Travel guides are mostly applied books that you take in your hands when going on a trip. However, if the author is a person who deeply knows the local architectural and urban context, such a publication becomes an extremely informative reading for every architecture lover. In the case of New York: a critic’s guide to 100 iconic buildings in New York from 1999 to 2020 (DOM publishers, 2019), these advantages are added to the understanding by the architect, critic and curator Vladimir Belogolovsky of global processes, because he works on an international scale. And, although his book deals only with New York, these processes could not but affect the appearance and development of this metropolis, and there is a place for a conversation about them in the introductory article.
Belogolovsky wrote a guide to new buildings that appeared - and will appear - in New York between 1999 and 2020. His view of a professional and caring inhabitant noted a sharp change at the very end of the 20th century: a rather long period of stagnation ended, and bright, bold projects began to be implemented in the city one after another - and this trend has not ended until now. Therefore, in our days, the author, by his own admission, had a difficult time: it turned out to be an unexpectedly difficult task to choose a hundred conceived from the whole variety of new buildings. It is important to note that he watched all these projects from the presentation of the first version to the completion of implementation (with the exception of objects that were not yet ready at the time of the book's release). Summing up - of course, intermediate - Vladimir Belogolovsky emphasizes that the variety of new structures makes us look without any regret at such non-embodied projects of past years, such as the branch of the Guggenheim Museum on the East River designed by Frank Gehry or the skyscraper of Santiago Calatrava: what was built in as a result - no weaker, more modest or more boring.
The author of this new book is primarily known to the Russian and international public for his ever-expanding series of interviews with the world's most prominent architects. The experience of these lively conversations gives him a special opportunity to reflect on the changing understanding of this profession at the turn of the millennium, on the emergence and meaning of the popular terms "architect-star" (starchitect) and "iconic building" (iconic building), on the emerging and fading trends literally before our eyes … New York, a city without an official capital status, but one of the undisputed world capitals, turned out to be an excellent object of field research for Vladimir Belogolovsky - how a new architectural era manifests itself in reality, in a living urban environment. The second subject of the author's interest, reflected in the guide, is the ability of New York to develop democratically, without an ideal complete image as a goal, while influencing by its very charisma the ideas of architects - often foreign or who have moved to this city from other parts of the United States or from abroad. Another topic raised by the author is the activities of Mayor Michael Bloomberg (he was in office in 2002-2013) and the head of the Department of Transportation, Janette Sadik-Khan (2007-2013), who did a lot for a more even development of New York, joining the public, the municipal sphere of quality design, the development of the transport system and the humanization of the coastal strip, cut off from the city for a long time.
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zooming 1/4 Residential skyscraper New York by Gehry (formerly known as Beekman Tower). Architect Frank Gehry Photo © Gehry Partners
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zooming 2/4 Building HL23 viewed from the High Line. Neil M. Denari Architects and Marc Rosenbaum Architects Photo © Neil M. Denari Architects
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zooming 3/4 Residential skyscraper 432 Park Avenue. Architect Rafael Vignoli Photo © Halkin Mason
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zooming 4/4 Social residential complex in the Sugar Hill area. Architect David Adjaye Photo © Ed Reeve
The new stage in the architectural history of New York, which began in 1999, practically coincided with the start of the era of "icon buildings" superimposed on the construction boom, which even the 2008 crisis could not really stop. Developers use architects who have suddenly acquired the status of, if not real "stars", then celebrities, as additional advertising for their projects, and different parts of the city compete with each other in the brightness and originality of new buildings. To understand such a mosaic, you really need a "guide", and therefore the genre of the guide turns out to be ideal for analyzing the situation.
Various paper maps leading to coordinates on Google Maps QR codes of buildings and color designations of areas help to see "energy" lines and points on the body of New York, around which a lot of iconic objects have appeared. Chief among them, of course, is the High Line, which ends at the Hudson River in the huge Hudson Yards complex, and the area of the new World Trade Center. Key trends are also emerging: for example, a dozen unprecedentedly slender towers have appeared in Manhattan, including the yet-to-be-built Meganom skyscraper.
The name of the guide contains the phrase “iconic buildings”, that is, all one hundred structures included in the book claim to be “iconic”. This status presupposes recognition and inclusion in the image of the city in the collective consciousness; one of the signs of this status is often a nickname. Belogolovsky was a little ahead of the collective imagination of the townspeople and "christened" each of the described structures himself, helping to remember them for the reader: on the pages you will find "Gills", "Woodpecker", "Vertebra", "Cyborg" or even "Guillotine".
The fact that Vladimir Belogolovsky is the author of books, articles and exhibitions about the latest architecture, that is, a person who follows the pulse of time, determined not only the relevance of the hundreds he chose for the guide, but also the format of describing buildings: almost each of them accompanies a fragment of an interview with the author of the project to the author of the guide, placing the structure in the context of the creativity of its creator.
It is worth mentioning one more advantage of this publication, which should attract not only readers going to New York: it gives a much more diverse and balanced picture of the new architecture of this city than the seemingly immense and all-inclusive Internet. Unfortunately, readers of Archdaily and sites like it see only objects promoted by their architects, and the resources where editors themselves look for stories to publish have much less coverage. Therefore, it is especially valuable that, along with the well-known buildings (of which, however, Vladimir Belogolovsky always has a special opinion), the book contains the most interesting buildings that remained in more or less dense shadow: this is the residential tower One Madison of the CetraRuddy bureau, an office Fumihiko Maki's 51 Astor Place, SOM's 911 call center, and more.
