Pension & Hollywood

Introduction
New Journalism’s fantastical construction of “real,” such as Joan Didion or Hunter S. Thompson’s questioning of circumstance in extreme detail, is a possible method for observing architecture. Inevitably manifestations of multiple perspectives – Architecture is rich for observation. In many ways, as Michael Bell points out, “reality is stranger than fiction,” even in the most quotidian architecture. Even with buildings that, to some, are otherwise inconsequential.

As Baudrillard pointed out, Los Angeles is already a sort of simulacra, quite literally a Hollywood set. The reality of that physical construction heightens the sense of strangeness: with thermal luxury, buildings are hardly “real” but vicissitudes of architecture. Picture stick-frame homes in some visual mutation of an adobe house. This architectural landscape is documented with adoration by Rayner Banym in Los Angeles, The Architecture of Four Ecologies, 1971, and more recently in Los Angeles Standards, a described “photographic portrait of Los Angeles.”¹ In both, images indicate a faux historicity – a house with a turret – although each with a predictable variance. After all, the simple construction methods and equally accessible materials align the single-family home into a handful of typologies. In Los Angeles Standards, homes are documented in a few key modes, including “stucco boxes, dingbats, stilt houses, and skirt houses.”²

But like the suggestion “reality stranger than fiction” one can imagine the house with a faux turret to tell other, perhaps even more perverse, stories inside. Take an Airbnb I stayed at in late 2022 which, slightly unprepared for guests, had the remnants of its usual tenant, a fitness influencer, scattered throughout the home. Under the 78” television with surrounding Bose Speakers was a small selection of books. A likely arrangement for, what is after all fairly typical in Los Angeles, the influencer, included The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, by Mark Manson, Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life by Gary John Bishop, Get Your Sh*t Together: How to Stop Worrying About What You Should Do So You Can Finish What You Need to Do and Start Doing What You Want to Do (A No F*cks Given Guide) by Sarah Knight, and One Million Followers, Updated Edition: How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days, by Brendan Kane. We might look to artist Nina Katchadourian’s arrangements of books for meaning in this readymade.

In these Los Angeles homes, there’s an unimaginable array of strange; a hilarious, surreal set of commonplace readymades in the perfectly temperate Trumanshowian physical reality of life in the west. The artifacts at which, taken at deadpan, are even more alive than a novel. But perhaps this reality, as strange as it is, doesn’t stop its obscurity at its literal, physical level. And, like a journalist, we can investigate the Los Angeles complex through the realm of abstractions, the reality of which may be even more surreal.

Hollywood

To uncover this “reality stranger than fiction,” I look to employ an “Architectural Investigation,” in which history or circumstance is documented by way of the implicated architecture. Like the approach to New Journalism, actively seeking neutral or “deadpan” photographs is fundamental for this project. As similarly done by Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi in their study The Significance of A&P Parking Lots, or Learning from Las Vegas first published in the Architectural Forum in March 1968, I suggest a similar employment of Ed Ruscha’s photos for this investigation. And, like the students who “did what they [do] best—they brought a case of beer and drank it [with Ruscha],”³ I offer Ed the same deal.

Importantly for the Learning from Las Vegas project, “The Los Angeles artist Ed Ruscha…had by the mid-nineteen-sixties established an attentive but and almost scientific approach to photographing urban landscapes, including gas stations and apartment buildings, that Denise Scott Brown would later refer to as ‘deadpanning.”⁴ This was inevitably employed in typical architecture-student-appropriation:

“When the students in the Yale course traveled west to Las Vegas, they stopped off first in Los Angeles and visited Ruscha’s studio, where they would have had a chance to learn how he captured his images of Sunset Boulevard by attaching a 35-mm. camera to the hood of his Ford. (They also spent a day at Disneyland.) A photo montage in “Learning from Las Vegas” is labeled “The Ed Ruscha elevation,” and one of the short films produced for the Yale studio was called “Deadpan Las Vegas (or Three Projector Deadpan).”⁵

The Rushca body of work, and specifically the art-book titled Some Los Angeles Apartments, 1965⁶ is described in Doug Eklund’s essay “The Toughest, Meanest Art I Was Making’: Edward Ruscha’s Books, 2020.”⁷ He writes: “Ruscha’s readymade apartment complexes are distinguished by the seemingly infinite ways in which historicity and conventionality are unsuccessfully, yet hilariously, thwarted and travestied—a kind of architectural slapstick reflecting the United States’ chronic historical amnesia.” In other words, like Didion, Ruscha’s documentation underlined a typical American pathos, one that needed no further explanation than the simple photograph. Through the “deadpan,” a revelation on the status of things, a revealed obscurity, an almost journalistic joke told. One can’t help but imagine slick Ruscha driving around Los Angeles in a coupe, documenting the complex of the typical-unusual, its result an even more ubiquitous black-and-white photograph.

Like my suggestion to understand Los Angeles’ “reality stranger than fiction” past its material and architectural artifacts, Ed Ruscha, through titles of photo books and text paintings, further contextualizes these deadpan photographs to their realm of obscurity.

Consider Ruscha’s print The Housing Tract is Only Texture, 1976 within the book that was published alongside the corresponding exhibition Ed Ruscha: Custom-Built Intrigue, Drawings 1974–1984, in parallel to the photographs in Some Los Angeles Apartments. Is Ruscha suggesting a relationship between the single house and its broader, more obscure reality? Where, by shift of scale, the single-family house exists in the dreary infinite suburb?

One may also look to page left and consider Thick Blocks of Musical Fudge, 1976 as a sort of rebuttal: maybe Ruscha’s print (page right) has no broader implications for the architectural condition, despite this print’s exhibitory proximity to the strips of deadpans in this year’s MoMA retrospective.⁸

Whether on purpose or not, we can interpret some level of abstraction in Ruscha’s self-published book titled Real Estate Opportunities, 1970. Here, the word opportunity is inextricably linked to abstraction in financial terms: opportunity implying potential profit, or in an investor’s terms, the net potential value of the real estate deal. Here, Ruscha is (directly or indirectly) indicating that the building in the image is, being an “opportunity,” is in a realm of immaterial finance. Real Estate Opportunities thereby implies a realm of obscurity past the actual buildings themselves; a world of real estate brokers, investors, city council members, lenders, loans, banks make up its shadow. One might imagine a foil to Ruscha in Miki Naftali, now 5th ave developer extraordinaire, taking similar photographs as a student at USC with a part-time real estate job, likely driving a similar car to find, like Ruscha, Real Estate Opportunities.

It might be too convenient for my argument that Ruscha is thinking of his deadpan photographs in such abstract terms—specifically regarding real estate finance. And despite Ruscha’s eleven multi-family property portfolio in Southern California, worth tens of millions⁹, the theory that Ruscha is considering an obscurity beyond the physical artifact may have little basis. Nonetheless, Ruscha’s work has been interpreted, not only by myself, but one of New York City’s largest developers, Edward J. Minskoff, who after purchasing Ruscha’s 2016 painting Galaxy, U.S.A, Dot, placed it’s photograph on the first page of the EJME (Edward J. Minskoff Equities) website.¹⁰

As written in catalog of the Gagosian show, “Extremes and In-betweens” Ruscha’s work “all completed in 2016…sets in motion a dynamic interplay of words and their meanings in ascending and descending shifts of scale and tone that echo the relation of macrocosm to microcosm.”¹¹ Does Minskoff interpret Ruscha’s painting beyond its value to the art market? Does Galaxy, U.S.A, Dot, quite literally describe the structure of Minsoff equities, the relation of a fund to its holdings?

Like the pyramidal structure of “Galaxy, Earth, USA, State, City, Block, Lot” is there an equivalent relationship to Real Estate? The same pyramid structure is true for any fund; holdings of smaller assets combine into large funds, these funds reside within a holding entity, and this entity is under the broader industry.

Is Minskoff, through the use of Ruscha’s understanding of scale similarly implying a reality beyond the physical property? One that suggests a broader complex of rent, structured finance, and ownership? And does the fact that this painting adorns the website of one of the most successful property owners suggest we can interpret the deadpan imagery of Los Angeles in relation to other scales?

More explicitly, I suggest that Ruscha’s deadpan photographs thereby implicate a “reality stranger than fiction” that goes beyond the physical artifact within the photograph, and points to other realities that particularly align with processes of ownership and real estate. Using New Journalism’s deadpan approach, how can we similarly methodically investigate this broader, stranger reality of the single-family house? What dead-pan images reflect the systems implied within the quotidian Los Angeles stick-frame? Like Ruscha’s painting, how can we document the scales from Block to Galaxy?

It’s been largely discussed how the single-family suburban home ultimately succumbs to the realities of Suburbia (inefficiencies, inequalities) and its material reliance on a global supply chain. Whether it be the glass in the windows, aluminum for appliances, or the reality of eating food in the refrigerator that is imported via container-ship. However, what other systems and therefore architectures are implicated in the single family house? And how can we read these implied architectures as a designed part of the same complex?

Pension Funds

Consider a fiction.

A Nuclear family has two breadwinners, a police officer and a teacher. Over the last three years, reality has been stranger than fiction for these two as a new tension has arisen in the household over political differences that were once swept under the rug. Honestly, she can’t stand him anymore. And after months of arguing, specifically about the promised appliance fixing and the subsequent reality of the unloaded dishwasher, Janet can’t take it. And John doesn’t care. For him, the dishwasher seems like a non-issue compared to the perpetual problems of his (disliked) mother-in-law’s untrained shih tzu who’s always finding a way to the carpet. Janet decides to meet with her old friend, a lawyer, who unbeknownst to John, Janet had a fling with back in high school. It never seemed perfect in many ways, but Janet never knew their conversations would begin to cease to exist altogether due to their differences. It wasn’t worth fighting anymore, but Janet couldn’t ever serve those papers.

Nonetheless, both employees of the state are willing to put differences aside as they’re retiring soon, both nearing the age of 65. Finally, these two are in their golden years. With their pension, they’ll soon be living the leisurely Los Angeles lifestyle they’ve always dreamed of but only tasted on Christmas and weekends.

This deadpan image is potentially the tip of Ruscha’s pyramid, a circumstance in which the single-family house is emblematic as part of a larger system, namely the pension fund.

In fact, this house, plus or minus the status of a divorce or a functioning dishwasher, is similar to over two million other homes in Los Angeles who are able to make mortgage payments and retire with peace of mind—in their dingbats and skirthouses— with the security of a pension. And like Ruscha’s provocation of scale, a new drawing unfolds that redraws in increasing scale the words: House, Block, Lot, School Building, Police Station, Pension Fund, Pension Fund Investment, State, Country, and Galaxy.

We may ask again, like an investigative journalist employing a deadpan approach to the Los Angeles house, how does the artifact of the house imply the stranger reality of the pension system? And to what degree does the financial system begin to tell other stories visible through architecture?

Historically, pensions have been fundamental in the role of government’s stability and have had parallel architectural implications. The roots of this stem from antiquity, Roman soldiers in “brutalized by the rigors of slaughtering their fellow men in face-to-face combat, often returned with few economic prospects beyond legion. The frequent realization that their colleagues in Rome had prospered while they themselves had sacrificed their youth for the glorification of Rome left them embittered and susceptible to demagoguery.”¹² We can refer to Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus for this story. The empire underwent a series of turmoils related to this issue, ultimately culminating in Augustus Ceasar’s 13BC pension plan that used a dedicated tax stream to support a system in which “veteran legionaries were to receive pension upon the completion of 16 years in a legion and 4 years in military reserves.”¹³

This solution reappears in a 1592-93 session of British Parliament, in which annual pensions were suggested for injured soldiers. This is further supplemented in the United Kingdom with literal housing and aid for wounded soldiers, the creation of Chelsea Hospital, 1682-92¹⁴, and Greenwich Hospital, 1696, (which are retirement homes rather than the misnomer “hospital”) designed by Christopher Wren. Both hospitals are therefore government-sponsored architecture-as-pension, not unlike the Los Angeles home whose mortgage is paid by the pension system.

With only so much space, Parliament offered a monetary pension in lieu of residence for those not able to secure a room. Importantly, whether it be residence or pension, “expenditures were financed through mandatory deductions from soldiers’ pay and supplemented, when necessary, from the general funds of the Exchequer,” the tax-revenue funded Treasury in Britain.¹⁵

The pension, specifically for injured soldiers, insisted on the infirmity of the pensioner. This clause is visible in the early United States pension system, insisting upon a decline in health, as proven by medical examination.¹⁶ This therefore implies a relationship between body insecurity and financial security; indicative of the early pension system’s fundamental reality that the government, through contributions and tax revenue, couldn’t keep up with the number of distributions, a problem that persists today.

To put it simply then, pension funds, since their infancy as government-stabilizing tools, have had the insecurity of keeping up with the promised demand. And although defined benefit plans are rooted in the growth of workers’ contributions, for pensions to keep up the promise that these contributions will one day be worth more than the sum amount taken out of their paycheck, the pension system fundamentally relies on investment.

It is no surprise then, for the Navy Pension fund, an early investment on behalf of the funds’ trustee George Simpson occurred on November 11, 1800.¹⁷ Purchasing United States bonds, in blocks at 6, 7, and 8 percent discount rates, this transaction begins a process of investment on behalf of the public worker. By 1950, this type of investment was manifold for all pension funds.

By the 1970s 75% of pension fund investments included alternatives to fixed-income: stocks.¹⁸ And after the Employee Retirement Income Security Act or ERISA, passed in 1974, employee pensions and welfare benefit plans were given criteria for investing in other realms of the private sector. Specifically, ERISA mandated portfolio diversity, leading pension funds’ exposure to real estate to become commonplace. Especially as commingled funds grew popular, pensions could invest in real estate managed by professional investors, removing direct responsibility in selecting, acquiring, managing, and selling real estate assets. This of course has implications for fees.

All the while, the capital pools under pension funds grow exponentially. From 112B assets under management in 1952, Pension funds hold about $25T¹⁹ in total financial assets today. For perspective, $25T compares to total financial assets held in 2023 by: all life Insurance companies, $9T²⁰, mutual funds 18T²¹, and commercial banks, $23T²². This makes pension funds one of the largest pools of capital in the world today (if not the largest), and implies a fundamental relationship between federal and state workers, and a system of investment.

Putting aside methods in which pension funds have Real Estate exposure, through tools such as fixed-income REITS, pension funds hold anywhere between 5% to 20% of real estate assets outright.²³ On the low end, a 5% asset allocation implies that pension funds are holding roughly 600B in real estate assets. On a conservatively higher end, at 12% of asset allocation, pension funds hold 1.4T in real estate assets.

To put this in perspective, considering an overinflated average $2B price tag of any New York Skyscraper over 650’- its possible that pension funds, at the low 5% estimate of their total asset allocation, could own 300 of New York’s Skyscrapers. If we consider the more likely 12%, this means that pension funds could own 720 New York Skyscrapers over 650.’

However, it should be noted that New York City has only 102 skyscrapers at over 650,’ from the tallest, One World Trade at 1,776’ to the specified 650’ cut-off size of 712 Fifth Avenue, a 53-story office building. It’s notable to mention other towers in this profile, such as Woolworth, at 792’, MetLife, 808’, 8 Spruce Street, 870’, Empire State Building, 1,250’, 432 Park Avenue, 1,397.’ This is a baffling relationship: the 102 most iconic towers in New York City would need to be multiplied up to 7x to encapsulate the entirety of the pension fund’s current investment portfolio.

This is therefore an undeniable “reality stranger than fiction” to examine further: as pension funds grow, we can assume a continued appetite for real estate by their trustees that are impossibly linked to their true financier’s, the state worker. In Los Angeles therefore, the house is a sort of shadow building, in which the skyscraper, backed by the worker’s deferred salary, casts an investment shadow on thousands (perhaps millions) of homes. We can refer to Ruscha’s drawing of Real Estate Opportunities, 1970, a depiction of his own book levitating, casting a shadow on the texture of the paper below. We know from Ruscha that the “Housing Tract is Only Texture.”

Certainly unbeknownst to Ruscha at the start of his deadpan project, the California Public Employees’ Retirement System or CalPERS would grow to be the largest defined benefit system in the United States, followed by California State Teachers, New York City Retirement, New York State Common, and Texas Teachers.²⁵ With $495.3 billion of assets under management by March, 2024²⁶, CalPERS has over two million people under its defined-benefit plan, including anywhere from university professors, medical workers, firefighters, park rangers, or administrative staff. It’s a true cross-section of California’s public employees from the low paid analyst to the president of UCLA, (who’s pension, according to public records is $316,551.09).²⁷ And likely occupying the Ruscha-documented buildings, CalPERS members alone make up approximately 5% of California’s population. For comparison, that’s almost the size of Brooklyn’s population.

Initially the CalPERS pension system was created to weed out unproductive older public workers who “had an incentive to stay on the job and just ‘go through the motions’ to get a paycheck, as a 1929 state commission put it.”²⁸ By 1939, California changed the retirement age from 60 to 65, concerned that the retirement age would “encourage or permit the granting of any retirement allowance to an able-bodied person in middle life.”

In its infancy, the California Pensions were modest, based on a percentage of 1.43% of the workers average salary over his last five years on the job, multiplied by the amount of years worked: “For example, a state worker who retired at 65 after 40 years on the job would qualify for a pension equal to 57.2% of his average final salary.”²⁹ By 1983 this formula was adjusted “2.5 percent of average final salary for every year worked, which could be taken starting at 55. A police officer or firefighter who began work at 20 and retired 35 years later with a final average salary of $50,000 now qualifies for a yearly pension of $44,000.”³⁰

With the 2022 average pension of $36,780, we can estimate the average salary today by using the same formula:

To ultimately make a comparison between the houses the CalPER pensioner lives in and the real estate investments they’re responsible for, we can likely just refer back to documentary images of Los Angeles Standards. However, maps made accessible by “The Opportunity Atlas,” which visualizes typical incomes in specific neighborhoods can be compared to the publicly available pensioner data.

For a simplified estimate, we can assume a benefit factor around 1.75%, and a 30 year multiple for service credit. Using the average pension, the estimated salary in an average worker’s final year of compensation would therefore be approximately $70,057 per year.

With this, we can estimate the neighborhood in which this demographic lives. Setting a range from $58K to $92K of median household income, plausible neighborhoods include Culver City, Alhambra, Carson, Lakewood, South Gate, El Ranchero, etc, and are visualized on the corresponding map. With little surprise, a Google Street View of these neighborhoods looks similar to both Ruscha’s photographs.

Like Ruscha’s deadpan imagery of Real Estate Opportunities, what reality do these houses—like the one on 5539 Hersholt Avenue in Lakewood, California—represent? Again, does the deadpan reveal an obscurity?

Consider a potential owner of 5539 Herhold, who was, in 2023, receiving $33,907 annually, or $1,532 biweekly, and felt secure about her decision to work a public job. Her entire financial life is explained by two bars, opting for a lower wage for the security and benefit of the pension. The graph explained: the contributions throughout her career would grow and ultimately be distributed at a premium. Finally reaching the retirement year in 2022, Jan was relieved to receive the check in the mail, which on top of her nest egg left by her late husband, her expenses and savings felt secure.

At the same time, however, the money that would be left out of her paycheck would flow into a much larger pool, accumulating with the cohort of other public employees. And just as she would invest in her home at 5539 Herhold, a series of much larger scale investments, managed by the investment professionals of CalPERS, would be made on behalf of her deferred pay.³¹

AXA Equitable Center

CalPERs, and their investment professionals, by law, employ a diverse investment strategy to continually grow workers’ contributions. As of March 31, 2024, this includes 45.4% of public equity, 14.7% of private equity, 25.0% of fixed income, 13.4% of real assets, 2.6% of private debt, and 3.2% of other total fund financing.³²

Drawing a through-line from the single family home to another form of architecture, a CalPERS’ 2023 document titled Real Assets Annual Program Review, indicates contributions allocated to $56.8B in Real Estate, $89.5% of which is core assets, split fairly evenly among retail, apartment, office, and industrial properties.³³

This investment strategy has historically been bicoastal, and perhaps for that reason, unsuccessful. As described by Steve Malanga’s chapter The Pension Fund that Ate California: CalPER’s Corruption, Insider Dealing, and Politicized Investments Have Overwhelmed Taxpayers with Debt:

“CalPERS’s investments in real estate, which had begun cautiously in the 1960s, exemplify the wrong turn. The fund started expanding its real-estate portfolio during the 1990s tech boom. Then, as its stock investments slid at the turn of the millennium, it chased even higher returns in real estate. Between 20004 and 2006, as the country’s real-estate bubble was inflating, CalPERS pumped $7 billion into the sector, most of it in a few places that later became ground zero for the housing bust.

By 2008, the fund owned 288,000 homes and lots, 80 percent of them in property-bubble states California, Florida, and Arizona. The fund’s real-estate portfolio grew from 5 percent of its assets in mid-2005 to 10 percent by June 2008, even as real estate was already collapsing in CalPERS’s biggest markets.

The portfolio included a $500 million bet on two large apartment complexes in New York City—Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town—that went bust in a high-profile default. There was also an investment of nearly $1 billion in Landsource Communities, which planned to develop some 15,000 acres in California’s Santa Clarita Valley but eventually filed for bankruptcy. By 2011, the value of the fund’s real-estate holdings had declined by 49 percent, resulting in $11 billion in losses.”³⁴

Perhaps the most emblematic of mismanagement, was the reaction of CalPERs after this real estate loss, panic-selling their 2.3 million shares of Apple for $370 million, worth about 10 billion today.

Despite all the losses and missed opportunities, in 2016, CalPERS would buy its largest real estate investment, sending a letter of intent to purchase 787 Seventh Avenue, in Manhattan, New York. Under the guidance of the CEO Anne Stausboll, CalPERS negotiated the 1.6B transaction of the office asset, with the insurance conglomerate Equitable, who officially named the tower the AXA Equitable Center. A joint venture with investment manager CommonWealth Partners, AXA Equitable was financed with three single-asset mortgage back securities, sponsored by J.P. Morgan Chase Commercial Mortgage Securities Corp, the total outstanding debt on the property amounting to $921,700,000.

Designed by Edward Larabe Barnes in 1986, the AXA Equitable Center (752’) is crowned by an arched window, behind which is the metonym for private public defined contribution corporations under the neoliberal system: the boardroom. In a scene of reality stranger than fiction, a 2019 Helicopter crash on the roof³⁵ of AXA Equitable is perhaps a metaphor for the confusing reality of structured public finance; unlike the accidental crash at AXA, there is no clear origin of capital flows, no World Trade Center.

Like the deadpan image of the single family house, what does the CalPERS’ consolidated capital at AXA reveal? Ultimately tied to the suggested pension-architecture-complex, can one see the Equitable tower as representative of the larger system of financial flows, solidified through its architectural design?

In the case of AXA, the history of the building speaks to deep pockets of institutional capital to sponsor what is ultimately, the post-modern architecture game. It’s no surprise that the deed exchanges hands from an Insurance company to a Pension Fund, institutional funds the only plausible landlord. Can we look at the arched window at the top of 787 as a proxy for the single family house, a part of the same complex, the artifacts of architecture documenting the effects of this otherwise dematerial financial system?

Chess

How can we read the arched window? In many ways, it can be summarized through a story of a design scrimmage between two architects, with enough social capital and charm to steward wealthy, institutional benefactors.

“What’s the Game, Barnes?” Johnson remarked to Ed over a glass of Moet on a marble slab of his designed MoMA courtyard during an artist’s reception in 1964.³⁶ The two architects, dressed in a uniform more or less no longer familiar to architects today, the suit and tie, chuckle slyly. The chess pieces set, the board the Manhattan Grid, all that was missing were the clients.

Barnes, standing by his wife Mary Cooke Barnes, who works for Philip at MoMA, is uniquely positioned between the players, ultimately switching teams, working on the Interiors for Barnes’ IBM tower, the first true match between Johnson and Barnes, 590 and 550 Madison.

In an age of Architecture criticism, Paul Golderberger watches, documents, and cynically remarks from close by. The tale of two men, two, towers, unfolds in the New York Times, the winner of design charette a public facing game.

Just as Johnson (GSD, 1943), cut his teeth with Mies at Seagram in 58’, Barnes (GSD, 1942), breaks into the New York Scene through collaboration with Hugh Stubbins at 601 Lexington for Citicorp Center in 77’, just one block away from Seagram. The tower, which concerningly stands on its thick four toes, is sublime in scale at 915’, dwarfing Seagram 516’, and amplifying “sleek” metal-clad design. As Goldberger notes, the amenity of Barnes’ tower is the “esthetic of serious design.”³⁷ But Barnes’ collaboration, two decades after Segram, is not his sole chess move, and he knows it.

No, it’s IBM’s development on Madison which Barnes admits he’s “terribly excited about.”³⁸ With no surprise, it’s the Ruscha-owning developer, Edward J. Minskoff, who, with financing from the Ohio Teacher’s Pension Fund, develops the sleek tower.

Barnes stays level headed throughout the opportunity: “The thing that is exciting about New York is its wonderful gridiron of streets that gives everything form and permits variety….Its is the graph paper against which all goods are displayed and it is a foil that saves New York and such the street lines must be reinforced.”³⁹ Only across 57th street however, another building is planned for AT&T, the first moves are set.

And even the first design charrettes are public, updates unmissed by a relentless Goldberger. The two Harvard graduates, like on the same stack of Gund, react to one another after each pin-up in the Times.

By July 12, 1978, Carter Horsley makes the first comparison in the article “A $75 Million, 41-story Prism for IBM” writing “The tower will be about 45 feet shorter than the recently announced 648’ American Telephone and Telegraph Company skyscraper that will rise immediately south of it on Madison Avenue.”⁴⁰ He notes that even in the planning stage, the firms aligned on the rules of the game, “John Burgee of Johnson/Burgee, the architectural firm that designed the AT&T tower, said that both buildings would install white granite paving and that the pink granite facade of the AT&T building was chosen to contrast with the gray-green granite of the IBM building.” Johnson, by proxy, plays fair: “the sitting of the AT&T building, he said, was planned to shed as little shade as possible on the park.”⁴¹

In the same Wednesday times, Paul Goldberger also compares the two towers, mentioning “an obvious contrast is with the planned American Telephone and Telegraph Company headquarters by Johnson/Burgee slated to rise one block to the south. Here, granite will be used to create an altogether different kind of skyscraper, one that breaks away dramatically from modernism, with Renaissance-inspired arches at the bottom and an elaborate broken pediment at the top. By comparison, IBM will appear conservative indeed.” He continues with a sense of contrition for Barnes, “But [conservative] is a label, not a criticism.” Be it conservative or modern, IBM promises to be a dignified addition to midtown Manhattan, a building that embraces a set of urban values that can only be called civilized.”⁴²

Interestingly, both Barnes and Larrabee take time, mid-match, to write forwards for their mutual friend Bon-Hu Uy’s book “Drawings, Architecture & Leisure,” a series of architectural representations with childrens-book-like sensibilities.

Johnson points to a shifting style: “In the old days of modern architecture we could learn through models and make presentations to clients by means of models. Now however, the details, the framings, the moldings are too elusive to be worked by the modelmakers. Renderings are the only fair way.” Barnes on the other hand, writing a longer entry, holds his modernist ground, “Today in architecture, it is trendy to do facades – to fashion syles – to design more as a painter than an architect.” He continues in a sort of manifesto: “However, real architecture has priorities other than facadism. Volume, space, mass and light are the pedal points of every great design.”⁴³ Attempting to tie his theories back to the purpose of this entry, he concludes “great architecture must be strong in moonlight, when the details are in shadow, and great drawings must reveal the most basic forms.”⁴⁴

By construction, ostensibly a sort of mid-review, the two offices stop for a picture, a curious artifact of the mid-match.⁴⁵ One can imagine another edition of the photograph with text bubbles, the two written forwards from Bon-Hu’s book stemming from the architect’s mouths.

An article from the Architectural Record magazine, titled “Granite panels perform as unitized assemblies and give form and color to IBM’s prism tower” documents the appliqué of the facade, detailing how Ottowa Marble is cut and applied to 7’x20’ steel frames, ultimately hung from the floor plate. Described by Barnes as being “green as a garden…a counterpoint to technology,”⁴⁶ the article describes the poetically modern approach to Barnes’ building through examination of the facade’s thoughtful detail.

However, by the time the two buildings are occupied, Goldberger steps back in hindsight. After the public triumph of AT&T, he speaks of IBM: “Is it that we have all learned a lot, or that the design of this skyscraper was not so good in the first place? It is a little of both, I think – but whatever the reason, the I.B.M Building which is largely complete, must be considered the greatest disappointment of the current wave of high-rise construction in Manhattan.”⁴⁷

Cynical Goldberger can’t help but mention that when “one does stop and sit [in the atrium of IBM], the view is of the neighboring AT&T and Trump Tower buildings.” To make matters worse it’s Barnes’ structural daring otherwise architecturally (but causes engineers immense later worry) successful at Citicorp which becomes a laughing stock at IBM, “the latest joke in architectural circles was the speculation that IBM was going to sponsor an architectural competition to find a design for a column to support its missing corner.”⁴⁸

And despite the initial proposal Barnes’ office carefully detailed, it’s clear that Johnson’s AT&T, iconic and memorable to most even outside the architecture circles, has won this first move.

Only three years after IBM and AT&T, Goldberger’s Architecture Review had understandably moved to the “Arts” section, now offering a less critical “Architecture View.” Offering comments on what would be the second match between Barnes and Johnson, Goldberger notes three buildings along 53rd between Lexington and 3rd. The first discussed building is Kevin Roche’s E.F. Hutton building at 40 West 53rd, but for this he doesn’t dwell. The two other towers are Johnson’s so-called “Lipstick Building” for his usual client, Hines, at 53rd and Third, and Barnes’ 599 Lexington for Boston Properties.

Both towers are similarly triumphs according to Goldberger: “599 Lexington is surely Mr. Barnes’ best tower in New York since his 535 Madison avenue building was finished in the Early 80s. Like that tower, this one is a frankly modernist building and it is shaped like a minimalist sculpture.”⁴⁹ He continues “The real achievement, though, is the buildings unusually handsome metal “skin,” or exterior sheathing…Mr Barnes and Mr Lee have found a way to make an exterior wall of metal that is fully ‘modern,’ yet has a degree of texture and variety to it that resembles the more articulated facades of older buildings.”⁵⁰

In similarly good spirits Golderberger once again compares Johnson and Barnes, first describing Johnson’s “round peg in a square hole” on third avenue tower as a “garish combination of different kinds of granite.” Nonetheless, he ultimately relinquishes to what is, as he describes “a tact in 3rd avenue vulgarity”⁵¹ a choice that “since they couldn’t beat [3rd avenue], they might as well join it. This is ever-so emblematic of Johnson’s oeuvre.

For this round, the match is even. But just as any game that ends in a tie is no fun, Johnson and Barnes would’ve continued till certain triumph. But Barnes, with the most ambitious commission he’ll receive, trips over his own feet, without Johnson’s intervention. As documented thoroughly by Robert Stern, Barnes’ tower, under construction during the completion of 599 Lexington, is the move that puts him in check. By the end of this, he’s lost to Johnson’s New York triumph.

Somewhat hidden from the New York Architectural dialogue, the AXA’s history can be found piecemeal, remnants of the design process locked away in the archives of Harvard’s special collections, by appointment only. Only more emblematic of the hidden project, as Stern points out, is Barnes’ “monograph, where he banished the project to the addendum.” This is all despite the project being Barnes’ largest, at 1.6M SF. As Stern writes, an irreverent Barnes, “the hitherto minimalist architect [struggled] with his client’s taste for classically recollective form.”⁵²

The development of AXA comes after the special zoning district of midtown enacted in May 1982, in which city planning allowed towers to rise to an FAR of 15. Hoping to move congestion from 3rd Avenue to the west side, planning relinquished to the creation of an architectural canyon, opting to form mid-block cuts as a reliefs of this over-building. Jane Jacobs famously writes of the need for “small blocks,” like those employed by Rockefeller Center. Barnes follows suit, cutting-out the base of the tower first in the form of a pitched roof house, and later a more simple rectangular cut, creating 6 ½ Ave.

Barnes’ ultimate stylistic foe, the Equitable Life Insurance company, is not new to the tribulations of architectural patronage. As Stern documents, Equitable builds offices first on 120 Broadway by Arthur Gilman and Edward H. Kendall, later rebuilt by Graham, Anderson, Probst, & White, then 393 Seventh Avenue (now Penn 11) with Starrett & van Vlack, and finally 1285 Sixth Avenue by SOM (now UBS tower). Equitable would finally move into Barnes’ project at 787 Seventh Avenue by 1986.

The chosen photo for AXA’s appendix submission is a simple, white massing model. Notably, the tower is marked by three simple geometries, a half circle marking the entrance of the tower, a square at the center of the west facade, and a triangle, marking the top of the tower. The triangle, behind which would be the AXAs boardroom is the most obvious distinction of Barnes’ slow lack of control over the design. Moving through a chronological timeline of proposals, this top window is first a triangle, then a circle, and finally in the last option which likely reflects the client’s preference, concludes the tower “in a penthouse that incorporated, as part of an executive commons, two soaring vaulted rooms lit by forty-two-foot-diameter windows on the east and west facades which in their exterior expression suggested Serliana or so-called Palladian windows.”

What ultimately crowns the building with a sort of curtain-wall pediment is a reduced and uninspired mirror to Johnson’s towering antique.

Barnes’ postmodern insecurity is ever-so apparent through the shifting design of the tower’s entrance. Not unlike 550 Madison, AXA greets its enterers with a 5-story romanesque arch, the dimensions of which are almost identical to Johnson’s design. Like Barnes’ other design jostles, we can assume Barnes didn’t arrive here with much ease. In fact, although the initial massing utilized the half-circle, Barnes simplifies the entrance with an orthogonal strategy, a likely attempt to differentiate from his romanesque opponent on Madison. Another attempt at differentiation includes an over-sized half circle over an entrance shaft, however considering the familiarity of the suggested aperture, one can assume why both Barnes and his client would forgo this option.

Not unlike Goldberger’s reception of IBM, he writes AXA as being “among the most curious buildings in New York…at once adventurous and timid…modern and ‘post-modern,’ grandiose and restrained. As a work of architecture, it represents 54 stories of ambivalence.” And although “seeking park avenue rents on seventh avenue”⁵³ it is not only Barnes that would likely agree with Goldberger’s review but Equitable themselves who ultimately washes their hands of the tower, moving out and taking their Thomas Hart Benton, America Today, 1930, with them.

Likely even more perverse to Barnes were the interiors of the crowing space, designed by Kohn Pedersen Fox, which completely opposed Barnes’ (and his wife’s, Mary Cooke Barnes’) interiors of IBM at 590 Madison.

Roger Kimball describes the interiors as “a study in bureaucratic bombast,”⁵⁴ Stern remarking that “schmaltzy theatrical feel of opulent stage set… was convincingly, if improbably, classical, with finley and elaborately detailed woodwork, a gracious interconnecting stair, and a nobly scaled boardroom.” The overly ornate interiors are an almost fetishistic opposition to Barnes, a bombastic reflection of Equitable’s power-broker executives who, in a sort of New York congress, steward capital in leather chairs and matching writing pads.

The bombast is ever more clear through the dining options. In hilarious opposition to their building at 1235, is SOM’s design for Palio in the Equitable center. Stern writes:

“The same was to be said of the restaurant interiors of AXA. Two restaurants Palio, featuring Italian food, designed by interiors division of Skidmore, Ownings, and Merrill, was much more interesting, not only because of its twenty-four-foot-tall, thirty-by-thirty-food ground-floor bar, the attic frieze of which was bold, colorful, and bawdy mural painted by the artist Sandro Chia, but also for the subtly detailed second floor dining room with hand-painted banners hung on the walls and its custom furniture designed by David Allen of SOM and table settings by Lella and Massimo Vignelli.”

The same could be said and seen of Le Bernardin, which still today triumphs as New York’s premier restaurant. The interiors of which, through their 80s-style paneling, floral upholstery, and salon-blue walls, invites the stewards of institutional capital from the tower above, downstairs, into comfortable seats with delicate fish service.

The reviews of the restaurants could not be more dissimilar than the review of the building itself. In fact, in an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of Le Bernardin, 787 Seventh Avenue (the development of which initially bankrolled the restaurant) writes of the tenancy in an otherwise insignificant building: “They made the trans-Atlantic move to the present location in New York in 1986, as an anchor in a collection of restaurants in a new office tower on Seventh Avenue.”⁵⁵

In further opposition to the triumph of F&B, other reviews of AXA are politely scathing: Progressive Architecture was similarly critical of the “undistinguished quality” of the facade, saying: “Barnes’s tower can’t seem to make up its mind whether it’s a Modern skyscraper or a Post-Modern one.” Roger Kimball of The New Criterion wrote: “Mr. Barnes seems to have abandoned any attempt at a cogent architectural design. Instead, he has contrived to produce one of the most pretentious and ungainly new buildings in New York.” The New Criterion cited Equitable Tower’s “large clunky base”, its “replaceable”-looking granite and limestone facade, and its massive arches that “seem more like movie-set novelties.” Suzanne Stephens said the criticism showed that Barnes was “more adept at chipping, chamfering and chiseling buildings with rotated geometries.”⁵⁶

Chairmen

In a profession which makes its living from providing confidence towards what should and should not be built, Barnes’ lack of confidence in the building’s modernity or postmodernity is ostensibly the architect’s undoing. He’s questioned not only his future practice, but put his prior constructions on unstable ground. Couldn’t a true modernist convince a client like Equitable into sleek, chamfered, modernity?

Instead, the building is crudely twisted to traditional, pediments and columns shaping the executive’s fantasies of power and greed. The bombast at AXA Equitable seamlessly transitions to CalPERS’ ownership, emblematic of the fund’s own struggles with greed, despite the sanctimonious attitude of “investments for the people.” The arched window is secondhand, but tells the same story of private institutional capital, and arguably its inherent avarice.

Driven by conflicting aspirations, chairman of CalPERS don’t tend to hold their positions for long, and are often tempted by the proximity to capital flows.

As of April, 2024, the current Chief Executive Marcia Frost is even under question, who in an annual board review faced criticism, discussing her lack of a diploma, saying openly: “I’ve been clear from the start that I don’t have a college degree.”⁵⁷Although her tenure has been otherwise successful, the review came after concerns regarding other resume gaps. Again, CalPERS has almost half a trillion dollars under management.

CalPERS is ripe with other realities stranger than fiction, documented well by Steve Malanga’s article “The Pension Fund that Ate California: CalPER’s Corruption, Insider Dealing, and Politicized Investments Have Overwhelmed Taxpayers with Debt.” Metaphoric for a prolific mismanagement of the pension fund, Malanga starts his chapter with (what one would assume to be a boring subject) with a hook:

“After spending years dogged by unpaid debts, California labor leader Charles Valdes filed for bankruptcy in the 1990s—twice. At the same time, he held one of the most influential positions in the American financial system: chair of the investment committee for the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, or CalPERS, the nation’s largest pension fund for government workers. Valdes left the board in 2010 and now faces scrutiny for accepting gifts from another former board member, Alfred Villalobos—who, the state alleges, spent tens of thousands of dollars trying to influence how the fund invested its assets. Questioned by investigators about his dealings with Villalobos, Valdes invoked the Fifth Amendment 126 times.”

This is not the story one would expect from the steady hand of institutional capital. In fact, Magala documents a much longer story of how CalPERS ends up rotten with “double-dealing,” those at the top too often tempted by greed.

When it comes to investing on behalf of others, it’s clear the CalPERs investment committee is prone to gambler’s disillusionment, mitigating risk callously. This hasn’t come without its jackpots: during the tech boom of 1994 through 1998, CalPERS spectacularly earned $68 billion from its stock portfolio. Nonetheless, this initial success led to riskier deals, which, most emblematic through real estate, included the riskiest portions of the capital stack. Alongside the discussed failures of Peter Cooper Village and Stuyvesant Town, as CalPERS began taking loses, they doubled down: “Desperate for higher returns, CalPERS also bought the riskiest portions of collateralized-debt obligations, accumulating $140 million of them by 2007. These were the packages of debt, largely subprime mortgages, whose defaults helped trigger the 2008 financial meltdown.”⁵⁸ An almost hilariously bad investment in 2007, these equity tranches became known as “toxic waste” on Wall Street, the cyanide pill that ultimately led to the bailout of Citigroup.

All the while, asset management fees on the multi-billion dollar portfolio kept the corporate wheel turning. And it’s no surprise that throughout the losses, money exchanges hands in familiar ways. Unbeknownst to Steve Malanga at the date of his book’s publication, the aforementioned Villalobos in his essay’s hook would make his final financial transaction through the rental of a 9MM pistol at “Reno’s Premier Gun Store & Shooting Range,” placing the gun in his mouth and pulling the trigger.⁵⁹

Villalobos, who managed the CalPERS account on behalf of Apollo Global Management, was to appear before the US District Court in San Francisco, for bribing Fred Buenrostro, the CEO of CalPERS from 2002 to 2008. His lawyer would later inform the district attorney “Villabos was dead.”⁶⁰

Previously on the board of CalPERS himself, it was Villalobos’ strategic greed that led him to step down, and become the greasy wheel of capital placement. Fittingly odd were the bribes themselves, including Villalobos paying for Buenrostro’s wedding and subsequent trip to Asia in 2006. Their criminal anxiety becomes obvious, almost hilariously documented like children with a secret: “video of Buenrostro’s wedding, which took place at Villalobos’ Tahoe mansion, showed Buenrostro embracing Villalobos during the reception. But the last time the two men appeared together in court, in San Francisco last July, they stood 10 feet apart and pointedly didn’t look at one another.”

The story doesn’t end there; Villalobos also bribed Charles Valdes, the Chief Investment Officer working under Buenrostro. Valdes, riddled with anxiety about his misdoings, would go to a Tahoe - Reno casino, and drive himself into personal bankruptcy for the third time. His death would later be described as “mysterious” coming only a week after his “housemate and domestic partner, Clarence Munson, 55, was arrested on [battery] charges that he had deliberately injured the 74-year-old Valdes.”⁶¹ Valdes later lay dead in the bathroom of their home in Carmichael as Munson, who is described as the perpetrator of elder abuse, was held in jail without recourse to pay bail.

Fittingly, Villalobos and Valdes worked on the placement of 125M of CalPERS capital to be invested in CIM group’s California Urban Real Estate Fund, an otherwise equitable development initiative. Speaking to the economically stabilizing force of Real Estate, an article titled “Alfred Villalobos, fixture in CalPERS corruption scandal apparently commits suicide,” coyly mentions; ‘Most of the investments brokered by Villalobos have been profitable.”⁶² Nonetheless, our 9MM wielding capital placer with a penchant for institutional real estate is out by 08’, making way for another series of investments like AXA.

Rebellion, Fiction

“Oh Larrabee, lay down your sword, and give up. For your tower is no master, but a foolmans attempt to anxiously define that which is. Relinquish your tower Larrabee, for you curtains aren’t as solid as the coin.. Like life from limb, shall we not also take your tower’s skin? As rebellion, as ours? For we own your crown, and we own your futile mockery. Under your sad skin is cold steel like all others, holding in no more than subtle fish.”

Lest we forget, that will of the people can only withstand the sour fruits of corruption when it doesn’t affect them. But could the power brokers with greased hands be busted for their lack of performance? Perhaps Villalobos greased the wheel at just the right time.

As oddly dramatized by PBS’ series Frontline, the documentary The Pension Gamble, 2018 begins to ask the question; what if pension payments far outpace contributions and earnings?⁶³ And like the power of accumulated capital, it’s no surprise that pension-denied teachers come together as a body-politic to protest. Could this populous demand a shift in strategy? A material change?

As described, investments in real estate are unique as they solidify the capital flows of the pension – and although much of the portfolio is invested in dematerial assets, the material realities of architecture make these investments, in many ways, concrete.

Consider again a fiction, in which a disgruntled, pension-denied worker flips through the investment committee’s annual report to find his deferred salary tied up in the two granite 52-story office towers of City National Plaza at 515 Flower St, Los Angeles. Just a short drive from his house in Alameda, would it be unfathomable to imagine him entering the building, and taking, whether it be a chair or a piece of drywall, a piece of the building as a form of compensation? The capital flows condensate from numbers to reality – the system becomes literal.

Instead of the pensioner receiving their biweekly allowance from the properties cash flow, could they seize the materials that make the building itself? And instead of putting cash flow towards the retiree’s likely home improvement, surely they could improve their own home with the fruits of this material rebellion? Quite like the literal architecture-as-pension proposed by the United Kingdom in late 17th century, the disgruntled pensioner proposes a similar system, in which the capital flow is equally architectural.

Fiction

Forming a sort of road movie, the disgruntled pensioner’s rebellion, taking the literal material from the otherwise distant investment, ends in an utterly anticlimactic, realistic, feasible, and boring way.

It’s easy to image, the investment committee who doesn’t care to understand structured finance,⁶⁴ comprehending and ultimately suggesting the simple material flows.

By February 2024, “CalPERS’ 787 Seventh loses $120M of pre-Covid value.”⁶⁵ In fact, as documented by The Real Deal, the “Manhattan building was valued at $917 million by KBRA” far less than when they acquired the 1.7-million-square-foot property for $1.6 billion in 2016. The article specifies: “Since then, vacancies have increased slightly and cash flow has fallen by 10 percent, according to KBRA, from $73 million annually to $66 million.”⁶⁶

Consider a final fiction:

Joining a slew of ~50 other office to residential conversions in the New York development pipeline⁶⁷ CalPERS, legally the general partner on the property, has no choice but to reposition the asset to its highest and best use, residential. Using cuts in the floor slab along the perimeter of the building, the tower now abides by code.

Offering 54 stories of high end residential apartments and amenities, the tower is named after its continuously operating restaurant Le Bernardin, marketed as Maison Bernardin. With a refreshed sense of bombast, the conversion asks well-over market rate for its balconied deep units.

Maison Bernardin

Welcome Home787 7th Ave, New York, NY 10019

Welcome to Maison Bernardin, where luxury living meets architectural brilliance in the heart of New York City. Occupying the former AXA Equitable Center originally designed by Edward Larrabee Barnes, these studio to three-bedroom apartments redefine urban living.

Indulge in a lifestyle of unparalleled elegance with amenities tailored to exceed your every expectation. Dive into serenity in our pristine pool, invigorate your senses in the state-of-the-art workout center, or unwind in the soothing embrace of our sauna. For the ultimate cinematic experience, our iMAX theatre awaits, promising unforgettable movie nights right at your doorstep. Other amenities including a rooftop terrace, concierge service, and private parking. Maison Bernardin offers a sanctuary of luxury amidst the bustling cityscape.

Conveniently located just steps away from Rockefeller Center, Maison Bernardin puts the pulse of New York City right at your fingertips. Immerse yourself in the vibrant energy of Midtown Manhattan, where world-class dining, shopping, and entertainment options await around every corner. Whether you’re exploring the iconic landmarks of Rockefeller Center or enjoying a leisurely stroll through Central Park, Maison Bernardin offers the perfect balance of sophistication and convenience for the discerning urban dweller.

But like any office to residential conversion, the tower will have to be reclad; the sealed curtain wall is not up to code. Barnes’ yellow and red granite must be stripped–a new operable facade added.

But like the pensioner who makes his investments material by going to a CalPERS property and taking what is – in some ways – his, the investment board understands the tact of material engagement.

In fact, this material strategy is advertised like any cheap roadside lawyer – Barnes’ postmodern thesis is no more important than the value of its collapsed parts. A roadside sign reads “Reduced Pension? You might be entitled for Material Compensation.”

And unlike the drama of Titus Andronicus, it’s the pensioner who relinquishes, not the sovereign. Rather, the road movie begins, the CalPERS pensioner packing up their cars and heading to New York, accepting a piece of the otherwise junk facade as part of their retirement, circumventing fungible dollars, and literalizing capital flows.

The arrangement begs the question: what would happen to the old facade anyway? The result of the repositioning, the stripped facade is a product of added value to 787 Seventh, the pensioner receiving it a band-aid of its poor performance.

In the end it’s Ed Larrabee Barnes, from his grave who’s most happy with the arrangement, glad to have the stain of AXA Equitable wiped from the Manhattan chess board altogether.

With a steady diet of corporate media and nutrients, the pensioner’s make their way from California to New York, lining-up along 53rd and 7th, waiting to strap a piece of the unitized panel system to the roof of their modest sedans. They stay a night in the outer boroughs, and make their way back west.

The workers estimate that relative compensation to be about a year’s worth, or ~80,000k, for 8 panels worth of curtain wall. Aside from the material value, they too consider the value of real estate investment, considering the property-enhancing power of a home extension, a typical play for the retiree, the space forever plagued by auxiliary uses: the workout machine graveyard, craft space, air mattress for grandchildren’s visits.

Ultimately the CalPERS investment will regain its value after stabilization, and another institutional investor will come along looking for returns on its steady cash flow.

But a new form of architecture encapsulates the drama: the extensions look different from the typical, the architecture, like the arched window on top of AXA, metonymic of a system that stayed in place, a public once again abiding to the power of institutional capital.

“…they too consider the value of real estate investment, considering the property-enhancing power of a home extension, a typical play for the retiree.”

“…the space forever plagued by auxiliary uses: the workout machine graveyard, craft space, air mattress for grandchildren’s visits.”