Post by Vishaan Chakrabarti, FAIA

Extraordinary official release yesterday of our design for a renewed Penn Station completed in collaboration with HOK, HNTB, Severud, and others for Halmar, Skanska, Amtrak and USDOT. Amazing review below by Curbed’s Justin Davidson, who writes: “Chakrabarti has been mulling over the problem of Penn since at least 2016, when he fantasized that Madison Square Garden would decamp, leaving a circular steel skeleton that could be repurposed into a glass pavilion above a giant hall. It was a brilliant but impractical solution, for the same reason relocating the Garden isn’t happening now: Paying off the owners to move out would make the project astronomically expensive. But even that speculative scheme showed how sophisticated PAU could be in adapting an assortment of seductive pasts. At the Domino Refinery, it slipped a modern office building inside an industrial shell. Renovating the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame means coming to grips with I.M. Pei’s original design. A new residential college at Princeton will negotiate with a gathering of neo-Gothic and variously modern predecessors. And so, in the constant tug-of-war between tradition and innovation, the latest design heaves toward history, meeting the future’s infrastructure needs in comfortingly familiar costume…PAU’s design remains visionary.”