Turning Green

It used to be that architects aspired to design the tallest buildings in the world. The race really quickened in the nineteen-twenties with Philly's own PSFS building designed by George Howe and William Lescaze. (For fifty years Philly counted itself out of the Height Race with its pious ukase that no building shalt be taller than the Calder Penn statue atop City Hall. It took the German Helmut Jahn to break that taboo, with his Liberties!)

The Empire State Building quickly trumped it, soon to be upped by the fancy, schmancy Art Deco Chrysler Building (still my all time surge in skyscrapers!) Hohum with the Sears Tower in Chicago, and sorry, Osama bin Laden, the World Trade Center may have been the tallest Evil Symbol of the American Devil, it was also Tackytecture.

As a native Detroiter I was forever wishing the best for that local boy made tall, Minoru Yamasaki. But he goofed big on this one, a failure that civil engineers are not so civilly asserting that it wasn’t very good internally either. (I will still remember fondly, dearest, our February 1982 birthday party at “Windows on the World”, which at its certain height at a certain time of day even made New Jersey look beautiful!)

Alas, we’re out of the Can You Top This race now. (Although my Numero Uno of the Moment, Santiago Calatrava, may put U.S. in the race once more—in both Chicago and New York.) The Petronas Twins in Kuala Lumpur have the bragging rights for a few nanoseconds as those Oiligarchs are practicing the New Hubris with their Petrodollar Heightened Towers. Daniel Libeskind has got the clever idea—not Height but Right as in his 1776 foot replacement for the vanished WTC. I’m not a bit depressed.

PBS is now showing us the saving futures of High Rises. And the color is green. Cesar Pelli’s Glass Geometry Lesson next to 30th Street Station is passe before it even has the green patina of age. His son Rafaelo is the newest guru. In Battery Park City he is noodling high rise apartments with an astonishingly green agenda. Nothing is wasted. Broad roof terraces recycle rain in miraculous ways, saving heat in the winter and cooling off in the summer. Leave no waste unused! Use it twice. Hell, recycle it for eternity.It’s still the same old H20 with no other possible lives but steam and ice.

Meanwhile in Midtown, architects you’ve never heard of are designing Green Towers right in the thick of it. One Bryant Square has a 200 acre plot set aside for the new HQ of Bank of America, where all the quirks of turning green are in full force. And 4 Times Square (I’m not sure I relish the new Baroque Addresses of these Green Havens) has already achieved Green Star status.

In the PBS video I saw these new horizons of sound environmental policy are explained in the clearest English, by Paul Goldberger, lately dean of the Parson School of Design and inheritor of the mantle of Lewis Mumford at the New Yorker, ably abetted by the editor of Metropolis and the several pioneering architects of the new Green cadre. It’s so easy when you put the motivation of more profit behind creative minds. Green architecture is already making more green bucks for its initiators than the sloppy old brown wastrels we became too easily accustomed to.

And noble Lord Foster has shown that even old buildings can be jiggered greenfully if a noble mind is applied. His Reichstag in Berlin and his newly bloomed Hearst Tower on Eighth Avenue both attest to the redemptive capacity of casually badly designed buildings to the Green Ethic. If you abstain from television because it isn’t green enough for your mind and emotions, think again. Each of the DVD’s are available for $19.99.

You’ll be so glad they did—architects, that is, before they reach for their Pritzker stars. Ungreen architects will soon be sneered out of the profession. The ingeniousness of their solutions makes this old Navy radar tech thrill at his recollection of electronic wonders during World War II. Down with the pushy, prissy Pritzkers with their Titanium Baubles and Men’s Pissoir White Tiles. Shticks are no longer Chic.

Green is in. Green is on. Long flourish the living world around us not yet obliterated. Check local listings.