65. No. 8 Thomas Street Building
A.K.A.: David S. Brown Store
Location: 8 Thomas Street
Built: 1875-6
Architect: Jarvis Morgan Slade
National Register Number: 80002705
Listed: April 30, 1980
Visited: May 8, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYC PLC report
My references describe it as Gothic Revival, Venetian division. Now I went to Venice as a teen but remember little of it save for crummy personal shit. Never read Ruskin, either. (I should though, right?) And apparently No. 8 is a relic of a style with few surviving examples in the city. So how am I going to contextualize this building? Well, it sometimes uses bold shapes and colors and quotes older styles...well, sounds kinda postmodern to me! Yes, obviously wrong--modernism arguably hadn't even started yet when this building was built, forget about its putative successor--and yet it's my understanding of postmodern architecture that comes rushing in to fill the vacuum of my knowledge.
I don't mean New York postmodern, though. Our examples of the style such the Sony Building, Worldwide Plaza, and 60 Wall Street are a turn-off; the details meant to distinguish them from the soulless glass boxes of the modernists are so blunt, so elephantine they end up making not much of a difference at all. No. 8 is so modest in size there's no room for elephants, just a rather fanciful composition of colonnettes, arches, mansard roof, and punctuating oculus, all scaled just right for the man in the street below to apprehend and enjoy.
Location: 8 Thomas Street
Built: 1875-6
Architect: Jarvis Morgan Slade
National Register Number: 80002705
Listed: April 30, 1980
Visited: May 8, 2008
Additional Documentation: NYC PLC report
My references describe it as Gothic Revival, Venetian division. Now I went to Venice as a teen but remember little of it save for crummy personal shit. Never read Ruskin, either. (I should though, right?) And apparently No. 8 is a relic of a style with few surviving examples in the city. So how am I going to contextualize this building? Well, it sometimes uses bold shapes and colors and quotes older styles...well, sounds kinda postmodern to me! Yes, obviously wrong--modernism arguably hadn't even started yet when this building was built, forget about its putative successor--and yet it's my understanding of postmodern architecture that comes rushing in to fill the vacuum of my knowledge.
I don't mean New York postmodern, though. Our examples of the style such the Sony Building, Worldwide Plaza, and 60 Wall Street are a turn-off; the details meant to distinguish them from the soulless glass boxes of the modernists are so blunt, so elephantine they end up making not much of a difference at all. No. 8 is so modest in size there's no room for elephants, just a rather fanciful composition of colonnettes, arches, mansard roof, and punctuating oculus, all scaled just right for the man in the street below to apprehend and enjoy.
Labels: Civic Center, Tribeca
posted by Michael at
10:00 PM
1 Comments:
I would say the Jefferson Market Library is Venetian Gothic Revival.
Or High Bacon Revival (all those stripey layers)
And yes, 19th century eclecticism was a bit like Post-Modern but without the irony.
great work!
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