Thirty-odd years ago, if you had announced a plan to rip apart the base of Philip Johnson and John Burgee’s AT&T tower in New York, you would have had a line of architects stretching down Madison Avenue hoping for the chance to swing a sledgehammer blow against America’s most controversial (and hated) new building.
How times change. In November, architects and preservationists gathered in front of the Chippendale-capped building to protest a plan by Snøhetta architects that would do just that. Produced for a development team led by the Olayan Group, Snøhetta’s scheme would replace the pink granite front facade at the lower levels with a diaphanous glass curtain wall. The building’s Postmodern monumentality would be replaced by the kind of transparency made fashionable by Apple stores everywhere.
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