At a reception at the University Club earlier this week I met a gentleman who’d visited Udaipur and stayed at the Taj Palace.  “The rooms were so incredibly ornamental,” he said, “you couldn’t tell where the walls ended and the decoration began."  That’s an apt description of the Club itself.  Built by McKim Mead and White in 1893, it’s the most sumptuous of the city’s turn of the century university and athletic clubs.  Stepping inside off the midtown sidewalk is like stepping into ancient Rome or, rather, a city sophisticate’s fantasy of ancient Rome.  The broad, atrium-like entrance hall is populated with gigantic Doric columns, cut from a heavily-figured green marble and topped with gilded capitals.  And that’s just the beginning.  There’s the seventh floor Dining Room and the ground floor Reading Room: high, sweeping, French-flavored halls that span the entire depth of the building.  The Club’s most celebrated space, its Library, modeled on the one at the Vatican, was closed for renovation.  Every surface of every room in the Club is lavishly plastered, trimmed, upholstered and coffered, but the effects fall just short of vulgarity.  The architecture is a sustained, exquisitely calibrated fantasy. 

For whatever reason, there just aren’t many prominent interiors in New York City that transport one this way.  Maybe, on a smaller scale, Philippe Stark’s designs for the lounges at the Paramount and the old Royalton had a similar kind of power.  City interiors are typically governed by good taste and good sense; they aren’t about crafting a fictional space.  Architectural historian Vincent Scully famously declared that when arrived at the original, extraordinary Penn Station (another McKim Mead and White masterwork with Roman strains, modeled after the Baths of Caracalla), "One entered the city like a god."  In contrast Kevin Kieran, one of my professors in architecture school, praised Louis I. Kahn’s work by saying that it made one feel deeply human.  While Kevin’s words will always guide me in making and thinking about architecture, I have to take Scully’s point of view with respect to the University Club.  Walking through the building’s entrance hall to get to the coat check makes one feel, for just a few moments, like an empress.  And that’s a pretty great feeling. 

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is once again playing with their graphics.  The agency is testing updated platform signs that list the stops along each subway route.  The previous graphic was an 11x17 black and white sheet that looked as if it had been designed and printed at an MTA worker’s cubicle.  The new ones are finer graphically but unnecessary.  What confuses riders aren’t the stops along the route, but the way old, iconic routes like the F have changed, and the way trains, particularly on the weekends, take alternate routes.

Much more troubling to me are the graphics for the five-borough subway map.  In 1979 the MTA abandoned the graphically exciting but informationally confusing 1972 Massimo Vignelli-designed map (shown above) for one by Michael Hertz, a predecessor of today’s map, which added layers of information about the above-ground world, including major streets and bodies of water.  Then last year, after years of incremental changes, the TA unveiled a more thoroughly updated map which distorted the already-not-accurate landmasses for clarity.  So now Manhattan, that elegant sliver of an island, looks like a pickle, and Brooklyn and Queens run together together like wet pancakes.  The map’s been drained of any last bit of physical reality and become a diagram entirely unrelated to geography, like the London subway map, although without that map’s dazzling complexity.  New Yorkers might have the best subway system in the world, tying together diverse communities and running at all hours.  But we do not have the best map.

We know how to get to Carnegie Hall, but do we know how to get to a Carnegie library?  For those of living in a North American city it’s pretty easy.  At the turn of the century, in order to help those who wanted to help themselves, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie donated money for the construction of public libraries to cities throughout the world.  In 1901 he made a one-time pledge of over five million dollars to the New York City libraries, funding 66 branch libraries (so-called Carnegie libraries), of which 60 remain.

Carnegie didn’t specify what the libraries should look like but his preferences were well-known: grand entrance staircases, central librarians’ desks, and open stacks.  My own local is a Carnegie Library, as is the library in the town where I’m stationed now.  They’re both typical designs, with heavy, symmetrical, stone facades that scream institutional authority.  The library here looks like police station, and others look like churches, train stations and mausoleums.  Yet each one I’ve seen, though battered by rounds of renovations, has survived with its spirit intact.  The buildings are focused about bright central spaces with open stacks that invite silence, study, wandering, and an enchantment with books.