EDITOR’S WORD
Economic uncertainty may cloud the future,
but one constituency that can profit in such
times is endangered architecture. Real estate
speculation, or simply lots of money to play
with, has driven the destruction of many
modernist treasures over the past ten years
— a Paul Rudolph in Connecticut, an Alfred
Browning Parker in Florida, a Samuel Marx in Missouri — even
as appreciation for the period has soared. But if the dollar signs
blinding developers to the beauty and originality of, say, a 1955
Nils Schweizer on a choice waterfront lot evaporate, they might
well move on.
Preservationists can take
heart from the landmarking
this past November of New
York City’s Silver Towers com-
plex, designed by I.M. Pei &
Associates and completed
in 1967, with its signature
sculpture by Pablo Picasso. It
is the first postwar large-scale
urban renewal development
in the city to secure such pro-
tection. The designation is a victory not only for the Greenwich
Village Society for Historic Preservation, which, with the support of
groups like DOCOMOMO, the AIA and the Municipal Art Society,
waged a five-year-long campaign under the direction of Andrew
Berman, but for modernist developments everywhere. Increasingly,
preservationists are concerned not only with protecting buildings,
but also the landscapes that they are part of. These might be physi-
cally integrated into a design, such as a pedestrian plaza — the
Sunset-Vine Tower in Hollywood, discussed in City Report, is an
example — or a distant view that is integral to the architect’s vision,
such as at Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in La Jolla. Silver Towers is
more than a collection of three 30-story buildings; the complex
is distinguished by the heterogeneous spatial relationships of the
structures to one another across an open plaza, to the massive yet
lyrical sculpture that marks the center and to the urban fabric from
which the development is set apart.
New York University, which owns two of the towers as well as
the land underneath the complex, has revealed its intention to
build a 40-story tower in the open space to the north of the sculp-
ture. However, the Landmarks Preservation Commission’s acknowl-
edgement of the integral role of open space at Silver Towers — it
noted the “tension between the buildings and the space they occu-
py” — makes approval unlikely.
While this preservation success was not linked to economics,
each such victory sets a precedent. Landmarking may be the best
protection, but the cash and credit crunch provides a window of
opportunity to encourage voluntary preservation through renova-
tion and adaptive reuse.
Many thanks to Artnet.com for sponsoring our Winter online
edition. Artnet.com is a rich web portal for collectors, providing
access to online auctions; information on market trends in the fine
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features covering the world’s art and design markets.
–Andrea Truppin
10 www.modernismmagazine.com
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