"A Little Fun"

New York's celebrated concrete canyons and glittering skyscrapers, which many people consider exciting, are actually sterile, pompous and stupefyingly dull. At least that is Melvyn Kaufman's view--and he is doing something about it. A partner in the William Kaufman Organization, a prominent New York building firm founded by his father, he has launched a campaign "to humanize buildings through shock and disruption."

Kaufman's efforts began in earnest in 1970, when he opened a new office building in the Wall Street area. From a distance it looks like the other towers all around it--humdrum--but it has its surprises. On the roof stands a replica of a World War I Sopwith Camel, complete with an AstroTurf runway and a wind sock. Says Kaufman: "It's something for the workers in surrounding towers to look at."

The building also has no lobby. Instead, Kaufman provided a lively outdoor plaza with pools, a thicket of trees, and an old-style candy store--all for less cost than the usual marble and glass entry. The whole area forms a relaxing and pleasing contrast with what Kaufman calls "the street-level sterility of the financial district."

Even more startling touches went into another office building a few blocks away. To enter it--there are no doors --people must pass bright new boutiques, a gigantic fishing lure, and the world's biggest digital clock (50 ft. high), and then they must walk through a corrugated steel "tunnel."

Once inside the building, another shock awaits them. The maverick builder thinks elevators are "like coffins." Not here. They are garishly painted and lit in red and blue so that riders' faces acquire a purplish tinge. "Not always flattering, but it makes people talk," says Kaufman. "And conversation makes the trip into a human experience." Such experiences may not suit everybody, but the building is fully rented.

Dead Space. Kaufman does not hesitate to preach what he practices, irking conventional architects. "Handsome details and elegant proportions are meaningless," he says. "No one notices them; they fade into the canyon walls." He therefore deprecates Manhattan's architectural landmarks--Lud-wig Mies van der Rohe's Seagram building and Eero Saarinen's CBS building, for example--calling them "gigantic sculptures that do nothing for the city. Look at their plazas. Dead spaces!" Their tragic flaw, he insists, is that the architects designed the ground floor to relate to the building rather than to the street, where the activity is.

Kaufman's latest tower, now being completed on Third Avenue in midtown Manhattan, corrects this supposed error. As architecture, it is totally undistinguished. But on the street floor, Kaufman's exuberance shines. The sidewalk is a brick path that winds through trees and canopied seating areas, and leads up to the building entrance, a wooden front porch. "It's an event for people," Kaufman says, "a return to the human scale."

Well and good. But Kaufman has his own flaw: he has made it quite clear that he does not know when to stop. All the pipes and wires in the new building lobby will be exposed and treated almost as if they were works of art. Like all whimsy, the joke can pall. "It's a little fun," says Kaufman. "It doesn't mean a damn thing--and we can always take it out. All we're trying to do is add levity to this somber city."

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