Las Urbanistas

Top, MetroHistory.com; above, Don Hogan Charles/The New York Times

The Renaissance Theater and Casino in 1936, top. The complex now has the aspect of a romantic ruin. Plans call for replacing the theater with a 13-story apartment house, for saving the casino’s exterior and for expanding the casino and its ballroom into a larger community space.

THE two-story Renaissance Theater and Casino on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard is architecturally unassuming but particularly significant, because unlike most of Harlem, it was built by blacks, not whites.

But last week, the Abyssinian Development Corporation — whose 10-year-old plans to build apartments and restore the casino structure recently took on new urgency — successfully defeated landmark designation, which would have created intolerable delays, it said.

Sheena Wright, the chief executive of the nonprofit development company, which is associated with the Abyssinian Baptist Church, contended that landmark designation would “basically kill the project.”

The blocklong Renaissance complex dates to 1920. That’s when William H. Roach, an immigrant from Montserrat who owned a housecleaning service, bought the northeast corner of 137th Street and Seventh Avenue, now known as Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.

Property records are not explicit, but it appears that Mr. Roach, working chiefly in partnership with his countryman Joseph H. Sweeney and an Antiguan named Cleophus Charity, built the Renaissance Theater there in 1921.

Two years later, the partners added the Renaissance Casino, with a second-floor ballroom, at the 138th Street corner of the block.

The 900-seat theater first showed silent movies, apparently with stage acts, but was soon converted to talkies. The casino was used for public meetings, like a 1923 anti-lynching meeting held by the N.A.A.C.P., and it was also the home court of the Harlem Renaissance Big-Five, the black professional basketball team known as the Harlem Rens.

The architect for the complex, Harry Creighton Ingalls, designed a deceptively simple work in tile and brick, “inspired by the Islamic architecture of North Africa,” according to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.

The casino, at the north end, is slightly higher, with a second floor of large windows and an attic level of openings alternating with patterned squares of colored tiles. It is a sophisticated but rather mild work.

There is no evidence that the Renaissance complex was meant to be anything but a simple business venture, but perhaps that was the point. According to Michael Henry Adams, the Harlem historian, articles in The New York Amsterdam News indicate that Mr. Roach and other principals were followers of Marcus Garvey, who promoted black self-sufficiency and business enterprise.

In his book “When Harlem Was in Vogue” (Oxford, 1989), David Levering Lewis describes the Renaissance as one of the places where “the cream of Harlem would unlimber with the Charleston and Black Bottom.”

The Renaissance closed in 1979, and the Abyssinian Development Corporation bought it in 1991.

Four years later, the Rev. Calvin O. Butts III, the pastor of the church, told The New York Times that he expected to start the restoration of the ballroom by the end of 1995. “People have got to have a place to laugh, sing and dance,” he said.

The Abyssinian Development Corporation’s plans did not come together until last year, but for them to go forward, it had to get the Landmarks Preservation Commission to retract a proposal, dating to 1991, to designate the Renaissance complex a landmark.

The development corporation’s plans involve replacing the Renaissance Theater with a 13-story apartment house but saving the exterior of the northern part of the complex. This would be incorporated into a larger performance, ballroom and community space reaching all the way back to the church, to the east on 138th Street. The old Y.W.C.A. building between the two would be replaced.

Abyssinian has secured important backers: David N. Dinkins, the former mayor; Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president; and the New York Landmarks Conservancy, one of the city’s major preservation organizations.

The conservancy has endorsed the demolition of only the theater portion, but it is rare to have a preservation organization speak against any landmark proposal.

For now, the Renaissance complex has the aspect of a romantic ruin. Perhaps half the tiles have fallen off, and the words “Chop Suey” are just visible on an old Chinese restaurant marquee projecting from the theater building.

The soft tapestry-brick facade is so wet that fields of moss are growing straight up, like spring grass on the prairie.

As the Renaissance project moves forward, no one has spoken up for the little Y.W.C.A. building on 138th Street, even though the shifting colors of its brick — orange, rust, yellow and purple — seem to warble like a bird’s song.

Built in 1931 and designed by Joannes & Marlow, it is a perfect little gem of side-street architecture, all the more so because there is little in Harlem like it.

The lower section, with its faceted bays weaving in and out, shows a clear awareness of German and Dutch Expressionist architecture. The parapet is a double row of bricks set in soldier courses, with the long side oriented up and down. The bricks are laid on intermittent, undulating mounds, and thus look like a marching column going up and down a hilly landscape.

This is the one building whose demolition was never in doubt.

E-mail: streetscapes@nytimes.com

Rendering by Jose Achi of S. Russell Groves

MORE PRIVACY As Russell Groves and Jose Achi reimagine a modest bungalow in Flanders, N.Y., eight-foot-tall fences would wrap around the front of the house, screening it from the street.

Ruby Washington/The New York Times
The house is currently on the market for $299,000.

Ruby Washington/The New York Times
THE IDEA PATROL Jose Achi, left, and Russell Groves tour the existing house in Flanders, N.Y.

Rendering by Jose Achi of S. Russell Groves

WALLING OUT THE NEIGHBORS To separate the house from those nearby, the architects propose big beige bricks for the side walls.

WITH the wind riffling the marsh grasses, Russell Groves borrowed an aluminum ladder from the construction crew working next door and climbed up on the roof of the tiny white house to survey the icy bay beyond.

The house is for sale for only $299,000, a rare case in which someone in search of a modestly priced house on the South Fork of Long Island can buy a lot extending into the marshland without anything — or anybody — blocking the view.

Not directly, at least. But part of the reason the property is so cheap is that the piece of land, about one-tenth of an acre, is sharply angled on one side, where the aforementioned construction workers appear to be adding on to the back of the neighboring house, only a few feet from the property line. And on the right, much farther away, is the kind of new house that seems to be designed to infuriate its neighbors: a series of white boxes rising two stories near the marshes — the opposite of contextual.

So, besides turning a boring 1930s bungalow into a stunning retreat — at least on drafting paper — Mr. Groves, a Manhattan architect with 15 staff members and a reputation for both retail and residential work, was also challenged to give the house some privacy, to position it so the houses on either side were well screened, if not invisible.

That windy day, his first solution was to create what he called a “telescoping” house: a big squarish section made of heavy materials nearest the road, then a smaller, more translucent section in the middle, and finally, a transparent cube — each one smaller and smaller, “like one of those Russian dolls,” he explained.

Mr. Groves compared the setting with that of a four-bedroom multilevel modernist house he recently remodeled on the South Fork, in Wainscott, a renovation featured in Architectural Digest in October.

“That house actually didn’t have the view this one does,” he said. “The disadvantage here, of course, is the weirdly shaped lot and the encroaching neighbors.”

He might have mentioned the street, too, in his yin-yang appraisal: the advantage is that it leads to a public boat launch, which offers truly wonderful open views of Flanders Bay; the disadvantage is that the bungalow is right next to the street and, one presumes, the boat trailers would rattle by in the summer.

Because of the Lilliputian lot and the cheek-by-jowl houses nearby, the challenge was to build something fabulous — without spending so much that the buyers could never recoup their investment. (One real estate credo: don’t buy, or build, the fanciest house on the block.)

A week later, on a milder day, Mr. Groves and Jose Achi, the project architect for this imagined remodeling, met in Manhattan at their office on 11th Avenue between 24th and 25th Streets, in a building packed with architects and artists.

They had avoided the temptation of glitzing up their plan with towers or a second story — and instead concentrated on a pure, straightforward design. They have increased the square footage of the interior space somewhat, from 600 square feet to 872 square feet, without changing the foundation, and have added almost as much outdoor decking, organized for three-season living. (This very indoor-outdoor house could be lived in year round, but judging from the rather bleak surroundings in mid-February, it might not be so appealing in cold slush.)

Where before there was one bathroom, now there are two and a half, although the design is careful to use the existing plumbing underpinnings. But everything from the ground up is new, or in the case of the composite wood deck ($3 to $6 per square foot), newly recycled.

All together, the ballpark budget for this high-style, low-maintenance construction project is $350,000, which includes everything but the new furniture and plantings.

In the end, instead of the “telescoping” idea, Mr. Groves came up with the “stepped” house: using light, medium and heavy walls, which often interconnect, separate and screen at the same time.

Starting from the street side, there are “light” walls, eight-foot-tall fences that afford privacy and wrap around the front of the house, enclosing a seven-foot-wide sunning/garden area between the road and the entrance, which the architects have elevated because of wetlands requirements.

(Although the architects did not undertake a study of the rules for Flanders, which is part of the town of Southampton, they said they followed general guidelines for building on or near wetlands.)

To separate the house from its neighbors, they used larger-than-normal beige bricks for walls on the sides. Huge industrial windows with giant panes would let in light at the front and back. (Each window bay, 12 feet by 4 feet, would cost about $1,500, the architects said.)

Running through the center of the house, they propose the “heavy” wall, a thick divider that contains the half bath and the kitchen, with closets along the back for the two bedrooms on the other side. (The two full baths are on the side of the nearer neighbor, where the original bath was positioned. The master bath is also designed to look out toward the marshes, and there is a door that allows terry-clothed owners to step out onto the deck.)

As one can imagine, the best views are toward the marshes. What looks like a pet enclosure bought from the local Agway in the backyard would be headed to the scrap heap, Mr. Groves said. “Perhaps a meandering path through spiky, naturalistic grasses instead.” He paused. “People who want to make these suburban lawns at a country house are just plain silly.”

Inside the house, he has drawn a mix of vintage and newly imagined furniture: some metal tubular lounge chairs by Thonet, a dining table he designed himself and some Dunbar chairs from the 1940s, identifiable by the piece of metal exposed across the top of the leather backs.

There is no pool.

“It probably wouldn’t be allowed so near the marshes, on such a small lot,” Mr. Groves said. “Better yet, what about the town building one of those old-fashioned wooden diving rafts near the boat launch?”

A great idea — but, please, not too near the outboard motors.

Office for Metropolitan Architecture
ARTS DISTRICT, BUILDING BLOCKS This 52-story design by Rem Koolhaas is to house apartments, hotel rooms and artists’ spaces as well as stores, an art gallery and a cabaret.

AFTER a wild development saga involving a dozen legal actions and the hiring of a mega-star architect, the design for a new tower to anchor this city’s arts district emerged last week as, well, kind of wild.

The structure designed by Rem Koolhaas is 52 stories tall and holds 1.2 million square feet of mostly residential space. Yet, from most angles, it resembles nothing so much as a small child’s precarious stack of blocks. Looking from Manhattan across the river, the skyscraper presents the startling prospect of a giant barbell, standing on end.

Mr. Koolhaas, the Dutch founder of the internationally known Office for Metropolitan Architecture and a professor of urban studies at Harvard, said he took note of the way bare-boned monoliths dominate Jersey City’s modern architecture — “and played with that.”

The building he designed for a two-acre site at 111 First Street here is born of conflict. Displaced artists, Manhattan developers and Jersey City politicians have mixed it up in court for years over the project’s configuration and scale and the basic question of whether it should replace a historic industrial building where artists once lived and worked.

Mr. Koolhaas seemed to cast that history into oblivion during an interview after the unveiling of his designs — or at least he tried.

“This building was born under a lucky star,” Mr. Koolhaas said after the formal unveiling, held at the Jersey City Museum. “I think everyone who has seen it so far likes it.”

One key issue in the debate over the structure, the proposed centerpiece of the city’s Powerhouse Arts District, has been whether a high-rise is appropriate for the site, since the city had said it intended to create a neighborhood to human scale, with vibrant street life.

Mr. Koolhaas and his associate Shoei Shigematsu, the lead architect for the project, responded by breaking the building into three components — a cube and two rectangular blocks — and stacked them perpendicularly. Terraces and open spaces are created at each structural joint, and slices of the view of Manhattan from existing buildings in the neighborhood are retained.

There is to be a meditation pool at street level, as well as a sculpture garden and sports terrace. Upper terraces are to feature gardens, outdoor dining areas and other amenities. A connection across Washington Street to the historic Powerhouse building, a vacant Victorian-era power plant slated for conversion to an arts center, will be achieved via a pedestrian plaza with sculpture garden.

The First Street tower is envisioned as a “vertical city” by its Manhattan-based builders, the Athena Group and the BLDG Management Company.

The top 25 floors will hold 330 apartments; the 7 floors below that will have 252 hotel rooms. Below these, there will be 40 loft apartments; 120 artist live/work spaces; parking for 719 cars on 6 floors; and a 2-story street-level area for stores, an art gallery and a cabaret, plus the lobbies for the hotel and the condos.

From some angles, as displayed in digital renderings and a scale model by the architects last week, the structure’s profile looks positively svelte — even a trifle fragile, as if it might topple in a stiff wind. “That was my first question,” joked the Jersey City mayor, Jerramiah T. Healy. “Is it going to blow over?”

The president of BLDG Management, Lloyd M. Goldman, whose company owns the site — and who at one point sued the city for stopping demolition of the old tobacco factory there that served as housing for hundreds of artists — declared the new design “utterly sound.”

“We brought in WSP Cantor Seinuk as the structural engineers,” he noted. “They’re the firm that’s doing the Freedom Tower at the World Trade Center.”

A reinforced concrete tube running through its core will anchor the building. Cantilevered concrete beams will support the two upper blocks, whose end sections splay out over the street.

The bottom third of the building will hold the artist spaces and rise 16 floors over the two-story retail area. The midsection, 18 stories tall, will hold the hotel and 10 floors of loft apartments that may be developed as “hotel condos.”

The glass-faced 16-story top section, which will face the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline directly eastward, will be condos.

As with other parts of Jersey City, a total transformation is under way in the area — providing a source of satisfaction for developers, angst for artists who loved the beaten-down warehouse district the way it was, and torn loyalties for city officials committed to revitalization.

At the unveiling of the design for the $400 million project, the mayor chortled over the coup of getting a “cool house for Jersey City,” playing on the architect’s surname, and called it a step forward in a renaissance. Later, he said he needed to correct himself. “This area used to be full of two-family frame houses, factory buildings and hole-in-the-wall bars,” he recollected. “We’re not just seeing a renaissance. We’re building a new city.”

William Matsikoudis, the city’s attorney, said he was thrilled to have wrested a compromise from a crowd of “New York City lawyers” hired by the developers, permitting a high-density structure on the one hand, but on the other a building that resembles a “600-foot-tall sculpture.”

Mr. Matsikoudis said he had handed the developers a list of seven world-class architects last June and told them a deal could be struck over the size of the building if they could lure a “star-chitect” to the project. Mr. Koolhaas accepted the commission in September.

The deal also included a commitment from the developers to donate $1 million to the arts in Jersey City. A first check of $330,000 was turned over to the city art museum two weeks ago.

For Mr. Koolhaas’s firm, based in Rotterdam, the Jersey City structure represents its first large-scale residential project in this country.

Mr. Koolhaas described the project as a welcome chance to produce “serious” architecture in a “real” place, as opposed to “spectacular architecture in unreal places.”

The architect, who won the Pritzker Prize in 2000, has in recent years designed the Prada stores in New York and Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum extension, the Seattle Public Library and the Illinois Institute of Technology campus center in Chicago.

His firm’s largest project to date worldwide is the China Central television headquarters and cultural center, under construction in Beijing.

Mr. Koolhaas said he thought the Jersey City arts district would appeal to “anyone who doesn’t want to live in a manicured environment.”

Asked for his favorite vantage point for viewing the 111 First Street building, Mr. Koolhaas said it would be from the thoroughly unaesthetic New Jersey Turnpike. “From there,” he said, “you see the Jersey City skyline in the foreground, with the Manhattan skyline in the background, and the two seem to meld. This is truly urban, truly beautiful.”

Roland Halbe

THE ART OF DEFENSE At the Caltrans District 7 Headquarters Replacement Building in Los Angeles, the architect Thom Mayne and his firm, Morphosis, placed sinuous steel bollards and benches in a plaza, as though they were outdoor sculptures.

Not so long ago, architects were obsessed with the notion that globalism, the Internet and sophisticated new building technologies were opening the way for a more fluid, transparent landscape in which walls would simply begin to melt away.

Silverstein Properties

CASTLE KEEP A rendering of the Freedom Tower plaza in New York City, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill and Peter Walker & Partners.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times; Royal Collection, via Agence France — Presse

Above, NoGo barriers, by Rogers Marvel Architects, in Downtown Manhattan; da Vinci’s fortifications against mortar spray.

Reinhard Krause/Reuters

A barrier separating Abu Dis from East Jerusalem.

Things didn’t turn out that way. After 9/11, a craving for the solidity of walls reasserted itself. And the wars on terror, and fractious peaces, enforced it. The Green Zone in Baghdad, Jerusalem’s separation barrier, the concrete bollards that line corporate headquarters on Park Avenue — all are emblems of an unintended new mentality.

Four years after the American invasion of Iraq, this state of siege is beginning to look more and more like a permanent reality, exhibited in an architectural style we might refer to as 21st-century medievalism.

Like their 13th- to 15th-century counterparts, contemporary architects are being enlisted to create not only major civic landmarks but lines of civic defense, with aesthetically pleasing features like elegantly sculpted barriers around public plazas or decorative cladding for bulky protective concrete walls. This vision may seem closer in spirit to da Vinci’s drawings of angular fortifications or Michelangelo’s designs for organically shaped bastions than to a post-cold-war-era of high-tech surveillance.

The emblematic capital of this transformation is the Green Zone, the American encampment in Baghdad, where the 12-foot-high concrete slabs that surround Saddam Hussein’s former palaces have infused the city within a city with the ethos of the gated suburban enclaves of Southern California. It is a place with “the calm sterility of an American subdivision,” as described by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City,” not a place that expresses American ideals of democracy and political transparency.

That mentality has become acceptable in relatively stable cities as well, including London, where a debate has now arisen over what do to with the concrete barricades that surround the United States Embassy in historic Grosvenor Square. Some suggest that they should be replaced by a permanent, more visually appealing barrier, as if better design could somehow negate the notion that we are surrendering to the inevitable. And in downtown Miami, federal marshals have suggested that the barricades originally included in the plans for a park designed by Maya Lin as part of a new courthouse complex might have to be reinforced, even as people begin to move into the building.

The most chilling example of the new medievalism is New York’s Freedom Tower, which was once touted as a symbol of enlightenment. Designed by David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, it rests on a 20-story, windowless fortified concrete base decorated in prismatic glass panels in a grotesque attempt to disguise its underlying paranoia. And the brooding, obelisk-like form above is more of an expression of American hubris than of freedom.

But even the most thoughtful solutions, like the gracefully curved steel tubes that defend the plaza of Thom Mayne’s Caltrans District 7 headquarters building in Los Angeles or the faceted bronze bollards on Wall Street, suggest the fragile balance today’s architects are struggling to reach between assuring the freedom of movement that is vital to a functioning democracy and bolstering security.

To some, compromise may be preferable to surrounding our cities with barbed wire and sandbags. The notion that we can design our way out of these problems should give us pause, however. Our streets may be prettier, but the prettiness is camouflage for the budding reality of a society ruled by fear.

Lew Sichelman, Special to The Chronicle

Sunday, March 4, 2007

This article appeared on page K - 10 of the San Francisco Chronicle