Thursday, July 15, 2010

A Roadside Motel Comes to Brooklyn















Holiday Inn is, of course, one of the largest hotel/motel chains in the world. It began as a dream of Memphis building-industry mogul Kemmons Wilson. In the 1950s Wilson travelled the newly-created Eisenhower Interstate highway system, and was appalled at the slovenly conditions that he found in America's roadside motels. He envisioned a chain of motels, offering clean, convenient, standardized accommodations across the country. The idea of franchising was relatively new then, and Wilson and Ray Kroc (of McDonalds fame) really revolutionized the concept. Holiday Inn was the first mass-produced hotel/motel chain, and is still one of the largest in the world.













Now, other than as a business model, Holiday Inn has never been spectacular in any way. In fact, the chain became a bit slovenly itself in the 80s and 90s, and the company (now British-owned) decided to undergo a chain-wide image makeover. This seems to have chiefly involved a new logo, and a new architectural image, which seems, by all accounts, to basically be cheap and pseudo-neoclassical, or something.

This new design loses on all fronts. At least the original Holiday Inn aesthetic was current-- it may have been cheap, but it perfectly embodied the futuristic aesthetic of the 1950s, and thus fell in line with the designs for automobiles, airstreams and the other new products of postwar America. The new design prototype, at some pitiful attempt at connoting class, manages to do nothing but summon up shell-shocked, horror-stricken architectural flashbacks of Michael Graves:













The new Holiday Inn in Gowanus' "Hotel District" (image at the top of this posting) embodies the worst of this.

The saddest part is, before this company-wide re-imaging campaign, there were actually some pretty interesting Holiday Inns going up around the world (see below images, of inns in the Maldives and Sao Paulo). Or maybe they just saved their good designs for overseas.


Honestly, I hope this whole thing backfires on them. Stick to your roots, Holiday Inn. If you wanna go for historicism, why not go back to your original car-culture aesthetic, rather than this stupid, un-founded and un-urban 'classical' look? Now Gowanus has another shitty stucco monstrosity. Fuck you, Holiday Inn.

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

The AIA's Ugliest Building List

The American Institute of Architects' NYC chapter has published its list of the city's top ten uglies buildings. Here's the link: http://www.designtaxi.com/news/32292/AIA-Calls-New-York-Times-Building-Ugliest/?page=2


I gotta say, this is a strange list, given that it has supposedly been compiled by architects.


First off, why would the NYT Building make the top spot? Sure, it is 'old' and 'grey' like the paper, and certainly less inspired than nearly all of Renzo Piano's other buildings, but, really? the ugliest in the city? The building was surely designed to connote respectability and sobriety, a fitting request from the most trusted newspaper in the country. If you'll recall, the Seagram building was designed to be banal for the same reason--so people would respect Seagram as a veritable business, even though they make a product that gets people drunk. But the AIANY would never dream of putting the Seagram Building on this list, probably because of the bizarre deification of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe by the architectural elite, even though Mies is basically the inventor of modern ugly. And furthermore, if "God is in the details", as Mies famously stated, then Piano's NYT building is far superior to any of Mies' famous works.


Second, why the Bear Stearns headquarters? Are some of the AIANY members still angry at the company for fucking up their retirement funds? This skyscraper is nothing spectacular, but it is certainly far more elegant than the majority of its' neighbors in Midtown. I gotta say though, I do agree with the AIA's inclusion of the Trump buildings.


Hey AIA, here's a few biggies that you bizarrely overlooked:


1 Penn Plaza - Not only is this one of the most uninspired designs in the city, it also lies on the hallowed ground of the old Penn Station, the greatest building ever to be demolished in NYC.

















MetLife Building - Sorry Philip Johnson, you fail. This drab monstrosity would be bad enough on a normal block of Midtown, but it also sits in between two of the city's treasures, the New York Central tower and Grand Central Terminal, and casts is foreboding shadow over both.












Verizon Building - Please, please give me a facelift.











Javits Center - the 'Death Star on the Hudson'. This has got to be the ugliest convention center on the planet. It looks like this is where you go if you want to get transformed in to a robot and simultaneously have your soul sucked out. Even FXFowle's new project to renovate the building won't save this thing from scaring little children.