A Supergirl-Inspired Epiphany

I saw Supergirl over the weekend and found it enjoyable. There’s a flashback scene where Kara meets her cousin Clark for the first time, as she arrives on Earth from the ruins of Krypton. She’s in a spacesuit and he’s in his Superman costume, and she says to herself “Why is he in his underwear?” I realized yesterday why this question resonated with me, beyond the fact that I’ve been wondering about his costume for a very long time.

Here’s a picture looking east on Liberty Street from Church Street:

Left to right, we’ve got the black monolith of the US Steel Building, (now One Liberty Plaza), completed in 1973, the 1924 Westinghouse Building at 150 Broadway, the 1910 Sinclair Oil Building at 55 Liberty Street, the 1924 Federal Reserve Bank, and the 2003 apartment house at 2 Gold Street. Gold Street has a concrete frame and the others have steel frames; Westinghouse, Sinclair Oil, and the Fed have traditional masonry curtain walls. Sinclair Oil and the Fed do a serious job with the revivalist styles, while Westinghouse is more of a brick box with some ornament. The modern building at Gold Street has a facade that’s a combination of brick and glass panels – non-traditional in form and style, but serving, traditionally, to enclose both the interior spaces and the structure.

That brings us to One Liberty. SOM went to enormous lengths during design in modeling the heat from fires in order to (successfully) convince the Department of Buildings that it was okay to have some of the structural steel exposed at the facades. In a sense, it doesn’t matter: if the steel grid we see were entirely fake, the visual sense of heavy steel would still be overwhelming. Having the windows set flush with the inboard face of the structure gives a better look to the interior, but makes the exterior feel even heavier. I’ve been aware of this building for a long time and I’m not particularly a fan, although it is a great example of a certain branch of International Style Modernism. In any case, I looked down Liberty Street yesterday and said “why is it in its underwear?” The building is, to me, inside out with the structure where the curtain wall should be and vice versa. Superman’s been wearing his underwear over his pants for more than 80 years and is still going strong, so I don’t think my opinion or this blog post is going to shift anyone’s thinking about the building, but at least I now fully understand my own reaction to it.