Unfortunately, the new approach winds up being an argument for polite contextualism. Architect Robert A. M. Stern (who is pro-contextual by nature) is designing a new residence hall at Broadway and 113th to resemble a typical Broadway apartment house. And the Robert K. Kraft Family Center for Jewish Student Life, a six-story building on West 115th Street designed by Gruzen Samton, will be clad in Jerusalem stone that is "very contextual in color and texture," according to Lloyd, and the architects yielded to community requests to make the center's cornice line up with those of neighboring buildings.
What Tschumi did -- not so different, really, from building fake nineteenth-century row houses to mask a fifties apartment tower -- seems more like a meditation on the meaning of context than a contextual building. What's especially clever is that he used McKim, Mead and White's organizational logic as the premise for his own scheme. The 1893 campus plan called for lining the perimeter of the campus with matching sets of buildings, each pair separated by a courtyard. Of the original buildings, only Avery Hall, home of the architecture library, was constructed this way. That is, until Lerner came along. Tschumi recognized that the space between the east and west wings was his: "There was an enormous amount of freedom in the gap."
During student orientation in early September, new students and their parents meander up and down Lerner's ramps. Most are searching for the office that dispenses keys to the mailboxes mounted on the back wall of the Lerner atrium at an angle that mimics that of the ramps. The students, if they are impressed by this oddly skewed, daylight-flooded space, don't let it show. Sure, it's new, but from their perspective, the domed rotunda of nineteenth-century Low Library is equally new.
Actually, the official explanation for Tschumi's ramps, which take up a lot of space and don't always offer the quickest route from point A to point B, is that they are an updated, all-weather equivalent of the Low Library steps, the university's premier public place. The steps, of course, are best remembered as the scene of 1968's student insurrection. One can only assume that students will someday find unintended uses for the ramps too.
Back downtown, NYU's administrators and their architect are contemplating changes in the design of the Kimmel Center. In June, the Municipal Art Society sent a letter to NYU vice-president Robert Goldfeld advocating more "architectural animation and interplay" at sidewalk level. Roche had already added display windows to what had previously been a blank wall, but the Municipal Art Society wanted more.
And the society also "strongly endorsed" replacing the granite skin with red brick. "The use of red brick would resonate more successfully with the neighborhood," argued the letter. As if a redbrick façade would more effectively hide the building's size and newness. Ideally, you shouldn't have to mask new buildings with red brick. Tschumi's trade-off -- I'll give you context if you give me freedom -- is better than the more commonplace alternatives. It is certainly preferable to Roche's Kimmel Center, a polite contemporary design that will adapt an old-fashioned veneer, if that's what it takes to pacify the neighbors.
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