Charles Renfro Builds This City

CR: I don’t think anyone would say they want to “alienate”.

AB: They may not admit it.

CR: I think probably what you’re referring to are a lot of these upper condo projects that are private by nature – and we’re certainly dealing with public projects, so there’s a difference – but even a private project could be engaging and thought provoking and contribute to the culture of the city: the cultural architecture. Not much of that is happening here. I could look at a couple of corporate private projects and say there are some really good examples: I’d say the New York Times building [right] is a great example, while the Hearst example [left] is a terrible example of that – both have been receiving rave reviews. I think Frank Gehry’s IAC down here is a pretty good participant in the city in opening that event space up, but it’s not really open. It’s kind of an electric collar – you think you can do what you want to do, but you get shocked every time to get in the building. It’s this disciplinary space.

AB: Yes.

CR: The condo projects that you see going around that are giving a lot of attention to architecture, such as 40 Bond Street and 40 Mercer Street – it’s weird that they share the same number – are unfortunate in there street presence. In 40 Mercer Street, it’s simply just retail. On Bond Street, you’ve got the fence that says “Do Not Enter”. Old townhouses in New York City – their front gardens were really approachable. If they had fences at all, they were really low. Stoops were open to the street. Herzog & de Meuron had reinterpreted the townhouse, but instead of making this transition zone between public and private, they’ve made a hard line between public and private, even while they’re saying they’re reinterpreting the tradition of the New York townhouse. All the Europeans coming here – do they really understand the tradition of something like a stoop? I don’t know.

AB: What do you think of the New Museum?

CR: Beautiful on the outside: fantastic new form for New York. It’s slightly disappointing on the inside given that it – you don’t understand the form from the inside. Plus, I’m just frustrated that there’s not a singular route to take you from top to bottom to all the galleries.

AB: What do you think of it in context?

CR: On the Bowery? I think it’s great. I think this is a great example of an institution that is completely open to the street and participates in the life of the city. Yeah, it’s going to cause gentrification or it’s the result of gentrification, yet I think it’s doing what it can not to be an elitist institution. The loading dock is right on the street: you see everything going into that building, just like you see everything going into the kitchen supply places next door.

AB: I find your work fascinating because – both in terms of the porous nature of it, but also the integration of the environment on a larger scale, specifically with regard to the High Line. There’s shift in zeitgeist. It’s no longer conquering nature. It’s finally a realization that we have to live with nature. The High Line’s a perfect example, because the trains were key to industrialization.

CR: We’re turning it back to nature.

CR: I don’t know. We’ll see. Who knows? It’s a fragile ecosystem that we’re trying to recreate. Part of our idea was to not over build – not over architecture, not over develop – so there’s no commercial stuff there: to let saplings and weeds and grass grow through the cracks like it did on the existing High Line. The reason it worked so well on the existing High Line is that it wasn’t a public space. No one could go up there and trample it down. Yeah, we have concern that the vegetation may not – it may have to transform through the life of the High Line. We really don’t know. We’re going to see how popular it is. I think we can keep the literal commercialization off of the line. That’s something we won the battle on, which is fantastic, but if it’s a very popular place, the way we’re imagining the vegetation to work may have to change over time.

AB: I guess it would be naïve to think that it wouldn’t. I have this interview you did with ArtKrush in which you sa, “Like SoHo before it, Chelsea is a neighborhood whose success will be its own demise. Its fate is now in the hands of developers.” Do you feel complicit in the evolution of the neighborhood?

CR: It’s such a double-edged question. In a way you’re saying, “Architects should never build in places that haven’t been built before,” because that, by definition, is a sign of transition and change. You can almost guarantee that property values will go up if something happens in a place that hadn’t happened before. I don’t know if that question is intended to admonish.

AB: I guess “complicit” may be a little harsh.

CR: I think as architects, we like to think of ourselves as very powerful players in the cultural landscape – and I think we are, but we’re also kind of victimized by the system in that we’re hired to do work. We don’t generally start work ourselves. If we were architects and developers, we might make different decisions, but it’s just impossible to stop certain things from happening. We can sit back and say, “We’re not going to work on that because that’s going to kill the neighborhood” and watch someone else do it worse. Or, we could say, “Okay, why don’t we help take this in the right direction”. The High Line is the perfect example. If any park were made there, the whole neighborhood would transform, anyway. I think the neighborhood was going to transform whether the High Line happened or not – the land values in New York have just gotten so high, every place in New York is going to be developed. So, the High Line may or may not be a major part of that, but I think that because we took that project and we were able to say, “This isn’t a commercial place, this is a well considered, rough, tumble natural environment.” I think we changed the way at least that thing works and hopefully we can steer some developers to do better work: be a leader in that process.