WestView reader, Joel Gordon, offers us a photo of what is without question the most arbitrarily ugly structure ever erected in the West Village, the MTA ventilation tower at the crossing of Greenwich and 7th Avenue at 11th.
This is not the first such edifice in the Village—over the decades similar structures have been built to house mechanical equipment serving the subways. We have one near 8th Avenue at the start of Greenwich Avenue with a tracery of Art Deco revealing it’s 1930’s age, and we even have one on Washington off Christopher for the PATH tunnel built in 1908, which might be called turn of the century contemporary.
These are not distinguished designs, but they are not in your face ugly as is the 3-story concrete blockhouse on 7th Avenue and 11th.
To compound the design brutality, the MTA engineer who drafted it decided to literally hang a bulky freeze of red bricks simulating the window fenestration of a Federal style town house.
OK, you can’t fault this creativity-starved draftsman from trying to be a bit of a “for-real” architect or even abstract artist (after all, right now if nobody does anything about it, his moment of creativity will sit right in the middle of the Village for centuries).
Before we had art critics we knew what ugly was. Now we need help.
The MTA blockhouse is ugly and this paper will now start an effort to, at the least, make it less ugly and at the best, make it a landmark.—Intro by George Capsis
By Joel Gordon
Westview News should have an “ugliest buildings award” similar to the Carbuncle Cup. This is an architecture prize, given annually by the magazine Building Design to “the ugliest building in the United Kingdom completed in the last 12 months.” The MTA tower at 61 Greenwich Avenue and 11th Street would win.
The facade of the building has a haphazard look of “unfinished,” or maybe a half finished tower, and is an eyesore to historic Greenwich Village. What makes it worse is that the MTA created a small park but they do not clean up the garbage that people leave behind.
I feel the MTA, or someone, should take responsibility for cleaning up this mess.
What I would like to know is how they were able to get this tower passed in the first place.
It is time to get a real architect and fix this mess.
