continued from page 54 that same tightness to another
corner of the room, assuming full enclosure, as one
must when designing an art museum in a place
where thieves roam the streets and it rains. So, yes:
boxes often result when we think soberly about use.
No shame there.
My favorite studio critic, when he saw his charges
charging off toward ill-considered formalist delights, liked to lay down the law as follows: “You’ll
have to give me a really good reason why this
building should not be a dumb box.” He meant dumb
lovingly; he had, as I do, an affection for things
that answer honorably to a task without waste or
fuss. Though this is changing slowly as we learn to
better sync the fractured or oblonged visions in our
computers with the possibilities of construction, as
our material culture still stands, answering honorably to the task of making space that is efficient—
in time, money, and use—still begins with that
“dumb box.” If you can solve the problem with a
Butler building, my critic’s reasoning continued,
any deviation from or complication added to that
solution must be backed by some poetic or practical logic that makes the expenditure pay.
People tend to gather in
front of the New Museum,
puzzling it out.
It’s a good basis for rigor, and who among us
doesn’t need a little more of that now, all dogmas
discarded, all hot forms so easily attained and
beckoning? Even Frank Gehry works in this way,
sort of. His office typically roughs buildings in as
rectilinear models, massaging square-footage in
easy-to-suss squared units before the inevitable
arrival of signature spatial distortions and surface
blips. The impetus for Gehry, of course—as I’ve
written here before (and as the suit filed against
him last fall by MIT implies)—is foremost style, not
function. At the New Museum, SANAA appears to
have had the inverse—dare I say correct—priorities:
tweaking the noble starting point of the box so that
it works inside and out, both as structure and
delightful conundrum.
As they do at the building discussed here last
month, Herzog & de Meuron’s admirable 40 Bond,
not too far away, people tend to gather in front of
the New Museum, puzzling it out. It is incongruous. To the left is the three-story, yellow-brick
Sunshine Hotel, vestige of the fashionable Bowery’s
late High Homeless period, and to the right there
is another casualty of time, a six-story building
as nondescript as its neighbors on both sides of
the street, limping in disarray for half a mile to
the south. This contextual strategy—let’s call it
kerplunking—results in an interesting inversion,
turning the street on its ear. SANAA has dropped a
high pile of largely blank boxes into a long row of
largely faceless ones, but the careful proportioning
of the newcomers, approximating in some cases
the dimensions of the abutting buildings—albeit
horizontally rather than vertically—makes it a rich,
not an alien, contrast.
That’s good box work, and it continues at scales
large and small. In the last five or six years, as
the Lower East Side was discovered by people with
money and those who build their apartments and
hotels, the area’s generally low-rise continuity has
been colonized by finger and continued on page 58
