Come as You Are, as You Were

TONIGHT, WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 1999. That expression dates not to the actual turn of the third millennium, reckoned in anno Domini, a quarter century ago, but to about another quarter century earlier. By durable anecdote, Prince and his band were on the road at the tail end of a local tour in 1982 and stayed at a motel with free HBO, on which, in the small hours and under the influence of mind-altering substances, they watched the 1981 documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, narrated by Orson Welles, about the cryptic book of predictions written by Nostradamus and how that sixteenth-century French astrologer and would-be prophet purportedly foresaw a world-historical apocalypse before the second millennium was done. “We’re going to look at his predictions of the French Revolution, the Kennedys, Napoleon, of Hitler,” intones Welles around a massive cigar as he wearily commands a curio-filled set. “If his predictions of the past are accurate, then his predictions for the future could very well affect the lives of all of us.” By the next morning, the story goes, the musical prodigy had already written the song, its text very much in the tradition of the last book of the canonical Christian Bible, the third-century CE Revelation of Saint John of Patmos, in which various marvels and monsters portend the End Times, a millennium of rule by Jesus Christ on Earth, the Day of Judgement, and the Creation of a New Heaven and a New Earth. Prince, who grew up in the Seventh Day Adventist Church, would have been familiar with an urgent presentiment of a closely proximate apocalypse—that Protestant sect had its origins in the inaccurate though influential ministry of the upstate New York Baptist lay preacher William Miller, who prophesied that the world would end on Tuesday, October 22, 1844. In what his disciples called The Great Disappointment, it didn’t. To my ears, Prince’s song also speaks to the genuinely more credible possibility of instant annihilation offered by the frostiest moment of the Cold War since the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which the fantastical grandiosity and millenarian fatalism of Ronald Reagan had yet to encounter the tactical charm of Mikhail Gorbachev. Witness the be merry for tomorrow we may die abandon, tinged by nihilism, of its lyric, “We could all die any day, I don’t wanna die, I’d rather dance my life away.” Or its startling final line, “Mommy, why does everybody have the bomb?”

I no longer seek to party like its 1999. But I do always seem to seek out the 1990s. These days, I’m far from alone in that, although all the reasons for the shared search are as contradictory and inconsistent as the searchers themselves. For some, repro Nirvana T-shirts and all, as a matter of taste it’s simply riding the postwar generational fashion cycle—in the ’90s what was cool was the ’70s , in the ’80s what was cool was the ’50s, in the ’70s what was cool was the ’30s—that lumbers on like a declining species of pollinator even as its ecosystem of monoculture and mass media collapses into so many fractured feeds in which all trends are simultaneous and permanent, retrospective and speculative. For others, all that fracture and collapse render the 1990s an irrecoverable golden age: a pre–social media, pre-algorithmic, pre–simulated intelligence, geisty zeist of very good rock and hip-hop, and more than one functional political party. Its awakeningly caffeinated and nicotinated young people, those littlest Cold War veterans, the last to reasonably assume death from the sky—and now in the appropriately ironical but low-key earnest assessment of a breathless December 2025 New York Times Style Magazine cover story, the actual Greatest Generation—sublimated their trauma into a sensibility of wised-up anti-capitalist slack and Zen-like ironical remove from both hope and fear. That attitude was tempered by a tendency toward ecstatic abandon—thanks latchkey childhoods!—and so they convened the last and best of all yesterday’s parties. Some (music critic Chuck Klosterman in his 2022 The Nineties: A Book; former Time architecture and design critic Kurt Anderson in his evergreen 2011 Vanity Fair essay “You Say You Want A Devolution”; art critic Jason Farago in his extraordinary October 2023 New York Times essay, “Why Culture Has Come to a Standstill”) will tell you that this is because we haven’t managed to organize any kind of after-party. Our outward-facing interest in shaping and telling the temper of our times—those late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century decades with personalities and names—has gone inward and been supplanted as a central cultural project by our ever more intricate and involute defining and retconning of the characteristics purportedly shared by members of various macro and micro generations: X, Y, Z, Alpha, Beta, Geriatric Millennial, Xennial, Zennial, Jones, etcetera. All that divisive particularity and removal of ambiguity must, at least, please the machines.

In culture generally, but especially in design culture that lends itself to the visual field privileged by screens, this real-time generational taxonomizing seems to be the complement of a relentless presenting and packaging to those generations of their many and various pasts. The software that scrapes the world for visual evidence feeds it back to us in order to train us to be ever more like itself: stimulated by binary choices and definitive categorizations; perilously intolerant of uncertainty and boredom. Today, aesthetic is not a noun necessarily in search of a particularizing adjective but itself a generic adjective: something that looks like something, that looks a way that makes you feel a way about it. We’re all just vibing in one big hot tub time machine in which everything, everywhere, all at once is back to the future. The jets are on high: The turnover of novelty in the looks and artifacts that bubble up, in all this associative simultaneity, is—as our attention spans are diminishingly extracted from us so that those machines may learn—faster. The revivals are shorter. The trends—Cottagecore, Goblincore, Gorpcore, Dark Academia, Light Academia, Clean Girl, That Girl, Indie Sleaze, Y2K, Coastal Grandma, Rat Boyfriend, Mob Wife—ever swifter in their journey toward cringe (a word that is no doubt itself already so far past cringe that it might even be ironically cool again). We visit the past ever more often but ever more briefly. In architecture, revivalist pseudo-historicist hyper-styles or meta-styles are devised for the dopamine-hit glances and swipes on social media—often cultivated by students or by their instructors in search of high visual impact. (They come and go at an astonishingly high burn rate. O, post-post-modernist paper architecture of 2019, all elevations and paraline obliques of tart green and sweet pink arcades and vaults, and opportunistic confusion of the portentous and supercilious affect, we hardly knew ye!) In this telling, there have been—because the internet—no enduring and no epochal aesthetic innovations—since, say, around September 2001. The 1990s have therefore become, at thirty-five years old and counting, the longest decade ever. Every subsequent macro- and micro-generation is, really, just another Generation X, to the considerable extent to which they are all, in the immortal words of Kurt Cobain, “over-bored, self-assured” (not to mention stupid and contagious). The very cultural mechanisms of recapitulation of which the 1990s are the irrecoverable precursor mean that the 1990s themselves, as the last new thing, are endlessly and recursively recapitulated. This ostensibly unrecoverable era has, some say, never left us alone. And even if we wish to leverage no critique, we can, thanks to Seinfeld and Friends on streaming, burn at will through all the seasons of all its years. We can’t retrieve the 1990s, much less revive them, because they just won’t leave.

Which is why I always seem to end up on Astor Place. It’s where New York City stores the 1990s. It’s one thing to have a story about another time fed to you so comprehensively and reductively so that you must only resist. It’s another thing to walk a city and benefit consciously from the experience of active search: for every reminder of non-inevitability and contingency and alterity. Which, when so much seeks to tell us nihilistically that everything has already been found and said and done—we’re so cooked—is especially useful. Buildings and the built environment have always scrambled any tidy mapping, at any moment, of formal conformity onto linear temporality. So protracted are buildings in their design and construction and demolition and material extraction; so syncopated are they in their arrivals onto the streetscape; and so frequently delayed are those arrivals past the economic conditions and land practices that occasioned their commissioning, that any walk down a boulevard—outside of dusty would-be utopian bubbles like Arcosanti and Brasília—is always already an eras tour. Present-day Astor Place is astonishing for both its oldness and its newness: the traces of 1830s Colonnade Row down on Lafayette Street and the glorious anachronism of 1859’s Cooper Union Foundation Building (famously built with elevator shafts long before the actual practical invention of the elevator); and, rarely for our city, three dominant buildings from the very recent past, at number 51 Astor Place, 445 Lafayette Street, and 41 Cooper Square. But the reason I find the 1990s at Astor Place is Starbucks.

“THIS IS THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT.” That was not a statement about still more nuclear holocaust (nor a reference to the manically elegiac and millenarian 1987 single by R.E.M.) but, as quoted by the noted boulevardier and Y2K-era King of New York Lockhart Steele for the online publication Eater, the reaction of one New Yorker to the 2009 closure of one of what were then two adjacent branches of the Starbucks coffee chain within sight of each other on Astor Place in lower Manhattan. The observation continued: “You’ll always remember those two Starbucks, standing aside the East Village like living ‘Fuck You’s’ to anyone nostalgic for the heroin and Bob Dylan and Basquiat and all that other romantic shit. Starbucks, baby.” Another recollection reported by Steele: “my favorite ’bucks in all of NYC: addicts, models, students and professionals—great people watching.” Today, the area is an inhospitable hardscape triangle immiseratingly presided over by a dark glass abyss in the form of a thirteen-story commercial office tower with an antiseptically overlit CVS pharmacy in its storefront that is the worst building ever authored by Fumihiko Maki (51 Astor Place, 2013). It’s known locally as the Death Star. The place to which it brought said death had been the most architectural of all Starbucks: Smith-Miller + Hawkinson’s 1997 elevated pavilion for the now defunct Pasqua coffee bar chain, whose brand and fifty-four locations Starbucks acquired in 1998. That branch featured steel as delectably treated as that on the spinning cube of Tony Rosenthal’s nearby Alamo sculpture (Astor Place, 1967), plus Parisian outdoor seating among a pocket-park grove of London plane trees reached by a gentle ramp. The whole was a raised platform—refuge and prospect—which in an ingenious adaptive reuse tucked itself into an existing porch and overhead canopy, which extended usefully and shelteringly from a mid-twentieth-century Cooper Union engineering building. Somewhere in that pocket park was one of the massive stone eagle statues salvaged from the demolished old Pennsylvania Station. As another man on the street told Steele: “The concrete ramp and the little nook of tables behind the bathroom made it … like a little medieval city.” The fundamental competence and basic civic mindedness of this lost place should be the baseline for the Manhattan streetscape, instead of, in its welcoming humanism and understated urbanity, an extreme outlier.

While the Smith-Miller + Hawkinson pavilion was for the design heads, the best Starbucks in the universe was the other one, the former Riviera Diner three hundred feet to the west. It closed forever on Monday, July 29, 2024. (A third Astor Place Starbucks branch, once embedded within an also-shuttered branch of the Barnes & Noble bookstore chain, now accommodates a Juice Generation, a TMPL Fitness, and an empty storefront: which is to say, variations on nowhere and nothing.) As of this writing, the greenhouse-like glass storefronts of the former best Starbucks in the universe are still covered with brown construction paper. It addressed a newspaper stand and subway entrance at a rounded peninsula across the full width of the narrow block on Lafayette between East Eighth and the narrow finger of Astor Place itself that extends west toward Broadway. The tall and narrow 1892 Renaissance Revival building into which it was installed has its own durable dignity, as its tall arches and bays diligently echo, with only a little extra Corinthian filigree, those designed a half century earlier for the Cooper Union Foundation Building opposite. The site is ennobled in vibe by the former Astor Place Opera House (1847–1890), built in the image of a Greek temple by one Isaiah Rogers, who among other glories held an intriguing defunct federal office, buried in the Department of the Treasury, called Supervising Architect of the United States. Just the names formerly attached to the building and its chambers—the District 65 Union Hall, Clinton Hall, the Mercantile Library—evoke urban institutions of popular edification and empowerment that today’s establishment might prefer that we forget.

Opened on Thursday, March 30, 1995, the Starbucks branch inside the former Mercantile Library building (13–25 Astor Place) brought the city’s count up to eleven. (The first, which closed after a mere decade, had opened a year earlier at 87th and Broadway.) The reason for its closure—the commercial rent reportedly was unchanging—is as inscrutable, and now presumably fin-tech algorithmic, as the reasons why locations of the planet’s second largest food chain after McDonald’s do what they do far more often, which is open. Some speculated that it had something to do with its workers’ unionization in 2022. Despite an enshittifying renovation in 2018, the original virtues of the millennial Starbucks aesthetic remained: a touch of warm wood, Thonet-esque chairs, a polished cement floor, a lofty ceiling with performatively candid industrial ducts and lighting grid. That aesthetic was a continuation of what in 2018 something called the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute identified as Global Village Coffeehouse, a highly specific look of “handcraftedness with ancient or tribal imagery, often with earth tones and vaguely nature-oriented motifs,” which at such venues as Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, Borders Books and Music, and the Panera Bread Company was quintessentially expressive of 1990s neoliberal fantasies of global trade harmonizing the futuristic with the vernacular, the bourgeois bohemian urban aesthete with the Indigenous agricultural laborer somewhere over the horizon. This dream was central to the comfort of Starbucks. At Astor Place, the niche aesthetic’s more twee imagery and more antic geometry was tempered by the sober and august affect of the former Mercantile Library above and by the tonal and technological coolness of all those ducts and electrical conduits up behind the halogens.

What ultimately made the Astor Place Starbucks the best was that, as at such places as that eternal 1980s icon the Odeon restaurant in Tribeca (145 West Broadway, 1980) and its 1990s heir Balthazar (80 Spring Street, 1997) in SoHo and several other such local ventures by Keith and Brian McNally and Lynn Wagenknecht and partners, its pastiche of historical references was so successful that like the Velveteen Rabbit it eventually became what once it merely signified—the kind of beloved neighborhood place that a Starbucks branch used to displace. The dupe aura farmed. (Of course, in the age of Amazon, this is also happening to your locally endangered Barnes & Noble, that former corporate excrescence now experienced as a treasured third space.) The distinctive raised platform in the interior of the Astor Place Starbucks that was meant to evoke a stage, Greenwich Village style, for troubadours, actually became a stage for troubadours. The coffee was better than anything in the neighborhood—New York in its provinciality not ever having been a coffee town on the order of, say, Melbourne or Oakland. The Manhattan psychogeography was perfect: Sitting in the glazed greenhouse-like extension was almost like sitting in the street—but mediated and tempered—as at a Parisian café terrasse in late winter and earliest spring. I belong, actuarially, to those at the tail end of the first, greatest, and most silent of the succession of generations and embedded and interstitial generations whose real-time historicizing and theorizing has been a significant cultural pastime of the new century: Generation X. And as such I can remember experiencing the city, and especially the East Village and Alphabet City, through a block-by-block awareness of physical safety and through a nocturnal search for stimulus, even of merely caffeine and sugar and company. That Starbucks, its counter like all good temple altars facing east, was the great backstop to the playing fields of downtown.

TODAY, THE DEFINITIVE STOREFRONT OF ASTOR PLACE, along its southern edge, is the deadening one hundred and twenty-five feet of inevitable Chase ATM lobby (26 Astor Place, 2006) at the base of Charles Gwathmey’s greenish glassy tower (445 Lafayette Street, 2005). The genesis of this tower, all thirty-nine multi-million-dollar apartments and all twenty-one stories of it, is a long story. In one of the very many fiduciary failures and follies with which it has recently and so profoundly failed the Advancement of Art and Science, the neighboring Cooper Union in the year 2000 sold a ninety-nine-year lease on the near-insular and triangular site—worthy of a minor Flatiron Building—for private development: The Nineties celebrity hotelier Ian Schrager commissioned designs for an Astor Place Hotel from a rare team-up between Nineties celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas and his slightly younger generational rivals Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. The inept collaboration presaged how time would bring out the worst of both practices. The formula of the Dutch practice (an eager hyperformalism, a ready and unneighborly rudeness passing for candor, and an aspiration toward an aesthetic of ugliness presenting as a loftily analytical disinterest in mere appearances) was unredeemed by the formula of the Swiss one (a would-be luxuriant and reliably sterilizing degree of surface polish in which recursively self-referencing maximalism dresses in would-be serene minimalist drag). Their failed collaboration was a lumpen, arbitrarily torqued, and squatly truncated frustum. The ragged façade perforations that were its main ornament caused it accurately to be compared by many to a cheese grater. Under the headline, “A Supermodel of a Hotel Sashays onto Astor Place,” then New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, generally all too favorable to the all-too-famous, gave it a pre-construction rave. “Turn, girl,” was the excruciating first sentence.

The story goes that 9/11 killed the deal. But that’s a saving of face. Eventually, a less glamorous developer turned to Gwathmey, quiet hero of an earlier age and author in 1991 of the brilliant addition to the formerly seemingly unimprovable Guggenheim uptown, whose achingly late work it became. Gwathmey’s sufficiently artful and cheerful composition at Astor Place is a surprising mashup of pomo, ’mo, and decon: The prospect of its principal northern façade presents as a boxy limestone-veneered upper third only slightly clumsily bricolaged onto a dutifully Corbusian-curved glassy middle, below a chic and swoopy hat-like mechanical penthouse, all above that broad base, with its ATM lobby. It was good enough—maybe even, for all the depressing value engineering visible in the cheap flat glass—really pretty good! When viewed in passing and as you walk along, that flat glass magnificently syncopates and collages into something out of Braque, as curved glass could not, all that it reflects. I’d live there.

But by its opening in 2005—the so-called War on Terror with its black sites and extreme renditions; the lies and genocidally scaled losses of innocents of the Iraq War, its futile protesters in their millions; the Housing Bubble tumorously swelling toward the crash of 2008—the now self-evident loss of what might have been a last gasp of 1990s heroin chic was too much to bear. The building was poorly received. Paul Goldberger, back in those glory days when The New Yorker regularly reviewed the city’s, and the world’s, architecture as assiduously as it does cinema and cuisine, called it, perhaps presciently, “Mies van der Rohe as filtered through Donald Trump”—and it took years to fully sell. Its ongoing offense is that deadly Chase Bank at the street level. Especially with the best Starbucks in the universe gone, that particular façade should be statutorily obliged to be like Harry’s Bar or Café Florian at the Piazza San Marco in Venice, full of the stuff of life, spilling out into the public commons, under the quicksilver flight of pigeons and of years.

SPEAKING OF WHICH FLIGHT, did you notice how, just before deflecting into an account of 445 Lafayette, I had just begun to tell you all about my own private 1990s? How boring that would have been. But to my credit I did once—speaking as we must, in the 1990s, of supermodels—perceive Naomi Campbell in a purple trench coat, holding a packet of Marlboro Reds, at Café Tabac (232 East Ninth Street, 1991–99), which was, like the erstwhile Pasqua, another addicts and models hangout just east of Astor Place. Almost that very same weekend, to my best recollection, I attended a visiting lecture by Jacques Derrida, probably at the New School for Social Research Building (66 West Twelfth Street, 1931), which I didn’t understand because I don’t sufficiently speak French. But it was good to hear him speak and see him grasp his suit lapels with both his hands, scanning the room like a barn owl. That was around the same time I talked with 1998’s Ray of Light–era Madonna for an hour at Lucky Strike (59 Grand Street, 1989–2020) without knowing that she was Madonna. What kind of music do you like, I asked her as her own songs played. This kind, she said.

Take a right at Gwathmey’s tower, turn south, and regard Cooper Union’s New Academic Building (41 Cooper Square, 2009), whose financing and construction epitomized that institution’s self-mismanagement, which culminated in a fiscal crisis from 2011 to 2014 that finally required it—in contravention of founder Peter Cooper’s idealistic vision—to charge tuition. Its 175,000 square feet, at a reported budget of $166 million, houses the School of Engineering, whose former building, usefully deep canopy and all, was once adapted by Smith-Miller + Hawkinson into the ex-Pasqua Starbucks. What is there left to say about this Great Disappointment? So much program is densely shoe-horned into this block filler, the squeeze made necessary by a photogenic stairwell, rather like an ear canal, lined by an expressive quasi-structural web. Its designers’ vocal claims for this as some kind of atrium-as-vertical piazza and social condenser are belied by its stairs’ steep seven-inch-to-eleven-inch rise and run; its inhospitable forced-perspective narrowing; and its willful and self-defeating visual and spatial detachment from the actual piazza and social condenser—called Cooper Square—right outside. Wrapping around a standard glass curtain wall, the perforated steel rain-screen façade—a graphic signature of the Los Angeles firm behind this building, Morphosis, since its monumental use at the 2004 Caltrans District 7 Headquarters in downtown LA—is expensively expressive, configured into billowing curves and intersecting folds and gestural slashes and antic perforations that, um, surely must have something to do with calibrating views from inside and certainly must have said to have had something to say about the streetscape outside. But as a matter of whole-to-part relationships and figural gestures, the composition of this object, isolated on its own tiny block between Third Avenue and an alleyway ennobled by the glorious Ukrainian name of Taras Shevchenko Place, seems comprehensively and intricately self-referential. Something in its insistently effortful façade evokes steely self-gratification. Obviously, its flat and mostly undecorated rear façade, facing that alleyway, is fine in both the adequate and elegant senses of that word.

That swoops and zigzags have something to tell you—and that formalism more generally is somehow informative—is a notion brought to you by the style called deconstructivism. The building at 41 Cooper Square might be seen as its last gasp. Morphosis was excluded from the small—yet as epochal as it was meant to be—Deconstructivist Architecture exhibition that ran for a mere eighty-six days from Thursday, June 23 to Tuesday, August 30, 1988, at the Museum of Modern Art. However, at 81 Morphosis cofounder Thom Mayne is of an age with many of the show’s select: Rem Koolhaas; Bernard Tschumi; Peter Eisenman; Daniel Libeskind; the men of the Viennese collective Coop Himmelb(l)au; plus the late Frank Gehry of almost a generation older and the designated Shirley McLaine of the Rat Pack (and the most fluent designer among them), the late Zaha Hadid.

The show—curated by architectural historian and theorist Mark Wigley in association with then-former Department of Architecture director Philip Johnson and coordinated with Frederieke Taylor—posited the stimulating formula that 1920s Russian constructivism in art and design plus 1980s French deconstruction in post-structuralist literary theory and criticism equaled, more or less, a phenomenon that could be called 1990s “deconstructivism” in architecture. The words went well together, to be sure. It was something about matrices, shifts, gestures, elisions, recursions, superimpositions, which could be said, in different ways, to have constituted both the formal/visual strategies of the Russians and the critical/rhetorical strategies of the French. The indeterminacy of deconstructivism determinedly accommodated the relatively eclectic final generation of elect architects directly tributary to Johnson. The style’s formal expressions tended toward extremes, in a postmodern both/and way, to those spiky zigzags or to squishy blobs, whose intricacy and double curves were accelerated by the then-nascent importation of aerospace and animation software. It was all structured and ornamented by a linguistically dense and deft discourse in the spirit of Eisenman’s energetic magazines of the 1970s—themselves, in their lively documentation of various architectural congresses and conferences and all their purist tendencies, painterly and otherwise, an expression of that decade’s own fashion for the 1930s—with which he helped establish our now common wisdom that, at least in architecture, pictures require words. Significantly, there was his endearing cultivation of Jacques Derrida, with whom he fascinatingly collaborated on an unbuilt landscape for what would become the Parc de la Villette in Paris. Theirs was a philosophy of absence—in the presence of a century or so of previous thinking that tended instead to emphasize the merely present. Interviews and mutual interrogations from that work were selectively extracted and transcribed into a 1986 book called (though not always consistently spelled) Choral Works. Derrida says in it: “I think something should either be missing or … something which should not only prevent you from totalizing but also motivate an infinite desire to start again.”

It’s noteworthy that in the summer of 1988, North American architects were looking to the Bolsheviks. Looking to the Soviet Union and its design avant-garde, before like so much else it was felled by Stalin, who in an early instance of the dictator chic now so common, imposed gilded classical trad as the official architectural style. The very week Deconstructivist Architecture opened, the Nineteenth All-Union Party Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was convened in Moscow for three days; documents from this conference show that General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev was planning for his celebrated October 1988 speech at the United Nations General Assembly a rhetorical conclusion of the Cold War—a “Fulton in reverse,” in reference to the town in Missouri where in 1946 Winston Churchill declared the lowering, from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, of an iron curtain. Perhaps it was an infinite desire to start again.

We know how all that turned out: Gorbachev’s internal reforms and unilateral military withdrawals and concessions didn’t forfend the end of his nation state in 1991 (generally dated to the failed coup against him in August of that year, only a month, of course, before the release of Nevermind). The ways in which Deconstructivist Architecture attempted to prescribe what it ostensibly merely described—how it spoke the predictive in the syntax of the retrospective—might be closely comparable to the simultaneous would-be prescriptive real-time historical theorizing of political philosophers such as Francis Fukuyama—who declared, in his summer 1989 article “The End of History?” and 1992 book The End of History and The Last Man, a tidy resolution of certain world-historical dialectics into one big Global Village Coffeehouse aesthetic—or the journalist Robert D. Kaplan—who in such articles as “The Coming Anarchy,” of February 1994, rather flipped that around, suggesting that the Cold War, for all its daily terror of death from the sky, might prove in retrospect to have seemed something of a lost Eden, as its great oppositions gave way to complex and even chaotic superimpositions of mutually corrosive and exclusive ordering systems. At the end of that article, Kaplan speculates about what kind of innovative cartography and diagram work could visualize such conditions—invoking a compositional methodology and graphic aesthetic not so different from that which would have been available some years earlier on West 53rd Street at the Deconstructivist show. In retrospect, Kaplan’s hope to map a whirlwind speaks to the straightforward internal contradiction of the deconstructivist project, if there were ever really such a thing, in architecture: It takes so much order (and in the making of a new cultural canon, so much power) to present the image of disorder (and submission to ambient conditions); so much stasis to present a building that appears dynamic; so much talk to induce speechlessness, so much putting together to posit a falling apart—this contradiction may be equally available within the corpus of deconstruction, in which structural and counter-structural systems are mutually dependent.

TO MAKE A BUILDING LOOK like it’s being swept away, you have to anchor it so effortfully. This is the pathos always already built into works of so-called deconstructivist architecture, which unlike its constructivist precursor did not aspire to an agile and lightweight limit of tensile and ferrous possibility. Every formalist feature that’s there to suggest a deflection or disruption requires, structurally speaking, a tributary accretion and accumulation of reinforcement. This kind of formal expressionism—even if what is notionally being expressed and postured at is some kind of indication of disruption or deflection or deference to certain forces of nature or culture—is a high-embodied-energy, high-embodied-carbon exercise. It is an instantly obsolete artifact of the temporary energy pulse that passed through civilization in the last three hundred years, with the squandering of the energy of three-hundred-million-year–old sunlight so usefully stored in flammable algae fossils. We blew through it and, with the commensurate release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, we blew it. Any architecture of such excess is now boring. How to wake up and smell the coffee?

We again need to find a more useful past. We are probably now remembering the wrong architecture of the 1990s. To be sure, certain documents among the early work of the most actual architects in the Deconstructivist Architecture show shall be immortal in their influence: paintings by Zaha Hadid and drawings by Peter Eisenman—especially the analytical orthographics of the Roman Numeral houses, with their intricate application of transcendent regulations to immanent matters—belong to the ages as much as cathedrals. And although that florid would-be secular cathedral and not especially serviceable art museum in Bilbao will eventually become a trivial artifact of our three brief centuries of civilizational energy surplus, Frank Gehry’s 1978 house for himself in Santa Monica (in which he famously wrapped the porches and dormers of his existing 1920s Dutch Colonial bungalow with corrugated metal, glass, and plywood bits that usefully extended its habitable volume to its northwest property line) may have lessons that point us in another way. What if we looked not to its slashes and gashes—which reached a nadir of scholastic imitation and bombastic incomprehension in places like Cooper Square—but instead to its nuts and bolts. Less to its purported ends than to its means: to the lathe and conduit taken from backstage to onstage, to the galvanized C-clamp points of attachment between the rooftop chain link fence posts and nearby parapets; to the steel plates anchoring the tilted timber and glass box above the kitchen; and of course to the creative misuse of off-the-shelf standard materials—chain link, plywood, safety glass—in off-the-wall ways.

An alternative 1990s architecture, an indie 1990s architecture—call it, ’90s-style, reconstructivism—would have something to do with such resourcefulness and repair; with an adaptation of the generic into the specific; with a fascination for joinery and needlework; with points of attachment between old and new; with an interest in insertion, installation, intervention; with the juxtaposition of high tech and hand craft; with ingenious scavenging—1990s throwback to the 1970s—from all those old industrial stores like Canal Plastic (345 Canal Street, 1963). I looked up this potentially appealing word reconstructivism and the earliest resonant critical use was, as far as I can tell, in a 2004 study of the history of cinema and art by the polymath philosopher and musician Christopher Sunami, describing work “generally composed of decontextualized elements from many different sources … made archetypical in a self-aware fashion.” A reconstructivist artifact, Sunami clarifies, “is not ironic, or if so, it cannot be merely ironic. It compels you to believe in its own deeper reality, even as it acknowledges its superficial artificiality.” Lessons, thus, for the earnestly ironical and carefully careless Generation X. You can see something like this in the best and earliest work of Elizabeth Diller and the late Ricardo Scofidio, whose original live-work studio was located at or about 36 Cooper Square, also the former home of The Village Voice. Say, in the installation Para-Site displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in July and August of 1989—a year almost to the day after Deconstructivist Architecture. Downstairs from the architecture gallery, right on the ground floor and the sidewalk and the street, the work comprised a constellation of installations that harvested the mechanical movements of human-powered revolving doors and the petroleum-powered escalators into subversive and compounding haptic and optic experiences: changing absolutely everything while adding almost nothing—reaping the operational energy use and social customs of use of the building. Cameras, CRT monitors on cantilevered swing arms, rubbery wires, pinned tubular mounts and mirrors and suction cups—all sleek and sinister and strenuously elegant, yet sloppy enough to stay loose and show it can hang. In the designers’ description:

If only everything Diller and Scofidio had done after—especially at MoMA—were like this, because it could be so credibly scalable into a vast matrix not of parasitism with any given host building, but of restorative symbiosis. You see this same regenerative and reciprocal sensibility in the work of their students, David and Paul Lewis and Mark Tsurumaki, cofounders of LTL Architects, in such projects as the 1997 Mies-on-a-Beam proposal, which, in their description,

In this Cooper Square quorum of Diller + Scofidio and Smith-Miller + Hawkison, you could even retain Morphosis: but the golden age of its early work between 1972 and circa 1992, especially under the influence of founding partner Michael Rotondi and, for especially artsy ventures, in sometime collaboration with Andrew Zago. This early work brilliantly concerned itself with kits of parts; assemblies; tectonics; intricate joineries both literal and conceptual; a metallic hot-rodding that seems right at home in the car culture of Los Angeles. But though the insides of cars are inherently more interesting than the angles and curves sheet-metaled around them, Morphosis—was it to appeal to New Yorkers whose California dream was Frank Gehry?—relaxed into formalism. “As the scale of the work increases radically over the decades, starting in the ’90s,” Mayne asserted in a 2020 podcast interview with Architectural Record, “it is now expanding to what people would understand as architecture as a social art form.” It’s hard to know whether the asserted “social art form” in question is the notion of material and spatial conditions convening social conditions—the claim made in vain for the would-be vertical piazza at 41 Cooper Square—or the infinitely self-flattering notion that buildings are not works of service to society but big showy formalist sculptures. Either way, in the case of that particular body of work: No.

To this retconned canon, we could in addition to LTL enroll—to borrow the nightclub clipboard guest-list formulation of Herbert Muschamp—“such architects as” Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi (who not unlike Morphosis were very good indeed at nuts and bolts before leaning a little into the angles and folds); early Reiser + Umemoto; LEVENBETTS; Kiss + Zwigard; Balch/Baratloo; Asymptote Architecture; Kolatan/MacDonald Studio; early Hodgetts + Fung; the sisters Gisue and Mojgan Hariri; Mario Gooden; Wes Jones; Caples/Jefferson; ARO; plus that ultimate ’90s band of arte povera savage scavengers, LOT-EK. Call them all the plus sign and the slash and the hyphen crew: all those punctuation marks of accretion and extrapolation—and of cleavage in both its senses. It’s an insufficient list—add yours in the comments. (The prehistory of this alternate history—the praxis of all those names’ teachers in SoHo and NoHo, is somewhere in the work of Joan Kron and Suzanne Slesin, whose epochal 1978 book, High-Tech: The Industrial Style and Source Book for the Home, reminded readers how to furnish our kitchens from restaurant supply stores and retrofit our lofts with accidentally perfect fittings from ships and garages, prisons and hospitals.)

A reconstructivist architecture de-normalizes demolition and renormalizes addition and renovation in a way that may be as close as we can get to that hyper-rational response to the significant contribution of embodied energy and carbon by the building sector to the climate crisis: the absolute dream of a moratorium on all new construction. The true architecture of the future is the buildings of the past. In addition to (1) literal cultivation of renewable building materials and (2) material harvest from the existing built environment, the future belongs to (3) intervention, installation, densification, diversification, occupation, resignification, reintegration, and all other modes of adaptive reuse. To retroactive compatibility with legacy platforms. To which the reparative and rejuvenative and regenerative work of our newly retconned reconstructivists offer a precedent and a proof of concept. The democratic inconsistencies and reciprocal accommodations of difference required by such built environments, dense and scalable, may yet, to today’s ubiquitous simultaneity of all aesthetics and vibes in the service of machine learning, retcon an unexpected usefulness.

What may turn out to have mattered most about the year 1999 was not the trivial incident of the odometer turnover to zeroes of the numbers of the Gregorian calendar; or the desperately hopeful/fearful Millerite millenarianism that so easily attached to that trivial event; or the illusionary theoretical and critical certainties and stabilities of the brief 1991–2001 decade between the fall of the Wall and the fall of the Towers that rewarded the would-be prescriptive descriptions of that moment’s prominent architectural curators and political philosophers; or even the peculiar intimation of internet-inflected cultural stasis and metastasis that seems to have persisted ever since. But that in 1999 the global cost of energy as a share of GDP, at around 4 percent, hit a seven-hundred-year low. Today, it’s something like three times as much, and going ever back up. For centuries, the amount of energy we spent acquiring energy (felling trees, mining coal, splitting atoms) as a percentage of all the energy available to our society—a close correlate of gross domestic product—dropped; now, with the exhaustion of extraction and the end of the one-time-only civilizational energy boost offered by flammable fossils, we spend more energy just sustaining yesterday’s baselines of extraction and exploitation. The moral hazard of the otherwise morally neutral faith that we are living in some kind of end time is in how easily this can map onto the actual polycrisis in which we are living: It’s relaxing to mistake it for the end of the world, because this makes our lives feel interesting and important and relieves us of responsibility to our distant descendants. But we are only two-and-a-half-billion years in advance of our planet being consumed by the sun in its supernova phase, barely halfway through the history of terrestrial life. It’s far too soon to be interested in any spaceship except the one called Earth.

A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. That’s Kurt Cobain again, in the ninefold peroration of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Climate denialism is the common precursor to so many other violences, subtle and otherwise, to which today we are all subject. Even for those who won’t shut up about it, it’s hard continuously to admit to living through real-time biospherical and climatological events unseen in the whole history of our species and unprecedented since the Mesozoic. The unspeakable happens, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, all around the world. As they used to say during the pandemic: We didn’t think the world would end and we would still have to go to work. But the effectiveness of the simple and globally scaled collective actions of those pandemic years—the social work of bending the curve—was a reminder of the lesson always already available in the design and construction of the built environment, which is that all the work of human hands is, even under duress, a choice: Is a matter of non-inevitability and contingency and so of alterity. History, despite the message of so many would-be prophets among the politicians and tech bros (and despite the exclusive retrospection of their so-called “predictive” large language models that only re-present the past), has not ended.

Climate change presents as a force of nature but it is merely a force of culture. And culture, especially design culture, is fortunately and forever subject to change and to choice. However soothing, the influential Gen X attitudes that were inculcated by unconscious anticipation of incipient nuclear holocaust—an ironical detachment, an embarrassment at visible ambition and action, and a ruthless ecstasy of palliative merry-making—are especially the most useless sensibilities to bring to the holocaust, say, of a quarter of plant and animal species that we have lived through since the 1990s. Today, the most useful part of the Prince lyric may not be its last words—nineteen ninety-nine—but its first: Tonight. That’s a word that returns us to the interesting liberties to be found just in between present and presently, between moment and momentarily. It’s a word that locates us in the present day and prophesizes just forward enough, into the coming darkness, to encourage realistic direct action—attachment, intervention, preparation, reparation, reconstruction, maybe even reconstructivism—to bring about the best available outcomes for a very immediate future. Day after day, night after night, until we find ourselves in a better place. Imagine if we could liberate ourselves from sloppy idealizations of narrowly remembered and coercively reenacted pasts and equally from such grandiose hallucinations of unnecessary and useless futures as would have us living—instantly cancerous or abjectly subterranean—on nearby radioactive planets or robbed of our biospherical birthrights, including the right to mortality, as so-called post-human code. Imagine if we could simply start from where we are. Imagine the world we could be living in if we could say that tonight we’re gonna party like it’s tonight.