UN Secretariat Building, NYC, 2021.
All the pixels, pretending to get along, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/51381729335
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this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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Captured with the Phase One Achromatic back and the Rodenstock 32mm/4.0 HR-Digaron lens, with the back shifted down 8.5mm to maintain the building's geometry. I enhanced contrast in the sky with a polarizer, but otherwise used no color contrast filtration. The camera was positioned across the avenue about 10 meters up from the plaza level (at the bottom of the "canyon" of the skyline reflected in the bottom center of the building).
Love them or hate them, mid-century rectangular glass curtain buildings like this are easy to dismiss as being "boring", but I think that misses something.
Reflections of the surroundings become part of the facade, which changes at different angles and throughout the day. I visited several times and made dozens of photos, all quite different, before I settled on this one, and there are infinitely many photos others could make, all unique. (Similar to the new World Trade Center in this regard).
The UN Secretariat building was designed by an international team of architects (most notably Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer) and completed in 1950. It was the first important "International Style" modernist skyscraper in New York - exemplified here here by a simple, unadorned rectangle with reflective glass curtain walls on either side.
Glass box office buildings became almost cliche in mid-century NYC, but the UN remains unusual in being set apart in the skyline, uncrowded by neighbors.
@[email protected] Do you know the stories set in this building collected in Shirley Hazzard's wonderfully titled People in Glass Houses? Some great workplace comedy plus critical commentary on work in an international organization.
I have mixed feelings about Le Corbusier's architecture (to say nothing of his urban planning philosophy), but I think the UN Secretariat building was one of his successes.
An aside: If you look at the full resolution version (downloadable on flickr), you can see the HF amateur radio antenna on the roof. Nerds are everywhere, even/especially at the UN. There's also a family taking a group picture on the street in front.
@[email protected]
Robert Hughes's "The Shock of The New"
covered this remarkably well, (late 70s).
drew a direct (if you paid attn) line to the 3rd R's goals and this architecture.
https://archive.org/details/bbc.-the-shock-of-the-new-robert-hughes-1980-hq
@[email protected] many are boring. This one is very very not boring. It’s all in the details.
@[email protected]
I was born in the 50s so I saw a lot of that, some I found quite ugly. But for some inexplicable reason I really dislike that aqua colored glass the all use. 🤷