Whatever you think about the architecture of London-based designer Will Alsop — I think it's fine — one thing is certain: You could never fail to pick an Alsop project out of a line-up.
His work is invariably irreverent and saucy, and tends to be tricked out in summery, colourful frocks. Like the Sharp Centre at the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto — a slab smartly pushed skyward by long steel toothpicks — an Alsop building typically contests the dowdy sameness and caution of buildings round about. Look closely, and you can spot the many ways Mr. Alsop's designs creatively respond to real-world contexts — but it's always the distinctive, high-spirited stylishness that strikes you first, and stays with you longest.
Toronto could stand to have more flair of the kind Mr. Alsop brings to cities. But as things are turning out, we'll have to wait a while to see his first residential building in these parts. A condominium tower proposed early last year for King Street West, the architect told me last week, is still moving forward, but slowly.
The pace of Mr. Alsop's activities is quicker, however, in Yonkers, N.Y., where his first project in the United States was recently launched. Designed for Reni Cos., a New Jersey developer, the mainly residential, $282-million (U.S.) scheme will occupy a place now much on the minds of the citizenry in this town just north of New York City.
(top) Designer Will Alsop’s first project in the United States incorporates a decommissioned electrical generating plant on the Hudson River in New York. Middle, a side view and, bottom, a view of the Yonkers waterfront.
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It's a long stretch of industrialized Hudson River waterfront that, like urban riverbanks and shorelines elsewhere, has slid into decay over the past few decades, but is now the object of extensive regeneration plans. (A $3.5-billion renovation is already under way in the area.)
The exact site from which Mr. Alsop's buildings are set to rise — an electrical generating plant decommissioned long ago — is a special focus of concern for people busy with the conservation of industrial properties. Controversy has started to simmer over Mr. Alsop's intention to lop off the two smokestacks atop the generating station. (In an interview, he said the loss of the stacks was "sad," but added that the structures are hopelessly corroded and cannot be saved.)
If the developer and his architect succeed in taking down the smokestacks, and all else goes according to plan, by 2009 the whole site will be radically transformed from a dilapidated post-industrial zone into a visually festive destination by the water's edge.
The aesthetics of the project are vintage Alsop: a mix of optical fireworks and a dash of high seriousness. From the 10-storey base of the old power station, which will be converted into condominium residences, a sturdy 25-storey condo building will lift off. The triangle-patterned cladding cascades down the façade in a series of loose overlaps, like a beaded flapper dress from the Roaring Twenties, then stops short of the podium top to reveal ankles of steel.
Cresting the tower is a high, fantastic thicket of wires and tubes, all concealing more serious aspects of the design: a wind turbine intended to supply most, if not all, the electricity needs of the building, and a system for solar energy collection. (Mr. Alsop told me that, while most developers like to chat fashionably about sustainability and so forth, his New Jersey client is remorselessly determined to give the Yonkers project a zero-carbon footprint.)
Alongside the taller tower, and slightly set back from it toward the hills above the river, a more slender residential plinth will go up 18 storeys from grade. Here again, the effect is light, frothy, as delicious as ice cream. This building, clad in translucent fabric, resembles a tight skirt decorated by horizontal bands in black and white, and dark dots, and graced by a flaring hemline.
The third new building in this ensemble is a long, low attic surmounting a piece of the old power station, and wrapped in a skin marked up with scribbles, sketches and graffiti. (Along with retail outlets, a museum is to be tucked into the surviving station.)
Mr. Alsop has understood well the properties of his urban waterfront site, and what it takes to bring it to life after many years of neglect. There is liveliness here, and excitement about being on a great river's edge. The people who are refashioning Toronto's Lake Ontario shoreline could learn something from this scheme. To be sure, they are proceeding sure-footedly, responsibly, according to solid plans drawn up by top urban thinkers in Canada and abroad. But looking at Mr. Alsop's proposal for Yonkers, we see something Toronto's waterfront surely needs in greater quantity: more merriment, a keener celebration of pleasure, the kind of acutely focused over-the-topness Mr. Alsop brings to the problem of revitalizing urban space.
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