Needs the touch up.

we didn't rebuild wtc, but better

This entire proposal is an astroturf campaign. There is a well funded PR company putting this together. They have been running thousands of ads across multiple social media sites. They don't disclose who their clients are or indicate who is actually behind and funding the campaign. There is nothing grass roots about this proposal. If I had to guess it is by the same landlords who have been fighting against the governors proposal and who spent thousands of dollars on the last election trying to get a puppet candidate elected.

I don't see any homeless people shitting in that picture

Seems to be even weirder than that. According to the website it's a project of the National Civic Art Society, which is this weird Trump-affiliated non-profit devoted to "classical" architecture, at the exclusion of all other styles. They were in the news a couple of years back for instigating Trump's short-lived executive order banning all other styles of architecture for federal projects.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/07/arts/design/federal-building-architecture.html

Redoing Penn Station is a worthwhile area of discussion, but I'd be very suspicious of this organization's motives and affiliations.

They probably are trying to kill the current proposal as it suits their needs whoever it is.

[deleted]

No, I doubt the people with the money to undertake such a project would ever be willing to lose the commercial and office space on top of Penn Station just so commuters have a nicer experience while waiting 15 minutes for their train.

The Form 990 available on guidestar says otherwise. Those amounts are like a rounding error if it was well funded. Look up the 16 names on there of the board.

If Europe is busy rebuilding entire historic blitzed areas the way they were before WWII, I think rebuilding the most beautiful civic building in history warrants such a restoration.

yeah it's more expensive to build in NYC

And we’re infinitely richer, no excuse. Also, it wouldn’t cost any more than the cookie cutter glass buildings going up everywhere. Contemporary advancements in manufacturing have easily replaced skilled craftsmen used on historical classical buildings.

This is never going to happen given there’s an entire office building (2 Penn Plaza) right on top of where they want to build this that is currently undergoing a major renovation and expansion of size. Not sure why someone is bankrolling this at all given it’s inherent hopelessness

They're also trying to kill the bigger, more functional project that NYS is already planning (the one Hochul talks about). This group is basically trying to say "that project is too modern, so let's just do this historic restoration version instead - pay no attention to how much smaller and less useful it is!"

If the city is willing to play hard ball with MSG and not renew its permit then we can talk about making Penn Station nice.

If not there’s an arena in the way and at best the city will spend a lot working around the edges of it trying to make the space above the outer edges of the platforms nice.

(And now that Moynihan is built one possible place for a new arena is gone and MSG is even less likely to ever move)

And late to the game timing. Billions have been spent and earmarked for redevelopment of the site. To advance this proposal now would just be to try to derail meaningful strides that have been made. Additionally, MSG is apparently a pain to negotiate with, I can't imagine them saying 'yeah., we don't want to OK some construction that may temporarily impede our operations, but you can tear the whole thing down.'

Seems sus.

The issue with Penn is what is underground. Without addressing those issues a rebuild is not worthwhile.

That station was a dilapidated relic in the 60s. We missed the chance to revive it. The jet age arrived and nobody needed a grand train station anymore.

I can't understand why this sub is so obsessed with it when plenty of architecture could be protected today but nobody mentions it here.

[deleted]

It would if this country had any honor

Not any time soon... they literally just rebuilt it at the Post office with all the construction under MSG still ongoing

No. 2 Penn and MSG are never going to be torn down so the station will always be underground. The nature of the current proposal to skylight the un-used section of ground between the streets above one of the concourses is the only way to "light" up the station. I think that would go a long way. While I personally supported MSG being kicked out, that ship has sailed, so my main concerns now are widening walkways, raising ceilings, and bringing light into the station where possible. There's some great underground stations out there.. there is no reason we need to have a piss catacomb, it can be improved.

> Contemporary advancements in manufacturing have easily replaced skilled craftsmen used on historical classical buildings.

No, they haven't at all. Quality and integrity have just been compromised and degenerating for the past century to meet the limited capabilities of consumer driven mass production. There still isn't a machine that can carve those corinthian capitals or hot rivet together the steel and glass vaulting. You'd either have to substitute a shitty imitation of the genuine article, or you would have to develop and automated technology capable of replicating what those skilled craftsman could do; which would take decades to develop. The truth is that it doesn't matter how much money we have; there is no longer a sufficient skilled labor pool. It would take a generation just to apprentice a sufficient number of new craftsman in order to be capable of executing a project of that scale.

Yeah, Trump has no fucking idea what comprises classical architecture. I've seen his buildings.

Like...do you thing that Penn Station was built from load bearing masonry? It was a steel building. The stone was a facing material laid over a steel frame. And the train hall was pretty famously made of steel and glass.

There are definitely machines that could carve Corinthian capitals.

https://youtu.be/zWG6ZtKv8Ww

As an architect I’ll just say this one isn’t true by a long shot. It is far more expensive today to build Penn Station true to technique and form than it was in 1910. It can certainly be done, but to produce anything that doesn’t read as an awkward facsimile would require tremendous expense.

Todays building industry is optimized towards curtain walls, prefab masonry panels, metal rainscreens and dropped paneled ceilings, not intricate custom stonework and cast iron ceiling vaults. Ever visit any “new classical” buildings? Even a lot of the good ones look fake as hell, save for those faithful reconstructions in Europe. The techniques used for construction 100 years ago have simply been replaced and forgotten over time. It’s a little akin to saying we could easily turn on a dime and start mass-producing Model T’s again because of the huge advances in automative technology. Doesn’t quite work that way. Without tons of money and extensive retooling you’d probably end up with something looking more like a PT cruiser. Same idea here. Building/construction technique is a huge factor in the end aesthetic of a building.

It’s possible and it’s been done in other parts of the world (Europe), but doing it right isn’t cheap or easy. I for one at not holding my breath that this will happen. As cool as it would be—I think the time to reverse this crime against architecture has come and gone. I think something similarly artistically magnificent, technically prodigious and more adapted to todays infrastructure needs and building technology can be envisioned.

[deleted]

Guessing that those iconic 4 storey structural brick tenements with handsome ornaments are out of the cards nowadays too then, for similar reason?

Yes. It’s not that we can’t build them, like obviously we could if we really wanted to. But the techniques (both in terms of construction detailing/design and the actual, physical construction techniques of assembly) used to build them are not practiced anymore. You can produce buildings that look very similar, but won’t be identical. For instance, let’s build your 4 story brick tenement—back then they’d be built using solid masonry construction and wood framed flooring. Not flying today. Breakdown of why:

1.) You would not find many, if any, contractors skilled enough in building multistory buildings with solid brick walls and wood framed floors. More likely you will have a brick rain screen (1 layer of brick) supported on walls framed either in CMU block or metal stud framing. Already this will lead to a difference in the way the detailing in the brick facade is expressed. It becomes more economical and controllable to use pre-assembled brick masonry panels that are then installed on the facade on-site. Instead of wood framed floors, you will have concrete slab floors, which also ends up affecting the overall detailing, and therefore architectural resolution, of the building.

2.) Those ornaments you see on prewar buildings were once mass-produced believe it or not. For more upmarket or higher budget buildings, industries of masons and craftspeople existed that created ornament per architectural drawings. No longer. Custom ornament is expensive, which is why on so many “new classical” buildings you’ll see ornamental figures that are reminiscent of the ornament seen on older buildings, but with much flatter profiles and lower resolution. Example: compare the street-level facade of Carnegie hall tower with that of its namesake neighbor.Probably a bad example since it’s behind scaffolding right now but you can Google it.

So, in aggregate all of these factors (and more) mean that you can’t really make buildings that look pre-war, let’s say, without going through a lot of expense. They’re viable as one-offs, for big-budgeted institutions. And there are many “new classical” or “new traditional” buildings going up all over the place–but to any trained architect, and probably to anyone with a little aesthetic sense, all but the most carefully-made ones look REALLY BAD.

That’s why I don’t think it’s worth rebuilding Penn station to its exact historic design. It’s sort of papering over the palimpsestual process that is city-making. The act of it’s destruction is so integral to the foundational myth of late-20th century New York that to me, rebuilding it outright would almost feel stranger than preserving its memory with something new.

Do you know any specific examples of new classical buildings that were done well and some that were not?