“At last, he’s got to mention it!” I thought excitedly as I began reading Nicolai Ouroussoff’s hot-blooded embrace in today’s NY Times of architect Jean Nouvel‘s almost finished 100 Eleventh Avenue. As I perused the detailed appraisal of the building and its environs, I felt confident that the Knox Notch—the gap in Nouvel’s building that permits barely a glimpse of a fragment from Knox Martin‘s 1970 “Venus” mural—would at last get its moment of mainstream-media acknowledgement, if not sympathetic homage.
Nouvel’s luxury apartment building, “unveiled at an event this month,” has a “rough-edged sex appeal” with a “glittering facade” that’s “wrapped around the curved front of a black brick tower like a tight-fitting sequined dress,” Nicolai adoringly informs us. But he kinkily prefers the undressed part in the rear, “evoking the backsides of prewar tenements.” The building’s “eroticism,” he declares, “is mixed with a certain urban toughness.”
“Rough-edged sex appeal”? “Urban toughness”? I’m having traumatic flashbacks to what this neighborhood used to be best known for—its S&M bars.
Our intrepid critic works his way around the entire exterior, mentioning for the first time that it is “abutting a somber brick women’s prison” and even noting that some apartments overlook “a caged recreational area on the roof of the prison.”
But he never deigns to glance at the now blocked artwork that Nouvel’s crazy-quilt creation, dubbed a “vision machine” by the architect, also abuts:
But now let’s put the past behind us. We’re assured by Ouroussoff that the new building’s “mix of grit and glamour…is apt to temper whatever you may feel about the Wall Streeters and art-world insiders who are likely to move into its apartments.” That likelihood may become more likely once the oversupplied NYC residential market finally shows signs of robust renewal.