For Philippe Starck, the world is a battleground where the forces of beauty and ugliness are locked in a state of perpetual war. The epicenter of this conflict, as of last week, is 58th Street off Ninth Avenue, where 's Hudson hotel has just opened its doors to the beau monde.
Known more as a designer than an architect, Mr. Starck and his squad of aesthete-ocrats have staged massive intervention upon a pre-existing structure, preserving its contours only to subvert them from within.
Throughout the city over the past decade, architects have increasingly transformed older buildings instead of raising new ones. But nothing can compare with what Mr. Starck has wrought: He mocks the building even as he preserves it, almost as if he were break-dancing over its vanquished corpse.
Surely there is an element of generational conflict in all of this. Few buildings exemplify quite so damningly the dull, macho metropolis that midtown had become in the 1930's. It almost looks as if it were wearing a zoot suit. That may sound vaguely interesting in theory, but in practice its 24 stories of unrelieved brickwork are so suffocatingly banal as to deflect any warmth that humans could possibly feel for a building. Hidden for the past half-century behind the equally repellent walls of the now demolished Coliseum, the Hudson began life in 1928 as a residence for single women. It subsequently housed the studios of Thirteen/WNET before being purchased in 1997 by Mr. Schrager, who has poured $125 million into its renovation.
The Hudson is the fourth hotel that Mr. Schrager and Mr. Starck have collaborated on in New York, the other three being the Royalton and Paramount, in 1988 and 1990 respectively, and the Morgan, whose restaurant, Asia de Cuba, Mr. Starck designed three years ago. Each of these projects has its felicitous flourishes, but none of them rivals the sheer innovative audacity of the Hudson. For this newest hotel represents nothing less than the summa of Mr. Schrager's and Mr. Starck's very different, but ultimately complimentary, philosophies of life.
If the 51-year-old, Paris-born Philippe Starck had no other claim to greatness, the jarring counterpoint between the existing exterior and his impish intervention would be impressive enough. Mr. Starck's faÁade covers only part of the lower stories, laid over the surface of that all-too-solid structure like the flattest and flimsiest of decals. Despite its spare appearance, his addition is richly historicist, its mod geometry evoking the shagadelic 60's. Across the top of its pale surface there unfurls a frieze-like window that, together with the automatic doors at ground level, looks as if it were fashioned from strips of chartreuse-colored plastic. The whole postmodern poetry of his contribution consists neither in the original structure nor in his cheeky addition, but in what emerges from the unexpected collision of the two.
Such is his antic wit, however, that as you enter the building, absolute flatness is at once transformed into absolute depth. There is no lobby to be seen, only a stunning pair of escalators-also bathed in chartreuse light-that inject you upwards into the as-yet-unimagined recesses of the building. Presently you emerge into the reception area, a nocturnal wonderland whose operatic touches include a long counter of burnished wood, a crystal chandelier and, along the beveled corners of the walls, discreet Oscar-like gold heads, crowning some of the most tasteful brickwork of the past 10 years. The glass ceiling is draped in ivy, as is the broad Palladian window directly behind the reception desk, which allows a glimpse of the stylish private park beyond.
Just as the straitened shaft of the escalator expands into this massive enclosure, it too narrows unexpectedly into a pair of dark channels that run parallel to the park on either side and terminate in two 40-foot-high spaces, the Library and the Cafeteria. Along the way, a sequence of public bathrooms forms veritable pools of cream-colored light. The sinks, with their elegant metallic fixtures, are vaguely rococo affairs, fashioned from beautifully textured stone. As for the soothingly minimalist white stalls, never has the process of self-grooming, if you will, attained such an air of hieratic purity.
The Cafeteria is more impressive than its name suggests. Also built of brick, it features throne-like armchairs at the head of communal tables oriented toward a rectangular cooking space in the center of the room. The wood-paneled Library is so called because of the thousands of serious-looking books all placed out of reach. Unfortunately, they are nothing more than an elaborate faÁade, two inches deep. And despite one brochure's promise of "poetry readings and recitals," the fact that the only real books to be found are devoted to art and fashion suggests what the management thinks of its prospective clientele. The best thing in the Library is the pool table in the center, covered in purple baize and surmounted by a violet dome lamp designed by Ingo Maurer.
As for the Hudson's 1,000 bedrooms, you reach them by elevators clad in rough, retro-textured metal. These open onto corridors so dark that the faint green light emitted above each door would be entirely insufficient, were it not for the white glow of the vending machines in the so-called Canteens, refreshment stands facing the elevators on each floor. With only limited variations in size and shape, the bedrooms themselves are spare, rectilinear studies in white and dark wood, relieved by an occasional splash of color supplied by the Francesco Clemente watercolors that adorn the lamps. Because the television set, like the CD and DVD players, has been concealed behind a virginally white curtain, the overall effect of each room, together with the uniformity of all the rooms, recalls the cells of some monastic order.
Surely this austerity reflects the almost religious zeal that Mr. Starck feels for the very notion of design. In the Hudson, more than in any other of his previous projects here or in France, he has at last achieved what could almost be called an absolutist, even a totalitarian conception of beauty: Every molecule of this privileged environment, every detail from the faucets to the ashtrays, must be charged with beauty, and claimed as the domain of art. In consequence, every second of one's inhabitation takes on the aspect of a performance, and one is elevated in the process.
What beauty is to Mr.Starck, lifestyle is to . Whereas the Starckian cosmos is governed by the polarities of beauty and ugliness, Mr. Schrager's revolves around that crucial distinction between being in and being out, between those beautiful souls who are admitted at once to the caressing warmth of Studio 54 and those poor dopes condemned to spend eternity waiting on line to get in.
It was Mr. Schrager who pioneered the idea of the Hotel as Lifestyle, "because where you sleep says to the world, 'This is who I am.'" Granted, Hugh Hefner sounds like Immanuel Kant compared to that. Still, for Mr. Schrager no less than for Mr. Starck, the Hudson embodies his summum bonum. His entire staff, though unfailingly friendly, is clad in the obligatory black, like emissaries from some Chelsea gallery. As for the clientele hanging around the lobby, they look exactly as you would expect-usually affluent, sometimes picturesquely struggling. Cell phones and foreign accents abound.
As absolutist in his way as Mr. Starck, Mr. Schrager's ambition for the Hudson is nothing less than that every second spent within its walls be experienced as a state of exalted panache. In some silly but beguilingly persuasive way, the very ambiance is so charged with chic that everyone who steps onto the chartreuse escalators feels himself becoming more stylish as he ascends. The mere act of showing up has made him one of the elect.
Though the Hudson has been open scarcely a week, already the beau monde converges upon it each night, funneling themselves up the escalators to the bar, a thrilling movie set that stands opposite the reception area and is clearly based on Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Surely it would be easy to mock this scene, and no one should be discouraged from doing so. But what cannot be denied is that, to some small but perceptible degree, New York has a little more style than it had two weeks ago.
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