Locked in time

The façade of 510 Fifth Avenue in January 2011

Some buildings have a problem. They are just too well-designed. Emerging from the Lincoln tunnel into Midtown Manhattan, a yellow cab from JFK airport may well take you past such an architectural masterpiece.

Number 510 Fifth Avenue was originally the Manufacturers Hanover Trust Bank and was more recently a branch of Chase. It was designed in 1954 by Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 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.

A building becomes an architectural masterpiece by its resolved complexities, where the messiness of life is sculpted and the mundane made surprising. Mid-20th century banks were usually mundane, with a glass screen behind which a teller deposited cash and cheques into a hidden drawer. The security for any traditional bank was its vault but it, too, was usually well-concealed from the public gaze. At the revolutionary 510 Fifth Avenue, the vault was displayed behind the glazed façade, its 7ft diameter steel door a public exhibit of industrial design by Henry Dreyfuss. The escalators became central to the composition, falling and rising diagonally across the gridded lines like an updated game of snakes and ladders, to and from the upper floor, which featured a 60-ton gilded screen by Harry Bertoia.

Ah, the past tense has crept in. You guessed it, things are changing at 510 Fifth Avenue. As a very carefully-designed and much-admired building, Bunshaft’s baby finds itself at the frontier between developers and preservationists and it’s turning into quite a fight. For if there is one thing in architecture that causes friction, it is that our needs change, and so buildings must evolve and adapt to stay useful. Within reason.

Vornado Realty Trust, the site’s owners and one of New York’s largest developers, has assumed 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. To achieve the “rus in urbs” look, the gilded screen has been dismantled, the entrance is to be moved (the irony of 510 Fifth Avenue is that the entrance is on 43rd Street), 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 [sic], 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.

So there’s the paradox. Architects are often feted for designing buildings whose “form ever follows function” (according to Louis Sullivan, the pioneer of Chicago’s skyscrapers). 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 reuse 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.

Five hundred and sixty five years after the foundation of their monastery in 1540, the Ecuadorian nuns of Cuenca suffered a fire caused by old electrical wiring. The blaze killed a nun and damaged the complex (a heavy price for not changing with the times). To help pay for the refurbishment, they agreed to share their kitchens with a restaurateur and baker for a rent of $1,500 a month. The money is being used to restore their dormitories, to maintain the roof and to support their school. Apart from the benevolent smell of hot bread, they’re enjoying the sense of community that a restaurant brings after years of hermetic isolation.

Across the continent, Puerto Madero has been refurbished. The commercial docks for Buenos Aires were built to Eduardo Madero’s designs from 1882-97. By the 1930s, the docks became redundant and fell fallow for half a century. For the past 20 years, the city authorities have invested in the redevelopment of the red-brick blocks, revitalising a dockside forged from hard graft. Because of the clever integration between this upgraded area and the rest of the city, it’s now quite the place to enjoy an Argentinian steak.

Barcelona’s Las Arenas, a brick bullring of 1900, has taken a retail route out of dereliction, courtesy of Rogers, Stirk, Harbour. The building now has a domed roof with an observatory and a communication tower. The interior is packed with shops, completing the transformation from corridas to corridors. Beyond its salvaged brick shell and its name over the entrance, it bears scant witness to bullfighting. Now, citizens lock horns over a bargain with more than 300,000 visitors in its first week of opening this March.

The most exciting new place in New York is a revitalised chunk of Depression-era rusted steel. The High Line was built as an elevated railway through the Meatpacking District and, unused since the 1980s, was scheduled to have been torn down before local residents started a grass-roots movement in 1999. Three years on, the preservationists 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. The key was community. The Friends of the High Line provide 70 per cent of the operating budget and the line keeps growing, doubling its original length this summer.

This winter the International Council of Monuments and Sites is dedicating its general assembly to the theme, “Heritage: Driver of Development”. It’s quite straightforward to show that the imaginative new use of the most lumbering old places has offered successful spurs to regeneration. Europe’s largest redevelopment site at King’s Cross, London, can’t fail to build on the adjacent success at St Pancras where, at a cost of £800m, the station’s Victorian beer cellar has been subdivided into chi-chi stores selling chocolates, cufflinks and knickers to Eurostar passengers jostling under William Barlow’s vast iron vault of 1868. From there, you could take a train on to Bordeaux, where visitors to the converted spice warehouse that is the Musée d’Art Contemporain smell the aroma of ancient vanilla leaching from its pine trusses when it rains. Adapted buildings, it seems, are everywhere.

Back in Fifth Avenue, there’s much hand-wringing over the stripped modern icon. Is it too late to hope the perfect tenant turns up and wants to compromise at the cost of lessening its retail value? If it’s not to change, who will put it back together, take care of it and run it as ... what – an icon? Or, in the end, was it just fatally overdesigned?

Dr Jonathan Foyle is the chief executive of the World Monuments Fund Britain

This article is subject to a correction and has been amended.