Putting on the Glitz: Architecture After Postmodernism

Manhattan was first glitzed in late 1979 when developer Harry Helmsley and architects Emery Roth & Sons began making over a block-long property on Madison Avenue between 50th and 51st Streets. Under their direction, a mansion designed by McKim, Mead and White (1882) after the Palazzo della Cancelleria in Rome, was reborn as a luxury hotel. Helmsley persuaded the city that simple preservation of this historic building was unprofitable. His plan took the existing structure, restored its lavish interior, and converted it to an elaborate lobby and pass-through for a sleek bronzed-glass and anodized aluminum tower that housed the guts of a new hotel. Only the color related the old building to the new. Helmsley was a pioneer.

At a time when austere functional glass office buildings defined serious East Coast cities, glitz with its brash concern for effect was thought acceptable only for the provinces: Las Vegas, Miami Beach, and Houston. The Helmsleys brought it to the heart of...