Doom Spiral

IN MY LATE TWENTIES, I found myself beginning a job as a corporate lawyer. I had harbored many dreams of la vie bohème. I wanted to be Marguerite Duras. I wanted to be Allen Ginsberg. I wanted not to be a middle-class child of a Sunbelt suburb. But what was I supposed to do? Pretend to live off freelance writing commissions? Try STEM? I wasn’t good enough at math. So I went to college, I went to France, I went to grad school, and then, accepting the inevitable, to law school. Finally, I went, hat in hand, to the New York City I had dreamed about all those sweaty adolescent years in Florida. New York City, I discovered, was not a city of beatniks. It was a city of office buildings.

I started in one on Third Avenue and 55th, across the street from the “Lipstick Building,” Philip Johnson’s elliptical ’80s icon, where Bernie Madoff had worked on the seventeenth floor. Ours was more aloof, a professional-managerial prism of black glass by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill that had been, in the mid-1960s, erected on top of P. J. Clarke’s when the venerable burger restaurant refused to sell. Soon after the forty-nine-story tower opened, a fire so deadly erupted that New York City passed its first law on office building evacuation planning. But this is all by way of preamble. That corner of Midtown East where I spent the omicron-variant winter was part of the old New York. In the spring, they told us, any minute now, we would move into the future: into The Spiral.

Construction delayed our arrival, of course, and for months we watched PowerPoints about Hudson Yards, that enclave of shiny high-rises for highly credentialed workers living in shiny high-rises along the 7 train or across the Hudson.

The Spiral was designed by BIG, the big Danish architecture firm headed by Bjarke Ingels, in collaboration with Adamson Associates and structural engineer WSP Cantor Seinuk. Conceived as the tallest tower in the Western hemisphere, it ended up being the fifteenth tallest in New York, shorter than 30 Hudson Yards next door. Rising just over a thousand feet, the building subtly tapers as it ascends. The hook is its synecdochic “spiral”: a helix of planted balconies wrapping around sixty-six stories, translating the zoning-mandated setbacks of the classic Manhattan skyscraper into a continuous ribbon of landscaped terraces. The idea, BIG explains, was to extend “green space up and around [the building’s] exterior in a spiraling motion towards the sky—from the High Line to the skyline.” The reality is a greenwashed Tatlin’s Tower by way of Tishman Speyer, whose gleaming portfolio stretches from Pudong to Hell’s Kitchen. The megadeveloper paid $438 million for the site and the air rights; to clear out the rundown tenement there, it threw the last two holdouts another $25 million. (“I come from generations of slaughterers,” said attorney David Rozenholc, whom The Real Deal dubbed “one of NYC’s most feared tenant lawyers.”) Big things were coming, after all.

As we discovered after we moved in, it gets windy that high up. When someone opened a door to a terrace, squalls so powerful rushed in that the building swayed. In a hurry, custodians had to drape yellow caution tape on every floor until air-lock doors, themselves with permanent but more subtle caution warnings, were installed. The balconies were far smaller than the ones with the little people in the renderings, and they would never much be used: Custodial staff would silently deposit low-moisture plants, only for them to quickly shrivel in the cold and wind, a strange sort of ritual sacrifice to biophilic design. The terraces existed first for the portfolio, second for the skyline, and as a distant, forgotten third, for the “health and well-being” of the human capital inside.

Our lives were measured by the billable hour, the day broken down into six-minute increments of emails, meetings, research, writing, bolding, highlighting, formatting, etc. to be invoiced exactly and, at year’s end, accumulate to a total of two thousand hours. According to our firm, the “state-of-the-art” building was built “with numerous features and common areas to maximize a collaborative work experience with colleagues and clients.” The reality was that the luminous edges of the floor plates were sacrificed to unused but highly photographable “collaborative work” spaces while the associates—now mostly doubled-up in “interior” (i.e., windowless) offices—sat at their desks on Zoom, talking to colleagues at other desks, also on Zoom, sometimes even just a door away. Even when all staff was in The Spiral, on mandatory “anchor days,” almost everyone would convene electronically: Why risk missing an email? At the end of every meeting caterers would clear, from those sunny and sparkling conference rooms, a long credenza of untouched catering, the bite-size croissants collecting little dots of moisture.

This was life in Hudson Yards, where trash cans would fly in the wind tunnel of Tenth Avenue; Hudson Yards, the new New York, a New York without the taint of history. There were places to take summer interns to eat Hiddenfjord salmon. There were three Botox spas, a Peloton store, and a Whole Foods. There was a mall where tourists stood on the glass-floor “Edge” and pretended they were about to fall 103 floors. But there was nothing, really, for your eye to land on, no sign you were anywhere. Nothing except the Vessel, newly outfitted with suicide-prevention nets.

A GUSHING WRITE-UP in Architectural Digest touts The Spiral as a vertical translation of Google’s California campus, a retrofuturist Bedouin tent in Mountain View, California, also designed by BIG (in collaboration with Heatherwick Studio). The resemblance isn’t exactly forthcoming, but the tower does take after the Googleplex in at least two key respects: in its performance of environmental virtue through landscaping and in its grand designs on total workplace living.

The lobby smelled heavily of Tishman Speyer’s signature room fragrance, White Tea & Thyme, and millennial standbys (Tame Impala, etc.) played loudly enough to cover any conversation. Not that there usually was any, besides the salutations of the strangely numerous security guards, so many that they seemed there more to greet you than to perform any other function—though those stationed in the Tenth Avenue vestibule would softly compel you away from Margarita Cabrera’s sculpture of a deflated VW Beetle in red vinyl. There were other displays of contemporary art, like Studio DRIFT’s hanging installation of LED-fitted mechanized flowers, slowly opening and closing like umbrellas from the ceiling of the Hudson Boulevard lobby. By the elevator bank to our firm, there was a life-size sculpture of a brown-haired man in a black overcoat. He looked terrified. He looked exactly like one of the partners.

Upstairs, the wood was warm and the amenities abundant. There were ping-pong tables; only the custodial staff ever played. There was a cafeteria with ten flavors of kombucha on tap; only the first-years ever drank it. There were showers with pre-pasted toothbrushes. (I once saw someone had left a red pen by the fragrance-free shampoo, and no one, over the weeks to follow, dared move it.) There was an in-office clinic run by Mount Sinai where you could get a flu shot, physical therapy, or even, the posters cheerfully advertised, a gynecological exam. There was a top-story clubhouse, which hosted events like “free headshot night.” The building, its website declares, was “built with humans in mind”; lest we forget, we’re reminded one sentence later that it “is an unprecedented work of human-centric design,” optimized toward “enhancing the health and well-being of your workforce.” The Spiral’s ominous assurances of its humanity indeed recall Google, specifically the company’s now-forsaken motto: “Don’t be evil.”

Watching the Hudson from the empty “coffee social” space on floor fifty, I began to nurse a theory about the decline of the American way of life. I blamed two developments: word processing and email. Before the invention of word processing, a huge number of secretaries were needed to type as their bosses dictated. Before the invention of email, a huge number of couriers were needed to carry interoffice memos. As a result, there was a large quantity of skilled and semiskilled employment for those without college educations, and the midcentury was the height of disassortative mating (secretaries and bosses–how cinematic!). Couriering was decent employment for men in deindustrializing cities, and the massive mail and memo infrastructure allowed one to “work your way up from the mailroom.” And given how slow all this was, no one ever really did anything, relatively speaking, and managers were drunk by the afternoon. A decent, honorable way of life.

Of course, this was all just a nostalgic fantasy. What did I know about office life that I hadn’t learned from ’50s movies and grunge music?

But there was something sinister about the office life I came to know: We were supposed to pretend it was fun. The postpandemic Class A workspace was equal parts securitized asset, Google-inspired playpen, and shrine to frictionless productivity. Just as our jobs existed to convey compliance, our enclosures existed to convey strength: The truth is that real estate like The Spiral exists not primarily as a place of work but as a financial fiction. Last year, Tishman Speyer refinanced the tower with a $2.85 billion commercial mortgage-backed security loan. “We are exceptionally proud of The Spiral and pleased to deliver value for our investors,” said CEO Rob Speyer. Inside, we delivered value through the sheer expenditure of time, each of us a tiny, temporary element of a large corporate machine in which redundancy meant all the more value.

What was the point of an office in this terminal stage of capitalism? Why go outside at all? Why even be in New York City?

I suppose for the mandatory return-to-office policy, which apparently existed only to make signing a twenty-year lease right before Covid seem less stupid. The summer after my father died, I got a call from human resources to say that they had a note in their records that I had been working remotely from Florida because my father was in hospice: Had that “situation” been “resolved”? The call shocked me: I had been swiping my badge into the office for months. Of course, I would go entire days without speaking to a human being, besides those professionally cheerful security guards. But was my presence not even registering in a technical sense? The situation had been resolved, I assured them: My father was dead.