Blue Buildings

I’ve noticed something going on in our hometown, New York City, for some time, and I'm going to call it the blue building syndrome. The buildings are not really blue, but they look blue, a very light cool blue, they are huge and they are going up all over town. They are sleek, minimalist, elegant, expensive and rather bland. They are the default setting today for large-scale commercial development by the largest developers around. And the big architecture firms are falling in line producing them, including such distinctive names as Diller Scofidio & Renfro and Fumihiko Maki. Go down to the re-built World Trade Center or to Hudson Yards. Its as if someone designed the perfect glass curtain wall system and everyone agreed its the thing to do, which leaves only the building shape as the variable - with their straight lines, or tapered walls, or curves, or even tilting towards collapse. The blue-ness comes from the glass reflectivity, and the walls blend into the sky in a way that makes them almost disappear, as if apologizing for existing. They take on an ephemeral quality, and a lightness that is somehow pleasing and stultifying at the same time. I would say that it began right after the attacks of 9/11.

Maybe this is OK. If one looks at old photos of the Lower Manhattan skyline in the 1940s, its a marvelous sprouting of consistent limestone spires. I think its the consistency of tone and the impossibly narrow towers that made it so breathtaking, and unlike anything that came before. So maybe vast clusters of the new blue buildings will be like an eruption of quartz crystals, a new glazed version of that old Lower Manhattan. Or maybe not, if the next thing will come to be before such a thing can ever materialize to critical mass.