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The crass "Big Ben" contributed to the play of differences in
scale, style, and period that endowed Grand Central with its wealth of meanings.
The actual Big Ben alarm clock was designed by Henry Dreyfuss in 1939. Perhaps
not coincidentally, Dreyfuss was also the designer of choice for the New
York Central Railroad, the terminal's owner and builder. He designed the
elegant 20th-Century Limited and the streamlined 1938 Hudson locomotives.
The clock was a clever advertising choice and probably had more symbolic
significance than was intended. The Big Ben alarm clock was itself
a surprisingly popular item, and doubtless many thousands of commuters dashing
past the giant timepiece every day had been awakened by the bedside version
that morning. The out-scaled clock and its supporting columns formed a triumphal
arch of commutation. The small and large versions together registered the
prospects for making it to the office or back home on time. These clocks
bracketed the vision--pre- and postwar--of a suburban utopia, where the
mass man of Grand Central could become the individual man, with a human-scale
clock all his own.
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Unlike the restoration of Grand Central Terminal, Nicholas Grimshaw
& Partners incorporated modern elements alongside the historic
structures of London's Paddington Station. The preserved engineering of
the roof (above) lives happily alongside the high-tech departures and
arrivals board (1999; below, left & right) and sleek trains
(bottom).
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Photos: Top & bottom, Peter Cook/View Pictures; center, left & right, Nick Hutton/View Pictures
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Although the clock manages to provoke nostalgia, surely nobody would lament
the disappearance of the hulking Kodak sign, which for years dominated the
main concourse from the then- inaccessible east mezzanine. With its flanking
pavilions, it blocked the glorious east windows and upset the station's
symmetry. Yet its absence also leaves a void. The glowing billboard's designers
understood the power of scale, and the backlit images contributed to the
real complexity of the station. The sign brought color into the monochromatic,
sepia-toned, increasingly soot-encrusted station. It also served as a counterpoint
to the anachronism that the station, with its interurban trains, was quickly
becoming. Images of trains traveling through mountain passes, by the ocean,
looked modern and exciting even as rail travel was already being superseded
by the contextless futurism of mass airline travel.
Elsewhere in the world less proscriptive attitudes inform the renovation
of historically significant structures. In England, with its incredible
inventory of nineteenth-century train sheds, a much more liberal view of
"appropriateness" governs the reuse of its architectural legacy.
It seems as though so few buildings of historical significance have
survived in New York, and our experience in renovating them has been until
recently so disastrous, that we are afraid to engage them in any substantive
way. Our so-called architectural respect is really timid deference: Better
to be safe than sorry. Better a theme park of rail travel than a contemporary
assertion that is certain to offend someone.
In contrast, London's Waterloo, Paddington, and Liverpool Street stations
have recently received substantial bold renovations. The historical elements
of these inspiring buildings have been painstakingly restored, and the new
elements have been rendered in an unapologetically contemporary architectural
vocabulary. This approach actually enriches the historic fabric of the original
buildings. The old is old, the new is new, and the significations of
both are clearer for the contrast. At Grand Central, the old is old and
the new is pseudo-old. Both present and past are diminished in favor of
a spurious golden age.
Paddington Station has seen new life as the terminus of the Heathrow Express,
which whisks you from Heathrow Airport to Central London in 15 minutes on
high-speed trains. The original station was built between 1850 and 1854
by the great engineer and railroad builder Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The
renovation was designed by Nicholas Grimshaw, one of the most pragmatic
of British Modernist architects. Separated by more than a century, the languages
of the original and the renovation are remarkably similar. Both designs
were based on engineering and fine technology, but their expressions
and their technologies are radically different. It's this tension that makes
the "new" Paddington so successful.
Like Grand Central, Paddington had become "cluttered with ad hoc additions"
to quote Grimshaw, who saw his role as allowing the public to "appreciate
the old from a new standpoint." He has achieved this through the insertion
of stridently modern elements within the engineered delight of Brunel's
station.
One of the major design elements of Grimshaw's renovation is the station's
departures and arrivals board. It is a celebration of technology incorporating
architecture, industrial design, and digital graphics. It is in stark contrast
to the ironwork of the station itself, and yet because of its sleek character
it relates to both the station's architectural language and the jetlike
design of the trains. At Paddington the train shed is the station,
and the waiting trains become an integral part of the architecture. The
digital board mediates between these elements while retaining its character
and utopian associations.
At Grand Central the departures and arrivals board poses as an artifact
from the original station, a tasteful picture frame in which a digital sign
has somehow been inserted. It has none of the stature of the freestanding
ticket office on which it sits. In fact, the simple black electronic
sign that it replaced was a sleeker object with greater poignancy. An example
of postwar Italian industrial design, it was an explicit attempt to link
a fading mode of transportation with the modernity of international air
travel. And in contrast with digital silence, the sound of the old board
clicking through time and destination changes created an aural environment
of urgency and expectation.
Great historic buildings--not to mention the people using them--are demeaned
by renovations that pretend that time has stood still and that "old-fashioned
virtues" and utopian confidence have been preserved in a vacuum.
The buildings are deprived of irony, contrast, and the poignancy of their
unfulfilled dreams. As Robert Venturi perceived so acutely, they lose
the complex significance that is the fate of any building that survives
its original era. That fate is something to be celebrated, not denied. Buildings,
left to their own devices and the passage of time, create their own richness.
In the case of Grand Central, the clock showed that great architecture can
be treated with gaudy disrespect and be all the better for the insult. The
bad protects us from the relentlessness of the good. And to one degree or
another, the bad is inevitable. Trying to keep it out is like trying to
escape the Red Death in the Edgar Allan Poe story. The alternative is a
good taste that renders one place like any other. Thirtieth Street Station
in Philadelphia and Union Station in Washington are examples of the consequence:
a nationwide state of suspended architectural animation.
This is not to suggest that the clock should be resurrected, or the grime
restored to the Sistine ceiling. Once gone it can never be brought back.
To do so would be an act of the same pseudo-archaeology that infects all
nostalgia-based renovation projects. If we had been lucky enough to still
have it, it would be a gift of historic bad taste; to put it back would
be history repeating itself as farce. You cannot step in the same river
twice. Perhaps all of the inappropriate intrusions had to be swept away,
like a reptile shedding its skin, so that a new cycle can start again. We
have to wait and see. In the meantime, we miss the clock.
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