Saving Penn Station in the Name of Reuse
Two competing plans aim to retrofit the much-maligned transit complex. Which is better?
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The Great and the Good
Any future for Penn Station must make use (and reuse) of its past.
New York City has the best of everything. Except buildings. Here, block by block and despite the antic charm of its skyline when seen from a great distance, New York punches pathetically below its weight, especially in comparison to its little neighbors Boston and Philadelphia, which give us Bullfinch, Sert, Cobb, Kahn, Pei, Gropius, Rudolph, Richardson, Sullivan, and the work of all their students and schools plus the extraordinary vernaculars that were spared conflagration or avaricious demolition—all in casual abundance. The greatest city in the world, on the other hand, is mostly tenements and Hudson Yards and Duane Reades.
Here, on the rare occasions when we do achieve skillful and hospitable architecture, especially in the public realm, it happens in one of two ways. First, there is the splendid but narrow way achieved by would-be-Vasaris seeking their Medicis, artful designers who by a vicious species of talent and courtiership are able to provide a building grand enough to flatter those clients but also good enough to serve the city and its people—Mies van der Rohe and Natalie de Blois on Park, Marcel Breuer on Madison, Pier Luigi Nervi in Washington Heights, Pei and Saarinen here and there, Roche and Dinkeloo at the Metropolitan Museum. Secondly—and, because it depends rather less on individual genius, more promisingly as a future template—there are projects in which serendipitous convergences of middling journeymen, tempered by long experience and responding with radical competence to constraints of labor, capital, material, and code, manifest something that is both great and good. Great in appropriately reflecting the scale and stature of the city. Good in contributing to its appallingly limited humanity and urbanity.
Today, for the city’s inglorious Pennsylvania Station and its lower Midtown surrounds, a small group of architects, advocates, and private developers, though perhaps suspecting themselves of the genius required by the first way, may be quietly achieving the second. Emphasis, pending good governance, on may.
Faint Praise
From the archive: Unlike the trains now operating at austerity levels of service, Moynihan Train Hall has arrived exactly on time, ready to uplift.
by Michael Nicholas
At the start of the year, fewer people than ever were riding the train into and out of Manhattan’s Pennsylvania Station. Claustrophobic and artificially lit, with a uniquely asphyxiating air about it, Penn Station is the last place anyone wants to be in a pandemic. But just across Eighth Avenue, a new train hall attracted New Yorkers from all over, inviting them to momentarily shed their protective lockdown shells and soak up what we once recognized as “city life.”
Moynihan Train Hall opened on January 1 to a buzz that rarely accompanies new works of public architecture. The press was awash with praise about Moynihan’s bright and airy, classic-yet-modern, grand-but-not-austere—in a word, sunny— disposition. The project, which significantly adapts the Farley Post Office Building, has been over twenty-fives years in the making, since it was first proposed by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, but its carefully choreographed press rollout would seem to backdate those origins to the turn of the last century; that is, to a time of great public architecture, premodern Beaux-Arts craftsmanship, and a well-maintained train system. In the midst of declining confidence in the state and the country’s handling of the pandemic, it’s a story people were eager to hear.
An Ouster at the Institute
From the archive: A scandal erupts within the AIA after the president of its Middle East chapter was removed for organizing a webinar on the “ethnic cleansing of Palestine.”
by Zach Mortice
In May of 2021, president of AIA Middle East Ali Lari thought he had done a rather difficult thing: diffused a sensitive political situation without compromising the AIA’s stated commitments to equity and human rights.
The topic at hand was the occupation of Palestine by Israel. That spring, Israel’s (still ongoing) blockade and repression of Palestine had ignited into a major flashpoint that killed more than 240 Palestinians and displaced 52,000. Israel’s conduct has been roundly condemned by the United Nations, Human Rights Watch, and other humanitarian organizations. The intensely asymmetrical conflict is often explained in explicitly architectural and urban planning terms. By way of example, the Michael Sorkin and Deen Sharp–edited anthology Open Gaza: Architectures of Hope presents the built condition of the Gaza Strip as a harbinger of widening circles of surveillance, provisional adaptive reuse, resource scarcity, and colonial occupation. “The United Nations a few months ago declared that Israel’s practices are tantamount to apartheid,” says Lari. “Apartheid is an urban policy and urban design issue.”
New York Review of Architecture reviews architecture in New York. Our editor is Samuel Medina, our deputy editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
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