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.