The City Journal‘s Reimagining the Far West Side brings together a number of architects’ classical skyscrper designs for New York’s Far West Side:
The rebuilding of the World Trade Center site has gotten everyone talking about architecture, but so far it’s a one-sided conversation, as if the only question worth discussing is: What kind of modernism do we want? [...] But since we’ve now had 50 years of modernism here in New York, and only a half-dozen good buildings among hundreds of awful ones to show for it, maybe what we really want now is … not modernism.
Although New York is full of modernist glass box, tower-in-the-park skyscrapers, it’s best known for its classical skyscrapers, like the Empire State Building, the RCA Victor Building, and the Waldorf-Astoria:
If Chicago takes the palm for inventing the skyscraper, New York can claim to have brought it to full flower. The classical skyscraper is one of Gotham’s gifts to the world, the urbane expression of its technical genius, wealth, and confident cosmopolitanism.
The plan?
The City Planning Commission has proposed re-zoning for redevelopment a vast area of the Far West Side — more than 60 blocks from Seventh to Twelfth Avenues and from 30th to 43rd Streets. At the center of this redevelopment, an area now mostly of parking lots, rail yards, low-rise garages and repair shops, and the tangle of approaches to the Lincoln Tunnel, the planners envision a new boulevard, running between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, and zoned for massive office buildings suitable for major corporate headquarters. For this north-south street, called Hudson Boulevard, City Journal has asked six renowned architects to design a half-dozen truly postmodernist buildings, skyscrapers that bypass modernism’s dead end and bring New York’s long and vibrant tradition of classical tall buildings triumphantly into the twenty-first century.