Influx

A fascinating piece in New York Magazine on the evolving architecture of New York city focusing in on the changes over the past fifteen years. If anyone was looking for a great example of being able to thrive and survive in an era of constant flux, New York is a great one.

“Our city is molting.

Bricks
flake away. So do brittle fire escapes, terra-cotta encrustations, old
paint, cracked stoops, faded awnings, sash windows, and stone laurels
fashioned a century ago by Sicilian carvers. New York is shucking off
its aging walk-ups, its small and mildewed structures, its drafty
warehouses, cramped stores, and idle factories. In their place, the
city is sprouting a hard, glistening new shell of glass and steel.
Bright, seamless towers with fast elevators and provisional views
spring up over a street-level layer of banks and drugstores. In some
cities, a building retains the right to exist until it’s proved
irredeemable. Here, colossal towers are merely placeholders, temporary
arrangements of future debris. New York lives by a philosophy of
creative destruction. The only thing permanent about real estate is a
measured patch of earth and the column of air above it. The rest is
disposable.

And
the metamorphosis has sped up. In the past fifteen fat years, more than
76,000 new buildings have gone up, more than 44,000 were razed, another
83,000 were radically renovated—a rate of change that evokes those
time-lapse nature films in which flowers spring up and wither in a
matter of seconds. For more than a decade, we have awakened to
jackhammers and threaded our way around orange plastic netting,
calculating that, since our last haircut, workers have added six more
stories to that high-rise down the block. Now that metamorphosis is
slowing as the economy drags. Buildings are still going up, but the
boom is winding down. Before the next one begins is a good time to ask,
has this ferment improved New York or eaten away at the city’s soul?”

Posted by Ed Cotton