If cathode ray blue was the color of the “digital,” and millennial pink that of the “post-digital,” with perhaps a brief moment of international orange in the transition between, then the color of whatever we find ourselves in now is not in fact a color at all. It is a mercurial material, a silvery-grayish, maybe aluminum or steel or concrete, finished to something between mirror and the liquid crystal noise of an ambient occlusion rendering.
Silvery-grayish is the material of the elemental products of twentieth-century industrialization, elevated by the precision of their arrangement, like a restaurant kitchen, or the ready-made sculptures of Charlotte Posenenske. The silvery-grayish boxes of the present complete the full circle of architecture’s relationship to industry and art, from functionalist assemblages — Bruther’s Residence for Researchers — to absurdist objects — Junya Ishigami’s anti-gravitational aluminum cloud. Silvery-grayish boxes grace every other cover of El Croquis or 2G. Disposed to an economy of means, they increasingly incorporate the idiosyncrasies of load-bearing stone or adaptively reused concrete into their otherwise mechanically reproduced repertoires. They convey a certain understated cosmopolitanism, intimating knowledge of the latest fashions from Tokyo or Paris, posing a challenge to overwrought geometries and theoretical abstractions by virtue of their deadpan expressions of material fact. Silvery-grayish is adjacent to, sometimes inspired by — sometimes was the inspiration for — Off-White™.
A can of silver spray paint and a roll of silver mylar have become best friends to a generation of students, the shortcut to a speculative architecture that is simultaneously committed to engaging the “realities” of construction and is primed for digital dissemination. Derived entirely from stock finishes, a model rendered silvery-grayish carries none of the authorial paralysis nor semiotic baggage that might attend either the choice of color or the insistence on the old standbys of black, white, or wood byproduct. Its structural rigor is self-evident, while its surface effects remain seductive.
For ANY’s generation of well-credentialed young architects, these silvery-grayish boxes have been a constant not only of their global media ecosystems, but of their educations and internships up and down the Amtrak northeast corridor. See for instance the siding of nearly every MOS project, in perfect contrast against a verdant landscape or the gradient environment of its screenshot™; the exceptional elevation of Johnston Marklee’s Sale House; most spectacularly, the steel chainmail over the smooth concrete and on into the oversized aluminum window frames of SO-IL’s Kukje Gallery, probably the most influential aesthetic gesture produced by the post-9/11 Ivy-affiliated scene.
Caught within its imperfectly reflective surfaces, the light-industrial vernacular of the late-capitalist landscape folds in on the immaculate detailing of international architecture ad infinitum. Like the best song by the best band that you’ve never heard of, a well-executed silvery-grayish box unfailingly suggests a reference to a reference to a reference to a reference. The perfect distillation of the silvery-grayish box of the present is Kersten Geers and David Van Severen pulling photographs of Frank Gehry’s Davis House, Jean Nouvel’s Nemausus, and the Smithsons’ Upper Lawn Pavilion from the slide library in the Ábalos & Herreros archive to put on display at the Canadian Centre for Architecture under the title “Architecture Industrielle.” But its most potent architectural antecedents are Mies van der Rohe’s 1923 Concrete Office Building and OMA’s S,M,L,XL
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Diagnosing the crisis of modern formalism in the early 1970s, Manfredo Tafuri described the emergence of an architecture assembled by a new generation from the fragments of the utopias that their modernist forbearers had failed to usher in1. Having abandoned modern architecture’s ambitions to give productive form to the socio-technical revolutions of modernity — in other words, to derive formalism from the polycrisis of colonial-industrial-modernity — these architects put formalism itself in crisis, reappropriating the language of modernism to engage in a critique of its intellectual and political foundations amid the polycrisis of post-colonial/industrial/modernity. In the face of social upheaval and environmental decay, they waved architectural white flags, most emblematically in the early houses of Peter Eisenman, whose “post-functional” drywall columns displaced the white plaster boxes of Le Corbusier and Giuseppe Terragni into a context of pure linguistic structure.
But if an architecture of seamless white boxes, with occasional color-blocked accents, tends to signify immateriality, the primacy of the abstracted conceptual and geometric operations that precede the actual construction of buildings, an architecture of silvery-grayish boxes, each seam expressed, signifies pure materiality, the primacy of the literal objects — the CMUs and screws and panels — from which modern buildings are actually constructed.
A decade after Tafuri described architecture’s retreat to so many boudoirs, in which infinite private languages were conceived, Kenneth Frampton sketched out a collective way forward through the framework of “critical regionalism,”2 wherein modern architecture could be resuscitated and modulated by its interactions with the material specificities of sites and cultural practices. Picking up the threads of Team X and other heterodox modernists of the postwar period, Frampton described the means by which architecture — having abandoned the dream of utopia — could at least carve out a global constellation of local exceptions from the increasingly planetary dystopia of late capitalism.
Today’s silvery-grayish boxes deploy the formal fragments of modern architecture, whether with self-reflexive ambivalence, as in the “empty” works of Office KGDVS, or with dogged instrumentality, as in the increasingly “activist” interventions of Arno Brandlhuber. Where once such fragments were charged by their evident anti-functionalism, today their origins are more blurred, the dialectic threads unravelling. If not precisely modernist-functionalists, nor are the architects of these silver-grayish boxes precisely not modernist-functionalists, as Andrea Branzi, Peter Eisenman, James Stirling, and Tafuri’s other “knights of purity” were. Sincerity and optimism, tectonically expressed, outweigh the abstractions of irony and cynicism.
To the extent that this architecture is specific to its sites, these sites are themselves the sites already cleared and built and cleared again by the economic churn of modernity — the site is modernity. These silvery-grayish boxes cannot be defined by their relationship to something before or outside of modern architecture, as Tafuri’s architects were defined by their relationships to classical types or Frampton’s to regional crafts. This is an architecture comprised not only of the linguistic fragments of modern architecture but, increasingly, of the literal material fragments of modern architecture — the actual, not rhetorical, products of a century of globalized and industrialized construction. It is an architecture sited inside the reinforced concrete and steel shells of ageing modernist buildings, in its quarries and brownfields, its odd lots and industrial parks, its sites of extraction and production. This question is whether some of these silvery-grayish boxes suggest a way forward, or whether they can only lead us around again, into the diminishing half-life of another revival of revival.
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An Architecture, New York, experience:
There are three spaces in Soho, each occupying a generic slice of the light-industrial fabric. There is Jack Ceglic’s design for the Dean & DeLuca grocery store (RIP) at the corner of Broadway and Prince. A bright whitewashed space filled with stainless-steel kitchen shelves and refrigerated displays — straight from the suppliers over on the Bowery — filled with tasteful consumables to serve a discerning customer base. A couple blocks over at the corner of Mercer and Spring, Donald Judd’s Untitled (1969), a rectangular aluminum tube the size of a very small room, sits on the third floor of his old factory turned Gesamtkunstwerk. It is a massive precursor to the 100 furniture-sized milled aluminum boxes that fill a warehouse in Marfa and to their infrastructurally scaled concrete cousins that sit in the fields outside. And between the two, kitty-corner the old Dean & DeLuca, around the corner from the now Judd Foundation, is OMA/AMO’s Prada Epicenter. Is it the most intellectually sophisticated, spatially ambitious retail fit-out in the history of Western commerce? Maybe. Steel mesh display cages run on ceiling-mounted mechanical tracks over the vertiginously sloped floor, the relationship of the two elements simultaneously celebrating and undermining the spatial logic of the factory. But does it come close to transcending retail fit-out to become building, charged with the same potency to act on the spatial-material structure — and therefore the program — of modern architecture as Jussieu, ZKM, TGB, or any of OMA/AMO’s other unbuilt patents for Universal Modernization? Not quite close enough. And so which set of serially repeated silvery-grayish boxes achieves lasting cultural value? The industrial shelves of Dean & DeLuca as generic retail identity, soon to be globally imitated, transubstantiating the economical into the luxurious through the metaphysical powers of branding? Yes. Judd’s objects in their environments as art practice after the crisis of traditional artistic media spurred by the onset of mechanical reproduction and electronic communication, now sites of pilgrimage by those in desperate search of a new millennial “aura”? Yes. The mechanical cages of the Prada Epicenter as self-reflexive critique of the architecture of production and consumption, the extraordinary becoming just another shopping experience? Probably not. (Bureau Ole Scheeren’s late attempt to package Dean & DeLuca into a stainless-steel kit for global export? Definitely not.) And we won’t mention Warhol’s (silver) Factory. Manhattan’s intensity of capital and culture defy architecture, simultaneously inspiring and marginalizing it, leaving it always less than the undeniable aesthetic and financial vitality of what Koolhaas, forever spurned by New York, termed Manhattanism. New York is where Architecture first came to die of distraction.
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ANY claims, perhaps half jokingly, to be engaged in a critical regionalism of Manhattan. But, like most architects, the further they get from Manhattan, the closer they get to building, and the more Manhattan therefore makes a meaningful appearance. Architecturally speaking, Manhattan is no more a place than an idea to be transported to other places. Its unvarnished, often-mediocre architecture of pure capital accumulation and ad-hoc cultural expression is not so much a regional practice as a global metonym.
Take two cases, which reveal an extruded metallic volume, a sort of ur-element of industrially produced architecture — it could be the whole skyscraper, or just one mullion; Mies’s Friedrichstraße tower or a lone cruciform column — to be the beginning of ANY’s architecture. At the OBG HQ, a simulacra of a mid-century curtain wall is constructed as an interior partition organizing a Manhattan loft. Neither new curtain wall nor old curtain wall redeployed at the end of its original lifespan, the reproductions of mullions lack material and tectonic force. Built to the specifications of their new purpose, these “mullions” too neatly meter out the loft into its expected parts, eliding evidence of the inevitable predicaments that arise from the continual re-occupation of Manhattan’s leasable floor areas. On the other hand, the elongated trough of printed matter that is the “research library” at Vowels, a post-retail space in a basement on the Bowery, comes much closer to something specific to lower Manhattan. A dense linear array of periodicals perversely hung by their spines like smoked fish or Peking ducks, the metallic extrusion could be the bespoke vitrine of an eccentric collector or it could be a repurposed range hood from an industrial kitchen supplier. It appears, one way or another, to be from the Bowery, equidistant between, or simultaneously both, art and industry.
By the time we’ve crossed the continent, the ambition of ANY’s work is transformed with its scale. Though located along the main drag of what amounts to a one-road town in rural British Columbia, the stacked and shifted extrusions of the Peachland housing block add up to an elegantly unfinished pile organized on principles of access to light and air, a building by ideologues of Manhattanism. While the Corten screen of the facade suggests a palatable enough contemporary finish, polite acceptance of the assignment, an alternative elevation — likely never shown to the developer? — shows something refreshingly different. Perhaps best described as the grayed vinyl couch cover of a two-pack-a-day shut-in, the abject accumulation of burn-marks-cum-windows says, in so many words, “fuck it.” It won’t be built like that, of course, but even if only an image, the abjection is an important corrective to the depthless sheen of so much contemporary work. Like all purveyors of silvery-grayish boxes, ANY must decide whether they are engaged in an act of architectural resistance in the face of the polycrisis, even if futile, or merely an acquiescence to its imperatives toward the “interesting” but ultimately banal mechanics of ameliorative aesthetic improvement.
That facade, which reappears elsewhere in the firm’s repertoire, appears to be a nod to the ill-fated HdM×OMA collab for Ian Schrager’s hotel on Astor Place, a project that is about as close as architecture has gotten to a legendary night when so and so played with so and so at White Columns in 1980-something. Eventually, the hotel’s acid-etched facade ending up miniaturized into the elegant cast-aluminum foam panels of OMA’s Prada Foundation, while its truncated, twisted pyramidal form ended up in the utterly unexpected brick pile of Herzog & de Meuron’s Switch House at the Tate Modern, the Europeans having returned from Manhattan transformed by their encounter. So too, apparently, ANY.
ANY is not the first Architecture New York, of course. Like Cynthia Davidson’s Anyone Corporation, publisher of Log, Writing Architecture Series, and, previously, ANY magazine, the ANY of Michael Abel and Nile Greenberg aims to contain nearly the full spectrum of the later formal and theoretical ambitions of American architecture. Like their former employers MOS (it’s SOM backwards 😉), ANY are omnivorous connoisseurs. Unlike many of their peers, they allow themselves the indulgences of their browsing, up to and including odd remnants of the liquid digital surfaces of the pre-Rhino ’90s. This formal pluralism is their real Manhattanism, a trait most miss in their appreciation of OMA, who see the City of the Captive Globe as a parable of Manhattan, rather than the parable of a practice obsessed with Manhattan.
The odd bits of hypar surface in the Malibu Stone House, a fireproof silvery-grayish box adorned with articulated fire shutters, betray the limits of this approach, the project overwhelmed by references and diagrams — is it an assembly of digital “primitives,” a medieval castle poché plan, an on-trend neo-functionalist pile in fire-resistant and carbon-sequestering materials, or a late effort at reviving the autonomous problems of geometry? It can’t quite be all of the above. And that’s not mentioning the Corten interiors. The singular gesture of the Seoul Performing Arts Center, by contrast, a symmetrical scattering of glass boxes draped by a shimmering surface, suggest something closer to a productive endgame when placed in the context of ANY’s body of work, advancing the exuberant effects of their retail landscapes towards urbanism; reading, in a register of spectacular optimism, as if Joshua Prince-Ramus had once interned at Future Systems.
In any case, such heterogeneity of output is generally to be admired as evidence of genuine thinking and a willingness not to settle into a house style. But, as seen in the later trajectories of HdM, OMA, or the consummate post-industrial New Yorkers and makers of silvery-grayish architectural machines — our closest thing to a Sonic Youth — Diller Scofidio + Renfro, it can slide quickly from manifestation of conceptual rigor, architecture of and for crisis, to anodyne corporate branding, so much plastic collecting in the ocean of the global built environment. Already expert in navigating the branded world, it remains to be seen whether ANY’s architecture will continue to thrive on the energy of the idea of New York, or will become, like so much New York architecture before it, merely handmaiden to its exclusionary excesses.
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If the contemporary architecture of silvery-grayish boxes has come into being within the global network of Dieters Rahms-derived Apple products through which our architecture has been produced and consumed since the turn of the millennium, it may be that the arrival of the Cybertruck, a deeply regressive retro-vision of a militarized future, marks its end. Our technologically inflected optimism for what was promised by the twentieth century having ultimately delivered us instead into the repetition of its nightmares, this time, simultaneously, as tragedy and farce.
