Urban landscapes. Modernism in New York: A Ghost with a resume impressive

We are going to point the finger at the malevolent instigator of all our urban ills? If so, it should probably be the loft of Bauhaus style soft small building that stood at the 57th and Lexington. Designed in 1931 by Thompson & Churchill, it was as crisp and simple like a sugar doughnut powder on a sunny breakfast table. It was destroyed in 1987 to revenge neo-classical.

Confused post-World War I Germany in 1919, from the Bauhaus school arrived, like a light clear and pure, simple glass walls and trim, unornamented buildings, a new vision for a defeated country. Founder of the school, Walter Gropius, made his name with the Fagus 1913 in Alfeld factory; its wide banks of glass apparently weightless, without columns in the same corner, is become a touchstone when the school opened six years later.

But here, in New York, traditional styles in traditional materials have persisted. For us, adventurous was simplified Deco-ish 1931 McGraw-Hill construction of Raymond Hood on West 42nd Street and the brick horizontal and ribbons of glass Cory & Cory 1931 Starrett - Lehigh Building at 26th and the Hudson River.

To advance what soon became known as the International Style, a group including the young architect Philip Johnson held an exhibition of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Among the European as monuments the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier, the organizers sprinkled a few American commissions, half a dozen New York.

It was McGraw-Hill and Starrett-Lehigh. But one example, really referred to by alternative modernism, vitreous of the Bauhaus - the small loft's six-storey building at Lexington Avenue and 57th Street, just at the time of exposure.

It was developed by L. Victor Weil and his wife, Beatrice, who by one account, was an interior decorator and designed by Henry S. Churchill.

Churchill stated in an article in 1924 in The Arts magazine that "architects seem unable to think about anything except the terms of a dead tradition. Classical music was irrelevant, he said: "the Roman sculptors considered the acanthus as a beautiful thing that grows in the fields;"but what designer has never seen an acanthus that grow along the Bronx River"?

Perhaps explaining why the Office of Churchill was a skimpy; exit the handle includes the modernist cooked Lowell Hotel, at 28, 63rd East Street, with its luscious pink decoration.

For the first, Churchill has designed a building loft with remarkable light and air inside. This was possible, because the entire facade hung on cantilevers, without exterior columns and because he used a minimum amount of masonry, specifically slightly glazed baked cream, green and black.

Indeed Churchill, who railed on the city of New York, create the code for The New York Sun, have used steel panels chrome if he could. Despite this, the structure was also near a transparent glass box as you could get in New York for many years.

The first loft aired in various magazines and newspapers, but compared with the big dogs in the show of International Style, it was a tea cup Chihuahua and made just a small cry. There he sat, without notice, until 1967, when the first edition of the New York City a.i.a. Guide called "a pioneer of virtuosity structural piece.

But Lexington Avenue is a busy place, and in 1981 at the beginning, when I was writing in the architectural review Skyline that the building was on a site Assembly and in "immediate danger", the project to replace, it proceeded without any outcry. Preservation battles tend to depend on the existence of a powerful cooperative or group of tenants wishing to go to bat for a building, regardless of its quality.

The preservation of monuments Board did vote to consider the matter in 1982, but it was too late. Owner of the building, Madison Equities, had already received permits to remove the facade of terra cotta, saying that it was dangerous. The lawyer responsible for the case, Howard Zipser, me has said later, "we knew never anything on the monuments."

However, Stratford Wallace, whose family owned the land and has been embroiled in a dispute with Madison, wrote in 1999 unpublished letter to the Times that Madison had received notice of the hearing and that he had written "must immediately take steps to prevent" designation of landmarks. Mr. Wallace said that at the time of the hearing, "the building was nothing more than a skeleton framework and without interest to the preservation of monuments Board."

2010 Barry Bergdoll, the Chief Curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, Philip Johnson describes the first loft in an email to me as "a stunning building... what a waste."

His successor, a property known as 135 East 57th Street, 32 story Office is well behind the corner, with a large esplanade which could have hosted the 1932 construction well enough. But in its place is one of the architectural large responses of New York, a lugubriously postmodern but certainly classical folly, a circular ring, without masonry roof supported by pairs of columns.

But for this blocky tempietto, Henry Churchill modernist effort might have remained where it was, a little hiccup Bauhaus, as irrelevant today as an acanthus leaf on the Bank of the Bronx River.

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