In 1960 artist Robert Smithson noted, all too correctly, that contemporary buildings “rise into ruin before they are built.” Today, in addition to that, we can complain that new buildings rise into image before they are built. Massive, dense, and complex, they're built with truckloads of steel, glass and gravel, yet look like photographs. This is true of the New School University Building, that fills the half-block at the southeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue. Its facades are wrapped with horizontal bands of brass panels that cant in and out like accordion folds, and take on a plastic, purplish sheen in the sun. It has two stairwells pushing up against the facades, slicing through them diagonally, but their interiors remain hidden in shadow. The building’s shell has a bold contemporary presence on the street but feels illusory, empty, like a symbol for the building it was supposed to be.
But then I saw the building very late late one night, walking west on Fourteenth Street. Coming across it like this, in darkness and stillness, without expectation, the New School Building looked like a natural formation, like it was meant to be there, a cliff in Greenwich Village. The night sky softened the facade so that only its gently zig-zagging profile was legible. The staircases, lit brightly from within, thrummed, as if the structure supported an ecstatic inner life. The building, monstrous in daylight, now held the corner proudly, addressing both west and north, presiding over the neighborhood like a fortress, summoning visitors like a beacon. Unexpectedly, the building bested its own image.
Photograph by James Ewing, 2013.