There aren’t many industries that have been stripped of their architecture as consistently as legacy media. A brief roundup covering just the last few years would include 30 Hudson Yards by KPF, which AT&T/Warner Media sold to developer Related Companies just a month after the 1,300-foot-tall tower opened in 2019, as well as CNN Center in Atlanta, the longtime home of the TV news network. Warner Media sold that 1976 brutalist structure to CP Group, a Florida real estate company, to pay down debt in 2021. And it’s not just a phenomenon in big-city media capitals. My hometown newspaper, The Des Moines Register, which has racked up seventeen Pulitzer Prizes since it began in 1860, decamped from its understated streamline moderne headquarters in 2013. The building was subsequently converted into lofts.
Architecture critics have been fretting over legacy media’s inability to hold on to its monuments for a long time. In 1990, Herbert Muschamp, in The New Republic, decried the lack of maintenance and loss of prestige of Eero Saarinen’s 1965 Black Rock, the New York headqua…