The Built-Up Bones Beneath The Skin

That’s the south side of the old Battery Maritime Building, built as a ferry terminal for Brooklyn commuters and now used as a ferry terminal for Governors Island sightseers. The top of the building is being, improbably, extended and converted to hotel use.

The left side of the picture is the main land-side facade, with built-up ornamental steel columns (painted green to look like patinated copper – faking materials has a long, long history here) and steel and sheet-iron ornament. The side facade (the center and right side of the photo) have been stripped of its ornament, exposing the built-up columns that were not supposed to be seen. They are, notably, a lot smaller than the columns in front. There’s an odd architectural effect to exposed steel structure: people want it to be heavier than it is. In other words, because steel is so strong, steel columns on a low-rise building look too skinny to us because we’re used to seeing masonry piers and wood posts that are proportionally fatter.

In short, the columns are the left are designed for their architectural appearance, the columns on the right are designed solely to carry load, and both groups are built up of plates, angles, and channels. Looking at this, I get a sense of what the early modernist architects were talking about when they went wild for the machine aesthetic and pure engineering structures: the columns on the right are what they are, while ones on the left seem to be dressed up for a costume party.