Beware the Dark Side

The GE building: Product of a more enlightened age.

Myron Magnet looks at the dark and light sides of New York architecture:

Buildings once expressed some human value or aspiration—and I don’t mean just Greek temples or Gothic cathedrals that proclaimed the immanence of the sacred, but also structures like the old GE building on Lexington Avenue and 51st Street, with its riot of moderne decoration magnificently celebrating man’s mastery of electric power. By contrast, the Hearst Tower is as soulless as any International-Style edifice, and to make up for that defect, it has appropriated an artificial soul. Like a growing number of twenty-first-century buildings in the same plight, it declares itself a temple of ecology that treads lightly and reverently upon the earth, despite its oppressive—indeed, elephantine—footprint, despite the wholly manufactured appearance of its shiny stainless-steel exoskeleton and four-story-high glass scales, despite housing a corporation that gobbles up forests, and despite standing in a metropolis that is triumphantly a work of art, not nature. Nevertheless, though neither civilization nor capitalism has anything to apologize for in the use it makes of the earth, the building’s entrance proudly sports the seal of the U.S. Green Building Council, and the Hearst Corporation’s website coos about the building’s “environmental sustainability,” including its recycled steel (like most steel nowadays), its energy efficiency, and its “harvesting” of rainwater, which, among other wonders, bubbles down the atrium waterfall, “believed to be the nation’s largest sustainable water feature.”