i’m in nyc. and it goes without saying that nyc is chock full of amazing buildings. but here’s the issue: most of them have been photographed and documented a few trillion times.

so, i mean, i could go take a picture of the seagram’s building or the chrysler building, but i figure i’d rather search out something a little bit weirder. and today’s building is one of my favorite odd-ball buildings in nyc. it’s tribeca’s ‘synagogue for the arts’, as designed by William Breger (who was a student of Walter Gropius, the bauhaus bigwig).

decades ago i remember walking by it with a friend of mine and we had a pretty heated pro-con debate regarding the relative merits of this buildings. i was pro. he was con.

my pros were: it’s bizarre, it has no windows on the facade, it’s sculptural, it stands in stark relief to every other building in nyc (except the guggenheim) as it’s curvy and weird when almost all other nyc buildings are exclusively composed of right angles, it looks like an odd fluid wave, it kind of looks like a candle flame or a scroll, and etc.

his con was that he thought it was weird an ugly.

to this day he thinks it’s weird and ugly, and i think it’s one of the best buildings in nyc, especially as it hearkens back to a time in nyc when real estate was cheap and architects could be truly experimental (kind of like parts of l.a today). as new york increasingly becomes a very cohesive theme park for the very wealthy i like to visit buildings like this, as a reminder that nyc still has some awesome weirdness hiding out on it’s side streets.

thanks

moby