New York, Same Mess

The huge expanse of glass that forms the eastern edge of the Johnson Galleries on MoMA’s third floor frames a view that could be the cover of an architecture history textbook. At the corner of 54th Street and Fifth Avenue, the University Club of New York sits as a monument to sober Renaissance Revival, its nine-story volume clad in rusticated Milford pink granite, rigidly punctuated by arched windows and finished with a detailed but decidedly sober cornice. Halfway down the block, at 17 West 54th Street, the Rockefeller Apartments sit on land purchased in the 1930s by the family of the same name. The complex was designed in 1935 by Wallace Harrison (of Lincoln Center fame) and André Fouilhoux (who designed Chicago’s Tribune Tower with Hood and Howells) in the International Style, with cylindrical appendages that disturb an otherwise impossibly flat facade. An enfilade of stout residen…