We Need to Make Better Buildings

In 2016, 432 Park Avenue was unveiled to the public. The Rafael Viñoly-designed structure was an exclamation point to Manhattan’s Billionaire Row neighborhood. Off first impressions alone, the building caught attention for its bizarre floor-area ratio, being fifteen times as tall as it is wide. It was sleek, striking, and most impressively, ugly- being damned all over social media and publications for its egregious design. However, the main scandals that plagued this building came from the inside. Soon after units went on sale, claims arose about persistent flooding, elevator outages, and loud creaking in the building. A damning report by the New York Times documented residents’ grievances, most of whom had paid several million dollars for their condominiums. The report revealed that tenants had commissioned an engineering firm to see what the issue was with the structure - only to find out that “73 percent of mechanical, electrical and plumbing components observed failed to conform with the developers’ drawings.”

So what gives? How does something like this happen? It’s perhaps best to understand that 432 Park Ave isn’t a fluke, but part of a prevailing trend in architecture. It turns out that developers had exploited a loophole in New York City’s zoning laws which allowed it to be built so freakishly high. As The Times reports, “Floors reserved for structural and mechanical equipment, no matter how much, do not count against a building’s maximum size under the laws, so developers explicitly use them to make buildings far higher than would otherwise be permitted.” While the easy answer to prevent anything like this from ever happening again would be a zoning law revision, what we’re witnessing is a lot more insidious. The increasing privatization of architecture has led developers to adopt a “dollar for every square footage” model of construction - if it doesn’t make money don’t build it. As a result, the unfortunate consequence has led to a soulless American landscape of commercial architecture. As Darran Anderson writes for The Atlantic, “Hegemonic architecture has encouraged the opposite: a gentrified future...It imagines only one possible style for all possible lives.”

This trend of cheaply constructed housing for the uber-wealthy is simply not sustainable. It seems as if everywhere you go there’s a new luxury development, almost all of which look identical. Cities are losing their soul, and the class divide is only widening as a result. Fixing this isn’t going to happen overnight, but perhaps understanding what allowed bad architecture to proliferate in the first place can clue us into how we can reverse and amend these problems. We need to revert back to building for people, not profit. Eliminating the private sector would not only be disastrous, but impossible in the short term considering the stake it has, but we can explore methods of government regulation on construction, and even further down the line, public ownership options for owners and renters alike. Increasing state and income taxes on wealthy residents can easily subsidize buildings for the public, as well as eliminating tax breaks on corporate headquarters. Exploring new cost-effective construction techniques (3D printing for example) can allow us to maintain architectural vernacular, rather than replacing it with sterile corporate buildings. 

Buildings are the cornerstone of our public spaces. They should exist as proud representations of human ingenuity. A building should speak for the people, not defy them. As the architect Daniel Libeskind writes in his book Breaking Ground, “Since the modernist era began, buildings have been designed to turn a neutral face to the world, to be immune to expression. The goal has been to produce objective, not subjective, architecture. But here is the truth of the matter: No building, no matter how neutral it is supposed to be, is actually neutral..even if you live in the most perfectly minimalist, perfectly white loft, it is still an expression of your personality, and hence not a neutral space.”