A Fresh-Faced Classic
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Even without the ill-starred Jets Stadium, the progress of Manhattan’s far West Side continues apace. In addition to three recent Richard Meier buildings and the first installments of the Hudson River Park, we now have the West Midtown Ferry Terminal, which is so accomplished it is hard to believe that it was built in New York.
This two-story, curtain-walled building at West 39th Street assembles itself in a C-shape around a huge chunk of 1930s infrastructure, the ventilation towers for the Lincoln Tunnel directly below. As is so often the case in current architecture, the contrast between the pristinely contemporary glass and steel of the new structure and the plodding, Industrial Age massiveness of the towers is fully exploited by the architects, William Nicholas Bodouva & Associates. In a form of generational one-upmanship, the programmatic fragility, even hollowness of the new building mocks the clumsy surplus age of its forebear. Clearly the architect decided that it would be pointless for the new building to try to fit in with the preexisting context. Rather, by admitting their irreconcilable differences, he has thrillingly conjured into being a tertium quid, a third thing, out of the collision of the two.
The best thing about the ferry terminal is the sovereign confidence with which it inhabits its site beside the water. As you approach from uptown, this $56 million project appears to consist of two diminutive pavilions – one strictly rectilinear, the other a curving quadrant – that preside over a landscaped plaza. There is immense aesthetic satisfaction in the graceful interaction of these two northern pavilions, whose configuration is repeated in identical form on the south side. But it turns out that the two rectilinear pavilions are really the northern and southern tips of a single nave extending the entire length of the site. As for the quadrant-shaped pavilions, they have little function beyond pure ornament, which would be harder to excuse if they did not look so elegant.
On arriving at the terminal, you are apt to experience a minor shock of recognition: The unfolding scene recalls a vague multitude of images from some primer on Modernist architecture. Which is to say that the building already looks famous, classic.
On a recent trip to Chicago, I visited Mies’s twin towers on Lake Shore Drive and his various works for the Illinois Institute of Technology. I was struck by a certain seediness in the physical presence of those Modernist icons. Granted they are approaching the half-century mark, but I suspect that even when they were new they exhibited, despite their formal elegance, a pronounced indifference to their materials that was all too prevalent in mid-century. This indifference imparts to many of Mies’s projects a kind of institutionalized staleness that is almost tawdry at times.
That same tawdriness characterizes Pier Luigi Nervi’s George Washington Bridge Bus Station from 1963, which in many ways inspired the interior of the new ferry terminal seven miles to the south. But the ferry terminal possesses a freshness, a sensitivity to the charm of glass and steel and concrete that is more than a function of its newness. I suspect that 50 years hence, the building will not feel stale or institutional or tawdry at all.
Though the architectural vocabulary of the 20,000-square-foot interior is largely Modern – with its aquatic-blue carpeting, pure-white pylons, and Nerviesque beams along the ceiling – a contemporary note is suggested by such deconstructivist details as the external walkway that overlooks the seven boat slips and a two-story wall of angled blue glass that is one of the first things you see as you enter the site. Most contemporary of all is the gray, asphaltic landscaping outside the building itself: The only green you see amid this expanse of concrete is an oval mound of grass in the center.
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This aggressive rejection of naturalism is very much in vogue these days, as is attested at Hudson River Park, the riverside park at Trump Place in the 60s, and the new plans for landscaping the FDR Drive in Lower Manhattan. One of its most successful incarnations is the new elevated plaza at 55 Water Street, which overlooks the FDR Drive and the East River clear across to Brooklyn Heights.
Designed for Goldman Sachs by the firm of Rogers Marvel Architects and the landscaper Ken Smith, it is well hidden even if you know to look for it. You have to mount a steep succession of stairs before coming face to face with ruggedly exotic blooms and hardy grasses that have been set into concrete planters.
The site was born in the 1970s, that ignominious heyday of the Privately Owned Public Space program. This initiative allowed developers to build higher if they promised to maintain a public space on the new site. Most of these spaces were cynical, menacing failures – few more so than this very site, which was once little more than a brick wall and a few battered benches.
Now it has been reborn at a glamorous off-kilter slant that serves as yet another example of the deconstructed style. The site is so far from suggesting naturalism that it positively revels in the infrastructural orgy that is the FDR scarcely 100 feet to the east. Further artifice is suggested in the regimented planks of the wooden boardwalk, the neon-green Astroturf of the square lawn, and the surrounding concrete risers that in fair weather will serve as an outdoor theater. Most artificial of all is a 50-foot-high pink cube, a lantern made of translucent glass bands and light-emitting diodes, that positively glows in the dark.
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Far more conventional is Manhattan’s newest park, a 2-acre triangular wedge at the busy intersection of West and Canal Streets, hard by the Hudson River and the Holland Tunnel. The neo-Victorian contextualism of Canal Park, with its wrought-iron fences, Beaux-Arts lampposts, and wooden benches, is the dominant taste at the Parks Department these days. It is the defining element in the recently renovated Union Square and Madison Square Park, and it will soon be seen in Washington Square.
In this most recent example, the results are rather feeble. On the day I visited (admittedly a blustery autumn day), no one was there, and it is hard to see why they would be. Though the park is a pleasant improvement on the garbage-truck depot that was there for decades, it affords no sense of escape from the city. Rather, you feel trapped amid the flow of traffic. Matters are not helped by the fact that the grass is visible only through impassible wrought iron gates, whose function does not differ from that of so many other fences that the Parks Department has placed all over the city. You have the distinct feeling that here, as elsewhere, the department cannot bring itself to trust the citizens to behave.