Back to the Future VII
M ·AGRIPPA· L· F·COS·TERTIUM·FECIT
I. On a rainy Monday morning in 1963, construction workers with jackhammers made the first probes into the fabric of the Pennsylvania Railway’s terminal station in New York City, revealing for the first time in many years the luminous pink granite concealed by decades of accumulated soot and grime. Briefly and for the last time New Yorkers were able to see and perhaps appreciate the exquisite quality of the gateway to the city (and for many, to the nation) that railway tycoon Alexander Cassatt and architect Charles Follen McKim had envisioned, designed and built sixty years earlier. Both McKim and Cassatt saw the great spaces of Roman antiquity as inspiration for the settings of contemporary life and had applied that insight to their work on the new terminal. The theme of the tepidarium in the Baths of Caracalla, for instance, was transformed by McKim into the main waiting room of the railway terminal, and the result was perhaps the greatest public foyer ever built in this country. When the building was destroyed the city lost not only its most important public room, but also part of its ability to imagine itself as a great metropolis transcending the limits of time.
II. The association of public buildings in thi s country with the monuments of antiquity dates to its very foundation. Thomas Jefferson’s evocation of Rome in his projects for Virginia and Washington is particularly tied to American self-identity, the freshness of his reworking of ancient themes and images having captured the imagination of his fellow citizens. Now, current political rhetoric places great emphasis on the term empowerment, yet it can be argued that the quality of ennoblement as expressed by the buildings left to us by Jefferson and his contemporaries is an equally important political formulation. For if the vision we have of ourselves as represented in our public places is a noble one, then our political and social actions will be inclined in a similar direction. This is not to say that noble buildings will necessarily empower us, but rather that the two ideas are inextricably interwoven and interdependent, that without the one the other will die. “Ceci tuera cela” (this will kill that), wrote Victor Hugo in Notre-Dame de Paris.
III. Leon Battista Alberti begins the fourth book of the De re aedeficatoria: “It is obvious that buildings were made to serve man … and so if anyone were to comment that some buildings were designed for life’s necessities, others for practical requirements, while still others are for occasions of pleasure, he would not perhaps be all that wrong…. We shall consult therefore the experienced men of antiquity, who founded republics and laid down their laws Alberti, like Jefferson and McKim, was reinventing the forms and principles of antiquity for his time. He saw in the past a vision for the future and found nothing contradictory in that premise. His recognition of the idea that building must serve a human purpose is as valid today as it was in the fifteenth century, despite occasional assertions to the contrary. The value of conversing with and learning from our classical antecedents has similarly remained constant in spite of the many changes between Alberti’s time arid our own.
IV. One of the buildings from antiquity that Alberti refers to in his treatise is the Pantheon in Rome, a building which he knew and admired. Alberti, along with his contemporaries, believed the structure to have been built by the great Roman consul Agrippa, minister to Augustus, on the evidence of the bronze dedication fixed to the frieze of the portico. It was not until the end of the nineteenth century that archaeologists discovered the brick stamps dating the building to the rule of the emperor Hadrian. Subsequent research has demonstrated that the emperor and his architects rebuilt and reconceived the Pantheon of Agrippa after it had been destroyed by fire (an event of natural rather than man- made destruction). The great bronze inscription of the portico was left as a testament to the original budder, an act of artistic humility never surpassed.
V. In April of 1993, Amtrak announced its intention to rebuild Pennsylvania Station inside the McKim-designed Post Office, sited to the west of the original station. The James A. Farley Post Office Building was conceived by McKim as part of a five block urban ensemble which included the terminal and the Hotel Pennsylvania on Seventh Avenue. The failure of the space beneath Madison Square Garden to act as a dignified entry to the city, the revival of interest in high-speed rail transit, combined with the public’s desire for a building evocative of the former station, apparently prompted this idea for reuse. Amtrak’s announcement was accompanied by architectural renderings of the new station space to be built into the courtyard of the Farley Building. Among the features they show is a series of parabolic arches clearly intended to evoke the great glass and steel train shed of McKim’s station. The tragedy of these drawings is that they are more reminiscent of the images for the new Penn Station of 1963, particularly in their overt commercial aspects, than of McKim’s concourse, and they certainly bear no relation to the humanist values embodied in his great waiting room. Rather, they Illustrate one of the most egregious follies of modern thinking; to blindly assume ourselves to be the cultural as well as technical superiors of our ancestors, and so to refuse to emulate them at any cost.
VI. That little opposition to the scheme has been observed in the mainstream press can hardly be surprising to anyone versed in the politics of contemporary architectural culture. Like the profession as a whole the design media is generally unsympathetic to the classical point of view, and therefore provides few opportunities to those who would seek to express it. The scarcity of publications willing to devote significant attention to the subject of traditional building does a disservice to more than just the classical community, however; it has proven equally detrimental to the profession at large, because without a consistent forum for discussion there can be developed no fresh insight into or creative relationship with our common architectural heritage. The purpose of this new journal is to fill that void. To realize its objectives The Classicist has been cast in both a practical and an academic framework. As a professional publication it will provide information on technical subjects, publish built and unrealized work by practitioners and students, review books, exhibitions and related events, and consider issues relevant to the modern designer, builder, craftsperson and artist. Equally, as the journal for an active teaching institution, it aims to publish scholarly research on a variety of topics including theory, design, education, urbanism, history and archaeology. For those interested in contributing to its pages, we have established the following editorial policy: though The Classicist serves in part as the annals of the Institute, and thus has a special mandate to feature work produced by its members or under its auspices, the editors actively encourage all others working in the field to contribute material for publication or review.
VII. On January 20, 1994, the Amtrak official responsible for overseeing the relocation of Pennsylvania Station presented the project to an invited audience gathered at the Institute. At the conclusion of the event representatives of the school finalized a response to the proposal: in sum, while we applaud the attempt to recapture in the existing building’s exterior the civic ideals conveyed by the original Pennsylvania Station, we must condemn an interior space modeled after a shopping mall as symptomatic of a degraded public realm. Instead we would hope to rekindle throughout the new station the vision of Alberti and Jefferson, and the many generations who have since followed them. For if we have the courage and the will, then we too can create a great public arena “like a rounded city region, vaulted over in lofty beauty.“1 We would find in this vision the new in the old and the old in the new. We would even, perhaps, be able to risk Hadrian’s humility, and with conviction inscribe the resurrected terminal with the dedication “Alexander Cassatt and Charles Follen McKim made this,” and hope that posterity might believe us.
INSCRIPTION AT THE BEGINNING OF THIS ARTICLE:
Translation of the inscription on the porch of the Pantheon in Rome: “MARCUS AGRIPPA, THE SON OF LUCIUS, THREE TIMES CONSUL, BUILT THIS.”
1. Description of the Pantheon by Ammianus Marcellinus, a soldier who visited Rome in the suite of Constantius II in the spring of 357 A.D.
ABOVE: Cross-section of Penn Station main waiting room. Drawing from A MONOGRAPH OF THE WORK OF MCKIM MEAD AND WHITE. Demolished 1963.