Streetscapes | Modernism In New York: A Ghost With an Impressive Résumé

Shall we point a finger at the evil instigator of all our urban troubles? If so, it should probably be the sweet little Bauhaus-style loft building that once stood at 57th and Lexington. Designed in 1931 by Thompson & Churchill, it was as crisp and simple as a sugar-powdered beignet on a sunny breakfast table. It was destroyed in 1987 in neo-Classical revenge.

In muddled post-World War I Germany in 1919, the Bauhaus School arrived like a clear, pure light, the simple glass walls and the trim, unornamented buildings a new vision for a vanquished country. The school’s founder, Walter Gropius, made his name with the 1913 Fagus factory in Alfeld; its broad banks of apparently weightless glass walls, without even corner columns, became a touchstone when the school opened six years later.

But here in New York, traditional styles in traditional materials persisted. For us, adventurous was Raymond Hood’s streamlined Deco-ish 1931 McGraw-Hill Building on West 42nd Street, and the horizontal brick and glass ribbons of Cory & Cory’s 1931 Starrett-Lehigh Building at 26th and the Hudson River.

To advance what soon became known as the International Style, a group including the young architect Philip Johnson staged an exhibition of modern architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. Among European landmarks like Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, the organizers sprinkled a few American commissions, half a dozen from New York.

These included McGraw-Hill and Starrett-Lehigh. But only one example really evoked the spare, glassy modernism of the Bauhaus — the little six-story loft building at Lexington Avenue and 57th Street, completed just at the time of the exhibition.

It was developed by L. Victor Weil and his wife, Beatrice, who by one account was an interior decorator, and designed by Henry S. Churchill.

Churchill had declared in a 1924 article in The Arts magazine that “architects seem unable to think in anything except the terms of a dead tradition.” Classical was irrelevant, he said: “The Roman carvers saw the acanthus as a beautiful thing growing in the fields; but what draftsman has ever seen an acanthus growing along the Bronx River?”

Perhaps that explains why Churchill’s office had a skimpy output; the handful includes the modernist Hotel Lowell, at 28 East 63rd Street, with its luscious pink terra-cotta decoration.

For the Weils, Churchill designed a loft building with remarkable light and air inside. This was possible because the entire facade hung from cantilevers, with no exterior columns, and because he used a minimum amount of masonry, specifically lightly glazed cream, green and black terra cotta.

Indeed Churchill, who railed about the New York City building code to The New York Sun, would have used chrome steel panels if he could. Even so, the structure was about as close to a transparent glass box as you could get in New York for many years.

The Weils’ loft was publicized in various journals and newspapers, but compared with the big dogs in the International Style show, it was a teacup Chihuahua and made just a squeak. There it sat, without notice, until 1967, when the first edition of the A.I.A. Guide to New York City called it “a pioneering piece of structural virtuosity.”

But Lexington Avenue is a busy place, and by early 1981, when I wrote in the architecture journal Skyline that the building was on an assemblage site and in “immediate danger,” the project to replace it was proceeding without any outcry. Preservation battles tend to depend on the existence of a powerful co-op or tenants’ group eager to go to bat for a building, regardless of its quality.

The Landmarks Preservation Commission did vote to consider the matter in 1982, but it was too late. The building’s owner, Madison Equities, had already received permits to remove the terra-cotta facade, saying it was unsafe. The lawyer handling the case, Howard Zipser, told me afterward, “We never knew anything about Landmarks.”

However, Stratford Wallace, whose family owned the land and was embroiled in a dispute with Madison, wrote in an unpublished 1999 letter to The Times that Madison had received notice of the hearing and had written him that “steps must immediately be taken to prevent” landmarks designation. Mr. Wallace said that by the time of the hearing, “the building was nothing more than a skeleton frame and of no interest to the Landmarks Preservation Commission.”

In 2010 Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson chief curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art, described the Weils’ loft in an e-mail to me as “a superb building ... what a loss.”

Its successor, a 32-story office building known as 135 East 57th Street, is set well back from the corner, with a wide plaza that could have accommodated the 1932 building quite nicely. But in its place sits one of the great architectural ripostes of New York, a lugubriously postmodern but definitely Classical folly, a circular, roofless ring of masonry supported by pairs of columns.

But for this blocky tempietto, Henry Churchill’s modernist effort could have remained where it was, a little Bauhaus hiccup, as irrelevant today as an acanthus leaf on the shore of the Bronx River.

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