This place mattered #2: Important observations about how landmarks are created, in large part, through memories

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This blog entry is reprinted from 1/8/2006
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Edward Durell Stone's 1960 model for his Venetian Gothic building at 2 Columbus Circle. Photo: New York Times.

Herbert Muschamp, former architecture critic for the New York Times, has a powerful piece in today's paper about the preservation battle over 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan, "The Secret History of 2 Columbus Circle."

Interestingly enough, while I was never a fan of Muschamp's enamoration with starchitecture and buildings as art objects disconnected from the world outside of the confines of the building, I think this piece has some important observations about how landmarks are "created" by their association with life and times, the importance of the memories that people associate with the places and buildings where memories are created, and the "role" of the audience and how this role has changed in some marked ways over the past 50 years.

FWIW, I never liked the building he is writing about, and until this column, maybe I wouldn't have cared if it came down. And I'm a pretty strong preservationist, although not so much in terms of the "recent past."

Muschamp's piece makes me reconsider my parochialism.
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Some of the thought provoking writing in the article:

An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone? ... Now imagine that the game is a great city. What happens to a city when it loses reliable points of comparison with exceptional moments in its past? A void occurs, and before long, the vacuum starts to fill up with myths of dubious worth. The fantasy that Rudolph W. Giuliani "saved" New York becomes conventional wisdom. The corollary fable that the 1960's and 70's were the nadir of New York's existence. Yeah, wasn't it awful! The worst!

The public hearings that weren't held might have offered a forum for sorting out that era's facts from fiction. Indeed, the landmarks agency can't conduct its business until it has properly reckoned with the period. And because the agency is itself a product of that era (it was founded a year after 2 Columbus Circle opened its doors), that would naturally have to include a reconsideration of its purpose...

I HATE TO BE THE ONE TO TELL YOU THIS, but the old, relentlessly mourned Pennsylvania Station was a dismal piece of architecture. A late arrival in the City Beautiful movement, the building tried to augment meager conviction with extreme colonnades. Walking into its cold, cavernous spaces was like arriving in Philadelphia two hours before you had to.

Was Muschamp right about Penn Station?

But so what if Penn Station wasn't Grand Central? It was a crime to tear down a building that had become so deeply impregnated with New York's emotional life. The yawning interiors had a distinctive atmosphere. Like a vast sponge for intense expectations, the station soaked up the psychic energy of arrival, departure, separation, reunion and waiting that had accumulated over the years along with the soot, water damage and flimsy commercial intrusions. The station met the new arrival with a dare: can you make the big city know that you're alive? There's nothing like debased Beaux-Arts design for throwing out a frigid welcome.

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

AN AUDIENCE is more than a group of passive consumers. It can be a productive unit as well. It produces atmospheres, memories, arguments, textures of thought, a climate of receptivity and the stage on which performances occur. In the 60's, when freeways, shopping centers and expanding suburbs were leaving the future of the urban center open to serious doubt, an audience produced an extraordinary burst of energy about the idea of New York. Architectural preservation was part of that energy, and so was 2 Columbus Circle. Both were expressions of protest, and both were aimed at the same target: the exclusivity of High Modern taste in postwar New York...

They signaled the erosion of trust in top-down cultural pronouncements and the commencement of a period when the relationship between High and Low would be extensively reconsidered.

The audience was the critical factor in this process. But audience didn't mean popularity. It stood for a quality, not merely the quantity, of people in attendance. It represented the trait of receptivity, of paying attention to events occurring within the mind as well as those outside it. This trait is fundamental to the construction of memories and to the uses we make of them...

[The NYC Dept. of Cultural Affairs] supported the museums, dance companies, libraries and other institutions that enabled larger audiences to gain access to these experiences. In the process, the city gained access to itself in a new way. The idea of the audience began to displace the idea of the public as a measure of civic reality.


Because the audience supplied the meaning. Andy Warhol's multimedia show "The Exploding Plastic Inevitable"; Robert Rauschenberg's ventures into performance with Billy Kluver's Experiments in Art and Technology; the art opening without pictures; Cheetah (a nightclub without performers); the new girl in town; lights, cameras, reaction: the events of the 60's helped to catalyze the emergence of the active audience, the productive audience, the spontaneous organization of individuals around the act of paying attention.

Today the audience is largely identified with consumerism. That was far less the case 40 years ago. For us, the audience was a medium of discovery. It allowed the emotions of individuals to flow into a public setting. When emotions have been bottled up, as they were with us, the effect of releasing them is overwhelming. In the 60's, the space of the audience expanded from the theater to the city at large.