Thom Mayne’s Cooper Union: Finally Observed and 98.7% Awesome.

Since I’m about to move to Portland, I thought I’d spend these last few days and weeks around New York really looking at the city and its buildings. Last week, I saw Thom Mayne’s new Cooper Union building. And it was 98.7% glorious.

I lived in the East Village for a few years a few years after I moved to New York. I remember taking the 6 train down from wherever it was I spent my days, getting out at Astor Place, taking a quick right and then walking down 7^th Street over to 2^nd Avenue. I’d pass the lot, and if I was with someone who liked architecture, we’d invariably say something like “Oh, yeah, this is where that crazy Morphosis building is going.”

It was the terminally under-construction site that I never really believed would actually hold Morphosis building. For one, Thom Mayne is a little bit the Prince of Darkness of the architecture world: difficult to get a hold of (I spent a few cellphone-ripping months trying to track him down), tricky to understand, mesmerizingly intense. He is also, when he nails it, a spectacular architect.

So I’d almost forgotten about this building by the time I saw it. I haven’t lived in the East Village for three years, and I haven’t really had much reason to be by that particular block. But last week, after a dinner of Benton’s ham with redeye gravy with Matt Roman, editor–along with Tal Schori–of Yale’s next Perspecta (subject: The Real), I thought we’d take a walk and see if we could see it. And we could, and we did.

First impressions: it’s monolithic, brutalist, blocky. It reminded me for a second of Koolhaas’ Seattle Library, but where that building is, I thought when I stayed across the street from it, aggressively boring–you can’t not look but once you do there’s not all that much to Velcro your attention to–the Cooper Union building is fascinating, with big and little cracks here and there, moments that make you want to break up your experience of this otherwise brutal building and find a way to worm your way in.

Diagonal concrete pillars hold up the glass building, and they’re like spider legs – not quite delicate, but purposefully articulated. And then, halfway up the building in the middle, everything goes haywire and the facade looks like it’s falling in on itself or else like an alien just burst out of its chest. The glass surface folds up against a central cutout and it feels both aggressive and welcoming, purposeful and abstracted.

On the 7th street and 2nd Avenue corner, right over the entrance, a triangle of overhang just barely misses the rest of the façade. It’s like Mayne took the building and just kicked part of a little bit of it just a hair out of place. It feels kinetic, even playful, and the building winks at you and your acknowledgement of its brutalism and your fear of its monolith by inviting you to just slip this part back into place. You know it’s impossible but it doesn’t mean you don’t want to try. It’s a brilliant move.

And, unfortunately, it’s totally undermined by what happens in back. A diamond-shaped cut-out, just abstract enough to be vague and representational enough to be tacky, is the only moment of detail in this otherwise spare and flat wall. Zoning happens; we all know that. But the solution of making what’s essentially a decorative gesture is, when you see it in relation to the patterned glass–full disclosure here: I am terrified of the seemingly arbitrary and particularly the patterned–the wrong choice. Just accepting the blankness would have been, while maybe a little less thrilling, a lot more excellent.

So that’s the 1.3% I didn’t love. From across the street the building looks awesome. From up close, it looks powerful. And given that our economy has fallen off a cliff and we’re unlikely to see shiny glass condos taking the brunt of New York’s architectural forward-momentum, I’m glad this building’s finishing up now. It’ll be either a great reminder of the economic boomtime that precipitated a lot of truly great architecture, or a braver instigator of thoughtfully aggressive architecture to match our newly hungry spirits.

Photo by J. Moran Moya