Photo: CrossingLights | CC BY 4.0
When I was a little kid, I conceived an idea for a car with no pillars holding up its roof. It would have a single more-or-less-cylindrical piece of glass encasing the passenger compartment, giving driver and passengers 360-degree views, with no blind spots anywhere. I was the Virgil Exner of our time, I thought, envisioning the future in a way no automobile designer ever had. I presented the idea to my parents, sure that they would recognize its brilliance. “Sure, but when it rolls over in a crash …” my dad pointed out, and with one well-placed toss of rhetorical cold water, I immediately grasped why nobody had built such a thing or ever would.
No such icy plunge seems to have hit the developers at Extell, who engaged the architects at ODA to build a 52-story skyscraper called the Torch on Eighth Avenue between 45th and 46th Streets. Announced a couple of years ago, then seemingly stalled, it is (per New York YIMBY) now under construction again. Few renderings of the building have been shared, and our request to the developer for images was declined. The officially available ones are mostly from printed material (a few of which have been photographed and posted online) plus the line drawing posted on the construction shed. Usually developers are more than happy to broadcast their renderings far and wide, and their hesitancy here is a small but unmistakable red flag.
That’s probably because it’s a real doozy. The building is — whether you like the design or not — a child’s loopy idea, the pillar-less sedan spun up more than 1,000 feet in the air. On the way to that height, it tapers through three setbacks to a narrow section not much wider than the elevator core, then flares out again, hourglass style. The setbacks do not cut straight across but curl upward, not unlike the façade treatment of the building a dozen blocks to the south called the Spiral. Here, too, those ledges incorporate some greenery. A showy staircase that inevitably evokes the Vessel at Hudson Yards also wraps its way around. (This one will be glassed in, so nobody’s jumping.) At the top, a flamelike form, reportedly inspired by the Statue of Liberty and lit up like David’s Diamond, gives the Torch its name. The principal use of the section above the wasp waist will be amusement: an observatory, the staircase, and a thrill ride that will plunge visitors nearly 300 feet in 90 seconds. Much of the building will be a hotel, so it’s pretty clear this thing is meant to be experienced by visitors, not lived with. It is, by and large, Not For Us.
Photo: Christopher Bonanos
That’s okay — Times Square is an entertainment and tourist district, and I’m not here to knock the amusement-park aspect of the thing. Observatories are fun, and they make a ton of money, and there’s an arms race among them to attract visitors. Rockefeller Center, if you ask me, is better with an observation deck than without. I myself don’t get the appeal of the Beam and the Skylift — I can’t see any material difference between being 850 feet up and 865 feet up — but from an urbanism standpoint they’re harmless. If we’re going to have stuff like this, Times Square is where it fits in, historically and contextually. We’ve had a revolving restaurant there for the past 50 years, and it’s just been yassified; is a thrill ride that out of place?
More than that, though, the Torch does seem to be an attempt to solve an aesthetic conundrum. We are now about 75 years into the glass-curtain-wall era. The first of those buildings took relatively pure rectilinear forms. The United Nations Secretariat is a crisp box, with stone facing up the narrow sides and glass on the wide ones. Lever House is two boxes, one across, one vertical. The Seagram Building presents itself to Park Avenue as a straight-up-and-down bronze-colored slab. Detailing aside, virtually every variation you can ring on this boxy form had been rung by the 1970s. The glass skins went from greenish to brownish to mirrored to low-iron transparent. Houston’s Pennzoil Place traded boxes for a pair of trapezoids separated along a knife edge by a tiny gap. Philadelphia got an angular glass homage to the Chrysler Building. Pittsburgh got an angular glass homage to the Houses of Parliament. We got mirrored cylinders in Atlanta and Detroit.
There were periodic shifts into brick or pebbly concrete, but by the start of the 21st century, most tall-building architects opted again for glass. My colleague Justin Davidson has discussed this at length and with brilliance, first with mixed-to-positive feelings and then, later on, with justified dismay and warm words for the alternative. It is not hard to see why, either. Glass sheathing is inexpensive relative to, say, limestone ashlars. Apart from the occasional surprise, it’s durable as an architectural material. Modern sealants and frames make it tight and weatherproof. It doesn’t really show weathering. When it’s encasing a company’s headquarters, it enables some blather about “corporate transparency.” In residential buildings, it lets the light pour in and allows exhibitionists some fun if they choose to skip the draperies. There are tens of thousands of glass skyscrapers now, and the so-called International Style of the 1950s has indeed become the international style, even in places where the sun will absolutely fry you.
With ubiquity came a degree of creative exhaustion. Architects are tired of the glass box; developers and clients want their buildings to stand out. Boxes and cylinders and prisms can no longer do that, and the lone remaining expressive gesture is to Go Weird, as architects strain for enough distinctiveness to produce a landmark. The Gherkin, in London, may have kicked off this generation of Weird. A few blocks away, 20 Fenchurch Street, a.k.a. the Walkie-Talkie, is even weirder. Taipei 101 is not so much Weird as parochial, but it’s certainly eccentric. The Burj Dubai is noticeably less Weird, maybe because being half a mile high was enough to make it memorable.
Will the Torch’s brand of Weird grow on us? You never know. The Chrysler Building, when new, was considered an exemplar of flashy tackiness, and now it’s beloved for that same zing. On the other hand, some buildings that seemed awful at first stay awful. The turn-of-the-millennium multicolored façade of the Westin hotel on West 43rd Street was ghastly when new and is now dated on top of that. Two Columbus Circle was a laughingstock in the 1960s and over the next three decades grew seedy; despite a small cadre of enthusiasts, it was never really widely beloved, and it was skinned and rebuilt into the Museum of Arts and Design in the early 2000s. You can’t exactly predict where and when long-term love will appear. You can see that confusion as renderings of the Torch have dribbled out onto the internet. Look at the comments threads, and they alternate between “Thank God, not one more boring box” and “This is the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” A thrill ride, almost like the one up top!