A design by Robert Adam has been featured in “Reimagining the Far West Side,” an article in the City Journal that proposes reinstatement of classicism within New York skyscraper design. The article questions the architectural style of modern tall buildings in the wake of a proposed new development on the west side of the city that would comprise major office skyscrapers on a north-south Boulevard. Six renowned classical architects were asked by The City Journal, America’s premier urban-policy magazine, to design a building for this site, demonstrating that there is an alternative to modernism in this important architectural field.

Peter Pennoyer, Richard Sammons, John Simpson, Thomas Gordon Smith, Frank Lohsen McCrery and Robert Adam all created designs for this prominent site, which take inspiration from and develop the cities’ vernacular skyscraper tradition. A design vocabulary for tall buildings was already established within the classical tradition in the buildings of ancient Greece and Rome, and in the late nineteenth century, architects began to look to these precedents to formulate tall buildings in New York and Chicago. Taking the Campanile St Marks Square, Venice as a model, American architects experimented with the use of a tripartite composition for tall buildings to create a new chapter within the classical tradition of building. Decorative emphasis was placed on the street wall, usually all that could be seen of the building at pedestrian eye level, and the skyline, usually all that could be seen from a distance. Intermediate floors were the background to the major statements above and below. However, when the modern movement gained momentum, it took the skyscraper as its own. Buildings that define the city and set the direction of the architectural profession via their cost, prestige and visibility were reduced to a dull glass box that offered no architectural continuity or wider meaning.

Each building featured in the article learns from and adds to the classical skyscraper tradition, embracing new materials of the twenty-first century. Robert Adam’s design for the West side of boulevard is a columnar tower that rises out of copper domed pavilions and culminates in a stepped pyramid. At its base is an eight storey atria containing a winter garden that overlooks the new public park. Whilst all the designs offer the same height and open layout as a modernist building, each has a welcoming street frontage and an inventive and exciting silhouette. Above all, the article demonstrates that there is a truly modern alternative to the supposedly ‘cutting edge’ modernist designs that have actually become the safe, conventional choice for developers. Refreshingly, it proposes that that traditional design should be recognised as a means of re-humanising our cities and more specifically, bringing New York’s long and vibrant tradition of classical tall buildings into the twenty-first century.