When you fly low over the Hudson River at night, as you often have the pleasure of doing when landing in New York, the city's avenues are invisible behind their dark walls, but the cross streets snap open one by one, chasms filled with white and yellow light. Each in turn reveals some chance cargo; for two seconds, maybe three, you catch the backed-up traffic, a hint of neon, and always the buildings above them, mostly mute but for the sparkle they steal from other sources. Fading to black above the electric life of the streets, they are so many once-treasured knickknacks arranged by whim on their gridded shelves: a little teapot with faded blue glazing, a doll's head, a thimble.
And then there is Times Square, too wide to miss and too awesome to ignore. Light seems to come out of the seething floor of the square, blasting the buildings that cannot, for all their designerly gymnastics, compete with this energy, as constant as gravity or the sun. Architecture succumbs as well to the blinking signs, which accrete from the square's bright focus and climb ever higher on the unwitting scaffolds that generations of diligent architects have been kind enough to provide. From the air, it is so clearly the prize, almost the purpose, of New York and, looking past dimmer expanses to the horizon, maybe the world.
Down in Times Square there may no longer be vice enough to satisfy every taste, but rising above it there is evidence of many sins-- arrogance and vanity, avarice and sloth. Circling the square, supporting the brilliant signs, is a roster of architectural deviance, past and present: the Viacom and Bertelsmann buildings--what became of cool Modernism--with their sloppy flanks and pointy crowns; the self-important bastion of John Portman's Marriott Marquis; an inscrutable black box at 1500 Broadway; and Four Times Square, a building that tried, through repeated construction disasters, to keep itself from being built, just as it tries now not to be seen, using every feint in massing, skin, and detail to pretend it is not quite so huge. The buildings that are not yet built, or never were, fill out this lineup: the new home for Reuters, on the grave of the little Rialto Building, and the memory of Philip Johnson's best-laid plans: high pomo tyranny with two versions of post-facto appliqué.
The best building is the twice reclad One Times Square, formerly the Times Tower, ground zero of the millennium. Stripped of its brick in favor of white marble in 1965, the building is a perfect stage for the signs that perch on it with such disarming clumsiness. From top to bottom, a flag inviting all to the "Times Square 2000" celebration, a steaming Cup-O-Noodles, a Budweiser spectacular that simulates Pac Man as it cycles through a dozen modes, the NBC Jumbotron with its news of war, and the famous zipper, rescued and refurbished by Dow Jones. At the crowded foot of the tower, past a bivouac for the police, is a site not found on any official map. Technically, it is a part of Seventh Avenue and Broadway, which diverge at this point, between 43rd and 44th streets, forming a long triangle pointing north.
Since 1946 this site--a "gore" in planners' parlance--has been home to the country's most prominent armed forces recruiting station, a stark booth with four desks: Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. But the site is empty now behind a snipe-covered plywood construction wall, the building having been rejected by the Smithsonian and dumped, maybe in the Meadowlands. It's here, on the most conspicuous site in the most important public space in New York City, that two little-known architects are preparing to build.
Adam Yarinsky and Stephen Cassell, the founding partners of Architecture Research Office (ARO), have come to Times Square to be photographed on a mild evening in late March. They are not here to work, but after arriving they find that one of the first jobs performed by the project's lowest-bid contractor is not to spec. A subway vent (containing what they guess to be three feet of cigarette butts) covers most of the site and all of what will be the footprint of their new recruiting station. The contractor has literally cut corners, failing to angle some of the new grating to match the hypotenuse of the site along Broadway. They huddle to figure it out.
With their for-the-occasion suits and quick, innocent grins, they stand in contrast to the cosmopolitan glam of the square and the thinly disguised cynicism of the towers around them, rising up to meet their mortgage obligations. They are both young, which in architecture can mean any age under 50, but in their case is closer to the word's true sense; Yarinsky is 35, Cassell, 34. Both are married and each has one child. (Cassell, when caught at the site with a cell phone, insists that he got it because of his new baby, not for business or other affectations.) Their 12-person firm, founded in 1994, is a family affair in other ways. An ARO brochure, designed by Cassell's wife, an art director at a New York design magazine, records the birth of Yarinsky's son among the watershed events on an office timeline. The list also includes the three major projects they are completing this summer: a house in Telluride, Colorado, a loft renovation in Soho, and the Times Square recruiting station, set to open this Fourth of July.
The two heads of ARO met at the Princeton School of Architecture during what they refer to as the late Michael Graves era. They overlapped there for one year in the mid-Eighties before Yarinsky completed his graduate studies and headed west to teach at the University of Michigan, leaving Cassell to finish up his first degree. ("He was one of the cool undergraduates," Yarinsky says. "And he was one of the nerdy graduate students," Cassell counters.) At Princeton, Cassell studied biochemistry and molecular biology before switching majors. "Architecture seemed to have some aspects of biochemistry, which was about understanding complicated systems. And since my hobbies were always making things"--he has made jewelry since age 12, following the lead of a grandfather who was a jeweler and a civil engineer--"architecture seemed to have the biochemistry part and the 'making things' part." To this Yarinsky adds: "All in one neat package."
On the surface, Cassell plays the star designer, and Yarinsky is more the builder, roles that were first established when they worked together at Steven Holl's office in the early 1990s. At 25, Cassell was the project architect for Holl's celebrated Hybrid Building in Seaside, Florida. Yarinsky was brought in a few years later, at Cassell's recommendation, to get the award-winning Stretto House built.
"I was the Reality Bites guy in the office," he says. But the pigeonholes are not at all perfect. Each has a balance of intellect and facility that suffuses the firm and its work. Some of this Cassell attributes to the environment in Holl's office, which was quite small at the time. "We learned a ton about how to run projects there. And for any job you ran you had to negotiate the contract. I did the bookkeeping for a year."
Of the two, Yarinsky is a touch more professorial, though now when they teach, they teach together, most recently last fall at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where Cassell went to study after Princeton. During a recent stint of jury duty, Yarinsky passed the time reading Differences: Topographies
of Contemporary Architecture, a collection of essays by Spanish architect and theorist Ignasi de Solà-Morales. Afterwards he raved that the book "blends Deleuze with phenomenology. To me there is a lot of resonance with the way we are working. It's a very small paperback," he says, "about $10."
That easy shift between the intellectual and the mundane says more about ARO's practice than any affinity for theory. ("Theory should be the operating system, not the screen saver," quips Cassell. "I just made that up. Throw it in a pull quote.") In only five years, they have established themselves in many quarters as architects who are versatile, intelligent, and--most important--grounded in the real. Edwin Schlossberg, the founder of ESI, the New York interactive design house, worked with ARO on a prototype inner-city science center, and he also housed them in a corner of his office during their first year in business. "Either fortunately or unfortunately, I haven't dealt with architects who use a lot of rhetoric," he says. "ARO gets straight to the point."
ARO's office, once shared with another firm but now theirs alone after a round of new hires, is in a former printing house on Varick Street in Soho, a building full of similar design-world aspirants. It's a standard-issue architect's space, mostly, but without the pretensions to order that make many so sterile; it feels more like a workshop. One high wall is a floor-to-ceiling blackboard on which a geometric pattern of scales--the exterior of the Telluride house, called Sunshine Mesa, after its site--has been sketched out. Nearby, a full-size mock-up, a cavity wall clad with gorgeous Cor-Ten steel plates, displays a homemade system that allows the notoriously cranky material to rust to a deep eggplant brown, while protecting it from decay. The detail they developed (and tested through a winter on the site) might be an example of the "research" in ARO, but Yarinsky and Cassell are uncharacteristically vague about the meaning of their firm's name. Cassell explains: "Actually, we came up with it in, like, three days because we were trying to get a job designing the space inside a computer game. To be honest, we thought about it far less than we should have." Still, it fits, both in its self-effacing, generic overtones and its refusal to indulge in the usual trendy alternatives to putting one's name on the door: Asymptote, Resolution 4 Architecture, FORM, Morphosis. Enough?
On the wall above the Cor-Ten study, a series of cardboard models records the dozen or so close iterations that the Sunshine Mesa house went through before its elegant system of parallel slabs, loosely defining circulation as they step down their slope, was found. It's a trick they picked up from Steven Holl. "You could never show him a project unless you'd drawn through it in several different ways," Yarinsky says. It is also a method of working that suits designers who value intuition, one of the things that sets ARO apart from many architects. For Sunshine Mesa, the first move was to work with the walls, an unabashedly visceral reaction to the hillside site and to the client's high-priority demand that specific views of the surrounding ranges be framed. (Each member of the family had a favorite: The father liked Mount Sneffels; his son wanted a view of Sunshine Peak.) Cassell remembers the key moment: Working with one model, the walls locked in to suggest linked volumes, and he knew it was just right.
This intuition-heavy approach also owes a debt to Holl, whose very personal and expressive designs often begin as gestural watercolors of spaces. But ARO's is an intuition that looks first to pragmatism, then to poetry--intuition fed by problems. At their Harvard studio last fall, they tried to encourage this line of thinking, asking students to approach the program--a simple fencing salle--with a "false" one-week project. "Right away we had to dive into the problem and just come up with a 'building,'" one of their students, Thamarit Suchart, remembers. Then, with the square footage in the right place and the fencers out of the rain, the students were free to consider the problem afresh. But, according to Suchart, many of them had already found something that stayed with the project, the fruit of that fast-track experiment in trusting their guts.
ARO is also good at rigor. To site the walls precisely at Sunshine Mesa, they toggled from intuition to science, building an accurate 15- by 17-mile scale computer model of the terrain around Telluride. With this tool, a chunk of the Rockies on their hard drive, they could calculate sight lines with confidence. Connie Giles, a local architect, couldn't believe how well they framed the views--"I'm out here every day and I don't get that close"--or how well the house, with its Cor-Ten fins, fits in. "How do you respond to this landscape that just blows you away? What do you do? Tradition tells us that these quiet buildings are the right thing. But this is another way that looks like it works."
This other way is ARO's philosophy, measured by their distance from Holl. Cassell wrestles with it. "We're not idiosyncratic in the same way he is. It's not that our projects aren't formal, because they are. But what we are trying to do is to work on them longer before we let that creep in. It's not like we have a formal idea, a series of triangles or something, and then make the architecture work to that. We work so much around constraints--construction, program, process--that we try to come up with ideas that make sense and will work within them. Then we find a formal language that's rigorous. It can be quite rich, but it's so obviously specific to each project. Like the Cor-Ten wall. It does make sense, but if you look at it from the outside, people say, 'How did you convince your clients to do that?'"
As it happens, the clients, parents of a woman for whom ARO designed a New York loft with a funky leather floor, were won over by Cassell's ability to develop practical and formal issues hand in hand. "Stephen synthesizes everything," Karen Heitoff says from her home in Minnesota. "I firmly believe that when our house is completed there will be no stone unturned. There won't be one corner he hasn't considered." In one bedroom Cassell gave a corner some special last-minute attention, cutting in a window to face what he says is "a really beautiful little grove of aspens." By doing so, he also violated the logic of the straight walls before it could become a dead gesture, marking this house as a place where life, messy and exceptional, orders architecture. Cassell calls this "taking the system and twisting around local circumstance," a reminder that before exceptions must come rules.
What do you do, and how do you know what not to do? Architects can trust their taste, of course, and there is theory, which at its most profound offers a rationale for action, or, for those who don't build, at least the contemplation of it. Then there is conscience, one hopes, because like doctors, architects should first do no harm. But when more and more is possible, and always easier, where does one look for limits? Every reliable dogma has been banished, or failed outright, unable to keep up with the changes--in sensibility, in technology--that are the burden of architecture's lockstep progress with the cultures it seeks to house. In the grossest sense, there are but three places to find new rules: within or without, or both at once. Architecture as a measured take on the real world with all its madness, anyone?
Before he spun off into theorizing about cyberspace, Michael Benedikt wrote a tract called "For an Architecture of Reality." The high point comes on page four, a description of a beautiful idea to which he gives an ugly name, "the direct aesthetic experience of the real." What he means is gravity, the sun--the little things--waiting for an answer after we ask the brick what it wants to be. His catchy motto: "In our media-saturated times it falls to architecture to have the direct aesthetic experience of the real at the center of its concerns."
Following Adam Yarinsky through the 7,000-square-foot loft on the top two floors of 54 Thompson Street in Soho, it is clear that he is in love with its materials first. He points out dozens of them, some already in their glory, like the book-matched blue Bahia granite wall, some--the gold and silver interference paint or the kitchen's micaceous schist--still under wraps or piled on palettes in the huge space. The materials, in fact the entire loft, seem at first to be a hodgepodge. Or, more generously, a series of "researches." But there is a logic. Most of them do special things in light. (Why light? "It's a rare opportunity. We have four really good exposures," Yarinsky says.) The fault lines of the oak floor are intended to meet direct sun at a right angle, so that the heavy grain pops, appearing to ripple on the surface. And light also arranged the rooms. Wake up with the sun in the master bedroom and it will follow you all day, to the kitchen and the main space, finally setting over the Hudson as you watch TV in the den. The main stair is not so easily justified, though who could resist a Guy Nordenson--engineered cascading aluminum structure locked into a torque-resisting wall of laminated glass? The budget for the project is $4.5 million, and apart from that stair, none of it was spent on "form," in the sense that we see it most often. For ARO, at least for now, it is enough just to tweak the vast white cavity of the loft. As an inspired Columbia architecture critic once warned his students before they set off to reinvent the wheel: "You're going to have to give me a really good reason why this building should not just be a dumb box."
In 1947, Henry-Russell Hitchcock wrote a prescient essay, "The Architecture of Bureaucracy and the Architecture of Genius." Like John Ruskin, who made a Victorian distinction between architecture and mere building, Hitchcock argued that genius and bureaucracy represent two practices. From a "genius" one should expect a magnificent artistic response to a given program--Frank Lloyd Wright's just unveiled designs for the Guggenheim were his touchstone--but one runs a great risk of commissioning a functional or aesthetic flop. "In other words," he wrote, "the architecture of genius is an artistic gamble that may or may not come off, but rarely just gets by." Bureaucratic architects, by which he meant larger, more regimented, and typically faceless firms like Albert Kahn Inc., should be given those projects that must be built well and fast, but that need not carry any important symbolic load. Writing soon after the war, Hitchcock was primarily concerned with building a lot, and as quickly as possible. And though he stressed that works of genius would be needed to balance the coming wave of functional buildings, he thought that, for a time at least, they could wait.
Though few clients and fewer architects followed Hitchcock's wise prescription, the roles he identified are burned into the heart of the profession. There are the architects one goes to for airports and skyscrapers, and there are the architects one hires to do churches and museums. But, usually to the detriment of those using and viewing those same buildings, architects freely cross Hitchcock's line. Seeing the impossibility of successful art by committee, he wrote that "we must guard against the enticement of ideas and features which promise to give to bureaucratic building something of the special expressive power that can be legitimately provided only by architects of genius working as individuals." In all fairness, we must also guard against genius architects who would attempt to take on a complex "building," an impossible task in a profession where nobody can be a generalist, in firm control of all the latest techniques and tools. Of course, Hitchcock's assessment did not take into account hybrid cases: a Gordon Bunshaft, say, working at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, or the common practice of a genius (it's so hard not to put quotation marks there) teaming up with bureaucrats to get something built right. And his warmth for an architecture of function with all niceties banned is clearly that of a critic who had just sat through a crippling war, more crippling for architects than most. But today, with the best economy ever in this American century, and only a distant war, architects should be able to get it just right.
A parable: In a large U.S. city, a public official is invited to view a fashionable architect's project for a major piece of public infrastructure. It is a monstrous thing, vague, but boiling with ego and disdain--for its site, the public, and the processes that would make it real. Departing, the bureaucrat announces, "This is exactly what is wrong with architecture. All you can do with something like this is say, 'Thank you very much,' and then ignore it." The moral is not that a genius should stay in his depth; it is a cry for a third way, something of which Hitchcock just barely dares to dream at the end of his essay: the flash of the genius without risk, the competence of the bureaucrat without sterility.
Back at Times Square, Yarinsky and Cassell have resolved to question the contractor about the bungled grates, but because they'll be concealed completely under the stainless steel skirt of the new station, it may not pay to have him fabricate new ones. Now they are posing gamely at the spot where, in a few months, their building will be an instant Broadway star. A dozen cameras from the networks and the Web are always trained on Times Square, and in the fall, when ABC begins broadcasting Good Morning America from a glassed-in balcony at 1500 Broadway, the recruiting station is likely to sit right in the camera's path. Scooping them, MTV is taping the construction of the station in time-lapse from its square-side perch in the Viacom Building, across 44th Street from that little shard of a site.
ARO got this plum job by word of mouth, through Parsons Brinckerhoff, the giant engineering firm. Parsons executives couldn't be bothered with the project after the joint military powers decided that they wanted "a quote unquote high-profile design," Cassell says. "Of course, there was no definition of what 'high profile' was." The station quickly became a political football and a study in red tape. It took 22 meetings in three months to get it approved last year, wading through the alphabet soup of competing interests: the DOD, the MTA, the DOT. Then the Times Square BID, coveting the property, tried to kill it outright. And, of course, there were the usual client headaches. At a meeting in Pittsburgh, where a regional branch of the Army Corps of Engineers has an office, "some Air Force colonel said to us, 'If you don't get it in on time and on budget, one of you two will get shot.' " They got it done, but not without first realizing that they were in too deep. "We only had one person to deal with bureaucracy and one person to draw," Cassell says. "I thought we could handle it alone. I was wrong."
The design of the station is simple: two American flags, something that everyone can get. Weighing cruder language, Cassell calls it "a tough little squat building." He's not sure it's saying what it should, but what should it say? "There's no way it could compete with all the signs in Times Square." In a Venturi-esque move that he stresses they would never make elsewhere, they made a sign. (On the open market, its retail value would be $1.5 million a year.) The two long flanks of the building are lined with fluorescent bulbs sheathed in red, white, and blue tubes of a 3M plastic made for use on highway road signs. It reflects colored light, but at night--this is ARO's discovery--it can also transmit it. The best part is that nobody knows what the light will do. ARO consulted a lighting designer who told them that with so much reflection and ambient neon haze, there is no way to accurately calculate footcandles anywhere in Times Square.
So, before they throw the switch on July 4, all we know is this: By day the flags will gather whatever sunlight slants down past the station's gloomy neighbors. At night, its 300 bulbs will add what humble spark they can to the pillar of light that pours up from the square, taunting the buildings that shrink away, and widening the eyes of new arrivals.
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