"Mourning is just extended self-pity."
-Don Draper, Mad Men
1.
In the deftly arranged opening credits of AMC's acclaimed television series, Mad Men, a silhouetted, well-tailored male figure falls deliriously through an early-60s midtown Manhattan landscape comprised of sex, marketing, and alluringly reflective curtain wall facades. Not since Robert Longo's Men in the City paintings has urban existentialism seemed quite so attractive an affliction. Surface and personal complexity are placed in perpetual tension, with a tortured Gatsby-esque alcoholic chain-smoker ushering in an age of corporate anonymity and manufactured desire-equal part personal narrative and data-driven consumer research. The show is stylish and misanthropic (not to mention misogynist), but ultimately, displays a characteristically American panache in its characters' ability to maneuver within the space of such ambivalence. That the show is designed as something of a metaphorical device upon which to map current socio-political issues is perhaps less interesting than its role as a piece of myth-making, reinforcing the mystique of Modernist Manifest Destiny both through its overt projection and its simultaneous dismantlement. The American individual's capacity to endure is the primary beneficiary of this mythos-the Madison Avenue ad man is at once the architect of the system by which all desires become calibrated, remaining above the fray while sipping eighty proof single malt within his one-off Miesian tower, yet he falls victim to the very same system when he returns to suburbs with its Readers' Digest-dictated hierarchies and social mores. A drink in the office produces a winning idea and a lucrative account; a drink during a daughter's backyard birthday party becomes a palliative for atomization; just as the cigarette-puffing Obama is able to produce an approach to health care that turns soda into an enemy of the state, suppressing vice and excess beneath a data-underwritten narrative of progress.
2.
The double-edged sword of American ambivalence is its self-affirming self-destructiveness, served with the smile of someone who pushes forward in order to feign an absence of memory-a Gatsby or a Daniel Plainview who is driven or even afflicted by traumatic memory while rushing ahead with an insistence on willful amnesia. Can one really argue that inner city teens' valorization of Pacino's Scarface-a coke-fueled Horatio Alger tale, ending in the protagonist's foyer-fountain death-is simply misplaced machismo when staying in school, buying organic, and saving up for that first cookie cutter home is the prevailing alternative? Such a sense of entitlement is a fundamentally American proposition-entitlement as exceptional and spectacular procurement-with pragmatism as an almost metaphysical singularity of purpose. The alchemy of the America narrative mediates this uneasy tension at the core of Manifest Destiny, turning excess into necessity and invoking new necessities in the name of further excess. Needless to say, the ethical implications of this productive ambivalence are far from certain, but, one can safely state that they are not all certainly bad.
So, what to make of the emergent ecological focus in architectural thought and its crisis-inspired corollary, the new sobriety? Here then, is systems optimization without the mythologized romance of individual struggle; technocratic positivism voiced by Morgan Freeman, with the anemic grand narratives of 21st Century America forced to appropriate the cuteness of Arctic animals to galvanize a humanity too bored with itself to produce heroes who can speak for themselves, much less engage in a conversation with others.. Within this climate, architecture has gleefully re-branded itself as post-iconic, focused on holistic concerns and infrastructural amplification, or proclaiming a reevaluation of the primitive and the elemental, embracing a more metaphorical return to the state of nature-a pre-social contract postmodernism paradoxically enabled by the fruits of modern technology.
3.
Enter Obama-the man is the message-with an unruffled public demeanor serving to contain the ambivalence produced by an endless string of dichotomies: an anonymous managerial orgman who nonetheless wields an exceptional power of rhetoric. Transparent, yet coolly opaque, calibrating the fray while remaining above it.
4.
In his reading of Mies van der Rohe's 1958 Seagram building, Reinhold Martin asserts that in its seemingly neutral position-with its privileged removal from the fabric of Manhattan through its plinth and its setback from the street, and in its elegant curtain wall facade-it is not simply a bystander to urban events, but rather "in refusing to communicate, the Seagram building speaks eloquently of invisible disasters in which it recognizes its own role, only to withdraw again in sublime horror." Its sleek gridded wrapper and isolated disposition only reinforces its double status as both an exception and a self-perpetuating system with the capacity to spawn endless copies populating the landscape of corporate modernism. The Seagram building's ploy of feigned reticence is the prototype of the ambivalent executive, an aloof elitism that betrays its own pragmatist construction, with I-beams and glass modules serving as the traces of a mass aesthetic that is somehow forgotten within the reflective silhouette of its singular figure. This is, perhaps, the opposite side of Martin's notion of the "statistical sublime," whereby the contemporary trend of mapping and reproducing the endless complexity of global networks through design produces an affect of opacity that defies representation. As Wayne Congar and Troy Conrad Therrien suggest, the Obama administration's www.recovery.gov is a strategy, that, in the name of transparency, offers a "quasi-intelligible numerical accounting figures [that] are further obfuscated by their own accumulation," with noise returning to a point of overwhelming, yet un-formed singularity. They suggest that this technocratic impulse "is enabled by the absence of the regulatory feedback offered by imagery." And indeed, architects have largely abandoned the political potency of the image as a tool through which crisis can be addressed. The complexity of the global sphere or the city remains a tautological inevitability without the insertion of elements through which feedback can be established, or, more specifically, that mediate and clarify man's relation to the meshed complexity of his surroundings, opening up a space of distance that recaptures the individual's ability to critique, reorganize, and perhaps even be able to enjoy his environment.
5.
In a particularly brutal scene in Mad Men, the female secretaries at the office are rounded up to participate in a market research session for a line of lipstick as the male executives and copywriters look on from behind one-way glass while spouting derogatory innuendo and frat house misogynism. As the women begin to gleefully apply the lipstick samples, one of the men comments: "One-way glass, does that name seem a little weird to you? Should be two-way glass, right?" Voyeurism is by now a familiar trope in media criticism, but the episode is interesting less for its, admittedly somewhat caricaturish, insight into gender relations in the early 1960s, and more in its conscious prodding of the audience. The "glass" of the television screen may also be one-way, but it establishes a two-way feedback between the misaligned halves of the contemporary viewer's expectations. The voyeurism is alluring up until the moment when the male characters open their mouths, forcing the viewer to recognize the ambivalence of his position in regard to social norms and private passions. The target of critique is not then simply the politically incorrect norms of the mid-century America, but also the viewer himself, within whom is opened a space of critique.
6.
Architecture's ability to engender feedback hinges upon its production of ambivalent figures. The singular urban or suburban artifact has embedded within it the potential to act as a mechanism through which its occupants can make normative critical claims upon the city. In New York, SANAA's New Museum and Diller Scofidio+Renfro's Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center are projects which begin to make good on this potential, harnessing and honing the latent power of the Segram Building's Janusian legacy towards more critically-operative ends.
Awkwardly situated on the Bowery amidst the grimy facades of brick walk-ups like a supermodel on the A train, the New Museum is at once an affront to its context and platform for its reexamination. Unlike the plight of the now defunct post-punk club CBGBs a few doors over, where John Varvatos and Daniel Boulud have sought to conjur the aesthetic and spirit of the Bowery of yore-albeit through twenty-dollar burgers and dry-clean only fashion-the New Museum resists such a patronizing approach, less an icon, and more of a statement that reframes our own assumptions about what the neighborhood represents-what should be kept, what should be glorified, and what should be forgotten. The ground floor lobby is an extension of the sidewalk, separated only by a thin membrane of glass under which the concrete slips beneath. The lobby space acts as a kind of intensifier, fusing temporary exhibitions with cafe, ticketing, and shop functions. The space is visually open, yet continually packed with visitors. There is no grand procession to the upper floors, as street congestion is compartmentalized, first in the lobby and then in the oversized elevator. In some regards, the insular gallery spaces above are an afterthought, with many visitors opting to ride the elevator straight to the seventh floor viewing space. Here they linger over the city, having been provided a rare glimpse of the lower east side in all of its jagged contradictions. The scene is both to be admired and scrutinized. Bernard Tschumi's elegant sore thumb of a building is one of the obvious focal points. The piece sits in the distance as a tacit admonishment of the context, posited as an icon to adore rather than a platform which establishes feedback with the city. This is not to say that it is an unnecessary or undesirable work, but rather is an act that requires the presence of civic form to offset its economically-driven singularity of purpose. The New Museum and the Blue Building are akin to the good cop/bad cop of the LES.
In contrast to the siting of the New Museum, Alice Tully Hall appears right at home, and perhaps even somewhat anonymous, in its location at the threshold between midtown and the upper west side. This excavation of a Pietro Belluschi-designed building within the Lincoln Center complex is perhaps one of the most profoundly urban-conscious projects in Manhattan in the last decade. By opening up the preexisting concrete monolith to the frenzied intersection of Broadway, Columbus, and 65th street, DS+R frames the square and turns it into a stage of activity that parallels the goings-on within the theatre proper which it houses internally; architecture parlante for the cosmopolitan crowd. This action is hinted at by the peculiar red herring folly of seating that faces the glass of on the exterior of the building. It offers a challenge to the disposition of self-possessed icons, offering the viewer a choice between entering the building to face the stage of the city or turning his back upon the street to face the building, only to encounter a reflection of himself against the glass and the returning stares of those sipping coffee within, having made the opposite choice. The ambivalent figure of Alice Tully Hall evokes both its own presence and the presence of the city without being completely beholden to either, ultimately placing the ball in the court of the visitor to negotiate the site and address his own attitudes about the relation of building and city, so he can face the statistical noise of his surroundings with equal doses of silent anguish and full-throttled exuberance.
Justin Fowler is the Architecture editor of The Utopian and a Master of Architecture candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
References:
Reinhold Martin, "Atrocities. Or, Curtain Wall as Mass Medium," Perspecta vol. 32 (2001): 67-75.
Wayne Congar and Troy Conrad Therrien, "Absolute Recovery," no. 13 (2009) Hunch 66-75.