The City Journal, lamenting New York�s long, unpleasant experiment with �modernist� architecture, has some great suggestions for a rebirth of classical architecture on the West Side.
It is long past overdue for the City to stop alternately constructing hideous eyesores and bland, nondescript office buildings and move back to the classical architecture of Grand Central Station, the Flatiron Building and the Empire State Building. As the authors here state:
Well, the rebuilding of the World Trade Center site is a lost opportunity; but New York suddenly has another chance to move beyond the stale, seven-decade-old clich� of the endlessly repeated glass box, or the glass box twisted, deconstructed, or otherwise contorted as much by computer-design programs as by any human imagination. 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…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.
Here�s hoping this idea gets somewhere.