Elevation
I recently had the unpleasant experience of being trapped in a lift, while house-sitting for some friends who reside in a Ballardian Stunning Development. The lights went out, the alarm got ignored, the intercom seemed to connect us with a call centre in Manchester - it did feel like being abandoned by the entire world, although mercifully only for about half an hour. How this entirely straightforward bit of Victorian technology, long the norm in large swathes of the globe, manages to fuck up so frequently in Britain is an intriguing question, and unsurprisingly tied up with class - the famously appalling lifts of the Pepys Estate in Deptford when it was finished in the early 70s were probably not paralleled at the NatWest Tower. Via the invaluable Things, here's a great New Yorker article about the history and perils of the elevator - several chills ran down my spine reading the story of the unfortunate McGraw Hill employee.
posted by owen hatherley at 2:27 PM
5 Comments:
Thanks for the link to the New Yorker story.
However, your picture is the old McGraw Hill building - Raymond Hood's fabulous "jolly green giant" of 1931 between 8th and 9th Avenues at 42nd Street.
The tower with the dodgy lifts is the publisher's mediocre new 1972 home on 6th Avenue (between 49th and 50th IIRC) designed by the commercial hacks Harrison, Abramovitz & Harris as a bland western extension to Rockefeller Center.
Would it be insufferable to say that I already knew that? The pics of the newer tower were so boring that I went for the 1932 one - one of only two skyscrapers in The International Style, this being the other.
Hmmm. I still reckon McGraw Hill I is Streamline Moderne.
But I have to admit my ignorance - did Henry-Russell Hitchcock or Philip Johnson try to claim Hood's building for The International Style in their 1932 MoMA exhibition or the book?
It's in their book. It really sticks out actually - even Mendelsohn is a tad outre for that one. I can only guess they were desperate for a NYC inclusion, and it was only that or Hood's Daily News building that were almost free of the plague of ornament...But Streamline is only really Modernism for Hollywood anyway.
Your rather chilling remote-operated lift service calls to mind Southern Trains' GPS system, which failed in the early days - you might have experienced it - leaving passengers stuck on trains while the driver switched the whole train off and on again to reconnect the OS with some satellite somewhere. And, of course, still takes up to 15 seconds for the doors to open at Victoria.
It's beginning to feel a bit like Ubik.
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