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In the News: More Renderings of the Flaming Franklin Street House
••• Architect Jeremy Edmiston talked to the Architect’s Newspaper about his design for 187 Franklin, which I’m going to stop referring to as the Ed Hardy House so don’t try and force me. “Edminston told AN that construction is already underway and that the project is slated to be completed in December. The structure’s parametric facade frees bricks from their expected pattern and weaves them into what appear as dancing flames.” A couple of renderings/schematics/whatever you call them, courtesy System Architects. The one at right is from inside.
••• Tribeca bartenders Marcia Herold (Greenwich Street Tavern, American Flatbread) and Candice Valetutti (Bâtard) were “share their thoughts on the state of dating from the other end of the shaker.” —Tasting Table
••• “Local elected officials and community leaders are calling upon Governor Andrew Cuomo to appoint Battery Park City residents to the board of the Battery Park City Authority.” He’ll have to check with Andrew Farkas…. —Broadsheet
••• Karen Lord of Karen Lord Pilates Movement explains—and demonstrates!—the three main Pilates machines. —Racked
••• Too bad: Jack Spade is closing all of its stores (but it’ll survive online). —Wall Street Journal
••• 180 Water Street is being converted to “601 apartments, likely rentals.” Looks cozy. —New York YIMBY (photo from Google via Curbed)
Update: Comments have been turned off due to spam. To have them turned back on, email tribecacitizen@gmail.com.
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This design was rejected by the community board quite a few years ago. I guess like the Walking Dead, this is one of those zombies that don’t actually die like they should.
The attack on historic districts and historic properties by modernists is relentless. By modernists I include post-modernists, neo-modernists, and parametricians and I specifically do not include the modern fine art movement which has a different intellectual history. The attack originates in a hostile ideology from the 1920’s that sought to eradicate historical architectural styles and if they could not be wiped out, then literally, in the words of one of their theorists it would seek “to dominate” them. All this is well known to anyone who has read any architectural history or theory. It is not my own opinion, but rather an established fact of history.
Now we are in a tragic circumstance that our LPC has been taken over by a majority of people of this ideological leaning. They will approve anything, using this ideology as a rationale. Don’t believe me? Remember that one Landmarks Commissioner last year called the context of historic Tribeca a “tyranny”. What is particularly galling is that the Commissioners then have the Orwellian nerve to claim the nonsense they approve is “harmonious” with the historic district. They must think we are all idiots and do not know how to define the word.
Our Landmarks Law and the National Historic Preservation Act of Congress both call for the protection of historic districts as act in the public interest that serves public welfare across generations. They explicitly direct regulation to protect the integrity of the districts that get designated. But when the fox guards the henhouse, the law cannot be applied. The “fox” then approves things that erode the texture of the historic districts, until the district’s very integrity is gone.
This is exactly what is happening to our neighborhood. Tribeca is being treated as a playground for architects who are ideologically contemptuous of the historic context around them. They purposively seek to draw our eyes away from the district to their own creations, which belong in the suburbs or outside the historic districts, (where they would be mostly unremarkable and unnoticed). The strategy of placing them inside historic districts is to make them MORE noticeable by being so violently out of place.
At this point, the problem of capture of our LPC has to be brought to the attention of the Mayor, although to be gloom and doom about it, it seems unlikely that he cares or understands what he has wrought. Like Bloomberg, he has allowed REBNY and modernist religion to dominate and bully the LPC. He seems to be under the delusion that he needs to let REBNY and its fawning architectural courtiers run wild so he can talk them into helping him build affordable housing. How naive! They will run circles around him.
For the record, I think Modernist architecture has produced some great works of art, nearly all of them stand-alone works (like airport and museum buildings) that do not function well in dense cities, and need isolated sites to work best. I also am an admirer of modernist interiors, furniture and fine art, but I also think our historic city is itself, as an ensemble, one of the greatest cultural assets we have, one that has miraculously survived a tumultuous economic history. It is a priceless cultural asset as well and worth safeguarding for future generations.
And just to be clear: I am not arguing for preserving a city in amber, I am arguing for better protection and stewardship of one of its greatest assets – the historic districts. These ideologues constantly seeks to harm and undermine this very asset – the historic city, and in the doing, they have turned themselves into the city’s destroyers.
Lynn, Tribeca Trust, http://www.tribecatrust.org
Lynn, avid readers of this blog know that CB1 is powerless. Also, I can’t believe that you are trolling architects and homeowners with such vitriol. That seems well below your station.
I worry that Hook & Ladder 8 will have responded to so many false alarms after this building is complete that when it is for real, they won’t respond.
Residents need to decide that preservation of the historic district is important enough to hold elected officials accountable. That means withholding campaign contributions and voting them out of office. I hope we all remember this come election time. Trying to appeal to these bureaucrats’ sense of reason and obligation otherwise seems fruitless. Over the past year, Many of us have tried writing letters, submitting neighborhood petitions, etc… Only to receive no response other than an automated email from the LPC chair’s office that our concern “was registered.”