The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (34 page)

At Kohn Pederson Fox, Kennon had designed the highly regarded new Sotheby’s headquarters on the East Side of Manhattan, as well as the Rodin Museum in Seoul, a structure made almost entirely of glass and thus open to passersby and to cars whizzing past. An architecture critic wrote that the museum “inhabits both the site and Seoul in a way that suggests a new dialogue between cities and buildings.” Kennon was a commercial architect with an intellectual program that involved forging this new dialogue. “The big problem that architects have faced,” he says, “is how to energize public space. So much of what used to be public activity has now been superseded by television, the Internet, videoconferencing. You’re trying to say that a life exists in the public realm that’s not virtual; but because that virtual part of us is so ingrained in us, we have to work with it in order to reengage the real world.” The task, in other words, was to revitalize that old sense of Times Square as an agora, a happy urban welter, even as entities like Morgan Stanley were turning Times Square into the central switchboard of the global information network—to harness the abstract, bit-stream world in the service of the face-to-face world that it seemed bent on eradicating. Kennon wanted to create a sign that had the evanescence, the ever-changingness, of information culture and that simultaneously worked as a transfixing object.

The obvious medium for the new sign was LED. Charles Gwathmey had already used LED technology on the first Morgan Stanley building, but he had been compelled to work with a more limited palette. LED uses tiny bulbs that have been placed in a chemical bath so that they emit light at different points of the spectrum, and thus in different colors. Only in the previous few years, however, had blue LED become commercially available, so that now it was possible to work in virtually any color. It had also become possible—though it was very expensive—to buy LED that would reproduce the visual quality of a movie, and thus create a stunningly vivid, color-drenched image. But Kennon didn’t want to turn the new building into a giant TV set. “Normally you buy LED in eight-inch-by-eight-inch panels,” he says. “But you can buy the panels like Lego blocks in whatever configuration you can think of. You can completely break the box.” In other words, LED allowed you to project imagery in any size or shape you could think of; it was not only programmable, unlike neon or vinyl, but almost infinitely malleable. “There is,” Kennon says, “a strong cultural tradition of receiving mediated information through a framing device”—a proscenium, a TV set. “Now you have something which has the possibility of being completely different. The frame can transform into a fragment, into pieces, into things that are not framed.”

In the other post-1987 Times Square buildings, signs had been slapped onto buildings; even at 1585 Broadway, the sign was an afterthought. Kennon wanted to blur altogether the distinction between the permanent and massive material of the building’s skeleton and the transitory and insubstantial material of its imagery—between architecture and media. He wanted to create panels of LED that would be fused into the façade of the building, so that the viewer would be reading not the sign, but the building itself. And Morgan Stanley had agreed that the sign would feature computer-generated programming, rather than the kind of electronic stock ticker used at 1585. That building was known around the company as “the head”; the new building was supposed to demonstrate the company’s heart. “We wanted to portray Morgan Stanley as a service-oriented, family-oriented, global-oriented firm that cares not just about money,” says Susan Jarrett.

In order to create the programming, Kennon and Clement hired a downtown design firm called Imaginary Forces, which specialized in using computer graphics to create whimsical and ingenious movie credits. But Imaginary Forces had also gained familiarity with LED when it was called on to design the giant screen at the Baltimore Ravens football stadium. Mikon van Gastel, the Dutch designer who headed the project, spent long hours with Kennon discussing the idea of a sign that not only was as big as a building but
was
a building. Van Gastel says that Kennon told him, “I want to question what a façade is. Is a façade a window into the building, is it a reflection of the environment, is it a reflection of the world? But the big word also was, ‘I don’t want it to be commercial. We want it to be soft branding.’ It means you want to talk about the company without mentioning the company every three seconds, and it becoming much more of a reflection of its attitudes and values.” Kennon was telling Van Gastel, a young and extremely hip figure whose hair stood straight up and was only rarely seen in its natural color, to do just what he would do if he weren’t worried about the client’s reactions. Kennon’s aesthetic ambition appeared to coincide with Morgan’s wish to speak from “the heart.”

In January 1999, Kennon, Clement, and Van Gastel met at Kohn Pederson’s offices with the clients—fifteen or so executives from Morgan Stanley, the Rockefeller Center Development Corporation, Tishman Realty, and Hines Development, the worldwide building firm based in Houston. After presentations by the two architects, Van Gastel showed the images he had worked up. “It was a disaster,” recalls Kennon. “Lead balloon is kind of an understatement. After the presentation, there was dead silence. The comment from Morgan Stanley was ‘All of our commercials are basically people in boats. What does this have to do with anything?’” Kennon tried to explain that it was a sign, not a commercial; that he wanted to break the frame, and so on. But the executives liked the frame; they clung to the frame. To them, TV was not a “medium,” but the natural means through which electronic information was consumed. And they didn’t see much evidence of the service-oriented, family-oriented imagery they had in mind. One Morgan official who was at the meeting says that the pictures reminded him of “an MTV short”—abstract and ironic and full of ingenious one-liners. Kennon now concedes, in retrospect, that “It’s very difficult to propose something this creative when you can’t point to something [that already exists] and say, ‘It looks like this.’”

And then there was the old-fashioned issue of money. Kennon and Clement wanted to use an immense amount of LED, and they wanted it to be the highest quality commercially available, which was sixteen-millimeter (the distance separating each cluster of bulbs). The complexity of the program would also require extremely sophisticated hardware. The sign they envisioned would cost in the neighborhood of $20 million to build, and perhaps another $1 million a year to operate. Morgan officials viewed the meeting as a useful starting point; now they began doing some thinking of their own. Could the sign be built more cheaply, using either less LED or a lower quality of image? Could the bank’s own technology staff do the programming? The answer to all questions turned out to be no. After a year or so of research and planning, the bankers, to their credit, not only accepted the architects’ proposal but increased the costs by adding a large vertical panel over the entrance to the building, to be used for showing more conventional, news-oriented imagery. Morgan re-hired Imaginary Forces; this time they had the designers work directly with marketing and communications officials from the bank.

The programming that the designers devised satisfied Morgan’s concern about image without deviating very far from the original presentation. Van Gastel created six five-minute “themes,” all of them meant to evoke the identity Jarrett and others described without turning the building into a commercial. Some of the imagery was nevertheless fairly direct and literal-minded. The “Aspiration” theme consisted of words and images demonstrating “how Morgan Stanley facilitates dreams,” projected over pictures of people representing customers. There was an atmospheric theme, designed to use the building as a sort of giant mood ring: in the morning, images of sunrise; in the evening, of the moon. But Van Gastel never lost sight of Kennon’s directive to rethink the meaning of “façade.” The “X-Ray” theme turned the building into a transparency: after a blueprint of one floor flashed on the sign, a schematic image of an elevator would rise to that floor, the doors would open to show the activities on the floor, ultimately leading to one particular employee at work; text superimposed on the picture might say, “Little League coach,” or some other heartwarming—and fictitious—piece of identification. Instead of allowing the owner to project images onto the viewer, the sign was giving the viewer access, at least illusionistically, to the otherwise hidden core of the enterprise—to its “heart,” as it were.

Kennon and Clement designed the building in such a way as to fully incorporate the sign. The LED panels, each forty feet wide and eight feet high, were placed inside pockets formed by structural elements of the façade. The three horizontal bands covered spandrels, dark areas that contain plumbing and wiring, and alternated with windows of equal height, so that when an image played over the building, a viewer would have to imaginatively fill in the blanks created by the intervening floors—another means of connecting the spectator in the street with the extravaganza in the sky.

No one had ever designed anything like this before, and the technical problems were staggering. Each horizontal panel contained 5,346 pixels; a standard movie screen, by contrast, has 2,048. So much imagery could run on the building at once that Van Gastel had to use three powerful computers to create separate images and superimpose them on one another in order to see what the façade would look like at any given moment. What’s more, the LED panels were set inside the decorative mullions that ran up the façade; the software had to be programmed with five-pixel-wide blank spaces wherever a mullion would be located. The graphic information had to be programmed so that as it moved across the façade it would disappear or explode as it reached one of these vertical dividers—as if the building itself were a mediating device—and then reassemble on the other side. And the programming would grow more complex over time: Phase Two would add a layer of sound to the imagery, while Phase Three would incorporate sensors that would allow changes in weather or traffic to influence the imagery. After years of toil, the building would be everything the architects and designers had dreamed of— a sign that would be admired in Starbucks
and
anatomized in architectural journals and media studies departments.

By the summer of 2001, LED was beginning to emerge as the new medium of corporate spectacularity. NASDAQ had built a giant cylindrical sign jutting out over the street at the northeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, though all sign connoisseurs agreed that the quality of both the LED and the programming was poor. On the other side of Broadway, Reuters had commissioned the designer Edwin Schlossberg to create programming for a series of giant black panels that run down one vertex of the building and then continue just above the street level on two sides— and to use, as Morgan had, the highest quality of imagery.

Morgan planned to fully occupy its new building on November 15, 2001, so the programming was to be fully operational by then as well. Over the summer, Morgan installed the incredibly elaborate equipment required to operate the sign, and then began experimentally running the programming. It was during this period that passersby could see the piggybank gavotte, and the bouncing apples, and the pedestrians and the bridge. And then came the terrorist attacks of September 11. Suddenly, the idea of having your employees concentrated in the world’s most famous urban space lost its appeal; within weeks, Morgan Stanley was scouting for new locations and for a buyer for its “heart.” It quickly found the latter in Lehman Brothers, which had lost its headquarters, in the World Financial Center. In early October, Lehman bought the building, for $700 million. The sign, which had been four years in the making, was an afterthought. By the time Lehman formally took title, in early December, three of the six segments were up and running, but Lehman had suspended work on the rest.

In order to comply with the Times Square lighting regulations, Lehman continued to run the sign, but it kept only the most literal-minded images—the suspension bridge and the gallery of pedestrians— and ran them over and over until it was difficult to remember why the sign had been worth caring about in the first place. It was understandable that after the tremendous shock of 9/11, and the sheer logistical challenge of moving, reprogramming the sign was not exactly a top priority. Nevertheless, the bank hired Roger Dean, the Morgan executive who had been responsible for the engineering on both the sign at 1585 Broadway and the new one. When I went to see Dean in early 2002, he explained that Lehman had decided to at least temporarily strip away all the “foreground” images of data and graphics and to keep those few “background” images with which company officials felt comfortable. He had hired a new programmer, who had worked on the technical aspects of the new sign. He felt confident that Lehman would not reduce the sign to a commercial. “I don’t get the feeling at the moment that we’re likely to be blatant about it,” he said. “There’s enough blatancy in Times Square, and I personally would like to be removed from that.”

The new programming went up in the summer of 2002; I stood in front of Starbucks to take a look. The words “Lehman Brothers” covered most of the building, save for two panels on which appeared the phrase “Where Vision Gets Built,” apparently the company’s rather awkward motto, since it was followed by a trademark sign. Then a background of blue mosaic tiles appeared, and once again the giant words “Lehman Brothers,” this time sliding by as cutouts composed of the tiles. Then a mighty sea crashed against rocks; then “Lehman Brothers,” and “Where Vision,” etc., once again. Then came the bridge stretching over the sea, then rolling surf, then the company logo again, then the bridge, then a great mass of clouds, then the logo again, and then the blue tiles. I had had enough.

I called Roger Dean and asked how the corporate advertising squared with his antiblatancy pledge. “I don’t know if I would consider it advertising,” he said lamely. He was plainly uncomfortable. He added that his responsibility was “purely on the technical side.” This was true, though it also seemed plain that he had lost some internal battle. “Our thinking has obviously developed,” he said, and then asked, or rather pleaded, that I direct any further questions to Tony Zehnder, Lehman’s head of corporate communications. Zehnder seemed utterly mystified by my sense of forfeited possibility. He said, “We took the content that Morgan Stanley had for the sign and we pared it down to what we thought were usable images, and we put our name on to identify the name of the building. That’s what the sign is for the moment.”