AIA GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY book review

AIA GUIDE TO NEW YORK CITY (FIFTH ADDITION)

By Steve Wright

We wish all architecture guides were as well put together as the recently released AIA Guide to New York City (Fifth Edition, by Norval White & Elliot Willensky with Fran Leadon -- Oxford University Press.)

The $39.95 guide earns high praise for:

• Being well-organized by borough and neighborhood.

• Containing thousands of clear black and white photos.

• Clearly explaining various forms of architecture without being academic.

• Comprehensiveness that gives just as much history, detail and insight to a far-flung, low-rise structure in the Bronx or Brooklyn as a fabled masterpiece in Manhattan.

• Having dozens of maps and walking tours.

About the only negative is the 5-inch by 10-inch guidebook is so packed with information that it weighs a couple pounds. If you are going to take to the streets of New York armed with the guidebook, you might want to pack it in a book bag -- for it most surely will not fit in any pocket, or even most handbags.

The New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects first put out a guide to their own magnificent metropolis in 1968. Much has changed.
We say that with the knowing grin of a frequent visitor who has seen the real estate boom and bust be both kind -- in finding adaptive re-uses for aging structures -- and cruel -- toppling low-rise construction for out of proportion glass boxes for the "cool" people to live in.

The guide address those and other impacts of the economy, as well as recent civic spaces such as the tremendous success of the High Line -- a long-abandoned elevated freight rail now reborn as an urban paradise 30 feet above the street level and fueling both rehabilitation of old warehouses and placement of starchitect modernism along its Chelsea-Meat Packing District-points north westerly path.

The guides is warm and reads like it was published by a single architect with loving eyes for all that is New York. The fact is its two principal authors are deceased.
Willensky, an early preservationist and creator of the guide with his friend Norval White, died at age 56 in 1990 but so beloved is his bedrock material for this guidebook, that the AIA still credits him as principal author two decades after his untimely passing.

White died at age 83 in 2009, shortly after handing in the manuscript for the latest edition. White and Willensky are affectionately memorialized in essays at the front of the guide written by family and friends. The warmth sets the tone for a book that is exhaustive, but very approachable by the lay person architecture buff.

One of our favorite features is the necrologies, which give the history and lament the loss of demolished buildings great and significant. Sometimes reverent, sometimes cheeky, the necrologies pull no punches when a scolding is in order to make a point over a quality piece of the built environment allowed to collapse from neglect or razed so a lesser building could to up in its place.

The book's tone of speaking to you like a friend over the backyard fence (or in New York's case, from the next door stoop) continues in the introductions to various sub-neighborhoods of Manhattan and her sisters Brooklyn, The Bronx, Queens and Staten Island.

Delicious is the intro to the Gowanus neighborhood, identified by its association with the polluted from industry Gowanus Canal:

"Legends about the canal have grown like weeds along its fetid banks, including one tale of two thieves who fled police by walking across the canal's Jell-O-like surface. An excursion by boat is always instructive (mysterious, viscous bubbles rising to the surface appear to be 1/4th inch thick), affording excellent views of the canal's most interesting features: Its bridges and viaducts."

Such is the writing of authors brilliant in knowledge but also confident enough to not try to talk over the heads of a not as well-trained audience. Such is the strength, success and pure pleasure of the latest edition of the AIA Guide to New York City.

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LINK TO THE BOOK:
http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/ArtArchitecture/~~/dmlldz11c2EmY2k9OTc4MDE5NTM4Mzg2Nw==

Wright is the author of 5,000 published articles on urban life, architecture, public policy, planning and design. He is active in working to make sure universal design, which provides barrier-free access to people with disabilities, is incorporated to the essential and rapidly-evolving practice of sustainability.