Our first excursion to Manhattan was exploratory in nature, to get our bearings, so to speak. Greg, Kirk, and I made the trip last Friday with some trepidation, for the last time any of us visited the Big Apple was in the last century. For people like us who have been living for the past 20 years or so in small towns where the extent of public transportation consists of under-utilized city buses with limited routes at infrequent hours, having to navigate through the immense network of New York City's subways and cavernous train stations is a daunting undertaking. But our fear was somewhat alleviated by the thought that we were armed with the super-intelligent, hand-held personal assistant devices, also known as, iPhones. A word of caution about relying exclusively on these devices is that they inevitably run out of juice before the day is out. Fortunately, I had our day's adventure pretty well plotted out beforehand and Greg possessed a hard copy of our itinerary which he consulted efficiently, well before we were able to power up our phones to look for answers.
As usual, my itinerary for visiting any city is planned around selected buildings or sites with architectural significance. For this trip, I chose to see the following: the new Restaurant Pavilion/Lawn at the Lincoln Center Plaza by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, the Apple Store on the 5th Ave., MoMA's 2004 Expansion by Yoshio Taniguchi, the New Museum by SANAA, and High Line Park on the west side of Manhattan. With the exception of the Apple Store whose transparent glass cube is undergoing reconstruction and was completely shrouded when we got there, our architectural expedition was a success. All these structures have been well documented so I'll just say a couple of things about each here.
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| Restaurant/Lawn @ Lincoln Center |
I thought the solution of using a twisted parabolic roof to create two distinct public spaces - a restaurant and a lawn - on the same footprint inside the existing Lincoln Center Plaza was very clever. The highest portion of the lawn offers a view to the surrounding streets and buildings which is not possible on the original flat plaza surrounded by tall buildings on all four sides.
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| Glass Cube beneath |
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| Apple Store shrouded |
All the action inside the Apple store is taking place under ground beneath the seemingly empty glass cube. The place was jammed packed with people like sardines in a can. I wonder what the posted maximum capacity is there and if anybody is keeping a count of the total number of people crowded inside the underground space at any one time. I literally had to drag Kirk out of that high-tech candy shop.
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| Sculpture Courtyard @ MoMA |
I barely recognized MoMA in its current expanded configuration. The addition definitely gives the museum a sense of lofty spaciousness which it lacked before and its style recalls the Gallery of Horyuji Treasures, designed by the same architect, which we visited in Tokyo.
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| New Museum |
The New Museum by the Pritzker Architecture Prize winning Japanese architect team SANAA is located on lower east side of Manhattan, in a somewhat rundown area (on Bowery and Prince) amidst restaurant supply stores and empty storefronts. The building is made up of seven pristine but helter-skelterly stacked white boxes, like a frosted layered cake about to tumble. Curiously though, it does not look out of place among its considerably older, grimmer-looking neighbors. I think the fact that they all seem to be leaning ever so slightly in a disorderly fashion appears to tie them together.
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| High Line |
The High Line Park is probably one of the most successful urban renewal projects in recent U.S. history. The idea of creating a park out of abandoned, elevated railroad tracks was brilliant. And taking the self-seeding vegetation which grew on the abandoned tracks as an inspiration for the landscape planting design was another stroke of genius. The result is a lively strip of pedestrian park lined with benches and delightful wild flowers and grasses. Its success has given rise to new upscale apartment buildings along both sides of the park. I was told that it is especially pleasant to walk there in the summer evenings, watching the sun set on the Hudson River.
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| Space to pause and gather |
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| Wild flowers galore |
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| Elevated above traffic |
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End of Section 2 where one can
see the existing, still-abandoned
track with wild vegetation |
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Bench designed as if it
were peeling off the
linear pavement |
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| Well-utilized birdhouses |
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