top of the world in new york

 

One of the joys of visiting New York City is to perch atop a skyscraper and gawk at the expanse of urbanization. And it is quite delightful. We make it to the top of no less than three scrapers, including the Empire State Building, the One World Trade Center, and the Rockefeller Tower.

 

We blissfully hit the Empire State Building for an amazing witching hour dusk and saw (and photographed) some simply stunning panoramas.    

 

The One World Trade Center is the tallest of the perches at 101 stories and offers views of the Statue of Liberty.

The Rockefeller Tower offers views of the Empire State Building as well as Central Park. 

 

 

 

paul rudolph's modulighter building

 

One of the highlights of our trip to NYC last year was stopping in for a visit to Paul Rudolph's Modulighter Building. Rudolph is primarily known for his Brutalist buildings found across the country, but his more human-scaled architecture was much different, a neoplastic intersection of planes with a complex Loosian intersection of interior volumes (Rudolph's own townhouse in NYC has no less than 27 different floor levels).

 

Designed and built between 1989 and 1994 with the addition of the fourth and fifth floors based on Rudolph's drawings between 2007 and 2015, the building currently houses Modulighter, a lighting storefront that Rudolph co-established with Ernst Wagner, Wagner's home, and the Paul Rudolph Heritage Foundation. The interior is amazingly complex but the uniformity of white and transparency between spaces and with the outdoors calms the complexity, turning insanely complicated open stairwells, shelving, and floor levels into soothing sculpture. You feel like you're floating through a magical cloud as you stroll through the building.

 

We attended a First Friday Open House (serendipitously in town for it), which is really more of a house party for friends held by the client, owner and partner, Ernst Wagner, with wine and finger food. Wagner quickly noticed that we were newbies and heartily greeted and welcomed us into his home. This is the only interior residential space designed by Rudolph open to the public, and it is well worth a visit, both to experience remarkable architecture but also to partake in a wee bit of the NYC party scene.

marcel breuer's Whitney/Met/Frick in new york

We've really fallen in love with Marcel Breuer, and The Breuer Building in New York City is not only one of his best, but you can dinner in it! A Brutalist masterpiece built in the heyday of International Style glass towers, Breuer was commissioned to design a home for the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1963. The New Times Times described it as "harsh but handsome' with its stepped cantilevered facade creating space for a bridged entrance and a large, protected sunken garden. The Whitney moved to another part of town into a Renzo Piano-designed space while the Metropolitan picked up the space and rechristened it The Met Breuer. 

Sadly, the Breuer Building has fended off its share of challenges, including the horribly unfortunate proposed expansion by Michael Graves and, apparently, covid since the Met announced that it won't reopen the space after the outbreak (and will be temporarily leased to the Frick Collection).