Dwelling on Dwellings

Why should so many care so much about someplace intended for the use of so few? Apparently, it’s inevitable. The compulsion to dwell on dwellings you’ll never inhabit could be the inverse of the Marxist axiom regarding club membership.

Two weeks ago, nightclub owner-turned-hotelier-turned-real estate developer Ian Schrager control-released detailed renderings of the stratospherically expensive 40 Bond Street condominium in lower Manhattan, via a by-application-only website and an article in the New York Times (full-disclosure: that I wrote). The 27-unit luxury condo, designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron, instantly became hot bait for swarms of real-estate piranhas on the Internet. Good? Bad? Both Schrager and his architects revealed degrees of ambiguity about contributing to the feeding frenzy.

First, remember that the building is just a hole in the ground. The only “there” there is a swank sales office around the corner with full-scale mock-ups of a window frame, a bit of decorative wall treatment for the lobby, a sink, and some models loaded up with bunches of miniature trees that would never in reality flourish as shown. But, boy, does it do the trick. A personal favorite: the “living room” with Herzog & de Meuron’s sleek cast iron hearth and fireplace. In front of it, a white leather couch from Peggy Guggenheim’s villa in Venice. Why? Because Schrager — by the way, Rick, Humphrey Bogart’s nightclub eminence supreme, wouldn’t have been caught dead developing condos, but somehow this former velvet-roper gets a pass — thought it looked cool on a visit last summer and documented the sofa closely enough with his digital camera to have it replicated. See how easy it is for fabulousness to rub off on all that it touches?

Even if it’s only virtual contact. The website offers a tantalizing glimpse of what’s in store for initiates but the rest of us can only turn to information boot-legged by bloggers. And no detail seems too minor to rehash. Curbed gave comparative readings to the floor plans closer than most students would give to Hamlet’s soliloquies. The Gutter ran down the hors-d’oeuvres served at the press opening of the sales office. And Triple Mint’s hermeneutical analysis of structural detailing gave balanced consideration to the cast glass façade as well as the Jasper Morrison bathroom light fixtures and Miele appliances. (Someone break it to the talented industrial designer Konstanin Grcic that his hardware fell short of being mentionable.)

Naturally, it’s all pulse-perfect gorgeous. But what else could it be when you’ve got $2,800 a foot to play with? (Pace Donald Trump.) Still, a creeping squirm factor is beginning to infuse all this coverage of luxury condos. It seems like we went from bemoaning junky construction to whinging about excessively good design in one fell hiccup. Even Jacques Herzog, when discussing 40 Bond, felt compelled to try to put some kind of perspective on what he designed there, and what he believes is the right thing for architects to do. Knowing most people will never get into the building, he told me that he and partner Pierre de Meuron at least tried to make the place look interesting on the street for the pedestrian hoi polloi. Thus, a fence that looks like graffiti scribbles recalls the groovy glory days when the city was too bankrupt to clean itself. Cool, but its real job is still to block access to the so-called good life.

Schrager also rails happily against starchitecture, the phenomenon by which shrewd developers attach name-to-conjure-with architects to projects far from being built in order to stir up press attention and attract speculative money. Schrager told me on cue that he hates the idea of celebrity architecture, called it “totally repugnant.” Kenneth Frampton, the Ware Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, would probably second that. He told a crowd at the Municipal Art Society in Manhattan in late January that architectural “icons are determined by surface, a star system, a pecking order that the media either over or under criticizes…the Bilbao effect: hire Gehry because he’s ‘it’ — it’s not about the architecture.”

To rehash: Once, not at all too long ago, a lot of buildings — especially condominiums — were thrown up without regard for anything, particularly design. Then architects got hip, and started to design everything in sight. And now it’s pissing people off. Is it really bad for architecture that great talents like Gehry and Herzog & de Meuron are so in demand, so flush with work? Obviously, it’s the exclusivity that grates. Nobody knows yet if all the design amenities stocking luxury condos today will filter down to the betterment of our own domestic lives tomorrow. Unlike prospective owners at 40 Bond, I have no essential desire for my own wet room, whatever that is, or even for the “effortless living” Schrager is promising. And yet, perhaps we can agree on one thing: the democratic standardization of 11-foot ceilings would be nice.

Julie Iovine is the architecture critic for The Architect’s Newspaper and features director at Elle Decor magazine. Following a 12-year stint as a reporter at The New York Times, Iovine still contributes to the paper on architecture and design.