BACKCity Journal - Autumn 2004
City Journal published an editorial on what it would be like if Traditional Architects designed skyscrapers on the Hudson Boulevard site in New York City. Alexander Stoddart, Thomas Gordon Smith, John Simpson, Richard Sammons, Peter Pennoyer, Franck Lohsen McCrery and Robert Adam participated in the scheme. Below is a quote describing Richard Sammons take and to the right is a rendering of his skyscraper.
"All of our buildings have inventive and eye-catching shapes. On the west side of the boulevard, Robert Adam, designer of Oxford University's Sackler Library, envisions a columnar tower that rises out of copper-domed pavilions and culminates in a stepped pyramid. Richard Sammons, who has built country houses and townhouses from Hong Kong to Florida, has designed a suave limestone and glass tower, whose telescoping setbacks, facade articulation like a ballerina's plié, and rounded glass corners on its upper half give it a remarkable lightness and powerful upward thrust. Just to the north, John Simpson, architect of the breathtaking Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace, has transformed familiar classical motifs into something entirely unprecedented—a column of glass, complete with fluting, rising from a limestone base and culminating in an exuberant pyramid-topped temple, rotated diagonally to the base."
- Myron Magnet
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