The Chrysler Building is beautiful, but that alone does not explain the unequivocal, emotional reaction it provokes. Like all skyscrapers of the Modernist period, it conveys the grand ambitions of a new machinist age. But it also suggests something more intimate, that aspirations do not always play out predictably – that how you imagine you will experience the pinnacle is not how you might actually experience the pinnacle.
Distinctively, the building literalises this view, forcing us to look up delivering circularity rather than conclusion, surprise over certitude. Designed in the 1920s and completed in 1930, the spire was assembled the day before the stock market crashed in 1929.
The Chrysler Building, owned by an Abu Dhabi wealth fund and the Tishman Speyer real estate empire, is now for sale. There is not an obvious buyer. Despite its significance it is plagued by the same problems that face so many office buildings in the city that went up between the 1920s and 1970s, many of them, like the Chrysler Building, on the east side of Midtown.
They lack the light and efficiency of contemporary working spaces, and they are hugely expensive and time-consuming to repair and modernise, with warrens of rooms, interior columns and low ceilings.
Beyond that, these buildings encode an entirely different understanding of the culture of work than the one we ascribe to today, an ethos of Mad Men-era closed doors and misbehaviour.
The notion of how transparent the 21st-century workplace has really become is belied by the prevalence of a design style that seeks to erase perceptions of hierarchy, secrecy, obfuscation, deceit. We look at one another through glass, over low-framed cubicles all day. How much can really be hidden?
Open-floor plan
Among the many misconceptions the #MeToo movement has exposed is the fallacy that deviance was bound to be mitigated, or even expunged, with the arrival of the open-floor plan. Regardless, that paradigm is religion.
Whoever buys the Chrysler Building will have to compete in a universe in which WeWork is now the largest office tenant in New York. WeWork has branded itself as a purveyor not just of office space but also of office life, in particular a kind of life where the distinctions between work and nearly everything else are eradicated.
Just this week WeWork's chief executive Adam Neumann announced that the company, whose valuation stands at $47 billion, is changing its name to We Co. to better reflect its goals to encompass all aspects of people's lives, as he put it in an interview with Fast Company.
At one WeWork building in Manhattan there is a WeGrow school for young children, meant to appeal to parents who rent desks in the building. The school offers yoga and a play space designed by architect Bjarke Ingels, and children get to spend one day a week at a farm upstate and then sell produce at a student-run WeWork farm stand, because isn't it better that they are nudged into becoming Danny Meyer rather than task-mastered into conjugating verbs?
If this is the way of the future (and the company does plan to expand its schools) it is hard to envision 6-year-olds selling locally-sourced rhubarb in the lobby of the Chrysler Building.
Hudson Yards will contain millions of square feet of office space and gyms and stores and restaurants, but also Snark Park, an exhibition space with child-like, immersive art installations that could, for instance, involve jumping around in bubbles. And isn't doing that healthier than a Maker's Mark on the rocks after a fight – I mean, temperate disagreement – with your boss?
Collected as art
The future of legacy buildings especially now that much of Midtown East will soon see a new cluster of high-rise office buildings might be that they are collected as art by billionaires for the fun of it. One real estate executive suggested as much to the Wall Street Journal this week, saying that she could imagine a scenario in which someone bought the Chrysler Building to say he owned the Chrysler Building.
This week, to the joy of many theatre lovers, Lin-Manuel Miranda and partners bought the Drama Book Shop on West 40th Street to save it from extinction. It had meant something to him when he was coming up as a young writer and composer.
It may be that the survival of many great things in New York will ultimately depend on the affinities of rich nostalgists.
New York Times
