OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, Volume 1: 2 – 56

Bowery Savings Computer Shop – Pier Paolo Tamburelli Bowery Savings Bank is a building by McKim, Mead & White. Completed in 1895, it stands in Lower Manhattan, between Little Italy and Chinatown, with facades onto both Bowery and Grand. For McKim, Mead & White the construction was an occasion to carefully measure the distorted geometry of the plot – an irregular L-shape. A square and a rectangle are inserted into this area to provide the two main spaces (the banking room and the waiting area), expressed in the Roman Revival style. The remaining spaces, in between these two rooms and the borders of the plot, form a series of leftovers that are not wasted. On the contrary, the architects devote the utmost attention – far more than they do to the main rooms – to the patient scrutiny and re-composition of the accidents of the cadastral map. The borders of the property are mapped and annotated by means of different types of columns and pilasters, and by subtle variations in the distance separating columns from walls. This silent game of variations emerges politely on the facades: while the portico with four columns on Grand rests perpendicular to the wall of the banking hall, the entrance with the two freestanding Corinthian columns on Bowery follows the orientation of the street, thus diverging some ten degrees from the orientation of the waiting room. This faint misalignment (a surprising Lewerentz or Siza moment in the otherwise rather robust production of McKim, Mead & White) arises because the arch framed by the two columns is extruded following the internal geometry, thus exposing one side of the bank vault on the Bowery facade. This light, bleak cut in the impeccable classical pattern of the facade appears as a promise of imperfection. The masterful organisation of the plan seems to be entirely devoted to preserving the random nature of the subdivision of the land. Before the architects came along, there was a project here, even if only in the form of an abstract property line on a piece of paper signed by a notary. The city was already here. The city always comes first. In the one account that we have of a ‘debate’ among Roman architects (Cassius Dio, Historiae romanae, LXIX, 4, 3), we hear Apollodorus of Damascus criticise the emperor Hadrian on the grounds that he had neglected the possibility of using the basement of his Temple of Venus and Rome as a scenery store for the nearby Colosseum. This criticism (which according to Cassius Dio spelled first exile and later death for Apollodorus) is surprising and telling: the only discussion among Roman architects that has come down to us is about storage space! And yet this debate about storage space could also be seen, quite simply, as an enthusiastic eulogy for space. Architecture is about space, all space. And so storage has to be treated as an intellectual problem. To Apollodorus space is always precious. The Computer Shop in Tielt uses the same trick as the Bowery Savings Bank. The upper part of the facade follows the street while the lower part discovers the different geometry of the new blocks. The two regular volumes are placed into the plot to generate a figure of leftover space. Some bushes and a blind wall – this is what matters and what we love.