Architectural Heritage

Met Life building (former Pan Am building) at Grand Central

Having recently acquired a precious book edited by the Municipal Art Society, that assembles 10 architectural walks through the city of Manhattan, we have headed today to Grand Central Station, starting point for a walk that should acquaint us with the modernist architectural assemblage of world-famous Park Avenue.

Grand Central's Main Concourse

Grand Central itself was the first pearl of today's visit. Opened in 1913, it is a peculiar melange of neoclassicist and art-déco elements and greets its visitors with both impressive wide-angle vistas and magnificent decorative details that require a closer look. A mixture of three different marbles revet the station's main concourse - the hall giving access to the various subterranean train tracks - and bathe it into a warm reddish light. The main concourse also impresses with its vaulted greenish-blue ceiling showing the stellar configuration from God's point of view (that is, in reversed order when it comes to a worldly perspective). Thanks to MTA, which not only communicates plainly with its passengers, but has also launched a campaign of poetry in motion, I have recently discovered the following lines paying homage to Grand Central and capturing beautifully the spirit of this place:

The City orbits around eight million centers of the Universe.

And turns around the golden clock at the still point of this place.

Lift up your eyes from the moving hive and you will see time circling

under a vault of stars and know just when and where you are.

Billy Collins, 1941

Yet Grand Central should be but the starting point of our tour. First official subject of our walk was the former Pan Am building (today belonging to Met Life), which strangely thrones over Grand Central Station and, thus standing in the midst of Park Avenue, interrupts our view of the sky which usually remains unbroken within the north-south corridors that are Manhattan's avenues. Pan Am building's prominent location was of course not without political strength, as it underscored a particular hierarchy among the various newly available mediums for public transportation back in the 1950s.

Mies Van der Rohe's New York masterpiece:
The Seagram Building

450 Park Avenue

Despite it's soviet-style dimensions, the former Pan Am building convinces with its fair modernism (at least if one abstracts from the ugly posterior base structure). Yet the traces left by various undue architectural interventions that would transform the building into a contemporary business tower cannot be ignored. Changes have done much harm to the towers finely tuned interior hall, whose former elegance can only be vaguely evoked by the few original elements that remain. As such, the Met Life building therefore confronted us with one of the main themes of an architectural walk through Midtown Manhattan: the struggle of architectural preservation and protection in a fast moving and highly dynamic business city. The beautiful examples of International Style buildings that we came across later today have themselves replaced original Manhattan lower story brick buildings of which only few are left over in Midtown. At the same time, some of them are nowadays themselves threatened by contemporary functional architecture apparently well suited to business needs.

Among the wealth of interesting and often beautiful buildings that we have seen today, two have immediately won our favour. Unsurprisingly, one of them was Mies Van der Rohe's' Seagram Building, whose stately elegance remains one-of-a-kind and succeeds in preserving the airiness and cohesion of modernist architecture which we cherish and know from Europe. Its younger cousin, the Emery Roth & Sons 450 Park Avenue Building, came more as a surprise and enchanted us with its combination of the modernist gracefulness and the playfulness of (post) 1950s architecture.

Living at the Upper West Side, we only occasionally make our way to Manhattan's legendary skyscrapers. Today we have learned about the very beginnings of modernist business architecture in New York.

Seagram Building