Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis by David Gissen (review)

Manhattan Atmospheres is a challenging, ambitious book. It looks at a set of indoor spaces created in New York City during its period of urban crisis and prompts us to think about them in the same way that urban environmental historians treat outdoor spaces. David Gissen takes on the concept of the “maintenance environment,” coined by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and expands it.¹ The author focuses on both parts of the term: he thinks carefully about the way these environments were designed for containment in the face of a hostile urban milieu, but he also ponders the extent to which they required ongoing maintenance. The book is generally successful in achieving its overall goal: I will never think about these interior spaces the same way again. At the same time, there was more that Gissen could have achieved.

Gissen focuses on New York City between the 1960s and the 1980s, years in which the city’s bankruptcy, population decline, and overall state of decay made it the poster child for the urban crisis. Pollution, crime, and neglect combined to make New York’s environment hostile, both in reality and in the public imagination. It was also in this period that the controlled interior environment achieved its modern form, in the sense of large-volume building designs that were—or at least seemed—sealed off from the outdoor world through mechanical heating, ventilation, and cooling (HVAC) systems. These maintenance environments created what Gissen points out were really alternative environments: indoor spaces that could accommodate outdoor functions while also being more subject to control, protection, and ownership.

To make his point, Gissen examines four maintenance environments, each with a different purpose. Brown & Guenther’s 1962 Washington Bridge Apartments and Extension—known to listeners of New York traffic reports as “the towers” because they are built over the approaches to the George Washington Bridge—are his example of structures built to maintain people inside against a hostile external environment. The towers’ environs were doubly hostile: first, since they were built over a tremendously busy highway, they were subject to high levels of air pollution; second, highway construction, deindustrialization, and “white flight” had left the working-class neighborhood of Washington Heights subject to building abandonment and high crime. In contrast, the buildings’ developers promised an upper-middle-class, family-oriented community that warded off automobile exhaust and preserved a healthy interior. Sadly, the developers failed to deliver: squabbles with the Port Authority led to compromises in the design; construction decisions left the buildings exposed to noise and fumes; and poor maintenance almost immediately caused deterioration. Within a few years of occupancy, residents were protesting, and the buildings never fulfilled ambitions to serve as “beacons” of a new, safe urban living arrangement.

Gissen’s second example—the Ford Foundation headquarters (Roche-Dinkeloo Associates and Dan Kiley, 1967)—prominently featured a maintenance environment built for a different purpose: re-creating nature indoors in the form of an atrium garden. Gissen argues that the impulse behind the interior garden was a sense that the urban environment was too hostile for even trees to survive and that the failure to maintain and police urban parks made them unsuitable for the largely suburbanized office workers of Mid-town East. Gissen offers fascinating details on how the New York Botanical Gardens developed a de facto consulting service for such interiors and how the demand for attractive plants suited to the environmental conditions of an indoor space summoned forth an entire industry in Colombia to supply them. Nature was more complex than expected, however, and maintaining these spaces was so expensive that by the 1990s their horticultural ornaments were curtailed or, in the case of Chem Court on Park Avenue, dismantled.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 1978 Temple of Dendur room by Roche-Dinkeloo was primarily and...