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DESKTOP • PERSONAL • TRAVEL • ORGANIZATION • FURNITURE
continued from page 56 sliver towers—and in one case
by a giant blue fist: Bernard Tschumi’s car-crash-fascinating condominium on Norfolk Street. If it is
decidedly taller than the buildings just around, the
New Museum is just tall enough to take its place
in this new aerial rhythm, one that resembles
stretches of Tokyo, where the museum, with the provision of appropriate signs, might be mistaken for
just another little honky-tonk mall. From the terrace wrapped around two sides of the event space on
the building’s seventh floor, there is a wonderful
through-the-water-tanks view southeast to Tschumi’s
Blue Power salute and the Hotel on Rivington
(known to all as THOR), a furtive conversation
among interlopers.
The terrace is also the
place to get close to
the skin of the building.
Circle 102
The terrace is also the place to get close to the
skin of the building. At the ground the expanded
aluminum grille cladding is too high, but here you
can touch it and appreciate the elegance of the little
brackets, stamped flat on both ends, that fix it to
the silver-toned panels beneath. Close up it makes
a tantalizing moiré; from far away on hot days,
as William Gibson wrote of the sky over Chiba, it is
“the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
Having decided on their boxes, having arranged
them just so to provide terraces, skylight slots,
and a pleasingly anti-iconic aspect—having even
tweaked that arrangement considerably during the
design process to respond to newly discovered
spatial demands and the needs of the client—the
architects of SANAA tooled the interiors with precision and a light touch. There are explosions of
color in unexpected places—the lower-level public
toilets are an absolute must-see—but the three
main galleries themselves, one each occupying the
second, third, and fourth boxes (all varied by well-considered proportioning), are rec rooms ready to
be used and abused by the curators. The exposed
beams and skylights above tell you that you’re in
a working space for the study of art, not a dead
shrine to it, but the concrete floors set the tone.
Poured without relieving joints, they were left to
crack as they cured. Raw: brutal. Still, and this is
the level of detail—of boring, essential, purely
architectural thinking—seen throughout, the architects specified a tiny trough reveal all around
where the floors meet the walls. It will hide cables
as needed for the shifting installations, the sort of
end-user consideration not always found in new
museums. But it is also just enough, and not a
touch extra, to make th°ese dumb boxes into some- thing very much more. #
