Wednesday, April 20, 2005

 

(former) McGraw-Hill Building


(former) McGraw-Hill Building, originally uploaded by niznoz.

330 West 42nd Street

The building accommodates three categories of activity that correspond to the setbacks of its section; printing works in the base, loft spaces for book productions in the middle and offices in the slender shaft. Once, when it suited him, Hood pretended to have no feeling for color: "What color? Let's see. How many colors are there--red, yellow and blue? Let's make it red." Now he considers yellow, orange, green, gray, red, Chinese red and black with orange trimming for the building. The tower is to be shaded from a darker tone at the base to a lighter one toward the top, "where it finally blends off into the azure of the sky. . ." To realize this denial of the tower's presence, one of Hood's assistants checks the location of each single tile--its fit within the overall project of "disappearance"--with binoculars from a window opposite the construction site.


So here we have a building, which now hovers over the Port Authority Bus Station, whose airy top, which by design is indistinguishable from the surrounding sky, can take an equally (or not) airy idea and, as it travels down through the body of the building apply to it the alchemy of the publishing industry, until, at some length, it is ejected on the pavement as a book. Textbooks from heaven. Ephemeral excreta from the jolly green giant.

its golden shades pulled down to reflect the sun, the McGraw-Hill Building looks like a fire raging inside an iceberg: the fire of Manhattanism inside the iceberg of Modernism.
Both quotes from Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas, The Monacelli Press, New York 1994.


Tuesday, April 19, 2005

 

Ansonia Hotel


Ansonia Hotel, originally uploaded by niznoz.

2109 Broadway

Built in 1904, the Ansonia Hotel is a gorgeous confection. Beaux-Arts? So they say. Mit schlag? Absolutely! Full of architecutural creamy goodness outside, the hotel (despite its name it's an apartment house) possesses extra thick walls, making the apartments attractive to musicans (Arturo Toscanini, and Igor Stravinksy both lived there), and anybody who doesn't mind living next door to musicians as long as you don't have to hear them. Other residents included Babe Ruth, Enrico Caruso, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Theodore Dreiser.

The naughty 70's swingers club "Plato's Retreat" was housed in the basement


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