Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale in New York: Update

I have been fitfully researching Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale, and now have enough new material to justify an update to my post of May 31, 2007. I have been encouraged by the recent interest of Dutch-based architects and academics who maintain the website ArchiAfrika, on which they recently republished my original post, Jean Prouvé’s Maison Tropicale in New York. As this is an update, you’ll need to read the original post first for it to make sense. And speaking of republishing, the new online journal, Design Philosophy Politics has recently published an expanded version of my "Design for the Other 90%" review here.


Two Pères, Three Maisons

In May, I was unsure of who actually rescued the Maison from “deepest darkest” Africa: French dealer, Eric Touchaleaume, or American collector, Robert Rubin. Despite reading many more articles, I am still unsure, but this in itself may be interesting. In the official catalogue for the Christie’s sale of the Maison, Touchaleaume stated categorically that he made “arrangements in 2000 for a trip to Africa in pursuit of the prototype Maisons Tropicales, determined to salvage them from ruin and to bring them back to France. I was eventually able to buy them, dismantle them and ship them home.” (p.9) This cleared it up for me: Touchaleaume rescued all three Maisons from Africa, and then sold one to American collector, Robert Rubin. However, while at the hairdressers last week, I picked up a copy of Town and Country (October 2007) which contained an interview with Rubin in which he claimed to have rescued the three Maisons, then sold two of them to a French dealer. Now Town and Country is perhaps not the most reputable source of information but what is interesting is that, going back through the articles about the Maison, both Touchaleaume and Rubin both claim the glory for rescuing the Maisons from Africa – it depends on who the journalist interviews. Another possibly relevent aside I did find out is that Touchaleaume has been on the Prouvé trail for a lot longer than Rubin, as he co-published a catalogue in 1987, Jean Prouve Mobilier, 1924-1953, then in 1989 presented “Jean Prouve Meubles, 1924-1953” at the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Bourdeaux.

However, I did clarify which Maison is which, and what has happened to each of them since the great African rescue. Of the original three Maison prototypes produced by Prouvé, the first was commissioned by Paul Herbé, architect-planner of Niger colony, to be used as his office in Niamey. His idea was to extend the industrial prefab architecture technique to later construct Niamey civic structures such as schools and other institutions (an idea which never came to fruitition). The second and third prototypes went to Brazzaville, and were similar to the first, though not exactly the same. The Brazzaville prototypes comprised a smaller one, 10 by 14 meters, and a larger one, 10 by 18 meters, originally joined together by a bridge. And here’s the interesting connection I’ll come back to below: the smaller one was originally an office for the Bureau Régional d’Information de l’Aluminum Français. The larger one was originally a residence for the commercial director of Aluminum Français, Jacques Piaget. While the smaller one was originally partitioned into Director’s office, a secretary’s office and a waiting room, the residence was originally partitioned into a master bedroom plus two smaller bedrooms, a kitchen and a bathroom.

More recently, Robert Rubin painstakingly restored his Maison, the smaller one from Brazzaville, exhibited it at Yale and Hammer Museum, UCLA, and then donated it to the Pompidou Center where it now rests on the roof. (Another neat connection worth mentioning here is this: Prouvé was president of the Pompidou Center selection committee which approved Rogers and Piano’s high-tech "industrial" design, a high-profile commission which continued Prouvé’s legacy). Meanwhile, Eric Touchaleaume is currently painstakingly restoring the Niamey Maison, which he intends to set up in the South of France as a study center and exhibition site dedicated to architecture and design. And the third, the larger Brazzaville Maison, after being painstakingly restored, was sold to hotelier/developer Andre Balazs in New York in June. And though I don’t usually indulge in gossip on this blog, the Maison is rumored to be destined for a life as a bar in a Balazs luxury hotel in the Bahamas, with interiors designed by Lenny Kravitz. After the Love Revolution, give it up for the Design Revolution?

Colonialism and modernism

The interesting but, in retrospect, unsurprising, connection here is between Prouvé and Aluminum Français, the state-owned company that controlled French aluminum production in the interwar period, including, of course, bauxite mining in various French colonies in Africa. The Christie’s sale catalogue contained a photo of a Prouvé Aluminum and Formica Table, c. 1950, in situ in the Bauxite Processing Plant of Aluminum Français in Edea, Cameroon. The close relationship between the interests of French industry, colonialism and modernist design that I pointed out in my previous post were further confirmed by these concrete (or should that be aluminum?) connections. In addition, in 1951, ORSTOM, the Office of Scientific and Technical Research in Overseas Territories, placed a large order with Prouvé’s workshop to equip both their colonial offices and their main office in Bondy, Paris.

So, Prouvé’s Maison clearly illustrates the postwar colonial triangle: the French colonial mining company, Aluminum Français, extracted raw materials from the African colonies which were then returned to France, refined into aluminum, designed into prefab Maisons and furniture by modernist designer Jean Prouvé, and finally returned to the colonies as finished designer commodities, proof of French technical and cultural superiority. However, the final, and somewhat touching part of the tale, is that in 1953, Prouvé’s beloved workshop near Nancy which produced these objects (including the Maisons), was taken over by none other than Aluminum Français, a fact Prouvé seemed to be most unhappy about. Prouvé’s Maxeville workshop, run under socialist principles and founded on the Arts and Crafts ideal of maintaining a close connection between the designer and craftsman, was gobbled up by the colonial system it was both dependent upon and also supporting in its promotion of all the marvellous things, from tables and chairs to complete houses, that could be designed using colonially-sourced aluminum.

Designer Treasure Hunters

An interesting point about the Christie’s New York sale in June that I overlooked was the sheer volume of modernist designer loot “rescued” from countries in the developing world. While the star of the sale was the Maison, the sale also contained a range of additional French modernist designer loot by not only Prouvé, but also Charlotte Perriand, Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. It included furniture produced by Prouvé from the 1930s and 40s, ranging from single armchairs to a steel dining table (ranging from $20 000 - $40 000). The sale also featured a range of other salvaged French modernist design and architectural details, including loot from Le Corbusier’s postwar government complex at Chandigarh, India. Here it seems, Touchaleaume (or Rubin?) rescued library tables, chairs from government offices, shelving, stools, lighting fixtures – anything portable and designed by French modernists, including a Cast-Iron Manhole Cover designed by Pierre Jeanneret (asking $20 000)! It seems the 21st century market for design is hot enough to justify just about anything connected to the hand of a certified modernist great – if design isn’t art, it sure sells like it!

A further valuable source of colonial loot for sale was an Air France Unité d’Habitation in Brazzaville, designed by French modernists Jean Hébrard, Louis Lefevre, Jean Létu and Pierre Bienvenue. In 1950, Air France commissioned Charlotte Perriand to outfit their Brazzaville Unité, comprising 60 apartments designed to house French airline personnel on stopovers. Completed in 1952, it was a showcase of Modernist French design and must have been considered successful, as Air France commissioned subsequent projects by Perriand, including a similar building in Dakar, Senegal. For the interiors, Perriand used both her own designs and those of Jean Prouvé, as well as some in collaboration, such as the “Brazza” storage units which combined local tropical woods with Prouvé’s steel parts. Unlike Prouvé, Perriand went to Brazzaville to oversee the project and produce work there. Again, the building was stripped of its goodies some time in the past few years by Touchaleaume (or Rubin?). Presumably it was impractical or uneconomical to ship the entire five story concrete building to New York for the auction. Finally, there was similar loot from the Perriand-designed Air France building in Dakar also auctioned in New York – tables, lamps, cabinets, a Brazza storage unit, drying racks, even molded concrete paving stones from the rooftop terrace garden.



Constructing a Design Master, Constructing a Design Market

Finally, a comment on the reissue and rediscovery of Prouvé. In a previous post on Design Within Reach and Vitra, I discussed the phenomenon of “fully licensed classics”. These are not “original” Modernist classics like you might have picked up at the Christie’s auction for tens of thousands of dollars, but “authentic” design classics available for only two or three thousand dollars. Let’s look at a concrete (er, steel?) example: Jean Prouvé’s Citie armchair, steel and leather, c.1930. One of these chairs sold at Christies in June 2007 for $102 000 – this is the “original” version. In comparison, the “fully licensed classic” or “authentic” version is currently available in the US at Design Within Reach for $3265. While the original version may have been reconditioned or at least cleaned up a little, it was manufactured in 1930 at Prouvé’s workshop. In the contemporary reissues of Prouvé’s furniture, laser cutting, computer-driven machinery and new epoxy finishes have replaced Prouvé’s pioneering interwar methods and materials.

It is worth briefly unpackaging the various levels at work here, as they are inter-dependent: on on the one level, at the Christie’s auction of “originals”, we witness the fetishization of a design object as art – the original product of the certified master, rescued from Chandargarh or deepest darkest Africa, brought back to the safety of Western private collections and museums, stripped of its functionality and destined to a life on display on a pedestal. On the second level, that of the “authentic” version, we engage with the Prouvé chair as a 21st century simulacra, a virtual Prouvé, created with contemporary production processes and technologies. What is ultimately important is the chair’s modernist design, and design here is exclusively understood as aesthetic – it looks like the original, even if the production processes and technologies are quite different (and in fact, the new “authentic” chair may well be more perfect, more durable, and more "functional" than a well-worn “original”). I noted in the last post the vested interest that a company such as Vitra has in such a system – they not only reissue “authentic” Prouvé furniture, but also have a design museum containing “original” Prouvé furniture - so they operate on both levels. But the marketing doesn’t stop there. Vitra currently have a touring exhibition entitled “Jean Prouvé: The Poetics of the Technical Object”, which began touring various museums in Japan in 2005, and since then has been touring around various European museums (due to end in 2008 at the Design Museum in London). Finally, all this is not necessarily just about Jean Prouvé, but ultimately about the gap between what modernist design was and how it is perceived in the 21st century. Beyond this, what really interests me about modernism and its contemporary reception are two things: how to extricate it from contemporary market-driven design, and, following this, what its future possibilities might be.

All photos of the Maison Tropicale in New York, May 2007, by D.J. Huppatz

This will be my last blog entry for this year, I'll be back in the new year with more. Thanks for your interest.

Drew Gardner: Petroleum Hat

With its inconsistent tone and self-conscious awkwardness, Drew Gardner’s second book of poetry, Petroleum Hat (2005), may already be an early Flarf classic. The flatness, the fakeness, and the constant disruption of “communication”, that is, information consumption, doesn’t make for an easy read. Gardner’s poems, many of which read like constellations of fragments culled from internet searches or strings of spam, have caused some anxiety recently in poetry circles – anxiety specifically related to his methodology – are these anti-humanist poems simply “generated by machines”? Following generations of collage from Dada to Burroughs, not to mention MTV, mashups mediated by various forms of technological tools are hardly revolutionary. But beyond the methodology lies the importance of Gardner’s intervention into the spectacle of contemporary American media culture. For Flarfists, the contemporary muse is not an ancient Greek nymph who whispers sincere odes in the poet’s ear but a drag king impersonating the tragi-comic (late) Elvis in Las Vegas, all bejeweled jumpsuits and awkward karate moves. She may well be the specter haunting contemporary American poetry. Or it is a he? And perhaps that should be “spectacle” rather than specter?

While Gardner’s poems in Petroleum Hat might be perceived as conventionally “awful”, they ultimately declare themselves as poems. Nada Gordon’s recent book, Folly, on the other hand, extended poetry beyond its conventional bounds with Gordon’s interjections, conversations and references to theater or performance texts, all of which served to disrupt the book as a collection of discrete poems (see my previous post). In contrast, Gardner’s poems certainly look like conventional ones – blocks of text with justified left margins and ragged right margins, arranged into stanzas over a page or two. However, like Gordon’s Folly, Gardner’s Hat is characterized by its multitude of conflicting voices, its deflation of sincerity and its juxtaposition of serious and profane content.

Like internet search engines, Gardner’s poems make no distinction between “serious” information (“news”), personal asides and pop gossip: it’s all potential material to add to the mix. In Petroleum Hat, political figures mix it with celebrities in a flattened virtual world, and this may in fact be less of a literary construct than simply a reflection of the “real” contemporary America (the Governator of California, for example, springs to mind). While there are no consistent narratives or tones in Gardner’s work, the language all seems to be culled from the virtual world – what K. Silem Mohammad calls a poetry with internet “flavors”. At times, it feels as if Gardner is “drowning in the porridge of upload” – and, rather than distilling the information overflow into clear, rational packages of consumable data, he leaves it messy and thick with absurdity, cynicism and ambiguity. In “The Key and the Carrot”, Gardner writes:

I walk my room
looking for a destination,
only finding poets who love form and content
I have nonetheless found myself
walking to the receiver
as arsonist
with the new situation in quantum furrow
let it suffice with this:
the ground beef is still nothing received

The absence of punctuation makes it difficult to make “sense” of this poem, its initial autobiographical mode is disrupted by random appearances from quantum furrows and ground beef, as if our arsonist is burning the conventional autobiographical tone in which he (?) begins. If poets “love form and content”, Flarfists have instead fallen for relations and surface. Thus it does seem a little futile to be digging into the depths of these poems (what is “quantum furrow”? why “ground beef” here?) as they are less metaphoric than metonymic, establishing relations across a surface rather than mining a tradition (again, no evidence of ancient Greeks here).

A major theme of the book is the Iraq War, or more specifically, the images and language of the war as it is being consumed in contemporary America (or least on its computer screens). Gardner plays with War on Terror doublespeak, exposing its absurdity and deflating its seriousness. In this sense, it is worth considering the fragmented language and imagery of Petroleum Hat as a corrosive disruption to the sanitized feeds of information presented by mainstream American news sources. Gardner’s now-infamous poem, “Chicks Dig War”, for example, begins “Story time: Trojan Oil War (part 2)”, a pithy summation of the war, but he goes further than just the war with his repeated phrase “chicks dig war”. While it has been described as an anti-war poem, Gardner is actually dismantling the warped logic and propaganda that justifies war, and ultimately satirizes contemporary American gender and power relations. Joyelle McSweeny, in her excellent review in The Constant Critic, described the poem thus: “Fear of feminism, female strength and male weakness are conflated with each other and with the antithetical heterosexism of militaristic propaganda to create frightening, porny ideations: "God Made Girls Who Like War."” The foundational American trinity of miltarism, religion and patriarchy are all wittily deflated by Gardner’s satire.

In Gardner’s “John Denver Wawa Shadow Puppet Government”, he again mashes up key contemporary themes – the war, politics, celebrity and religion:

the NBC/Wall Street Journal doesn’t understand
the God of Isaac and Ishmael
soon we’ll all be praying to John Denver
if we don’t allow right-wing poor people to feel happy
ALL the time,
teach their kids how to pray in the direction of pizza
yet see no problem
with having the Lord’s Prayer printed in ghostly pubic hair

the president has become newly stressed-out
with the profound equality of all human beings
knocking over stone walls onto Avril Lavigne
as Abraham Lincoln once did

Here, Isaac and Ishmael, both sons of Abraham (though with different mothers), underline the common ancestry of Christianity and Islam (the former religion traces a lineage through Isaac, the latter through Ishmael). Mainstream news “can’t understand” that both religions have the same father. In a contemporary America where more people vote for TV pop stars than politicians, John Denver, bland country/pop singer of the 1970s and 80s, may be both a worthy idol and a worthy political candidate. However, unlike contemporary bland pop stars, and despite the potential patriotism of hits such as “Take Me Home, Country Roads” and “Rocky Mountain High”, Denver was also known for his political outspoken-ness, and was particularly critical of various (particularly Republican) governments.

In the following stanza, Gardner flattens the space of the poem to conflate Avril Lavigne and Abraham Lincoln. Beyond simply a curious juxtaposition, Gardner is also skating across the surface of language, with ALL as a key refrain from the last stanza – both bland contemporary pop singer and former president contain those letters in their names, underlining the equality of all. However, more seriously, equality is stressful for the president, with the resonance of “stone walls” recalling 1969’s Stonewall Riots, and suggesting that equality here is not just referring to the rights of America’s Pizza-eating poor but also the president’s “knocking over” gay rights proposals.

There certainly appears to be something sinister going on behind the scenes of the “shadow puppet government”, though Gardner does not offer a clear ethical stance on any of these issues – the poems force combinations or conflate discourses that do not usually belong in the same space. Another poem, “in this otherworldly quiet”, for example, begins:

in this otherworldly quiet
i heard the piercing cry of agony rent the air
dear little bird, why this shipbuilding?
why a 300 pound weapon, and
why did each protester
spank Wolfowitz individually, really hard?

administration has been made between
clauses relating to internet surveillance
and radioactive toys made of lint

Here again, Gardner presents a mashup of contemporary news issues – the war, internet surveillance, weapons – in a creepy silent otherworld (the silent distance created by the mediating screen?). But the messiness only allows the reader brief moments of empathy. By creating a space where prayer meetings meet celebrity porn and the war’s principle architect, Paul Wolfowitz is spanked by protestors, Gardner’s warped visions are certainly infused with an absurd humor. As spam aims to escape filters and spread virally, so too Gardner’s language escapes rational communication in unfiltered streams of the American collective unconscious, and the results are both humorous and frightening. Petroleum Hat is a collection of odd fragments that takes on the glittering surfaces of mediated culture in a combination of chance-generated spontenaeity and constructedness, resulting in a poetics which tries to take on contemporary media culture on its own terms rather than from the position of “poetry” that expresses “sincere emotions”. If not sincere, then serious? With the constant stoppages, voice changes and erasures, the reader is never really sure. As Gardner writes in “Skylab Wolverine Bunny Cage Nub”:

That last paragraph has to go—
I think that’s the wolverine bunny cage of
our problem—not counting the last paragraph
made of paper maché nub replicas.

FURTHER LINKS:

Drew Gardner reads "Chicks Dig War" at the 2006 Flarf Festival in NYC (YouTube video).

Drew Gardner reads from an earlier book, Sugar Pill, to the accompaniment of his own piano playing, in a duo with bass player Damon Smith (Ubuweb, sound only).

Drew Gardner's blog, Overlap.

The latest on Flarf, a National Poetry Foundation podcast. A good introduction and overview.

Starchitect Condos update

Following my last post, take a brief walk here through a new apartment at Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond St (really a promotional tour by a real estate agent, courtesy of New York magazine). Although the development is barely open, an owner is already trying to "flip" an apartment for $3.6 million. But before you pull out your checkbook, bear in mind that you may be the only resident of 40 Bond who doesn't "own their own plane". But you will have access to all the amenities, including "personal lifestyle management" (provided, that is, you have a lifestyle worth managing).

Designing Lifestyle in 21st Century New York: Starchitect Condos

The early years of the 21st century have witnessed a number of brand-name architects (henceforth starchitects) designing condominium buildings in downtown Manhattan. While the physical living spaces are not significantly different to, say, 1980s New York luxury loft-style apartments, what has changed is the imaging, or perhaps more correctly, the total design of luxury lifestyles. In this sense of design, the physical buildings comprise but a minor part of the package – indeed, even before a sod of earth has been turned to dig foundations, architects, designers, developers and branding consultants have already created a image-world that includes not just the physical building and its interiors, amenities and furnishings, but also available services (from a 24 hour concierge desk to dog walking services), as well as highlights from the surrounding neighborhood. In short, designing a luxury condo involves the creation of an entire virtual lifestyle long before the actual glass and steel have arrived.

The imaging process that creates contemporary starchitect condos begins with the website. Here, potential consumers can see not only projected images of the finished building and its interiors, but also an entire image-world of the designer lifestyle, including a soundtrack, video clips and plenty of both real and constructed images featuring people inhabiting (or perhaps simply posing within) the spaces. These Flash-heavy websites often take some serious bandwidth to download – and the general rule seems to be, the more Flash the better. Such websites are, after all, as much about entertainment as they are about communicating information. If you don’t have a good broadband connection, this can mean spending a lot of time staring at increasing percentage numbers – but then again, if you can’t afford a decent broadband connection and the accompanying high-tech hardware, you’re hardly in the market for a luxury condo. Presumably all of this sophisticated imaging is required so that the physical glass and steel structure will have already acquired sufficient magical qualities before people part with their money: the luxury condo enters the world of myth before it exists in reality.

21st century New York is characterized by its reliance on two industries, finance and real estate, complemented by a few secondary industries, most notably the media sector (TV, film and publishing) and the cultural industry (galleries, museums, music, dance, theater, etc). It is in recent starchitect-designed condos that these various sectors of the city’s economy clearly intersect – high design (culture) meets brand name architect (a media construct) meets developer (real estate) meets big price tag (finance). Culture, particularly culture that has been already mediated and confirmed by institutions and publications (“architect featured at MoMA”, “designer of iconic museum”, “as featured in glossy coffetable books”, etc), seems a particularly important selling point for a New York lifestyle.

Jean Nouvel, 40 Mercer Street

Value-added living via design

Richard Meier might be credited as the pioneer of the recent wave of Manhattan starchitect-designed condos, and his designs certainly set the scene for more recent variations. His 173/175 Perry Street buildings, started in 1999 and completed in 2002, are typical modernist high-rise buildings with concrete service cores and a steel structure covered with floor to ceiling glass panels. Nothing particularly innovative architecturally speaking, the apartments are essentially elegant modernist glass boxes. However, Meier created a design vocabulary based on a minimalist, or “pure” form of modernism for a newly wealthy and design-saavy New York audience. And it must be a successful formula, as Meier has designed others since, most recently his On Prospect Park in Brooklyn (due to be finished soon). Meier has reconfigured modernism to equate it with luxury – here, transparent glass boxes function as both sources of views and conspicuous images of “designer” lifestyles, complete with lobbies prominently featuring Mies’s Barcelona chairs (presumably “authentic” versions? – see also my previous post). Finally, it is important that Meier’s Manhattan projects were sold as “designed by Richard Meier”, with the architect’s name becoming an essential branding device that adds to the luxurious appeal.

More recently, the floodgates have opened on the luxury condo market, with globally-branded starchitects now in on the act. My survey here covers recently completed and under-construction projects, all located in downtown Manhattan (and this is not a comprehensive list, simply the biggest names). These include: 40 Mercer Street and 100 11th Street by Jean Nouvel; Blue by Bernard Tschumi; 40 Bond Street by Herzog and de Meuron; 80 South Street by Santiago Calatrava; 166 Perry St by Asymptote; Yoo Downtown by Philippe Starck; The Urban Glass House by Philip Johnson (?) and Annabelle Seldorf; 1 Kenmare Square by Richard Gluckman; and 1 York Street by Enrique Norton (TEN Arquitectos). One thing all of these developments have in common is the cost – most of the apartments on offer start at around $2 million (studios or one bedroom) and go up (and up) from there.

A survey of the websites reveals many additional common features. While the exteriors generally assert their difference from the surrounding context (especially Tschumi’s Blue, for example), the interiors follow Meier’s lead and reproduce minimalist downtown “loft”-like open plan spaces with high ceilings. These are not, of course, recycled industrial buildings as one might find in SoHo, but mimic the same interior aesthetic as 1980s lofts. The interiors all feature quality brand-name bathroom and kitchen fixtures and appliances, usually imported (read “European”) and some offer designer furniture options. In addition to private apartments, all condo buildings include some kind of recreational spaces – a gym or an indoor pool, and most feature a private lounge or bar. These, combined with the 24 hour concierge service desk which can arrange everything from grocery shopping to housekeeping, ensure that the owners’ designer life is almost self-contained within the building. The image is of effortless living with no domestic work necessary – a postindustrial Manhattan lifestyle that solves the old “servant problem” by outsourcing services – from grocery shopping to dry cleaning to cooking to dog walking. While Martha Stewart seems to have convinced middle America that domestic chores are fun (or at least that’s the fantasy she’s sold them), the really wealthy evidently haven’t bought this idea. In a designer lifestyle, domesticity is equated with drudgery that others can do, leaving more time to see and be seen.

A couple of further distinctive aspects of the websites worth commenting on are the music and the press page. Many of these websites feature music – it seems to be essential to create an aural ambience for a designer condo building – this is usually some kind of electronic ambient music, although Tschumi’s Blue, for example, features a short section of an old soul classic, “At last, the skies are blue…” by Etta James (I think?). Finally, and no less important, most designer condo websites feature a “press” page. The media publicity machine is already at work long before building has even started, with success measured in column inches and the number of feature articles (here design meets the media industry). Santiago Calatrava’s 80 South Street is the best example of this, with 18 articles collected on the website, that is, 18 articles about a proposed luxury condo building that hasn’t been built yet (and may never be built).

Bernard Tschumi, Blue, conspicious distinction

Buying a part of history

The most important aspect of starchitect-designed condos is that they have been designed by a famous architect. Calatrava’s 80 South Street, a speculative tower designed in 2003, features the following quotes on its website: “As featured in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York” and “own a part of architectural history”. The building is thus promoted as already part of the narrative of architectural history and already certified by a major museum as a significant cultural object, even though it doesn’t yet exist. And given the development comprises only 10 apartments starting from $29 million, it may never be economically viable. However, if it is never built, will it still be included in architectural history?

Meanwhile, The Urban Glass House certainly relies on a particular history of modernism in its promotion, making direct references to Philip Johnson’s original Glass House in Connecticut and suggesting that this new tower is destined to become a modernist classic in the same vein. The large billboard advertising the development in 2005 featured a split image, with half of Annabelle Seldorf’s face matched with half of Johnson’s face (Johnson’s half in black and white of course, to signify “history”). The tagline underneath read, “Modernist luxury as evolved”. PJ’s actual role in the design of The Urban Glass House is unclear to me, but my sense is that he simply lent his name to the project and Seldorf did the designing (though why, at his age, he would bother is indeed a mystery). Following Meier’s lead, modernism has continuing luxury appeal in Manhattan with The Urban Glass House and, as with the Calatrava development, buyers are not just buying a place to live, but a significant piece of architectural history.

While the language of modernism continues to appeal, Yoo Downtown by Philippe Starck, offers a slight variation on the starchitect-designed condo. Here, Starck has created a kind of postmodern gestamkunstwerk, designing not only the lobby area but also the pool, gym, theater and open-air terrace (“Starck Park”), in addition to providing a catalogue of furnishing options for the apartments. Starck’s best known projects in New York are a series of hotels designed for Mr Lifestyle himself, Ian Schreger, including the Royalton (1988), the Paramount (1990) and the Hudson (2000). With Yoo Downtown, Starck is extending his postmodern hotel aesthetic into spaces you can actually own. He has not only designed the public spaces, but is also presented as your personal interior design consultant, with four Starck furnishing options to choose from: Nature, Culture, Minimal or Classic. Each features a series of mix and match furniture and lighting choices from various designers (including Starck himself) so you can own your very own Philippe Starck-designed stage upon which to live out your designer fantasies.

Bernard Tschumi, Blue, billboard marketing designer interiors

But who are these fantasies designed for? Who needs a designer lifestyle anyway? A short essay on lifestyle from the website of Herzog and de Meuron’s, 40 Bond Street (developer Ian Schreger), provides some clues:

“Lifestyle is an expression of the life well lived. Lifestyle is the sum of our individual choices. It is the way we make our lives our very own. As old institutions fade and social structures fall away, the world is a smaller place. We are more mobile, jetting from one side of the world to the other, moving from one role in society to another. Nationality and class have been replaced by lifestyle. People find their place in the world through intelligence and taste. There are tribes of taste today. They recognize each other by their style. Lifestyle is the way a person distinguishes himself or herself. It is the artistry of living.”

Designer lifestyles are here equated with exclusivity and membership of a particular cosmopolitan class with good taste. However, only for an extremely small and select group of people has nationality been replaced by lifestyle – extensive passport controls at international airports and the erection of walls along the US-Mexican border suggest otherwise (imagine at a border crossing someone saying to the guards, “Hey, I’ve got lifestyle, let me in!”). Class, meanwhile, remains a key defining feature amongst of life in New York, and “lifestyle” and “taste” continue to be key determinants of class. The artistry of living, meanwhile, has been reduced here to consumption, as wealthy consumers are convinced to buy a lifestyle ready-made from famous designers. The “artistry of living” can be achieved without effort, creative input or even individuality, simply purchased as a prepackaged fantasy that seems like simply an up-scale version of Disney’s fantasy lifestyles on offer in Celebration, USA.

Finally, designer lifestyles, as presented in the image-world of the luxury condo, are centered around individual pleasures and individual consumption rather than any concept of community (where are you Jane Jacobs?). The surrounding neighborhood exists solely as a site of consumption, with the publicity material highlighting spaces such as cafes, restaurants and designer boutiques (rather than, say, public libraries, parks, schools or swimming pools). There is never any mention of interacting with the neighbors or participating in any kind of community life – the designer condo building is a sealed, exclusive enclave for a select “tribe of taste”.

But wait, there’s more

The Pandiscio company, a contemporary “brand creation and marketing” company create what they call “branded addresses”, and currently represent 40 Mercer, The Urban Glass House and Cipriani Club Residences. It seems that luxury living is now in the hands of brand consultants as much as developers or architects. Incidently, Pandiscio are located, appropriately enough, in the Meatpacking District. Their latest gimmick is a series of handmade soft toys called Cuddle Me Condos. These include characterizations of luxury condo buildings, including 40 Mercer (above left) and The Urban Glass House (above right) as well as Cipriani Club Residences and One Kenmare Square.

Finally, for his 40 Mercer St condos, developer/hotelier Andre Balasz (he who bought the Maison Tropicale), commissioned a children’s book as part of the marketing program. “Jacques et Jill” is a charming tale of two chihuahuas who fall in love in Soho and watch the sun set from the glass balcony of 40 Mercer St’s penthouse suite. Of course, the irony is that while chihuahuas (at least quiet ones) might be tolerated at 40 Mercer St, children certainly do not feature in luxury condo ads. Indeed, 40 Mercer St’s publicity does not feature childcare or babysitting listed under the amenities and features no playroom for children – it’s quite clear that children are not part of the “adventurous, sophisticated lifestyle” portrayed at 40 Mercer St. But everyone knows that adventurous, sophisticated people love reading a good children’s book and cuddling up with a soft toy of their designer condo, especially right after they’ve visited their therapist.

Designing Designer Designs

So how is it possible to address the role of design in this imaging process? Is it still possible to separate the physical building from the associated branding and marketing? Or, is the physical building really significant without the imaging process? Does the contemporary architect simply provide a distinctive veneer on a fantasy developed by branding experts? Beyond the hype, it is important to note in conclusion that the starchitects involved in these condo projects have not substantially redefined urban living. There is certainly never any mention of the condo’s connection to society as a whole – the complete absence of the issues of sustainability or environmental design principles confirm that the designer lifestyle is not only a self-centered fantasy, but one that may prove to be ultimately socially and environmentally unsustainable.

Photos of Nouvel's 40 Mercer St and Tschumi's Blue by D.J. Huppatz

FURTHER LINKS

Sondra Fein, “Condo Cool: Starchitect Branding and the Cost of “Effortless Living, or, Another Episode in the Continuing Quest for Social Status Through Design”, Harvard Design Magazine, Spring/Summer 2007. An excellent article about starchitect condos in Manhattan that I only just discovered when I was finished this entry. A must read.

An extensive list of luxury condo developments in Manhattan by Corcoran Sunshine Group here.

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Julie V. Iovine, “Jack and Jill went up the private elevator”, New York Times, November 6, 2005. Includes a page from the children’s book for 40 Mercer St.