Small Wonder: 41 Cooper Square

If the perforated metal was hard to see through, I could understand the need for some unmediated views, but it is not. The sad little concrete bench built in next to the window behind that cut-out is nowhere I would want to hang out. And to make the cut-out work, Mayne has had to engineer a huge curve of concrete running perpendicular to the edge of the slashing “gesture.” This takes away much of its energy, and anarchy. The difference between a real cut and one embalmed in architecture is similar to the difference between revolutionary Frank Gehry and the one we see today. When he tossed chain-link fence up in the air around his house in 1978 it was loose and direct; contrast that with the frozen music of the IAC Building’s scudding waves. The former seems like a better lesson for students than the mid-career signature style of the latter.

Mayne’s 2007 Federal Building in San Francisco, which I saw last spring, is a powerful piece of architecture, also more horizontal than vertical, and also employing a metallic wrap. That building owns its corner, and suggests that the future of organizations (corporate or governmental) is not in the vertical skyscraper. But it, like 41 Cooper Square, is also aggressively anti-urban. The Federal Building’s ground floor, which includes a “plaza” and a saw-tooth-roofed snack bar, seems to repel people. That may have been what the situation required — the building’s location on Mission is grungy, and there are a lot of obvious efforts downtown to homeless-proof the new architecture — but judging by these two examples, hermeticism is also part of the Morphosis DNA.

At the sidewalk 41 Cooper Square might as well be set in the middle of a parking lot in Mayne’s native L.A. I was thinking of the criss-crossing concrete legs as Breuer-esque (there are lots of big boxes lofted on diagonal columns in his campus buildings in University Heights) when another building, closer to Mayne’s home turf, popped into my head: Eliot Noyes’s 1964 IBM Aerospace Building in Los Angeles, now the Otis College of Art and Design. Almost a cube, clad in precast concrete panels punctuated with windows that suggest a punchcard, Noyes’s building lifted its symbolic screens off the ground on shifted diagonal legs and does sit in the middle of a sea of cars. Noyes’s building offered shaded space at the base, before the glass entrance, but in Mayne’s building, the space between concrete and glass is narrow and empty. A strip big enough for some sociability opens up on the south side, where a bookstore is scheduled to open. Maybe they will put out a few tables? In their loneliness the interstices of the legs are filling with bits of trash.

There is a small publicly-accessible lobby inside the entrance at the corner of Third and East 7th Street, and the guard ringed by the front desk will point you downstairs to a gallery. But the reason anyone would want to come inside, the lattice-wrapped, four-story, daylit “vertical piazza”, is only half visible, buried at the center of the volume.