On March 10 I went to Lebanese artist Rayyane Tabet’s talk at the Cooper Union. He welcomed everyone by jesting he was delivering the last lecture in New York, which might as well have been true. Later that evening, I visited my roommate for the first time at NYU Langone Hospital–Brooklyn in Sunset Park. He had been hospitalized when I was traveling, so I was surprised to encounter an unconventional hospital building, eerily calm during the onset of New York’s coronavirus outbreak.
Located just north of Cass Gilbert’s Brooklyn Army Terminal, the building was commissioned by the American Machine and Foundry Company as a lumber warehouse in the 1920s. Repurposed as a foundry and machine shop in 1941, it produced goods for World War II and the Atomic Energy Commission until 1968, when the site was gifted to the city, eventually being converted into a hospital in the late 1970s.
Occupying most of the site, the 444-bed, 500,000-square-foot hospital runs 700 feet along the southern edge of an entire block. A late modernist addition of glass and concrete was glued onto the …