Locked in time - Module 8

C2 Proficiency · Multiple Matching · Expert Proficiency, Pearson Education

You are going to read an article about architecture. For questions 1–10, choose the best answer from sections A-D. The sections may be chosen more than once.

Emerging from the Lincoln tunnel into midtown Manhattan in New York, a yellow cab from JFK Airport takes you past an architectural masterpiece. Number 510 Fifth Avenue was originally the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Bank and was designed in 1954 as a new kind of banking house, something other than a thick-walled fortress. It was a glass temple of finance, inviting passers-by to step through its cool transparency and be converted to its gleaming vision of the future. Mid-twentieth-century banks were usually mundane but at 510 Fifth Avenue, the vault was displayed behind the glazed façade and the escalators became central to the composition, falling and rising diagonally across the gridded lines like an updated game of snakes and ladders. The upper floor featured a gilded screen by the artist Harry Bertoia.

But things are changing at 510 Fifth Avenue. As a very carefully-designed and much-admired building, it now finds itself at the frontier between developers and preservationists and it's turning into quite a fight. For if there's one thing in architecture that causes friction, it's that our needs change, and so buildings must evolve and adapt in order to stay useful. Within reason. Vornado Realty Trust, the site's owners and one of New York's largest developers, has made the not unreasonable assumption that this commercial building on the world's primary shopping street should be adapted to suit its new tenant, a retailer of lumberjack-style shirts. For this purpose, the gilded screen has been dismantled, the entrance is to be moved, the escalator reversed and the vault moved. On the basis that the façades remain intact, the Landmarks Preservation Commission approved these changes in April. But in July, a judge halted work after a legal challenge by the Citizens' Emergency Committee to Preserve Preservation, which argues that, given the transparency of the façade, Landmark status must extend to those interior features that contribute to the streetscape. Too late. It is now gutted, the interior features broken from their positions of more than half a century.

Architects are often feted for designing buildings whose form follows function. And that's reasonable – intelligent design brings intellectual and physical beauty to the world. But architects are no better at predicting the future than the rest of us. Hence, the flip side to architectural masterpieces: the closer a building's form follows its function, the bigger the upheaval when the original purpose no longer needs to be served. Preservation groups are aware that conservation is an expensive business. Arguments to preserve for preservation's sake are weakened when loans are in short supply and the economic buoyancy that might offer a long-term business case for the sensitive commercial usage of old buildings starts to sink. The stronger argument is to update historic places so they can fund themselves. In any repurposing of a historic building, something has to give. And it usually gives in the direction of apartments, shops, restaurants or art galleries. It's a global picture.

The most exciting new place in New York is the High Line, built as an elevated railway through the Meatpacking District and unused since the 1980s. It was scheduled to be torn down, but local residents started a grass-roots movement in 1999. Three years on, they gained the authorities' support for a radical redevelopment as a city garden, a string of improbable greenery threading through an overlooked quarter that has since spread economic fertiliser in its wake with hotels, boutiques and bars abounding. Back in Fifth Avenue, there's much hand-wringing over the stripped modern icon. Is it too late to hope the perfect tenant will turn up and want to strike a deal? If it's not to change further, who will put it back together, take care of it and run it as... what – an icon?

Locked in time

the idea that a preservation project can regenerate the surrounding area

why a particular structure stood out amongst its contemporaries

the inescapable need to make compromises when structures find a new use

a successful attempt to halt the total destruction of an obsolete structure

a paradox regarding the work of highly renowned architects

an approach to saving the architectural heritage that cannot always be financed

how an architect made a feature of something which is usually obscured

a disagreement about how a principle should be applied in practice

a structure that embodied the optimism of its time

a feeling that alterations to a structure were justifiable

In which section does the writer mention

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