Save the Buildings You Hated

The Chippendale top on Philip Johnson's tower at 550 Madison Avenue got laughed at for years. A skyscraper crowned with a broken pediment, like a grandfather clock scaled up to 647 feet. Plenty of critics called it a joke when it opened in 1984. Then in 2018 New York's Landmarks Preservation Commission made it the youngest building in the city to win protected status. The joke got a plaque.

That swing, from punchline to protected, is the whole story of 1980s architecture right now. The decade gave us postmodernism: color, ornament, columns that didn't hold anything up, facades that winked at you. After fifty years of modernist glass boxes insisting that decoration was a moral failing, the 80s decided buildings were allowed to be funny again. People hated it. They still kind of hate it. And that hatred is exactly why so much of it is in danger.

Here's the thing about preservation: taste runs about a generation behind. We never value the recent past until it's almost gone. Victorian buildings were torn down as gaudy junk before anyone thought to save them. Brutalism spent decades as a slur before the coffee-table books arrived. The 80s are sitting in that same window now, old enough to look dated, not yet old enough to look historic. It's the most dangerous moment a building can have.

The good news is that people are finally fighting for these things. Robert A.M. Stern, no fan of being asked about postmodernism anymore, published a list of fifteen "landmarks-in-waiting" and put that same tower near the top, arguing the country has no consistent way of protecting work from the late 20th century. In Chicago, Helmut Jahn's 1985 Thompson Center, a wild salmon-and-blue glass drum, landed on the National Trust's list of America's most endangered places in 2019. It looked doomed. Instead Google bought it in 2022 for $105 million and is renovating it rather than flattening it. Reoccupation is penciled in for 2027.

Not every case ends that well. Preservation advocates in New York keep a running "Po-Mo Watchlist" of threatened postmodern work, and the losses are real: the Takashimaya building got recladded, the South Street Seaport facade redone. Once a facade is gone it doesn't come back.

I'm not arguing every quirky 80s tower deserves a plaque. A lot of it was cynical, developer-driven stuff dressed up in cheap historical costume. But the best of it documents a genuine argument about what buildings are for, whether they should serve the street and the eye or just the spreadsheet. That argument is worth keeping around in physical form, not just in archives.

The buildings you find embarrassing are usually the ones about to vanish. By the time everyone agrees they're beautiful, half of them have already come down.

Sources:

Robert A. M. Stern Identifies 15 Postmodern Landmarks-in-Waiting — Architectural Record

The Po-Mo Watchlist: NYC's Endangered Postmodern Architecture — Metropolis

Johnson and Burgee's AT&T Building Becomes a New York City Landmark — The Architect's Newspaper

A Brighter Future Ahead for the Thompson Center in Chicago, with Sale to Google — Architectural Record