In 2012 Ada Louise Huxtable, the Wall Street Journal’s esteemed architectural critic, published a devastating article. Early the next year, an eye-opening lecture (posted to YouTube) by Charles Warren, an expert on Carrère and Hastings, showing how the integrity of the building would be compromised by the Foster design, galvanised more protest. The early trickle of disapproval became a wave of dissent.
In November 2013, Bill de Blasio, who had previously blasted the CLP in a campaign speech on the steps of the NYPL, was elected mayor. Some of his closest advisors wrote a public letter urging him to “save the New York Public Library from its trustees’ misguided plan” that would rob the city’s smaller branch libraries and hurt students, seniors and immigrants. Seemingly de Blasio met Marx and pressured him to back down. The CLP was halted in its tracks.
In May 2014, Marx stated that the NYPL had jettisoned the CLP for financial reasons. “When the facts change,” he said, “the only right thing to do as a public-serving institution is to take a look with fresh eyes and see if there is a way to improve the plans and to stay on budget.” It’s estimated that the Foster plan would have cost at least $300 million.
Sherman’s book ends with an autopsy of the CLP and a discussion of the future of the research library in the age of digitisation. He says that the NYPL “needs government regulation”, and quotes a former NYPL director, arguing that it “deserves today federal support for its national and international role”, but exactly why taxpayers outside New York should support a municipal institution located in one of the world’s wealthiest cities is unclear.
Patience and Fortitude is a New York story, but much of what it describes is symptomatic of a larger pathology: the relationship between “starchitects” and their clients. The NYPL trustees, like many of their counterparts elsewhere, are more compliant than their forerunners who worked with John Shaw Billings. In those days trustees told architects, even the most famous of them, what they wanted and made sure it got built to their specifications and budget. Now, patrons, eager to prove their hipness, too often allow celebrity architects — such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster — to tell them what they need.
The results are often acts of vandalism, such as Foster’s planned defilement of the NYPL and his grotesque remaking of the British Museum’s Round Reading Room, Libeskind’s giant glass shard stuck in the neo-classical façade of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum, Dresden, or the blighting of Charles McKim’s graceful Italianate Morgan Library, also in New York, by Renzo Piano’s steel and glass box.
That these starchitects will continue to design new buildings that are monuments to their and their votaries’ egos is regrettable, but probably inevitable. That they are paid to wreak havoc with great historic fabrics like the NYPL is inexcusable.
In November 2013, Bill de Blasio, who had previously blasted the CLP in a campaign speech on the steps of the NYPL, was elected mayor. Some of his closest advisors wrote a public letter urging him to “save the New York Public Library from its trustees’ misguided plan” that would rob the city’s smaller branch libraries and hurt students, seniors and immigrants. Seemingly de Blasio met Marx and pressured him to back down. The CLP was halted in its tracks.
In May 2014, Marx stated that the NYPL had jettisoned the CLP for financial reasons. “When the facts change,” he said, “the only right thing to do as a public-serving institution is to take a look with fresh eyes and see if there is a way to improve the plans and to stay on budget.” It’s estimated that the Foster plan would have cost at least $300 million.
Sherman’s book ends with an autopsy of the CLP and a discussion of the future of the research library in the age of digitisation. He says that the NYPL “needs government regulation”, and quotes a former NYPL director, arguing that it “deserves today federal support for its national and international role”, but exactly why taxpayers outside New York should support a municipal institution located in one of the world’s wealthiest cities is unclear.
Patience and Fortitude is a New York story, but much of what it describes is symptomatic of a larger pathology: the relationship between “starchitects” and their clients. The NYPL trustees, like many of their counterparts elsewhere, are more compliant than their forerunners who worked with John Shaw Billings. In those days trustees told architects, even the most famous of them, what they wanted and made sure it got built to their specifications and budget. Now, patrons, eager to prove their hipness, too often allow celebrity architects — such as Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, Daniel Libeskind and Norman Foster — to tell them what they need.
The results are often acts of vandalism, such as Foster’s planned defilement of the NYPL and his grotesque remaking of the British Museum’s Round Reading Room, Libeskind’s giant glass shard stuck in the neo-classical façade of the Bundeswehr Military History Museum, Dresden, or the blighting of Charles McKim’s graceful Italianate Morgan Library, also in New York, by Renzo Piano’s steel and glass box.
That these starchitects will continue to design new buildings that are monuments to their and their votaries’ egos is regrettable, but probably inevitable. That they are paid to wreak havoc with great historic fabrics like the NYPL is inexcusable.
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