“Hacking Farley.” This was the in-house name that Kohn Pedersen Fox (KPF) principal Hana Kassem and her team gave their task, undertaken between 2019 and 2023, of transforming some 700,000 square feet, across five stories, of midtown Manhattan’s landmark Farley Post Office Building into office space for Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Much of that storied 1914 McKim, Mead, and White building was, in a 2020 project by SOM, adaptively reused as the new Moynihan Train Hall. This skylit waiting room has—despite its now famously inhospitable scarcity of seating and superabundance of pixelated advertising—palliated conditions in the intercity rail, commuter rail, and subway complex that have suffered ever since the 1963 destruction of Charles McKim’s 1910 original Pennsylvania Station and the willful neglect of its successor.

Flexible workspaces overlook the atrium (top of page), where Timur Si-Qin’s 50-foot-tall sculpture Sacred Footprint dramatically hangs (above). Photo © Connie Zhou, click to enlarge.