October 2023 | Eyesore

Commentary on architectural blunders in monthly serial.

Behold: the latest Borg to descend from on-high to the UFO landing strip that lower Manhattan has become in the decades since 9/11. The half-a-billion-dollar cube is called the Perelman Performing Arts Center. It houses three theaters that can be reconfigured every which way all together or separately via an elaborate set of elevators. Snazzy. It employs a huge staff of production directors, managers, and producers and scores of support personnel in tech, marketing, and the business side. It is one of those fantastic monuments a society builds for itself just prior to collapse. It will be broke and out of business in five years.

The animating idea behind the Perelman Center is that New York City’s near-term future will only be bigger, richer, more elaborate, and complex than ever before, and that this destiny requires spectacular gestures of tax-deductible tribute from the plutocrats who derived their fortunes from the financialization of the economy, which, incidentally, is exactly what has driven the nation, and its premiere city, into collapse. In other words, they have built a monument for the wrong future.

Notice that the district it is in — still called the World Trade Center — has been refilled with skyscrapers since the 2001 tragedy of the Twin Towers (and Building Seven). The rebuild at that scale was a poor decision, an act of societal hubris, especially now that so many office towers in Manhattan are operating at less than fifty percent occupancy, which is a dead-loss to their business model. But remember, the first law of history is that things happen because they seem like a good idea at the time… and then times change.

New York City is on the express track for contraction. It is in the process of getting poorer, smaller, more disorderly, and  less important than it used to be. History is a harsh mistress — spectacular civic gestures aside.

Below: entrance to the Perelman Center borg: a death fantasy: