From My City Window
A Review of “The Life and Death of Buildings”
Viewing Princeton University Art Museum’s exhibition of “The Life and Death of Buildings” is the closest you’ll get to walking in the streets of New York City while visiting suburban New Jersey. Through photography the exhibition composes a linear progression, depicting structures from their inception to demise. High-rise construction is caught in time-lapse. Monuments rise to their apex, while office buildings fall to their deaths. But pause in front of Alfred Stieglitz’s From My Window at the Shelton, North (1931), and you’ll meet a life-like skyscraper eye to eye.
Though nearly eighty years old, Stieglitz’s photograph, rendered in streaks of black and white with tones of silver gray, captures a New York City skyscraper on the rise. A rectangular strip of black shoots up the center, extending beyond the boundaries of the frame. The picture’s borders direct the viewer to zoom into the midsection of the foremost skyscraper, giving the sense of floating in the air. Your sightline penetrates directly to the building’s middle so that you meet the building at eye-level.
Tiny squares of light—the building’s eyes—vertically puncture this dark strip, accenting the form with repetitive sparks of white that compel your eye to move up and down the image. But there is danger along the horizon. A sweeping gray sky, reminiscent of storms clouds rolling in, create a wave-like effect, as if one were gazing up from beneath a translucent tide. Squint a bit harder. Tiny toothpicks pinprick this tumultuous atmosphere revealing a skeletal structure that barely stands out against this steely sky. It is a newly rising skyscraper, haunting the backdrop like a ghost.
Stieglitz’s vision of hanging in the clouds encapsulates the complexity and contradiction of “The Life and Death of Buildings.” While most of the photography portrays architectural development and urban decay over time, Stiegltiz’s photograph of an emerging Manhattan uniquely expresses his ambivalence towards this shifting city landscape.
His image is at once striking, yet quite foreboding. The flickering suggestion of high-rise construction in the photograph’s background is a sign of burgeoning infrastructure, but also a spectral reminder of construction’s ultimate fate: destruction. The miniscule steel sticks piercing the sky suggest the rise of an urban monument, yet their feathered edge point to the inherent fragility of life and its predisposition towards entropy. In Stieglitz’s dark rendering of the urban landscape, the birth of buildings, appears as a force of ominous change, rather than an inspiring sign of forward progress.
Even so, in Stieglitz’s photograph, skyscrapers are spectacular precisely for their vertiginous effect upon the eye. Shots of light emanate from them, illuminating the image with sparks of white that flash like dizzying paparazzi cameras. The photographer’s perspective, hanging suspended in mid air, creates a disorienting visual effect. The high-rise forms are streaky, slightly blurred, or almost indistinct, their edges nearly imperceptible, suggesting not only an imprecision in the execution of the shot, but also a sense of precariousness—at any moment these forms may collapse, or evaporate into thin air.
The structures’ ephemeral nature engenders distrust. Stieglitz’s skepticism is not only conveyed through his photography, but also recorded in his notes. The development of this section of Manhattan “both impressed and upset” him, a sentiment disclosed in this entry: “When [I] moved here…[as] a boy, it was all rocks and bare places. My father said it would one day become the center of New York…Someday I wonder if the last tree in Manhattan Island will not feel as I do. They have displaced with all that wonder.”
Like this last tree, Stieglitz felt displaced from the environment that had emerged around him. While having had little control over this unbridled urban development, through his lens, Stieglitz managed to capture the uneasiness that such change, or displacement brings about. In his photograph we do not see steady, dignified portraits of urban monuments, but shaky shots of uncertain forms with flashes of light bursting from within.
In this way, Stieglitz’s photography asks an essential question: if these new forms, growing upwards out of the grid are ill-defined, can they ever be truly known, or trusted? It is in this question that Stieglitz’s 1931 photograph resonates with a post 9/11 fear of man’s mega towers. A passage from Joseph O’Neil’s 2008 novel Netherland comes to mind:
“My assumption was…in the lustrous boxes thickly checkering the night, countless New Yorkers…stood at their windows, as I often did…. I was…afflicted by the solitary’s vulnerability to insights, so that when I peered out into the flurry and saw no sign of the Empire State Building, I was assaulted by the notion, arriving in the form of a terrifying stroke of consciousness, that substance—everything of so-called concreteness—was indistinct from its unnamable opposite.”
Through their respective lenses, Stieglitz and O’Neil contemplate the lives of others in the city by looking out towards lighted windows. In O’Neil’s passage we get the sense that, like Stieglitz, his protagonist Hans, is hanging in the clouds from the perch of his high-rise apartment, regarding New York with an ambivalent attitude. The “indistinct” Empire State Building, without form, or name, strikes Hans because it is supposed to be substantive and concrete, but it is ultimately amorphous, like Stieglitz’s depiction of two rising towers. In O’Neil’s framework, skyscrapers are supposed to be symbols of security, monuments to progress, but in the aftermath of 9/11, how can they remain such icons? Are they safe? Can we trust them to protect us when catastrophe and terror can demolish them in an instant?
Yet, there is a glimmer of hope. Perhaps the skyscraper is not so doubtful, or dead after all. The “lustrous boxes” in O’Neil’s passage and the square white sparks in Stieglitz’s photo are signs of life. The implication is that “countless New Yorkers” exist behind these luminescent panes. While we, along with O’Neil and Stieglitz, can only assume that there is human activity within, the hope that someone might be at home may be just enough assurance to restore our faith in an urban world burdened by the constant prospect of destruction. “The seemingly miraculous reemergence from the clouds of towers dashed from within with light” that O’Neil describes and that Stieglitz captures might just enliven the buildings that this exhibition has red tagged against human habitation. Perhaps in the city’s buildings there is not just life and death, but resurrection. One can only hope.
