31. J. P. Morgan & Co. Building
AKA: Morgan Guaranty Trust Company Building; Downtown by Philippe Starck
Location: 23 Wall Street
Built: 1913-1914
Architect: Trowbridge & Livingston
National Register Number: 72000874
Listed: June 19, 1972
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007
This building is the subject of one of the most iconic photos in early modernist photography, Paul Strand's 1915 Wall Street. The relationship of the building and its deeply recessed windows to the people on the street irresistibly summons all manner of potted sociological interpretations in the suggestable. Robert Morse Crunden: "...before these masses scurry buglike humans, mere undifferentiated shadows, all heading like lemmings off to the left, each casting a separate shadow in what seems to have been an early morning sun." Mark Stevens: "The image is a fearful intimation of tragedy, a presentiment of a century of spiritual crisis. You can see foreshadowed the inhuman scale of totalitarian power; the emptying of traditional meaning into the void; the cranking of human beings into the geometric maw of modernity." Keey-rist. The boldness of the black shapes in contrast to the gleam of morning light make it easy to ignore little details, like the guy carrying his walking stick (or umbrella) in a most un-lemming-like way. And, as the photo is so tightly composed, you can't tell from the photo the building's design owes less to "modernity" than to the classical precepts of architecture, and that the building itself is actually only four stories tall.
Even in the smaller scale of 1914's global economy, it is frankly amazing that J. P. Morgan & Co. was headquartered here. It doesn't seem like it'd be enough. Architectural machismo is ordinarily understood in terms of building bigger, taller, wider, but here, the reverse is true. The House of Morgan built it small, defiantly turning down a chance to maximize an investment in some of the priciest real estate in the world, as if to say such potential revenue would be mere straw compared to the moolah made day-in, day-out behind these doors.
It's part of a condo complex now, of course.
Location: 23 Wall Street
Built: 1913-1914
Architect: Trowbridge & Livingston
National Register Number: 72000874
Listed: June 19, 1972
Visited: September 28 and October 15, 2007
This building is the subject of one of the most iconic photos in early modernist photography, Paul Strand's 1915 Wall Street. The relationship of the building and its deeply recessed windows to the people on the street irresistibly summons all manner of potted sociological interpretations in the suggestable. Robert Morse Crunden: "...before these masses scurry buglike humans, mere undifferentiated shadows, all heading like lemmings off to the left, each casting a separate shadow in what seems to have been an early morning sun." Mark Stevens: "The image is a fearful intimation of tragedy, a presentiment of a century of spiritual crisis. You can see foreshadowed the inhuman scale of totalitarian power; the emptying of traditional meaning into the void; the cranking of human beings into the geometric maw of modernity." Keey-rist. The boldness of the black shapes in contrast to the gleam of morning light make it easy to ignore little details, like the guy carrying his walking stick (or umbrella) in a most un-lemming-like way. And, as the photo is so tightly composed, you can't tell from the photo the building's design owes less to "modernity" than to the classical precepts of architecture, and that the building itself is actually only four stories tall.
Even in the smaller scale of 1914's global economy, it is frankly amazing that J. P. Morgan & Co. was headquartered here. It doesn't seem like it'd be enough. Architectural machismo is ordinarily understood in terms of building bigger, taller, wider, but here, the reverse is true. The House of Morgan built it small, defiantly turning down a chance to maximize an investment in some of the priciest real estate in the world, as if to say such potential revenue would be mere straw compared to the moolah made day-in, day-out behind these doors.
It's part of a condo complex now, of course.
Labels: Bank, Financial District, Trowbridge and Livingston
posted by Michael at
8:33 PM
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