Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis
By David Gissen
University of Minnesota Press, $90
What does an air conditioner in Lower Manhattan have to do with global movements of capital? Can the area around Central Park provide an adequate stand-in for the banks of the Nile River? In Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis, architectural historian David Gissen offers a few possible responses to those questions by closely examining seemingly non-descript technologies of environmental control within Manhattan’s interiors. These technologies control the temperature and humidity and filter air, but rather than merely describing technological advances, Gissen explores how these interiors from high-rise apartments in Washington Heights to trading desks on Wall Street participated in broader social transformations in the city over two decades starting in the late 1960s. During the years of New York City’s major financial difficulties and urban unrest, these new forms of environmental control and maintenance provided a means to not only keep out pollution, noise, and other urban annoyances, but also contributed to a new vision of urban life.
A major feature of this new vision consisted of separating well-maintained interior environments from any sign of the exterior strife. Gissen emphasizes some of the ways that implementing technologies for environmental amelioration helped produce distinctive new ways to create physical segregation. This was the case with the Ford Foundation’s headquarters in Midtown, completed in 1968 and designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates, with Dan Kiley as landscape architect. The sky-lighted 200,000-cubic-foot atrium of the Ford Foundation filled with 20,000 plants acted as the central visual representation of the foundation’s primary claim to esteem: the expansion of innovative agricultural landscapes around the world, particularly in developing nations. But in Midtown, in the eyes of one planner, the atrium became a barrier “between the sealed environment of a modern office and the increasingly harsh and uncontrolled urban landscape outside.” In contrast to its location near the traffic and pollution of the Queensboro Bridge and a ConEdison electrical generator, the atrium’s leafy environs showed off the possibilities for an alternative through the power of environmental control.
The fact that Gissen’s examples tend toward private institutions is no accident, and he underscores the ways that focusing on technological solutions can supplant the role of public bodies. As Manhattan’s cultural institutions lost their municipal support in the 1970s, private corporate backers came in as a permanent replacement. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, financial institutions contributed heavily to its expansion plans in the 1970s. Alongside the addition of new galleries, museum administrators set their sights on acquiring the Temper of Dendur from Egypt.
Other American cities vying for the temple, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico argued that their climates would provide an ideal outdoor environment, while the Smithsonian in D.C. proposed a replication of the Nile on the banks of the Potomac River. In contrast, the Roche and Dinkeloo design for the Metropolitan Museum consisted of a glass interior with a concourse of water, Nile reeds, and lighting that mimicked Egypt’s sun. By offering an indoor environment managed through a “scientific system of architectural preservation,” museum administrators claimed that the temple, which had spent two thousand years outdoors, now needed a protective shell to ensure its continued existence.
The social consequences of scientifically-advanced solutions to separate interiors from harsh exterior conditions highlight the extent to which those with money and power can minimize their exposures to environmental risk and social unrest. So it is apt that Gissen’s final chapter focuses on the air-conditioned trading rooms for financial services employees. During the 1960s and 1970s, Manhattan’s workforce transformed due to the decline in industrial work and attendant rise in office employment. Though many of these new office workers were women and people of color who comprised the support staff, Gissen hones in on the world of the mostly male traders. With heat produced by computers and their own bodies (one journalist described the traders as “animals”), their offices required efficient cooling and ventilating mechanisms that supposedly used as much electricity as Guatemala. But human comfort was an ancillary concern to finding the right temperature to optimize worker productivity. In these cool, clean spaces the workers seemed less like human beings and more like machines facilitating the global exchange of money and information.
Gissen’s narrative begins with middle-class housing, but ends with the affluent, masculine space of trading rooms. In charting this course, he illuminates transformations that went beyond the updating of air conditioning and ventilating systems by encompassing the ways that Manhattan’s workforce, population, and drivers of the economy have shifted. With these changes have come new ways to imagine urban life. These interiors often put forward a vision of a city where those with power and money can almost imperceptibly segregate themselves from those who bear the brunt of the environmental and social costs, and attempt to convince themselves that what goes on inside has little connection to the outside world.