November 2020 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Architect Sir David Adjaye becomes the first back-to-back winner (Oct, Nov) at the Eyesore of the Month with this unfortunate and misconceived humdinger for lower Manhattan at 130 William Street. Unfortunate because this kind of residential mega-tower was the-thing-to-dojust a year ago, before Covid-19 rang out around the world, and then, suddenly, well-off Manhattanites began bugging out of the city, and international travel dribbled away, and foreign capital stopped parking itself in luxury New York real estate, and the price of all that real estate started crashing, and, well, the business model for projects like this came screeching to an end. So, do you understand that this type of luxury skyscraper is now obsolete? Manhattan life won’t be roaring back to pre-Covid normality anytime soon, if ever. With the Everything Bubble ready to pop, international capital itself is about to do a colossal disappearing act. The restaurants are not just struggling, their owners are bankrupt. The hotel business is on-the-rocks. If Broadway recovers, it may be a shadow of what it used to be. Even the future of major league sports is dubious. The office towers are still mostly unoccupied. Countless citizens are still in forbearance for rents, mortgages, and other loans — meaning they will eventually have to pay back all those months they were excused from paying (ha!) — plus consider that if landlords, mortgage-holders, and other creditors don’t get paid back, insolvency thunders through the system… see where all this leads?

So, yes, unfortunate… bad timing… paradigm shifts are unforgiving.

Then there’s the baleful design of 130 William Street per se. Mr. Adjaye has uncannily come up with the instant Modernist Gothic ruin. The soot-colored, pock-marked cladding looks like the building has been exposed to acid rain for seven hundred years, and the quasi-Romanesque arched windows add to the gloomy effect. Only gargoyles are lacking. The rendering below seems incomplete without a melancholy hunchback perched at the windowsill contemplating the cruel rise-and-fall of empires and the tragic heedlessness of human beings. Wait for the building to be sold for dimes on the dollar sometime in 2022.

Shout-out to. Ray Sawhill for the nomination.