Concrete Behemoths in the Morning Light

Terrace on the Park, Flushing Meadows, Queens. Photo: Owen Davies

Owen Davies moved from the U.K. to New York in early March 2020, and he almost instantly found himself in a ghost city. The busy streets he’d expected to encounter were deserted; his studio-photography work dried up. He, like a lot of us, ended up taking long walks to clear his head and get out of the house. He soon experienced what many of us did when we were new to New York: that whaaaat? feeling of coming around a corner and encountering a building you’ve never seen before, one that differs from everything else in the neighborhood. Big concrete monolithic buildings, comparatively rare in London, were the ones that really caught his eye, beginning with the Art Moderne bathhouse at Jacob Riis Park. It was autumn, he says, and “it just looked otherworldly to me. There were very few people around — it was kind of a quiet season — and the way it sat on the boardwalk, with the light hitting it, it just looked almost like it had just been sent down by a spaceship or something.” He took a few photos, thinking nothing of it, “and when I got home and put it up on screen, I thought to myself, I wonder if there are any more like this around the city that have a similar kind of feeling.”

He soon found himself collecting concrete towers, particularly the buildings of the brutalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, the ones that so many architects love and so many others really loathe. In particular, he saw them with a new American’s eye: “The light in New York and on the East Coast is very different to the U.K., which is” — he laughs — “almost permanently cloudy, always overcast, very soft, very diffused. The concrete there takes, to me, a much more miserable, oppressive tone. Here they kind of soak up the light and it really amplifies the texture, so I started to see them as monuments left behind from some kind of a failed utopia.”

The Egg at Empire State Plaza in Albany and the bathhouse at Jacob Riis Park in Rockaway. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

The Egg at Empire State Plaza in Albany and the bathhouse at Jacob Riis Park in Rockaway. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

The series of photographs, which he calls “Light/Mass,” is not limited to New York City, although most of the buildings are here or nearby, augmented by a few from Connecticut and Boston and Albany. (The giant egg-shaped performing-arts center at Empire State Plaza stands out, as does Marcel Breuer’s Armstrong Rubber Company building in New Haven.) Davies makes a point of talking about the light in his photographs, but what my colleagues and I find startling is the color palette: The buildings are pale buff and so is much of the landscape around them. (Davies does some color correction in postproduction, but not a wholesale overhaul; he also removes most of the people, evoking the emptied-out pandemic city where this project began.) The beige-ness is probably most evident in the photograph you can see here of the Abe Stark ice-skating rink in Coney Island, where the beach and the boardwalk and the building are practically monochrome. “That one — I was very much in that kind of Dune mind-set,” Davies says. “I was very glad that somebody decided to drive a truck or something across the sand. It gave me a bit of interest in the foreground.” A colleague of mine who saw that track said that it looked like the mark left by the spaceship’s exhaust during the landing. Davies says he stays away from shooting in the lat-afternoon golden hour, when the light turns the buildings tawny, and aims to work earlier in the day, when the sun highlights every bit of bush-hammering.

Asphalt Green, the municipal asphalt plant turned recreation center on the Upper East Side, and the Department of Sanitation’s salt shed at Spring and West Streets. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

Asphalt Green, the municipal asphalt plant turned recreation center on the Upper East Side, and the Department of Sanitation’s salt shed at Spring and... more Asphalt Green, the municipal asphalt plant turned recreation center on the Upper East Side, and the Department of Sanitation’s salt shed at Spring and West Streets. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

The Abe Stark Recreation Center and (left) a nearby apartment building in Coney Island; (right) the helical ramps at the Queens Place Mall. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

The Abe Stark Recreation Center and (left) a nearby apartment building in Coney Island; (right) the helical ramps at the Queens Place Mall. (Click to ... more The Abe Stark Recreation Center and (left) a nearby apartment building in Coney Island; (right) the helical ramps at the Queens Place Mall. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

The architectural legacy of this kind of building has been debated for decades and will continue for decades more. It is wildly out of style with the general public, and some of its great experiments are considered failures and are being demolished — which is especially poignant because their builders often expected them to be nearly indestructible, the boomer generation’s pyramids of Giza. “I guess for the people living in the buildings or using them, it’s probably a good thing ’cause I understand quite a lot are notoriously difficult to live with,” Davies admits. But he is less equivocal about the spirit behind them: “I love how the fact that these are, a lot of times, municipal buildings — they’re quite radical for a government to commission. For an architect to do something that kind of outlandish is a very un-government feeling, to me at least. I would assume they would want something quite plain and safe, but they’re like, No, give it to Paul Rudolph and let him go. Today you get— obviously there’s some architectural wonders, I guess, but a lot of them feel very safe.”

Tribeca Synagogue, White Street. Photo: Owen Davies

Two of Marcel Breuer’s four buildings at Bronx Community College. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

Two of Marcel Breuer’s four buildings at Bronx Community College. (Click to enlarge.) Owen Davies.

Would he live in one himself? “Yeah. My ideal — I have two. There’s one right by Lincoln Center” — Lincoln Plaza Towers — “which I love. Either there or the Corinthian, over on the East Side. Oh, and Chatham Towers, downtown.” I note that these are really all buildings that have a lot of haters as well as enthusiasts. “Yeah, it’s really interesting. I can maybe understand it in a smaller city or town where it’s like the only large building in town, as if it were dropped in from space. But in a large city like New York or Boston, you know, maybe you don’t like it — but you don’t have to like it. There’s another building for you around the corner.”

The former Armstrong Rubber Building in New Haven. Photo: Owen Davies