The top five floors abruptly cantilever. Some neighbors say it looks like a prison. An “arty fortress,” was New York Magazine’s phrase.
I like the building’s exterior. Most people I’ve quizzed on the street during a half-dozen visits to the area turn out to like it, too.
— New York Times
20 Comments
There is something unlikable about this building--mostly the assumption that good intentions leads to good architecture. Kimmelman dances around his own political correctness before landing near the reality.
Adaje's past work is much better...insert any of those buildings into this site and it would be an improvement. Via Verde is way better than this as public housing idea.
Ugly, dark, uninteresting. Time will tell, as will maintenance and such. Mixed use is great and all but overrated ... Just need schools and museums closely not necessarily all in the same building. Leads to a closed off (bunker) mentality of building vs the surrounding.
That said it is nice that the architecture critic for the nytimes decided to write about a new building instead of bike lanes or politics for once.
Welcome to the new tenements, a.k.a. Brutalism 2.0 (on the cheap).
I'm puzzled by the sides of the buildings. How could they have been resolved that way?
"Designed by a marquee architect, with no concessions to timid taste, the project aspires to must-see status."
This building is attrocious, especially in such a wonderful and actually must-see neighborhood.
"Sugar Hill is something of an extravagance and not easily replicable. But it posits a goal for what subsidized housing might look like, how it could lift a neighborhood and mold a generation."
This looks like a stilted and grey version of what public housing in NYC has looked like since Robert Moses started crapping all over the city. What is this guy smoking...or not!
"It’s clad in shadowy gray precast, thickly grooved concrete panels spectrally embossed with abstracted roses that refer to floral decorations on historic buildings in the neighborhood."
Is this what passes for contextualism by "marguee architects? Or maybe it's *critical regionalsim*. This writer seems to take political correctness to a whole new level.
"“Why is it that this is ‘cool’ for rich people but ‘tough’ for poor people?” he is right to ask, albeit houses and apartment blocks are different in scale."
Becasue rich people are rich-enough to escape to great restaurants, summer homes, and beautiful holiday locations.
"Fearsome in photographs, the development is, in fact, not nearly so imposing when you see it next to some of the public housing towers glowering over surrounding streets."
"Mr. Adjaye was hired and a premium paid for concrete-frame construction, with the goal of adding some 21st-century pizazz to a district of brownstones and postwar housing blocks"
Glad he made his money, but brownstone districts don't need this kind of "pizazz" being some of the most beautiful and sought after neighborhoods in the city.
"Mr. Adjaye spent a chunk of capital on the killer cantilever, saw-tooth bays and idiosyncratic window pattern. The apartments seem like an afterthought: awkward, with angled walls, quirky layouts that tenants may find hard to furnish, and deep-set, weirdly placed windows of various sizes."
So he blew the budget on some gimmicky starchitect move only to fuck over the tennants in their actual apartments. What happened to modern glass walls, this thing's a fortress.
"This complex is designed from the outside in. Providing poor families with small, distinctive but difficult living spaces to accommodate a striking facade throws the whole design into question, betraying the project’s basic mission...YET IT "it posits a goal for what subsidized housing might look like, how it could lift a neighborhood and mold a generation"
This article represents almost everything wrong with academia and the architectural media in this country. Unbelievable.
Brutalism 2.0: all of the bad cliches with none of the poetic and spatial substance.
I wonder if Kimmelman went easy on Adjaye because he's a black architect working on public housing. (Not to say Adjaye is a bad architect...anything but)
I wish at some point the media would hire a real architecture critic and not some liberal reporter/writer on the arch. beat. The quality of architecture in this country is plummeting due to a lack of understanding of design. Even Adjaye has publically questioned the medias celebrating him more for his race than his work.
"The quality of architecture in this country is plummeting due to a lack of understanding of design."
They don't teach design in architecture schools and haven't for years. There are elements of design that transcend style which is why when you eventually have to design, you get so much rubish. Yet the public get's it intuitively, but when they turn to the media, they have to read this Orwellian crap.
"Most people I’ve quizzed on the street during a half-dozen visits to the area turn out to like it, too."
Man of the people! I'd like to see his notes on that.
I take back the harshness of my critique of the architecture...ugly as it is, it is a built solution to solve a problem. Even ugly architecture is still better than a million Twitter feeds. Most of my contempt is for the media...obviously. So tired of pieces that talk about intentions rather than physical realities.
My concern with the Sugar Hill building, setting aside the sophisticated program and the talented Mr. Adjaye, is that it will likely "suffer" the same fate as the Rapson Riverside Plaza; derided by the public, while praised by the professional classes.
I like the Rapson buildings, I like the design intent, I like the colors, and chances are, I'd also enjoy living there when it opened. However, the buildings fell into disrepair, have not lived up to Rapson's original intent, and are a magnet for racist comments by the uninformed.
I only wish that Adjaye, and perhaps he did, looked at the history of this kind of type, using this type of materiality when it comes to providing affordable housing.
Can't i lever
no you can't.
I can't access the NYT article right now so maybe I'm missing something. Arch Record also posted an article on this which was more of a press release than a critique. And this article has better photos along with the tacit acknowledgement that what we can see is ugly.
But it makes me question the selection process for the architect. What reason did they have for picking a (talented) London designer of luxury residences and museums for affordable housing in NY? It just seems like a mismatch - and the result is a design which doesn't seem to speak to its site, its purpose, or its community.
Adjaye's design seems to reflect the sensibility of his typical London clientele. This kind of Brutalist architecture has really seen a revival in the UK - due possibly to London's overwhelming gentrification in the neighborhoods where such public housing towers stand. This hasn't happened in the US at all, and the message probably doesn't resonate with the inhabitants.
There's nothing inherently wrong with this kind of architecture, but the community has to appreciate it to make it succeed - this has often been the problem for Modernism in the US. An out-of-town architect with little understanding of NYC affordable housing or its inhabitants probably doesn't have chance of success, so I don't criticize Adjaye so much as the process that expected him to succeed here.
I thought I was angry before by reading the arch record piece is even more staggering:
"This Byzantine process is one reason why the total project cost for the 191,000 square-foot building was $89 million, only $59 million of it for construction.."
124 apartments over 48000 applicants. Almost 100 million for one "Affordable" building. This is like the lottery from hell. Doesn't seem like an efficient way to build. Need a better design and a better system. This country has a building problem.
= $700k+ per unit.
Of course if it was privately built it would have cost $34m and the apartments would sell for $2m+ each.
Which is of course why it is necessary to provide subsidized housing ...
Sorry, but there is absolutely nothing I can see in the Adjaye project at is either hopeful or nurturing. That is one bleak looking filing cabinet for humans.
And what the hell are those tubes coming out of the side of the building? The look like something out of the movie Brasil. Is that how they flush out the stalls before a new inmate...er, sorry, tenant... moves in?
I want to like this building. It reminds me of Leonard DiCaprio's role in The Basketball Diaries after he was so luminous in What's Eating Gilbert Grape: everyone had their fingers crossed hoping he would be as good as they hoped. I want to like it, but I have to admit it's hard to say I do.
Darkman I like with this statement: ...the assumption that good intentions leads to good architecture. I feel like I should like this building not only for the good intentions at work, but also the concrete facade which I want to love. Up close it looks beautiful, and concrete is one of my favorite materials - but in all the pictures it just looks so gloomy and overbearing. The cantilever really doesn't help.
It would be better to see IIT by OMA as an alternative to this type--colorful, playful, engaging architecture with low cost materials. Instead I think Adjaye is trying to hard to fit his neobrutalist concrete style to public housing. A case of architecture style in wrong context...
It's just out of scale. Concrete is great but something about concrete and punch windows together says "jail" to me. Concrete seems best when used as planes in a kinda de stijl way.
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