Architects! If you must design in a historicist style, let it be Egyptian Revival. Those who advocate for buildings stylized to evoke the olden days—classicists, mostly, and those trads who love them—deploy the word timeless as if somehow to suggest that a particular set of forms can be, and indeed ever should be, immune to the vicissitudes and duties occasioned by changing times, changing peoples, changing climates. What they mean, of course, is the opposite: that certain precincts in the built environment should be time-full. That they should be static, anachronistic, dispatching us to some fantastical Age of Heroes—Georgian London, Palladian Veneto, Periclean Athens—when the orders, or rather some soothing and enforcing Order, prevailed. The picturesque is lazily conflated with the nostalgic: Things can only be cute if they’re retro. And preferably inhabited by hobbits or other dutiful smallfolk. Behind all that is a Poundbury sort of pessimism that shades from mellow melancholy into a thrilling end-of-days nihilism, a sensibility that forecloses the future as inevitably worse than the past. It’s this sort of retrograde portentousness that must have prompted perhaps the most poignant observation from a member of the Modern Movement in Architecture, by Austrian designer Josef Frank, that “the goal of modern architecture is greater freedom. Failure to attain it in times past was due not only to more [technologically] primitive construction but primarily to the superstition that our surroundings required formal unity, style. We shall … never again have a style in the old sense.”
What redeems the Egyptian Revival is that it is so visibly and irrefutably derived from a time so very old and a place so very far that any claim to ubiquity or solemnity or inevitability for the style cannot much be made. Instead, we can lean into the human comedy of striving superstitiously to express something—at, say, an 1840s Connecticut graveyard or a 1940s California movie house—by resorting to the formal language of the Pharaohs. Not without Orientalist problems, to be sure. Even Cleopatra was a fan of the Egyptian Revival. It’s a sublimity to remember that, in time, we are now as far removed from that queen herself as she was from good old Hemiunu, credited as the architect of the Great Pyramid at Giza. “Life moves pretty fast,” in the words of architectural historian Ferris Bueller. “If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.” The so self-evidently stylized and stylish nature of the Egyptian Revival renders it inevitably, even if inadvertently, forthright: Why shouldn’t every party, the Egyptian Revival asks, be a costume party? (If I were a theorist of greater sophistication I would remind us that, in fact, we live all the days of our lives performing in some kind of drag and that only on certain feast days, on certain days off, are we able to explicitly acknowledge the personae with which we ornament ourselves, as much as the ancient Mesopotamian god Ninkilim, patron of all teeming creatures, would venture into the Egyptian pantheon bearing the noble face of a rat.)
I like to think that the Egyptian Revival crept up on Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, those ambivalent heirs to the mid-twentieth-century modern prodigy Eero Saarinen, as they worked on their masterplan and extensions for Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, in the middle and late 1970s. From 1967 to 1972, they’d already built something called The Pyramids, a groovy composition of three eleven-story glassy mastabas for the office park of the College Life Insurance Company in Indianapolis. By December of 1978, the three-year-long American tour that the Metropolitan Museum had arranged for the spectacular relics of King Tutankhamun was making its way to the Upper East Side. It is poignant, today, to remember that this late ’70s American fad for all things ancient Egypt was a consequence, in part, of cultural diplomacy between Richard Nixon and Anwar Sadat to burnish the latter’s global stature in the wake of the Six-Day War, an effort that led to the September 1978 Camp David Accords, at which Egypt relinquished its longstanding territorial claims to Gaza, which it had variously occupied or claimed since invading Israel in 1948, and recognized that modern nation-state to its northeast. Mummies, perhaps, served something of the palliative function also provided by that other fascinating dividend of Nixonian foreign policy, pandas.
Roche and Dinkeloo’s architectural undertaking at the Metropolitan is itself one of the greatest treasures in the museum’s collection—an underrated and hiding-in-plain-sight New York City jewel of modern design on the order of Natalie de Blois’s recently demolished skyscraper for Union Carbide (later occupied by JPMorgan Chase), Charles Luckman’s perpetually threatened new Penn Station, and Marcel Breuer’s enduring museum building on Madison (originally for the Whitney and of service since to the Metropolitan and the Frick). At the Metropolitan, Roche and Dinkeloo deftly wove together a century of piecemeal accretions at the Central Park campus with modern interventions that were confidently simple, credibly monumental, and subtly deferential all at once.
The climax of these endeavors was their big terrarium—perhaps as much as a quarter of the museum’s footprint—for the Temple of Dendur, a smallish charmer for the goddess Isis commissioned by the Roman emperor Augustus around 15 BCE and later delivered to the museum, courtesy of the governments of Egypt and the United States, after a hydroelectric dam flooded its original site, just south of Aswan, in 1967. Picture the temple—and its stone-lined gallery, its vast northern glass wall tilted just so, upward and inward. That wall’s glare-deflecting and drainage-allowing deflection affords functional deniability to the likes of Josef Frank, yet also visibly genuflects to the tilted sides of the little sanctum itself. An inky little reflecting pool manages to evoke the whole of the Nile. To encounter the entire composition, in all its languorous severity, is exactly to experience that phenomenon of which those classicists profess to be so fond, timelessness.
All of which brings us to 60 Wall Street, the forty-seven-story office tower Roche and Dinkeloo designed in 1989 for JPMorgan, until recently used by Deutsche Bank. As a work of architecture, it’s a pretty steep drop off in quality from the museum uptown—either as the influence of Saarinen faded or Roche and Dinkeloo aged flounderingly into the brief so-called postmodern era in the history of style, in which traditional revivalism was both pedigreed and debased by the shrill jocosity of an establishmentarian and academical imprimatur. (Roche and Dinkeloo’s other elaborations of the Egyptian Revival idiom, at the United Nations Plaza Hotel Lobby and the Central Park Zoo pavilions, leaned even further into the ostensibly wry.) On both Wall and Pine Streets, there are porticos of paired low-res Egyptianate columns: irregularly eight-sided shafts with vaguely palmate and florate bases and capitals—assembled from slabs of cheap-looking veneer pasted together with petrochemical goo—wanly echoing the stacked colonnades of the relatively ancient and landmark building at 55 Wall Street, opposite. The middle is all glassy horizontal stripes. The top has some more paired pilaster-ish appurtenances below a truncated pyramidal roof, a hat-like assemblage that appears to have mashed up certain wonders of the ancient world, perhaps the Alexandrian lighthouse capped by some of the tomb of Mausolus. Even for the brief post-modern era of self-aware recapitulations, this was a remarkably old-fashioned, pre-Sullivanesque way to make a skyscraper: Build a fat tower, stick an eye-catching folly on top—a dome from Wren, a Temple of the Winds—cross your fingers, and collect your fee.
What redeems the Egyptian Revival is that it is so visibly and irrefutably derived from a time so very old and a place so very far that any claim to ubiquity or solemnity or inevitability for the style cannot much be made.
The whole was redeemed by the peculiar enclosed space at the ground level. This is a three-story block-deep atrium, 2,360 square feet in all, daylit by glass walls behind those columns. It’s one of those infamous POPS, or privately owned public spaces, of which nearby Zuccotti Park is the most historically significant and the atrium of Trump Tower the most abject: the well-known zoning dodge wherein if a developer cedes a bit of territory below to well-behaved hoi polloi, they net more floors above. Past the Egyptianate columns, and the glass walls behind them, is another world. Inside are ten more Egyptianate columns, these robustly octagonal and in a widely spaced array that evoke a temple like Dendur far more than a mere market hall or trading floor (there were originally two of those just upstairs), whose compound capitals blossom outward, like the soffits of flowers or the canopies of palm trees, to accommodate hidden uplights that wash the chamfered and coffered ceiling—all the more brilliantly since that crisp and plastery ceiling, apparently constituted of pale and glittery Carrara marble veneers, is itself embedded and gridded with scores of mirrors. The whole is a dream of sycamores under a silvery moon.
A dozen actual palm trees, in two rows of six, redouble the effect of the columns and evoke the palm houses that, courtesy of Joseph Paxton and company, are at the very roots of modern architecture in glass and steel. Maybe there’s a conscious echo of those celebrated 1976 and 1978 Vienna travel agency interiors by Hans Hollein—that architectural prodigy of Saarinen sensibilities whose slouch toward postmodernism showed what might have become of the American had he lived past 1961—which featured groves of artificial palm trees under illuminated ceilings by stubby colonnades and mannered stonework. Against the east wall of the 60 Wall Steet POPS is a row of niches, in which picturesque stone grotesques, evoking Mannerist landscape motifs or the Far East philosopher’s rocks that may have inspired them, serve as dry fountains. At the northwest corner there’s a subway entrance, and along the west wall some glassy storefronts, currently apparently dead and empty. Although it’s today often described, even by its fans, as manifesting a kind of tacky-tastic coked-out go-go Gordon Gekko delirium—maybe it’s all those mirrors—I suspect its original effect was never really that. Its pale and pearlescent luminosity was already anticipating the morning after the sleep of reason that was the 1980s, fading by 1989, toward something cooler and calmer and even, counterintuitively, minimal.
As, sooner or later, happens with most all characterful anomalies and awkward triumphs in Manhattan’s built landscape, it is now going to be destroyed. The prospect has, since the spring of 2021, evinced a tart but muted example of the ritual combat between failed historic preservation effort and successful historic demolition effort so common in our city—a civic procedure, as of this writing, notionally ongoing. A masterpiece of backhanded condescension is to be found in the remark, reported by the New York Times, by current City Planning Commission chair Dan Garodnick at an August 21 hearing in which said commission did nothing especially useful, that “like many members of the public, I have a certain amount of fondness for the existing design of 60 Wall Street. That said, it’s not a landmarked interior, and the owners have a right to update, refresh, and reposition this vacant commercial office building.” A delicious rhetorical counterpunch was delivered, via the Architect’s Newspaper, by that noted student of design history and occasional classicist Robert A.M. Stern, who noted, “Postmodernism is a very important movement of the late 20th century and without question this lobby is one of its great examples. I’m hardly a student of the law but it seems to me the planning commission is operating outside its expertise. It’s not a body equipped to make aesthetic decisions. It should stick to traffic issues.”
The interior design of the proposed update is pathetic. With pedestrian access to the subway apparently reduced from two to one staircase and escalator, it doesn’t even seem all that good at directing traffic. It’s the same kind of polished anodyne modernesque that gives us airport terminal shopping concourses and gray-floored, subway-tiled, open-concept house-flipper renos on HGTV. Many have compared the renderings to that familiar aesthetic bogeyman, the Apple Store, but that sterile chain of electronics shops has at least, and to a fault, a compulsive conformity of detailing that reflects the comprehensive stylization of the products being sold. At 60 Wall Street, the proposed new atrium is instead a hodgepodge Pinterest board of circa-2016 ideas: there’s a bit of green wall and a striving skylight; there’s what appears to be some beige Japandi wood paneling that you know someone has called “warm”; there are skinny tubular columns, tinted about a quarter of the way up in such a way as to resemble vast upturned Virginia Slims, filters and all; there’s various grilles of what might be wood or steel, which maybe are supposed to make us think of Shaker spindles but look a little carceral. The whole is determinedly less than the sum of the parts. As a matter of spatial design, its greatest flaw is to blur the distinction between private operations of the commercial building lobby—elevators and security desks—and the privately owned public space. Although the current atrium is often mislabeled the lobby of 60 Wall Street, one skillful feature of the Roche and Dinkeloo design was to deliberately and legibly distinguish between the tower entrance and the public space—so that one could dwell in the latter without any intimation of having to participate in the routines and capital exchanges of the former. The new design blurs, perhaps to the point of intentional hostility to passersby and hopeful vagrants, the visitor’s ability to distinguish between these two functions.
Outside on Wall Street, the Egyptian weirdness at street level—like the proposed new atrium, to a design by Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates—is to be eliminated in favor of the new universal default for “tasteful” updates for buildings whose owners are afraid to look either too avant-garde or too old-fashioned—which is to say a photocopy-of-a-photocopy version of the work of David Chipperfield. Finlike bits of stone can be read as either contextual columns and pilasters or as echoes of the gridded unitized panel systems above; gradients and lengths of fin overlap, like little combs resting on big combs, to gesture at classical orders. It’s all very tidy. And demonstrative of how Chipperfield, witnessing what’s made of his kit of parts by the hands of those less strenuously Romantic and scholastic than he, may have failed in his success. The extraordinary and antisustainable waste of embodied energy, carbon, and material geography involved in destroying so much perfectly fine architecture and building something entirely redundant in its place—all that extraction and demolition and transportation and construction constituting a back-of-envelope 80 percent of the 40 percent that the building sector contributes to these planetary loads—should now go without saying.
Perhaps, after all, this is not a story about New York City’s continual failure at conservation of the rare beauties in its built environment, but of its failure in its duty of care for its citizens, its duty to be a city of refuge and sanctuary. Which means it might be a question not of historic preservation, but of zoning.
During a weekend visit this October, the atrium was forlorn and palpably forsaken. The unwashed glass was decorated by handmade signs telling messengers and delivery people just what to do with their e-bikes. Some of the palm trees had been replaced by dusty plastic simulacra. Inside, the air was the stalest atmosphere I have experienced in any interior since the advent of the novel coronavirus—it felt as if for years it had not been recirculated by any system other than the haphazard opening of doors, variously chained and padlocked and open and heavy. Breathing, as if at altitude, did not feel like breathing. Because of the antisustainable and greenwashing LEDs that replaced the original incandescent fixtures, and diode lighting’s propensity toward rapid falloff in illumination with distance from point source, the ceiling was glaringly bright and the floor, even in the afternoon, was gloomy. Between the non-working revolving doors at Pine Street, a single small security-ish person in a yellow reflective vest stood, enduringly and endearingly, on her feet. A dozen or so people sat quietly at the cheap plastic tables and chairs that seem to have replaced the fancy furnishings you see in circa-1990 photographs of the space. The people were who you think they were. Walking around, I thought: If you are carrying five big shopping bags you are someone who wants for nothing; if you are carrying fifteen shopping bags you are someone who wants for everything. Notes in the personal papers of Kevin Roche describe his intention that the space be “well-lit, bright and cheerful [with] pockets of repose and quiet—refuges from the hectic pace of daily life.”
Refuges is the word. Add an e and you get refugees. Perhaps, after all, this is not a story about New York City’s continual failure at conservation of the rare beauties in its built environment, but of its failure in its duty of care for its citizens, its duty to be a city of refuge and sanctuary. Which means it might be a question not of historic preservation, but of zoning. The atrium at 60 Wall Street, though less celebrated than the nearby Zuccotti Park occupied by the intentional communitarians and egalitarian utopians of Occupy Wall Street in 2011, was an essential part of their infrastructure, providing a tempered and sheltered and serviced annex—and electricity supply—for the encampment. Anecdotes of 9/11 indicate that the useful interior, like the sanctuary of the landmark Trinity Church nearby, was an effective place of refuge and staging. With our Covid-era memories not yet fully suppressed—of city convention halls and parks turned into hospital wards, with beds and partitions woven through with snaking infrastructures from the dearest dreams of Reyner Banham—we could imagine a similar state of urgency compelling us to simply install places for sleeping, washing, eating, learning, communing: for the people who sit with fifteen shopping bags at a plastic table, breathing that air that is not air. The volume of space provided by the atrium would accommodate perhaps a dozen slim townhouses, tucked between the columns and under the mirrors, facing Wall Street and Pine: Imagine if they were modern settlement houses for migrants or no-cost residences in an urban village—a little bit of Main Street on Wall Street. At present, there is in fact no rental client for the expanses of ever-more-obsolete white collar non-work-from-home office space notionally on offer at 60 Wall Street—the renovations seem intended, by the Paramount Group real estate investment trust, which since 2017 has owned 5 percent of the $ 1 billion property, and the Singapore sovereign wealth fund that owns the other 95 percent, to summon one.
Imagine if those institutions went another way, partnering with the city—tax breaks, eminent domains—to be radically good citizens. Those scrappy young disrupters at a firm called Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) have recently published a best practices case study, taking a 1971 commercial skyscraper at 1633 Broadway as a speculative example, on how moribund twentieth-century office towers—arguably the firm’s specialty—can be sustainably and creatively converted to housing. “With a stagnant office market, a housing shortage, and climate change,” SOM Design Principal and Adaptive Reuse Practice leader Frank Mahan has said of the project, “we could address all three existential crises of our time at once.” This type of adaptive reuse and regenerative upcycling of the existing built environment—conserving embodied energy and carbon, bringing dignity and delight during hyperurbanization and the Anthropocene—is, of course, the only defensible and interesting architecture of the near and far future. The true architecture of the future—not in mere stylistic imitation but in actual material substance and spatial occupation—is the architecture of the past.
If the ancient Egyptians taught us anything, it was to take the very long view. To dismiss the falsely timeless in favor of the near eternal. To consider the continuing life of the world, and perhaps the fate of our souls, long after our own physical death. I am a person of uncertain faith, but I’m entirely prepared to believe, as the Egyptians did, that when you die the god Anubis weighs your heart on scales, against a feather. If your heart is weighed down by misdeeds—perhaps by a billion dollars squandered on mere capital accumulation and not on good works and greater freedom—it doesn’t go well for you after that. Architects! And developers! And commissioners! And managers of the sovereign wealth fund of Singapore! Imagine how light your hearts could be.