its other most spectacular building sites: the Empire State Building, Rockefeller Center, and perhaps most beautifully of all, the Chrysler Building, with its gargoyle-sized Chrysler hood ornaments that link the grandeur of gothic cathedrals to the future of American manufacturing without irony or apology. Art Deco, with its chrome, spires, lightning bolts, and Fred Astaire-era class, manages to respect traditional notions of beauty while making one want to leap into the future with the confidence of Flash Gordon—a future that flowed gracefully from the past instead of being a brutal break with the past. Art Deco was the product of a civilization that was prosperous, proud, eclectic, and fun—not one so worried about giving offense or invoking the wrong tradition that it would rather make heartless boxes.
Maybe it would be naïve to try going back to Art Deco, but something like it would tell the world, all in one go, that we're still New York, still Western civilization, still dynamic, and still building—not merely recovering.
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